It was partly Nora’s encouragement that gained me my first real sale, a story to the Saturday Evening Post for eight hundred dollars. I’d received word in the morning and immediately rang her up at her office. But she’d gone. I was agitated the rest of the day, because I wanted to share this news with her. I’d been working on fiction for two years and this was the first evidence I had that I could sell my stories for money. I felt wonderful and spent most of the day congratulating myself that I hadn’t “cheated” or “lowered my standards” or pandered to “the popular taste.” I had eight hundred dollars and virtue, too. At four in the afternoon, I heard the phonograph. Bunk Johnson.
I opened the bedroom door right away and saw Nora sitting on the couch. It had taken me four months to write the story, Nora had followed it from the beginning. I trusted her absolutely, and now I looked at her and grinned and told her I’d sold the story and mentioned the amount. She knew everything about it, including how difficult the writing had been. I was certain that with this story behind me, I’d fly. “Nora, it’s really going to move now. The bastards can’t ignore me any longer,” I said, and scooped her up in my arms. She was so tiny and light it was like lifting a doll. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. She was crying, and I began to laugh.
“Oh, come on. No tears. Think of this, a real sale. Money. I’ve the letter right here. They really like it. They’re thinking of putting my name on the cover of the magazine. Do you know how many copies they sell a week? Five or six million copies.” I held her tightly and laughed. “Every dentist in America reads the Saturday Evening Post.”
When I put her down she was still crying. I started to say something funny, but understood then that the tears had nothing to do with me or the magazine. There was something frightening to me about Nora in tears, Nora hurt with no visible wounds. She cried without covering her eyes.
She stopped crying after a minute, and I went into the kitchen and made tea. She was sitting quietly in the middle of the sofa, a bleak look on her face, her hands in her lap, listening to Bunk Johnson. We had become very close over the six months, and I had a strong protective instinct toward her; it was partly fatherly, and strongly sexual. She had been the one encouraging me, and now I wanted to help her. I thought she was too strong to be hurt that badly by anyone.
“Do you want to talk?”
She shook her head.
“Drink your tea,” I said.
She held the cup in both hands, sipping the tea.
“Trouble,” she said.
“A man?”
She nodded, yes.
She was involved with someone, and I knew it was serious. She was the only woman in Washington who took sex seriously enough to be private about it. She had her own standards, which were uninhibited and seemed to me healthy; she said she loved the pleasure that sex gave her and never confused that with anything else. Beyond that, she was discreet. From time to time she stayed at my apartment, although we never slept together; different stars, wrong chemistry, she said. Those nights she was usually in flight from a bore or a sponge. She was cheerful about it, acknowledging that sometimes she picked the wrong man, and vice versa. But Nora’s life was not an open book.
“Well, I’m a mess today.”
I wanted desperately to say the right thing. She had always encouraged me when I needed encouragement, and I felt very much in her debt. I knew right away that this had something to do with her current liaison, the details of which I knew practically nothing.
“You tell me what you want to tell me,” I said, as gently as I could.
“I have to write a story this afternoon.”
“Well, I’ll write the story. You tell me what it’s about, and I’ll write it. Then you can rest for a bit and tell me what you want to tell me later.”
She smiled at that: “Friend, you can’t write a story for my paper. You don’t know how, your sentences are too long. Won’t work.”
“I’ll cable London and tell them that you’ve got the flu.”
“Would you do that?”
“Of course.”
“No need to cable, just call Judson.” Judson was the bureau chief, the man she worked for.
I telephoned, Judson was out, so I left word with the answering service. Then I went to Nora, who was stretched out full-length on the couch. It took an hour to get the essentials out of her, but I still didn’t have the man’s name. It didn’t matter to me who he was, except from one or two things she said I gathered he was someone important. She told me the usual things, what he was like, what they talked about, how they’d met, what he meant to her, and how it was ended. It was “permanent,” she said, but ended. He wanted to get a divorce from his wife, and that was the last — definitely the last — thing she wanted. It would ruin his career, and he would be no good at anything else. She would become an ego doctor, and she wanted no part of that; she saw it as martyrdom and it seemed to her wrong. If you’re an architect or a lawyer and you get into trouble, you can resign and go practice somewhere else. If you’re a politician and get into trouble, that’s the end of it.
“I can’t see him as anything else, and I don’t want to see him as anything else. I don’t care a hoot in hell,” she said. “Getting married doesn’t mean anything to me. It never did. I don’t care about it. He gets his … juice from politics. Politics and me. If politics goes, there’s only me. You know what happens then.” She shook her head. “It’s a disaster.”
“Does he know the way you feel?”
“Yes, and he says it doesn’t matter what I feel.”
“Doesn’t matter?”
“Yes, he says it matters to him. ‘The only way,’ he says. ‘The only decent way.’ Besides, he hates his wife.”
“Oh.”
“He says he doesn’t want to go on sleeping with me in motel rooms.” She smiled wanly. “Well, that’s rather sweet, really.”
“I guess it is.”
“The thing is, he’s really an awfully good politician. I mean … he’s really good. Damned good. You know?”
“Look, Nora. Who is he?”
“You don’t know?” She was incredulous.
“How would I know?”
“I thought everybody knew.”
“Maybe everybody does. I don’t.”
When she told me, I shook my head. I’d had no idea.
He was a Midwestern senator, about forty, one of those who is always named on the lists of Most Effective Legislators, and for the last two elections as one of the many vice-presidential possibilities. As senators go in Washington, he had what the press calls high visibility. He was not a member of the leadership, but he had an independent base of his own, particularly among academics. He had been a university president at twenty-eight and resigned to run for the Senate. That was a highly implausible sequence except that this particular university president’s father had been governor, and his brother now published the state’s largest newspaper. That was all I knew about him, except that he was a Washington politician who was clean. He was intelligent, he was not a thief, and he seemed to know his own mind.