Nora stayed with me three days, she barely moved from the sofa. Her spirits improved, her confidence returned. In the mornings we drank coffee, in the afternoons tea, and in the evenings beer. She told me the story of the romance, how he had enchanted her …
“I mean literally enchanted,” she said. Then she went on to list the things they did together, her tone of voice changing. She became wistful, a most un-Nora tone of voice. She talked of the future, too, how he’d plotted his political career, the plans he had for the next national convention; this was before he decided to divorce his wife. But she thought he had a self-destructive part of him, and that was not always unappealing, surrounded as he was by success.
And not once in the first weeks did they ever speak of politics. They spent a weekend together in Nova Scotia, “and this was in December. Gosh, friend, did you ever spend a weekend in December in Nova Scotia? I was touched, he used my name to register at the hotel. Mr. and Mrs. N. Bryant. The way he did it, he was … oh, I don’t know what he was doing. I took it to mean he regarded us as equals. We spent that time in Nova Scotia, and other weekends in other wonderful places. Have you ever been to Chincoteague Island? And all the time he was legislating in the Senate, and passing me the documents, the bad ones, to get them out in the open.” She laughed. “He used to call me his publisher. He loved to see them all in print, then listen to the bitching and moaning inside the committee. The FBI was called in to investigate the leak. I thought it was all obvious, too obvious, so I passed some of the stuff on to you. Didn’t you ever wonder where it came from?”
“Well, I thought you just picked it up …”
“Friend, you don’t just ‘pick up’ the sort of stuff I was passing on to you. It was all golden.” She smiled proudly. “He loved it, really loved doing it, watching the reaction …”
“The romance, Nora. It sounds to me a little heavy, it isn’t the sort of thing you pursue in motel rooms.”
“But it is! Why not? It was just fine, it was going along just fine. Nothing wrong, he’d have to go home from time to time. But his wife didn’t really care. I mean he was under no pressure. Not from her. Not from me. Now it’s ended.”
“Say again why.”
“He’d be ruined without his political life. I know that. What do we do now? Does he open a law office, become a lobbyist? How about a beachcomber?”
“My God, you can get a divorce and still run for office. A hell of a lot of guys do that. You can divorce, remarry, and run for office. There’s no law …”
“You don’t understand. He’s a Catholic. He wants to marry me. You don’t recover from that. Not in his state. No, he’d have to give up politics altogether. Go do something else.”
“You’ve talked it all out?”
“Until I’m out of breath! He won’t listen. He wants to wait a year or two, then marry. He says he’s through with motels and through with his wife. But he doesn’t know what I know. Which is that without politics he’s a different man, and not as good a man. It’s the self-destructive part.”
“Nora, someone isn’t defined entirely by what they do. People have other sides to them, sides that have nothing to do with … plumbing or writing or politics.”
“Not him,” she said.
“So you’ve refused absolutely to marry him.”
She nodded slowly.
“What did he say?”
“He said he was going to get the divorce anyway.”
“And then?”
“And then I’ll change my mind, he said.”
The next day Nora left, sad but in control. She was talking now about going back to England or cajoling her editor into a long assignment abroad, Africa or the Far East. She told me that she would never, never marry the man; it would destroy both their spirits, they’d be hypnotized for the rest of their lives by what he’d thrown away. She knew in her heart it was irretrievable. She said she understood the political mind too well not to understand that. If a man gives up power against his will it haunts him. And there was no need, she said. No need at all. Just before she left my apartment she made the only anti-American remark I’d ever heard from her. She generally regarded this country with great affection and enthusiasm, and it amused her to write pro-American articles for her Yankee-baiting London newspaper.
“Goddamned American innocence,” she said. “Destructive virtue.”
“Thank you, Graham Greene,” I replied. The remark irritated me, it was unjustified; it was true of course, but unjustified. “Can’t you see your man is in a bind, too?”
“Well, we’re all in a bind. But he’s the one who’s forcing it, and there’s no need.”
I couldn’t quarrel with that.
A week later, she called me for a favor. She said she would ask me the favor if I would cook her dinner. We ate a memorable meal, and she was full of praise for the Saturday Evening Post story and one other story I was working on. All the time she was talking, I was looking at her and wishing the stars and chemistry had been right. She was in good form, looking as beautiful as I’d ever seen her. She’d had another of her dinners at the White House and was full of new stories and phrases. She was pouring coffee when she said she needed the favor right away.
“He’s coming over here tonight,” she said.
“Great,” I said.
“Just for an hour or two. It’s better to talk here, was what I thought. Not that there’s very much to talk about. Can you make yourself scarce?”
I smiled at the Americanism. “Sure.”
“He’s due in about ten minutes.”
“I’ll go now.”
“You can come back in an hour.”
“I’ll make it an hour and a half.”
“I appreciate it. Friend.”
“Just keep the door closed, and I’ll know you’re still here if I get back too early.”
So I left, half-angry, half-sad. There was a bar down the street that had a color television set. I hadn’t been in the bar in six weeks, but it was empty as usual and I took a seat at the far end, backed up against the wall, and drank draft beer for two hours. I thought I had better give them all the time they needed. While I sat and drank beer I thought about Nora and how she would handle it. It occurred to me that there were a hundred jobs in Washington that the senator could get, all of them close to the — what did they call it? — “the center of events.” There were jobs in this town other than elective ones. Editing newsletters. Influence peddling. I began to think of him as an undersecretary of state or an assistant secretary of defense. Depending, of course, on how messy the divorce was. Whether or not the press picked it up. Well. No adulterers in the Pentagon. But as I sat and drank the beer, I understood that the speculations didn’t matter. What mattered was Nora, and how she saw it. She’d staked out her territory and was a very determined woman. She loved him, so she understood him, and she understood Washington, too; that was the essence of it. It seemed to me that the way she had constructed her argument made retreat impossible.