Noticing my supervisor glaring out of his glassed-in office, I waved energetically, increasing the amount of space I was taking up. Too much, indeed. I considered phoning Arles on the WATS line, but no, what could not be cured had to be endured.
Then Gosden was pressing against the back of my chair. Gosden, hanging on to five weekly minutes of nostalgic pipe slobber on the “radio side,” who, after liquid lunches, would corner mailroom boys and replay his exploits in the European theater (“Murrow, Mountbatten…I knew them all”), who had no worries about information control and the public trust, had come to wheedle stamps.
“Help yourself,” I said.
“Good show, good show.”
And plunging toward the open drawer, Gosden somehow tangled with the casters of my chair, causing it to slide backward and me to pitch forward, striking my nose on the console telephone. Pain webbed over my face. Blood poured from my nostrils.
Gosden, trapped in a historical site of his own, must have thought we were under attack. “Down, you fool. Get down,” he yelled, bellyflopping to the floor. “We’ve got too many reasons to live.”
“And God bless us,” I said, straggling off to the bathroom. “Every one.”
33
IT WAS, UNAVOIDABLY, A season of vehemence, the already turbid New York air dense with convolutions. To argue became obligatory, the refusal to do so an opinion in itself. Private problems were absorbed into public furor, small shoots amid the infinite jungle of Plot. Meals were hurried and phone calls protracted. A Senate Select Committee was investigating the Watergate affair.
I had quit CBS, was getting along on family handouts taken without apology or gratitude. I spent my time indoors mapping previously unknown tracts of insensibility. Out there, I knew, people were continually affronted, were exhausted by their outrage and in terror of being at a loss. How childish. How unnecessary.
I was systematically testing every recipe in a bartender’s guide issued by the old Hotel Luxor and on the initial morning of Maurice Stans’s testimony mixed a pitcher of Sazeracs.
“In Republica Dominicana this would never happen,” commented Nito, who had the apartment next to mine. “There a leader is permitted to lead.”
Nito worked part-time as an animal-control officer, sometimes sat in on timbales with a conjunto that played dance halls in the Bronx. He was very seldom surprised by anything. I could appreciate the wisdom of accepting corruption as part of the natural order, but that was off the point.
My position: “It’s not about politics.” I pointed to the set, where Stans, a member of the CPA Hall of Fame, read his prepared statement in a grain belt monotone. “This is a passion play. A rite.”
“High mass?” Nito made the sign of the cross. “I would rather watch the Ursula Andress movie.”
“Stay tuned. Study our national culture.”
“But where are the breasts?”
I took pride in those days in my total lack of purpose. It seemed to me a mark of real clarity, of harmony with the future. But in this role of disaffection, I’m afraid, there was too much ham. Even Carla, summering with friends on a farm in Pennsylvania, was sending me checks.
Bad Boy—
Am having dire word of you and your life in the slums. Mom and her inflations, you know. But here anyway a small contribution toward socket wrenches, or whatever you might need. Very muggy here, sleep difficult. The cukes, tomatoes, etc., seem to thrive on it, though. Raccoons come out of the woods at night and beg at the porch for scraps. Did you know they’re related to the panda? Neither did I.
Love and birdwatching,
C
For sure, the heat was on. Gordo suggested I enroll in electronics school. Casually, Alexander Butterfield betrayed the existence of a White House taping system. I slept with all the windows open and listened to sirens. I cracked ice trays into the bathtub and sat there reading about intrigue in the Ottoman Empire.
The Constitution in jeopardy. Our republic foundering. But I found no alarm in my surrounding streets. Nothing new at Katz Laundry, or at Three Bros. Coffee Shop, radio tuned to the Mets game. Elders outside the grocery sipped beer and slapped their dominoes, and of Nixon only amusement—“The fuckin’ guy.” Still, the indignant shock was out there, in some other part of town, or in green counties to the north, beside ponds and croquet courts, where values hard arrived at seemed to warp. Such blather. Such density of ego.
By the time John Dean began the careful relinquishing of his confidences, I had reached Chapter 7 in my bartender’s guide: Punches & Coolers. My cache of lemons attracted canny urban flies and scented the days with a pleasant bitterness. “A cancer in the White House.” The analogy anyone could understand. Clever Dean, nothing left to chance. Writers of enterprise flew off to interview his teachers and tennis buddies.
I filled a two-gallon pot with something called Rum Cockade and invited the Roysters. Chip and Dale had the apartment above mine. They were emigrants from northern Ohio, exponents of social change. Their walls were hung with serapes, the floor littered with cat toys. Their flattened vowels and cumbersome honesty charmed me, though I knew they were in for it. The city, having lured them, would no doubt show no mercy.
Dale assessed the President. “It’s like he wanted to get caught,” she said, swinging her braids. “Like when you’re a kid and do things just to test your mother. To see if she’s paying attention.”
Chip snorted and touched his bald spot. “Special attention for Dickie. He’s so misunderstood.”
Dale worked in a daycare center.
“Mr. Above-it-all,” she said, and drained her third cup. “You should be in a seminary.”
It struck me that this was one of those relationships based on the fact of its never working. Yet how tenderly Chip would comfort his wife a few hours later, cradling her as she retched over the sink.
I ladled out more punch. “Think we’ll ever get to hear those tapes?” What a host.
“Which tapes?” Chip said. “I mean, how do you ever know or not if what you’re listening to is fake?”
“He wants punishment,” Dale insisted. Hugging her knees, mouth hidden behind the tin cup, she was beginning to suggest an ad layout for CARE. “He wants to be stripped naked and flogged.”
“Yes, a ceremony.” I toasted her. “You’ve got a grip on it now.”
“What this country needs,” Chip said grandly, “is less humiliation and more humility.”
Chip had been with the Peace Corps in Guyana.
I slept heavily that night and dreamed I was a bagman for the Mormon Church. Gordon Liddy took me to lunch. The prime rib was rare. We talked about theocracy and gauchos and how to kill someone with a sharpened pencil. Waking in late afternoon, I told myself: Stop fighting the odds and you’ll make a fine apologist.
A few days later I met Dale in front of Katz Laundry. Her little face was pinched and she kept looking over her shoulder. Chip, she confided, was unwell. His vision blurred; he had ringing in his ears. Just that morning, short of breath and twitching uncontrollably, he had been admitted to Roosevelt Hospital for evaluation.
“We wanted to come here so bad. We said, ‘It’s the nerve center.’”
Now Dale pined for the simplicities of Dayton, molded-salad luncheons and covered-dish suppers. Chip was afraid of having to work the line like his father, but could it be worse than this?
Shortly after Judge Sirica ordered release of the tapes, Nito was stabbed in the arm by a junior high kid who wanted his radio. By the time impeachment proceedings were under way, I had moved back to Lake Success, regained my job with the network, and become a commuter. The democratic system, it was widely announced, was proving its special merit. I was relatively sober, flirting with accommodation. And, unbeknownst to anyone, my mother was preparing to leave the world behind.