Читать книгу Unravished - Hester Kaplan - Страница 8

THE SCHOOL OF POLITICS

Not everyone could say they had slept with a felon. Not that the Mayor was a felon back then—or even convicted yet—but still, he’d always been a criminal in Francine’s mind. Since his trial began, she’d taken to watching it every morning before work on the tiny television on the kitchen counter. The June sun fell singular and admiringly on the Mayor who trotted up the courtroom steps, and she noted how porcine he’d gotten in the eighteen years since they’d known each other. Back then in his apartment on Pratt Street, he had preened, sleek and invincible, and she’d been a little awed by him. Now each day she catalogued the sad evidence of age and corruption on his body; the excess of double chin, the money-stuffed bags under his dark and cautious gaze, the infantile white of his scalp where the hair had thinned.

“He’ll walk,” Sanford announced, moving from the counter where he’d also been watching the morning procession of defendants. “Criminal, thug, intimidator. Dag’s always gotten away with it, and he always will. This is his city, after all.”

Her husband’s certainty irked Francine. It wasn’t that Sanford was wrong about the Mayor—she preferred Mayor to the dopey nickname Dag, short for Albert—but his pronouncement provoked in her an unsettling feeling of protectiveness for the man. Somewhere in the grand courthouse, there was a ninety-seven count indictment with the Mayor’s name written all over it. She thought of the document, the history of a public man converted to twenty-five pounds of damning heft, as just slightly more than the combined birth weights of her three children, slightly less than the dog who spent her winding-down days twitching under the deck. The Mayor was charged with running a criminal enterprise out of City Hall. The accusation was like a game, as though he’d been caught cheating at Monopoly, siphoning pastel-colored money from the bank to buy Park Place, juggling hotels in his pocket. He could shrug it off yet.

She wished she could tell Sanford that she’d seen fear and contrition in the Mayor’s expression when he looked out of the television and directly at her, but it would have been a lie on several counts. She’d really only seen the usual arrogance there, a curl of the almost girlish lips, and the knowledge that he could still get a good seat in any restaurant no matter what happened. And, of course, the Mayor hadn’t looked at her at all, as Sanford might have pointed out unnecessarily, but only at his own fearsome reflection in the television cameras. Instead, she was the one trying to penetrate the impossible distance, hoping to find what had once drawn her to the man.

“I’ll give you a lift to work,” Sanford called from the deck where he’d been filling the dog’s water bowl. The Mayor disappeared into the courthouse, and Francine turned off the television.

They lived in a medium-size city, and though it often seemed much smaller, it had taken until last year to actually come face to face again with the Mayor. She’d been in the same room with him before, of course, along with hundreds of other people in ballroom fundraisers for cancer or the shrinking wet-lands, and even at the opening of the municipal skating rink where she’d watched as her son nearly had his hand yanked off by the Mayor’s vigorous shaking of it. But this time it had been at the Mayor’s elegant house during a May fundraiser for the gay men’s health center on whose board Sanford, a shrink, sat. The party was set up in the garden, but she and Sanford had gone inside to snoop. They hadn’t voted for the Mayor and so felt fine about what they were about to do; political dis-alliance justified such an honorable American tradition. Sanford goaded Francine’s curiosity about the Mayor because he assumed it was the same as his and all good citizens; simply, who the hell is this person? In her sudden surge of nerves, being so close again to the man she’d slept with a long time ago, she twisted the silk scarf around her neck, strangled what was left of her better will, and moved forward.

The richly lit public rooms were crowded with leather furniture, brass lamps, spiky plants, and glass decanters of various golden liquors. To Francine the place looked like a set. Shelves displayed an array of cheap tokens given to the Mayor by anyone hoping to do business with him. There were miniature beer steins, origami boxes, the key to another metropolis, a baseball cap preserved in a Plexiglas coffin. Nothing you couldn’t buy yourself in a souvenir shop.

In a minute, they’d found what they weren’t supposed to—the Mayor’s private living room. It was down several steps, relegated to basement status. The lighting was dim and would cast no blame, but still revealed a filthy beige carpet underfoot, a thousand shoes wiped dismissively on it. A distressed couch faced a television, and a signed poster of the Super Bowl champs of a decade earlier hung over the fireplace which held a listing pile of magazines. The room was so reminiscent of the Mayor’s old apartment, so discouragingly the same after all these powerful, commanding years that it made Francine sigh with disappointment—for him and for her. Sanford grinned, nodded, and misunderstood her. Wow, he mouthed as though he’d come across something blinding, yes.

What, she wondered, had they stupidly thought they might discover here? Still, she played along with her husband and sniggered about the secret life of the emperor—open cans of Diet Coke and full ashtrays—realizing with a kind of terrifying amusement that she could have been Mrs. Mayor. Not really, not fucking likely actually, but still within the widest realm of possibility. It could have been her instead of the real Mrs. Mayor who was now the ex and mostly forgotten, living in another state with the lone kid who had a substance abuse problem. The Mayor was a bachelor again, always seen in the company of a drink, a woman, and the rumor that he’d even screwed the six-foot ostrich-necked wife of the college president. He liked them tall. Francine had been part of that pattern, albeit before it was firmly established; she had three inches on the Mayor. He’d measured once in bed, leveling his head with hers while his feet came to her anklebones.

Francine crossed the floor towards where she assumed the bedroom was, the layout of her city’s historic homes being her thing. Behind her, Sanford suggested they’d gone far enough, that their wandering was wandering into something else, and shouldn’t they get something to eat before it was all gone? Two glasses of wine swirled in her chest beneath the silk and perfume, giving her the confidence to be nosing around, and she ignored him. After all, she’d had the Mayor in her mouth more than once, and if that didn’t give her the right to witness now his restless blankets, his pillow indented by his scheming head, the sour bathrobe balled on the floor, then nothing did. She recalled how the Mayor had liked to look at her naked and touch his erection which rose so ambitiously, how they’d both been turned on by their own part in the ritual. It wasn’t thinking about Dag’s hard-on now that made her shiver in discomfort, but a sudden understanding of the humbling nature of longing and that human instant that could make even the most powerful man fall to his knees.

“Francine,” Sanford hissed. “Come on. Even he deserves some privacy.”

But the Mayor’s life was public, though how bereft of contentment and consolation he was in private, she saw. Francine’s pulse beat wildly. She considered telling Sanford that she’d slept with the Mayor way back when, had a thing with him, but then she would have to explain why she’d never told him before. To say that it was a different time in her life was pious and inadequate. Sanford would be speechless, wounded. Disgust might pass over his hearty, intelligent face, he’d be stunned that he and Dag had in common that they’d touched the same woman’s heart, but most of all, he’d be curious. Really? He’d ask, sensible and tolerant after he forced himself to get over it, what was he like? What were you like? And would he really mean, who are you, Francine, after all these years? And how could she answer that when she didn’t know herself? This, then, was hers, and wasn’t it okay to hoard a single piece of experience and shame?

“Oh, no, you can’t be back here,” the Mayor commanded, suddenly emerging to claim his ground from her. “This space is off-limits.”

Francine turned quickly; she felt her feet might trip her. “I’m sorry. I thought these were public rooms, for everyone,” she said mindlessly, sensing his weighty presence close at her back.

He gave an obvious laugh. “Nope. The party’s in the garden. This way.”

As he ushered them back through the house, Francine detected the Listerine breath of a man who’s just stolen some time away to check himself in the mirror and wonder, what do I think when I’m alone? And then, in the dim of the front hall where they stopped before stepping outside, Francine thought he might have recognized her, but his gaze was already gone when he asked, “How are you folks tonight?”

“We’re terrific,” Sanford told him, glancing at Francine who’d gone silent and bloodless. “Good party.”

“Well, those men have done a nice job,” the Mayor said, and then, because he’d never expected there would be quite so many queers in his garden, he gave Sanford a virile pat on the shoulder before moving into the crowd.

“He was pretty gracious—considering.” Sanford touched Francine’s arm; he was ready to go. “Considering he’s a thug.”

How are you? The Mayor said that to everyone—this had become the “How are you” city. A different context (clothed now), another haircut, but wasn’t Francine’s face essentially the same? Pale, gray-eyed, an imbalance or two just short of classic, a look people sometimes read as cool. The Mayor had once told her she looked like something out of a Bonicello painting. You mean Boticelli? she’d asked (she was far from it, she knew, with tiny breasts and hips). Bonicello, he insisted to her, the art history major. Now her face hadn’t appeared to spark anything in him and she was saddened by this lack of ignition, this extinguished place in his memory.

But she was angry, too, at her smug husband and at the Mayor. Hey Dag, you fucked me once upon a time, remember? How should I be? Talk of his likely indictment was floating around even then, wafting through the early lilacs and the men in their blazers, the tonic water going flat and the ice dripping onto the bluestone, and the truth was, Francine knew well enough, the man was a politician; he’d fucked everyone at some point or other.

Ambition is a muscle; the more you work it, the stronger it gets. That was the kind of knowledge the Mayor had spooned out to her years before. Pretty pretentious stuff, she thought then, even if she now knew it was mostly true. Because here she was, another day in her enviable perch of an office, because she’d worked that muscle pretty damn hard—head, heart, and hand of it—to get to this second-floor parlor of the Hunt-Paring House. It was a dream job in many respects, something solid to aspire to. A private family endowment paid for the preservation and her dutiful running of the 1786 Georgian mansion, a museum open three days a week. It paid to call her Executive Director, and have the toilets scrubbed with silk threads if she decided that’s what should be done. There was priceless furniture and art throughout the enormous, meandering house, cupboards of silver, booty from the China trade, five exquisite Millerton landscapes, two Sargeants and, most remarkably, a La Pense. In her own office, off-limits to museum visitors, there was a luminous painting—The Stream by Grosvenor—a Robintrough bronze, a da Concci vase, a Davida-Lowell highboy, a green velvet chaise. She had a board which generally agreed with her, the freedom to roam the halls, explore the vast storerooms, and curate small, jewel-like exhibits. Snuff boxes, flora in the art of Angus Lentin, children’s toys—and soon, a show of fine embroidery. During her search for pieces to include, she’d discovered, the week before, a tiny, porcelain rooster hidden in the back of one of the Longe armoires. It was a funny object, stashed away for a century by one of the Hunt-Paring children, she guessed—a single, small treasured thing among the thousands, and she’d brought it to her office.

As she admired the rooster this morning, her neglect in cataloguing it—of declaring its existence at all—nagged dully at her. The fact was, she told herself as she put it down, her ambition had once been flexed, but now it was atrophied, and on many days, her career felt like being the farmer of ten-thousand plastic cows. What could ever sway their permanent and dopey pose? What was ever urgent here, and what would ever be missed? Voices rose outside and she rolled her chair to the window where she saw the head gardener Lewis berating his men for idling in the skirts of pachysandra. He was a sour, sinewy guy, descended from a long line of Hunt-Paring employees, who thought Francine’s compliance with certain laws—such as paying disability when Virgilio lost the tip of a finger in the weed whacker—went against the spirit of the Hunt-Parings. Which she was absolutely sure it did, though she wouldn’t ever say that to Lewis. Did any visitor, eyes blinded by the ridiculous gluttony of this family, ever wonder about how the wealth was gotten or about the more than nine-hundred slaving voyages sponsored by merchants like Mr. Hunt-Paring? She very much doubted it. Wealth was blameless.

Beyond Lewis, Francine could make out the courthouse downtown and the phalanx of radio vans and television trucks following the Mayor’s trial, now in its sixth week. Gleaming mobile antennae rose in the sky like giant drinking straws; the city might be sucked dry by this disgrace. For days, Sanford had left the house at six o’clock, toothpaste foam rabid in the corners of his mouth, to stand on line for a seat at the proceedings, only to discover he’d been beaten out by people who were even more obsessed than he was. At dinner with her husband, it was Dag on linguine, Dag on the grille, Dag in the ice cube in her second or third glass of wine. Their interest in the man looked enough alike, but Francine’s played with her mind in a way Sanford could never imagine. Talking with him about Dag, she felt like the criminal who makes a clumsy attempt at innocence when he tells the detective to go ahead, search my closets, dig up my basement floor, I have nothing to hide.

Search my city, the mayor had taunted his accusers, ransack my administration and you’ll find nothing amiss. It wasn’t a bad town, after all, at least from the outside, but the place was rotten at heart; corruption and deceit ran through it like its river—deep, sludgy, and diverted so many times over the years no one could remember how it had originally flowed. There’d been too many years of people looking away, of not calling the mayor on anything while living off his largesse, and in this silence, Francine knew, was their complicity, and her own, now in her marriage.

She had met Dag at a barbeque on Ives Street the summer after college. She found his stride obnoxious but hard to ignore, because who strode when everyone else worked so hard to be smooth and steady? His voice was too loud in the jammed backyard, his accent too local, his haircut and clothes not quite right, he was a decade older than anyone there. Ugh, she’d said to a woman next to her, who is that guy?

Dag had appeared at first to know everyone at the party but have no one to talk to. She watched him move endlessly, offering hi-how-are-ya’s and eyeing the imported beers and the cold crowd. When he tugged at his collar, she saw a heartbeat of self-consciousness in a single gesture.

“Tough crowd,” he said when he caught her staring. Later, she understood he’d meant just the opposite; these were Ivy League pussies, not city lions. The men she knew expected to ease into the spots reserved for them, while she sensed Dag would soon sit atop the hill he had pushed together with his own hands. The people at the party might have disdain for him, but that didn’t bother Dag. Already he accepted the realities of a public life; it wasn’t a bad thing to be disliked, it was only a bad thing to be ignored. Already, he understood the division of his city, and here it was in the clearest form, even in the July night: him and her.

She shrugged. “So who do you know here?”

“No one yet.” He smiled, swiped two beers off the steps she was sitting on, and slipped them into his pockets. “I try never to miss a good party though.”

Of all his purposeful choreography that evening, it was the stealing of the beers, and no one challenging him—though he seemed almost to invite it—that she found so appealing. Because how could a person simply do that, take what he wanted and what wasn’t his? It was near beautiful in its riskiness, as though this was an entirely different way to live and operate. She was excited by her sudden, illogical attraction to him and the way he was looking at her. No one would approve of what she might do with him or how she might slip into this other world, if only briefly. Already she felt the summer stretching too thin, her pose of independence and the prospect of graduate school losing a little more of its charm.

“I’m not sure how good a party this is,” she’d told him. “There are probably better ones we could find.”

He seemed surprised that she said anything more to him, and Francine saw that when it came to maneuvering through the uncertain corridors of the female heart, he was not nearly so sure of himself. She felt her own particular power slice through the air.

Below Francine, Lewis worked on his single topiary, a bear with stumpy, outstretched arms that looked to be begging for quarters. The blades of his shears sent cooling slivers of sound through the open window.

Dee leaned into the room. “There’s a call,” Francine’s assistant said. “About booking an event.” This wasn’t Francine’s department, and she gave the girl a look to show that she’d been in the middle of something very important. “It’s about the Mayor,” Dee added. “I thought you’d want this one.”

I’ve been caught, Francine thought—but at what? And she hadn’t been asked for by name, had she? “Yes, how can I help you?” she said officiously into the phone.

Friends of the Mayor, that infamous cabal, wanted to book the Hunt-Paring House for a private party.

“I thought maybe you were calling me to be a character witness.” Francine laughed nervously, tipping too far back in her chair. “How original of me,” she said when she’d righted herself. “Everyone must say that.”

The woman on the other end was chilly. “I wouldn’t know, I really don’t have anything to do with that sort of thing.”

It was pointless to explain that she’d been joking, when really she hadn’t been entirely. And the woman hadn’t questioned who Francine was to even know the Mayor enough to be a character witness, because everyone claimed to know the man, whether they thought he was a crook or not. Even Sanford recently referred to the time he’d personally met Dag.

“I’m surprised the Mayor’s in the mood to celebrate right now,” Francine said. She’d seen it that morning on the television again; the Mayor shrinking like an old lady, disgrace beginning to collect at his ankles like slipping stockings. She couldn’t imagine that her fellow citizens would be too happy to look up the hill and see him dancing it up and smashing around in the flowerbeds.

“Before we go any further, I should tell you that during our busy season we require a 100% non-refundable deposit,” Francine lied. “In other words, this policy applies to everyone.”

“You understand I’m calling from Friends of the Mayor.”

“I understand perfectly, and I’m sure the Mayor appreciates a democratic policy when he sees one. But tell me this: Why here?” She glanced at the porcelain rooster again, understanding finally at that moment its strange and strong appeal to her; the animal’s essential ugliness had been made to look proud. “After all, it doesn’t seem like his kind of place.”

“The Mayor’s always liked the house,” the woman told her. “He’s very interested in antiques and art, you know. It’s one of his hobbies.”

The Mayor’s only hobby was politics and arm-twisting, and as far as Francine knew, he had never set foot in the Hunt-Paring House. Probably because there were no Bonicello’s. The real answer to her question, Francine supposed, was much simpler; nowhere else would have him.

When the woman put her on hold, she thought about the time her sublet apartment had been broken into a month after she and the Mayor had started sleeping together. The police had told her it was junkies because it had all the earmarks of a smash and grab job. She’d been in the shower when it happened. Though she didn’t have much worth stealing besides her radio and her electric typewriter, the break-in left her edgy and doubtful about staying. The Mayor had been calming, chummy with the cops. He stayed with her when she didn’t want to stay alone, he brought over another typewriter and radio and she didn’t ask him where they’d come from. At night, he made calls and parted the curtains to look outside. While she felt safer for it, she also knew that such protectiveness was frightening in its own way—because what did it say about what might happen without it? As she watched him one night surveying the dark street, Francine understood what she and Dag weren’t to each other and never would be; they were too different for that to ever change. But most surprisingly, the same understanding had also felt like longing—to be known when it appeared impossible.

It would have been simple to lie then and say to the Mayor’s organizer, the Panikolopolos-Chu wedding is on that evening you want, or the golden anniversary party of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Crestman is booked for the following week. Sorry, all full, she’d explain, and never have to see Dag in her world. Shut him out like she’d begun to shut off the television every morning, despite Sanford’s protests. But oddly, it was that longing, unearthed after so many years as something still beating that kept her from turning the Mayor away.

She knew she’d have to inform the board and assuage the last Hunt-Paring who was hotly anti-Mayor and wouldn’t want him fouling the family home. You may not like him, she’d explain with a degree of level-headedness that had always garnered respect—and to Sanford as well, though here she might have to look away—but the man hasn’t been found guilty of anything yet, and isn’t this still America, after all?

“If anyone tries to solicit a bribe from you, I’ll cut their dick off,” the Mayor had allegedly said. This was according to the latest reports from the trial she heard on Lewis’s radio which he carried around with him as he pruned his way through the verdant grounds.

The Mayor would have said tits had he been threatening a woman. One night, Dag had taken her to Doubles, a popular waterfront restaurant wedged between the shipyards. The sign on the door said, “No Muscle Shirts Allowed.” On a hot August night the parking lot was bright with tail lights and cigarettes and mobbed with people waiting to get in. Dag worked the crowd—now here were his people—like an elected official. He had a way in which his right hand would simply flip out, like a turning signal, to shake someone else’s hand while still moving ahead. Francine knew she was out of place in her white pants and simple sandals, her hair pulled back. The Mayor wore a long-sleeved shirt and blue blazer, as though he’d come out of an important meeting and was on his way to another after dinner with his girl, when really, they’d just come from fucking in her overheated bedroom. He slipped the maitre d’ some money and something whispered, and they were shown to a table by the window.

“All those people were here before us,” she’d said, “and we just waltzed in front of them. And no one said anything.” The cool power of what Dag had done left her both admiring and slightly ashamed. “I mean, is that fair?”

“Oh, I see. You want to get back in line,” Dag said, a palm flat on the table. “I thought you were hungry, but if you’d rather wait for a couple of hours, fine.”

It was breezy by the window, and the waitress smiled patiently. Dag nodded and then ordered what he always had—two chops, a second scotch. He made a face when she ordered bluefish. They’d had plenty of sex, and he always clung to her at the height of it, revealing himself to be terrified of those seconds out of control, but what did they really know about each other, including their tastes? During dinner, they discovered that while she’d been attending arty camps during the summers, he’d been working at his uncle’s industrial laundry delivering clean linens to hotels and picking up dirty ones. Once he’d found an after-birth wrapped in a pillow case.

“Must have been while you were playing the flute,” he said, his tone and face suddenly hard. “From happy camp to happy college, and now what is it, happy graduate school? Art history? There’s something useful. Jesus, you’ve had it easy, had it handed to you, and you never even wonder how it all happens. No wonder you’re such a good girl.” A bite of meat was suspended in front of his mouth as he cast a narrowed eye at her clothes, her unpainted nails, her spartan fish, and she saw that he had a deep, cellular disdain for her he didn’t even realize.

His comment stung. “Well, who are you?” she demanded.

“Apparently I’m just the asshole who gets you the best table, who doesn’t play fair according to you.”

It was pointless for her to be defensive; she’d only played at being someone who was secure. Their differences began to spread like a spill on the white tablecloth. He might marry a woman like me, she thought, and I might marry a man like him, because we’d mistakenly think it is brave and good to colonize foreign soil. But she didn’t know who he was anymore than he knew who she was or how privilege wasn’t the same as certainty or power, neither of which she felt she possessed. The tide went out during the rest of their wordless, unraveling dinner, revealing the abandoned bones of an old dock.

Later that night, Dag took her to the armory at the top of Lincoln Hill, a deserted brick building with vast high-ceilinged rooms. The place had a disheartened, pissed-in smell, and was dark except for the moonlight that came in through panes etched with dirt. Chalkboards and chairs were pushed against the walls, the general and colonels having abandoned their fortress seemingly in a great hurry. She felt the need to hold on to Dag’s arm, to salvage the evening, and though he had appeared at first to be on proprietary terms with the place, brandishing his gleaming key at the front door, he didn’t seem to know where the staircase up to the view was.

“You haven’t been here before, have you?” she asked.

“Of course I have,” he told her, and then with the kind of logic she’d see later in his years in City Hall, he explained, “How else do you think I got a key?”

Eventually they found the stairs to the turret. It was a beautiful night by the open view, heat tempered with a breath of approaching September, and the trees mixed it up wildly. Dag pointed out various sites, named the neighborhoods that spread out before them—Kike Hill, Darktown, Spicville. He told her about shifting routes and planned development and what used to be where.

“From this very site, in fact,” he said, “our men fought the British. Not a great battle by any means, so you might not know of it, but it was significant—The Battle of Lincoln.”

Francine heard stray noises below, rats possibly, but more likely the city’s soul in a disgusted sigh at such a perversion, because she knew that what Dag had just told her was a complete lie. She’d done some research on the site once for an architecture project and knew that nothing more interesting than a four-minute visit from Lyndon Johnson had ever occurred in it. He turned in the moonlight to kiss her.

“That’s not true,” she said, pulling away from him, “about the battle. It didn’t happen here. Nothing did.”

“Shhh.” He grasped her arm, touched her lips. His fingers smelled of dinner. “Don’t be such a know-it-all. It’s not attractive. I want to kiss you now.”

There was a fluttering and a crash, as though a blackboard downstairs had fallen over. It’s the wind, Dag assured as his grip on her tightened, the westerly summer gusts—had she ever spent a summer in his city? He ran his hands over her breasts and pinched her nipples meanly. She slapped his hands away.

“Why do you make things up?” Francine demanded. “Why do you pretend that you know everything? That’s not attractive.” They heard voices then, the tangled sounds of another man and woman in an argument. “We left the door open,” she said breathlessly, fearful of being trapped on the turret, but also scared of Dag whose look was unreadable. “Maybe they’ll go away.”

He shook his head at her like a disappointed parent, and moved to the stairs. She followed, and by the time they reached the ground floor, the man and woman were engaged in a screaming match and wouldn’t have noticed if she and Dag had just slipped out. They clutched at each other, off balance, sloppy and drugged-up.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Dag barked, his spit silvering in the air. The two stopped, shocked straight for a minute. The woman, all teased hair and bones, moved away. Dag stood over the man whose eyes shifted unevenly.

“Piece of shit junkies,” Dag said.

“Fuck you, fat asshole college boy,” the man returned.

Junkies; Francine’s spine burned with hate. They took her radio and typewriter and security, and if not them precisely, then one of their friends; the city was full of them, Dag had often told her. She watched Dag’s body tense as he delivered a punch to the man’s stomach. Like his woman, the junkie was unsteady and folded like wet paper. For Francine, the episode could have ended there—a measured, if imprecise retribution—with the man wheezing on his knees in the armory dust. But Dag took a jump and leveled an unnecessary, toppling kick to his kidneys. Twin jolts of shock and shame collided at the base of Francine’s skull, a sensation that was tonal like the man’s moan, so that many years later, a certain pitch could make her feel as though she were suspended at the top of a cliff, her fall imminent.

“Those people make me sick,” the Mayor said when they were out on the street. He took a greedy drag of his cigarette. “Fucking bloodsuckers.”

“Why did you do that?” A cold fist had lodged in Francine’s throat. “Why did you have to go so far?”

“So far?” Dag stopped and looked at her.

“You already hit him once. That was enough.”

“Didn’t you see that they were going to mug us? That he was going to rape you maybe, Francine?”

“He could hardly stand. You could have left them alone.” She shook her head; how would she ever know what might have happened? “That wasn’t right.”

“Right,” he repeated, and flicked his cigarette into the street. “Did I hear you trying to stop me? No, I didn’t think so. One hit is okay, but two isn’t? You want it both ways. Jesus, you’re so fucking naïve.”

For a week after, Francine’s phone rang but she wouldn’t answer it. A police cruiser crawled up and down her street and then disappeared. One night, Dag got inside the apartment building and called her name from the other side of the door. His tone was unfamiliar; locked out, fearful of his need for her, exposed. She thought of how he clutched her when he came. Through her misery, she understood that in their time together, he’d never hidden himself from her. He’d shown her exactly who he was, even that night in the armory. That much was honest in its own way, more so than she’d ever been with him. How could she admit that what she’d admired in him was also what she hated him for, and that maybe they were not so different? Much sooner than she’d imagined, he was silent, and then she heard him leave. Less than two months together, and it was over, a clean, if ugly cut; still it stunned her to have been moved past so easily, to have left him so untouched.

There never was anything in the paper about a dead junkie, Francine had gone to grad school as planned, gotten married, had kids, and become Executive Director. She knew exactly how her life had happened, step by step, though on some days it still surprised her. Occasionally when she drove down Manton Avenue, she’d look for the pair from the armory, and every time she was waylaid by an addict in the supermarket parking lot, she’d give him a few dollars. A number of times since that night in the armory, she and Sanford had seen the Mayor eating alone in a restaurant—alone despite his popularity—and it never failed to recall for her his plaintive voice outside her door, and how she might have opened it again if he’d waited a little longer.

By August, no one could say if the Mayor would go to prison if convicted, but his opponents pawed at the air, anxious to get into the ring and take the title from him. On Thursday, Sanford brought home two “Langstrom for Mayor” placards and stuck them in the front yard.

“The guy talks about how the people want clean government as though this is some brilliant insight,” she told Sanford. “But we’re too far past that. This isn’t kindergarten, for chrissake. I really don’t want those signs up.”

“Langstrom’s not perfect,” Sanford argued, “but this says we’re ready for something else. The reign of Dag is over.” Her husband’s enthusiasm had a hard edge to it. “You think all this deception and intimidation doesn’t ever reach down to where you are? Think again. You’re scared of it just like everyone else,” he told Francine, as though she were to blame, and the Mayor’s upcoming party was only more evidence of her corruptibility. “And that’s pretty fucking sad.”

A few nights later, she vandalized the signs which were already softened by the sprinkler that had gone on at midnight. They’d been too much like For Sale signs, she realized, suggesting flight. The next morning Sanford was distressed, but not really surprised, when he looked out at the pieces of paper which littered the lawn.

In the city’s last summer weeks, Lewis’s lilies bent under their own weight, and the kids got on the camp bus like prisoners. Sometimes in the slow hours in her office, in the days before the Mayor’s party, Francine sensed the Hunt-Paring House inching closer to death, not from inattention or dwindling funds, but from a lack of urgency. If it was change and progress that reaffirmed purpose, what was there left to do here? The rooster still sat on her desk—a defiant, tiny crime with a blue eye—as she fiddled with the final copy for the embroidery show. There was some beautiful, illuminating work, but the captivity of the women who made the pieces was overwhelming to her.

By mid-day of the Mayor’s party, an affable breeze had wrapped itself around the house, showing up like the caterers to set things in motion, and at just after seven, Francine watched from her office window as the Mayor stepped out of his Lincoln. For the second he stood directly below her, his head was a landing pad for a drop of rain or spit. The tanned skin of women in backless dresses punctuated a grove of dark suits. Beyond the party and down the hill, the city was beginning to light up while her office darkened. She felt the arrhythmic pulse of a car stereo down the block.

“So? Tell me everything that’s happened,” Sanford urged when she called later, but she had only a single detail to give him; she’d been the Mayor’s lover once.

“I don’t have anything to tell,” she said.

He hesitated. “Are you okay then?”

“I should go,” she said, risk fading fast in her.

There were people arguing in the bathroom down the hall when no one was supposed to be upstairs. Months ago, Francine had taken her first of many baths there on a late Sunday afternoon when the house was empty and she was lured by the prospect of a soak in these aristocratic waters. It was a luxurious basin with silken sides and such a rushing sound of water it was like standing by the cataract of a waterfall loud enough to drown out any sense that she shouldn’t be there. This too had become her private room, a strand of her pubic hair teasing at the drain, the ghost of her wet footprints on the floor.

As she stood outside the bathroom, she heard that it was the Mayor doing the belittling of whoever was in there with him. In a minute, the door opened, and a man fled down the stairs. When she looked in, Francine would have liked to see the Mayor gazing achingly from the window at the town he’d screwed, his shoulders falling in resignation that he’d made a mess of things. What the city wanted, what it really needed, she knew, was not just his apology, but his admission. But what she saw instead was the Mayor about to take a piss without lifting the toilet seat.

“Oh, no,” she said, alarmed, “you can’t do that here. You have to go downstairs.”

He laughed without looking at her and zipped up. “It’s been a while since anyone told me where I could take a leak.”

Get used to it, she was tempted to say. “This is not a public bathroom.”

He held his hands up in an exaggerated defense. “Okay, okay, I didn’t do it, I promise.” There was still an aggressive charm to his tone.

“These rooms are private, off-limits.”

“So I gather.” He straightened his tie and turned to stare down the faceless, dark space where she knew he couldn’t see her. “My mistake then, obviously. I thought these were public rooms. You know—for everyone.”

These were Francine’s words, spoken as though she were trespassing in the Mayor’s house again, instead of the other way around. How stupid she was, she told herself, hurrying towards her office, to think that he hadn’t recognized her that night, or that he might not have known where she’d always been during these years. Or that he was here now by chance.

“Why don’t you tell me about some of these pictures,” he said, pursuing her. “Looks like you keep the good stuff up here—you know, where the public’s not allowed. And why not, really—they wouldn’t appreciate it. Dopes. What’s this one?”

Francine turned to see the Mayor pointing at a canvas; he was still the guy who let the tip of his finger get too close.

“James Marsh Millicent,” she said. “And don’t touch, please.”