Love was for suckers, and I was in a Hip Bag
If only I had listened, or even cared
My youth and dreams, wouldn’t die in here.
I knew all the angles, and how to score
But all it’s brought me was time and a steel door.
A few days of fun and years of pain
Is the price I pay for doing my thing.
Now I hurt in a way I’ve never known
For the rest of my life, I’ll be alone.
Here in the House of Time, grown men cry
I, too, am one of them and I know why
My brand of cigarettes tells of a hip young fool
Who destroyed his life and family being real KOOL.
Nora
by Ward Just
(Originally published in 1971)
Connecticut Avenue
Nora believed that my stories were old-fashioned. She said once, “Friend, why don’t you write something up-to-date, immediate. The romantics are dead. Friend, they’re gone.” She was really very serious about it, and I had to tell her that hers was a liverish idea whose time had not yet come. Not that it made any difference, because in 1965 nobody would buy the stories except an obscure review in the Midwest, whose payment was in prestige. In the first six months of 1965 I had two payments of prestige with a third on the way. For eats, as Nora liked to call them, I worked as a researcher for Congressional Weekly Digest, an expensive private newsletter which purported to give its subscribers advance information on legislation pending before the House and Senate. I was paid a hundred dollars a week for reading the Congressional Record and reporting my findings to the editor, who would rearrange them into breathless verbless sentences.
But that had little to do with Nora Bryant. She was English and had come to Washington as correspondent for one of the popular London dailies. She had good looks, and good brains to go with the good looks, but she was admired for her idiosyncrasies. Nora believed that America was alive and Britain was dead; interesting, amusing in its way, but dead nonetheless. She thought that this country was open to possibilities and in perpetual motion in a way that Britain was not. She had a wide circle of American friends, and spent as little time at the British embassy as she could manage; the ambassador there was an aging peer whom she called the kandy-kolored tangerine-flake stream-lined baron. In a bewitching West Riding accent she spoke American slang, and the effect was hilarious: Somerset Maugham imitating Allen Ginsberg. Her specialty was southern politicians and she told me it was a high point of her life here when she spent an evening with the then-occupant of the White House and came away with enough vocabulary to last her a month or more. She came to my apartment after dinner at the White House, still laughing over all the wonderful words and phrases she’d learned. I tried to pump her about the man himself, what he was like. How much did he drink? What was on his mind? Was his mood hot or cold?
“I didn’t have a thermometer up his bum, friend,” she said.
“Come on, Nora! Give! What did he say about the war? Anything about—”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Nora …”
“That dog won’t hunt,” she said, and that was that.
We’d met at a party on Capitol Hill, and I was quickly taken with her because she asked me about my stories. Under any normal circumstance a writer doesn’t like to be asked what he’s working on, except in Washington no one cared at all. No one ever asked me about my fiction, so my identity was frozen at “researcher for Congressional Weekly Digest,” a job I despised and was defensive about. Nora understood right away. She was persistent in asking about the stories and it was clear to me as I answered her that I hadn’t thought them out clearly. She saw this, too, but did not press it. She told me to keep working, and everything would be fine.
“You’ll be jake,” she said. “You’re a writer, I can see that.”
“Oh? Just how?”
“You don’t know what you think.”
Nora is barely five feet tall, and I come in at just under six feet four. In a brief moment of anger I saw her as a little girl who worked for a second-string London newspaper, looking up at me and figuratively patting me on my head; the patronage was unmistakable and outrageous, but I was charmed. At our first meeting, listening to her voice and watching her glide around the room, I fell half in love with her. She seemed wonderfully cheerful and inquisitive, intelligent and sure of herself, and I liked the attention. It was a large, jumbled party and she left it early, and two days later called me at my apartment.
“I’ve got a pretty good tip,” she said. “Will that do you any good at that thing you work for? That newsletter?” She sounded brisk and impatient.
“Sure,” I said. Gottschault, the editor, paid me a ten-dollar bonus for any authentic inside story, anything that had not been printed elsewhere. I had never taken advantage of this, because I seldom read the newspapers and therefore did not know what was news and what wasn’t.
“All right,” she said. “The Senate Finance Committee will take up the oil section of the tax bill on Thursday. They will report it on Friday. There will be one day of discussion, in private. No more.”
“Thursday, huh?”
“Yes, Thursday. Now does that suggest anything to you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, today is Wednesday. That might suggest to you that the oil section has already been written.”
“Stop the presses,” I said.
“Would you like to have that? For your very own?”
“Are you under the Official Secrets Act?”
“I’ll send it over by messenger.”
“Are you serious?” I suspected a joke.
“Yes,” she said, and rang off.
The document arrived that afternoon, and when I gave it to Gottschault he whooped with pleasure and literally did stop the presses to get it in the newsletter. Then he gave me a twenty-dollar bonus, but when I asked Nora to dinner to celebrate, she declined.
I don’t remember when she started calling me “friend.” It was probably the period when she began dropping in at my apartment unannounced. This was a two-room apartment in a brownstone off Connecticut Avenue. I’d know she was there when I heard the phonograph; Brahms if she was in a good mood, Bunk Johnson if she was not. She’d taken to American jazz along with everything else and loved to listen to the blues when she was low. I worked in my bedroom and would finish whatever passage I was writing and join her and we’d sit and talk, sometimes all night. Washington politicians fascinated her, she thought they had nothing in common with the ones she knew in Britain. She came to modify that opinion, but in the first months in Washington she was as intrigued as a biologist investigating a new species. Nora developed categories for the politicians that she met.
It was clear from the first month that there would be no romance. I was never exactly sure why. She seemed to want a friend, someone off the Washington political circuit, who was compatible and what she called “talkable.” I was pleased and flattered — romance or no — because I was being very reclusive and difficult at that time of my life, and Nora was one of the ornaments of Washington. She had her own center of gravity, a distinct and (I thought) hard-won personal style. Late at night we tried to analyze the town, what made it work, why some men were successful and others were not, why women seemed to fail, and what each had to do with the other.
A couple of times a month she’d give me a document or memcon — she’d picked up government slang, a “memcon” is a memorandum of conversation — and as a result of that I was a boon to Gottschault. Now he was paying me a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, plus a thirty-dollar bonus for really important items. Items that were exclusive. Because of Nora’s tips, Gottschault had become very popular at the National Press Club bar. It was clear to everyone that he had inside information, “inside skinny,” as Nora called it. I enjoyed the extra money, but more than that I enjoyed Nora. I’d wait for her unannounced visits, when we’d sit and drink coffee or beer and talk. The longer she stayed in Washington, the more doubts she had about America; but she never regretted leaving London. Of course she was by then one of the best-known foreign correspondents in town. Her copy was nothing much to read because of the form in which she was obliged to write. The editor of her paper had a theory that no paragraph should be longer than two sentences, no sentence longer than ten words, and no word longer than three syllables. Once she wrote a two-hundred-word political story entirely in haiku, but her foreign desk mixed up the paragraphing so it came out wrong. But it was a noble effort, and (as a matter of fact) excellent haiku.