"Yes. Now."

She turned to look at him, her face slack. He tried to remember her as she'd been in Katmandu. The outlines of her beauty were still there, but back then this beauty seemed to be projected from an inexhaustible source of reckless energy that kept her always in motion, her eyes full of mystery. When he saw her again in Goa she was showing signs of wear. She'd lost weight and her eyes didn't have the precision he remembered.

"You're crying," she said, then reached up and wiped a tear from his cheek.

Trey said, "Mich.e.l.le."

"Don't be sad," she said. "Maybe you take a little fix with me."

He shook his head.

"Give me one, Trey. I want you to do it."

"Rudy's in trouble," he said.

She sighed dreamily. "Don't worry. You will think of something, no?"

"I need your help."

"You do what's best."

"Listen to me."

"Please, Trey. Not now. After a little fix." She reached down and stroked his crotch. "Then we make love." They hadn't, not since she'd started shooting up again. The drug had swallowed all of her desire, and he found he didn't want her as she was now.

He pushed her hand away. "I'm trying to talk to you."

"Trey, please."

He had no illusions about his complicity in Mich.e.l.le's habit, but he felt that some last shred of principle was upheld by his refusal to stick the needle into her arm. Now this seemed a cheap distinction. Mich.e.l.le was beyond thinking. He had allowed her to do this to herself. For this he had to accept responsibility, and for the rest of it.

"All right," he said. "All right, I will."

She sat up on the pallet and rolled up the sleeve of her shirt. The arm was thin and pale, speckled near the joint with needle marks. Trey took the bandana from around his neck and tied her off. She leaned over and kissed him. He swabbed her arm with alcohol, then wiped off the needle.

"A little more," she said when Trey started to heat the spoon over the flame of the oil lamp. "Okay?"

A little more, then. For the next few hours he wanted her out of it. He didn't want her to know what he'd had to do. He wished her a long, cool rush that would lift her beyond the clammy walls, beyond the gray hills outside to a white, featureless place where there was neither choice nor betrayal. He almost wished he could join her there. He shook more powder from the packet into the spoon, then closed his eyes and opened them.

When the powder had melted, he put the spoon down on the pallet, drew the liquid into the syringe and held it up, looking for bubbles. He missed the vein on the first try, his hands shaking badly. When he tried to pull it out a peak of white flesh rose around the needle. He clutched her elbow tighter. The second time the needle slipped easily into the vein. He raised his thumb and depressed the plunger.

Where he drew the needle out, a tiny red bubble blossomed and burst. Mich.e.l.le's face unclenched and she sank down onto the pallet with a sigh.

He staggered down the stairs and, outside, got down on his hands and knees and vomited.

He found him in the bazaar.

"You have decided," the Pathan asked.

Trey nodded. There was nothing he could say.

"You have somewhere to go?"

"I won't bother you," Trey said.

The Pathan nodded solemnly, then reached under his shirt and held out a dirty white envelope. "Two hundred dollars," he said, "as a token of good faith. When I return you will have the rest of the money for me, as we agreed."

Trey let him stand there, holding the envelope. The Pathan waited; he would not insist.

Finally Trey took the envelope and shoved it into his pocket. "Two hours," he said.

After nodding again, the Pathan turned and walked off through the bazaar. Trey imagined rifle sights on the receding blue turban.

The sun had just dipped behind the mountains in the west. The bazaar was closing down. Trey was sitting at a table in front of a tea shop. The old man who had served him came out to look at him, then went slowly back inside.

Someone was talking to him but at first Trey didn't hear what was being said. The man who was speaking had his bushy hair tied back in a pony-tail and wore a gold ring through his left nostril. He was waving his hand in front of Trey's face.

"Hey, man, do you read me? Anybody home in there?" He unstrapped his backpack and took a seat across the table. He put his index finger to his ear and said "Bang!" then patted his shirtpockets. "Got a smoke?"

Trey shook his head.

"Got a voice? No, don't answer that. I know how it is. Some days, what's to say. Am I right? Silence is golden. I got this friend in some monastery, he's taken this vow of silence. Which is entirely cool." He held his hands out between them and cracked his knuckles. "Speak to me, man. I'm going crazy. Five f.u.c.king hours at the border. They tear my pack down. They strip me. Check my a.s.shole. Under my toenails. Behind my ears. But I'm clean. Jesus, I'd kill for a toke right now. Swallowed my last half gram on the bus. Once that hit I thought the Khyber Pa.s.s was going to swallow swallow me alive. What a place. Journey into Hades. So tell me, what's the scene around here? These dudes toting guns. They got a war going on?" me alive. What a place. Journey into Hades. So tell me, what's the scene around here? These dudes toting guns. They got a war going on?"

Trey saw the Pathan approaching briskly, then stopping a few yards short of the tea shop, taking his pistol from the holster and leveling it at him. Trey's companion quit talking and followed his gaze, then dropped to the ground and rolled under the table.

The Pathan seemed to be trembling. "We had an agreement," he said, his voice very strange.

"What happened?" Trey said.

"Perhaps you think to make a joke."

Trey opened his mouth to speak but couldn't catch his breath. The pistol was following the motion of his head.

The Pathan said, "My offer was more than generous."

"Where is Mich.e.l.le," Trey asked.

"Where? Do not worry about where. She is where you left her." He stepped forward and examined Trey's face. "You do not know, then?" He shook his head, spit on the ground between them and, stepping forward, went through Trey's pockets with his free hand. He found the envelope, put it in the sleeve of his shirt, then left.

The man with the ponytail got to his feet and put his arms around Trey's shoulders.

Trey looked at the ring through his nose, wondering if it had hurt to have a thing like that put in.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ," the man said. "That was close, man. Somebody could've got killed."

It was almost dark, and Trey thought of telling him something Rudy had said-that it was dangerous to be in the bazaar in Landi Kotal after dark. Looking up at the huge gray sky, he could see the first faint stars. He could feel the planet turning and moving through s.p.a.ce. He could feel the tug of gravity in his arms and legs, and he could hear the roar of darkness sweeping toward him like a fist.

1982.

My Public Service Was it Kissinger who said that power's an aphrodisiac? The dictator with his cabaret dancer, the studio boss and the starlet, all the ruthless, puff-bellied, hairy-eared trolls with their creamy cupcakes ... it's hardly a notion to inspire poetry, or pride of species. But the quest for power can be a search for love. This is what occurs to me now, years after I helped bring the senator down.

Like many before him, he required women. It was a compulsion, as drinking is for some men. He was a teetotaler, but he couldn't bear to pa.s.s a night alone. If he had fifteen minutes between appointments, he wanted to spend them in hot congress with a warm body. One of my jobs was to summon them, smuggle them up the back stairs, through the rear door, spirit them out in the service elevator just ahead of his wife if she'd taken the early flight. The blonde in the second row, the stewardess named Tami, the student who asked that interesting question about mental health. I would say that the senator was very impressed with her whatever-her question, her comment, her thoughts on the health-care question, her thorough and enlightening explanation of the safety features of the Boeing 747, her long blond tresses, her t.i.ts-and would like to meet her in his suite. At first I was embarra.s.sed. A former fat boy who retained the doughy, pig-gaited self-image long after the lard had melted away, I was nearly incapable of approaching women on my own behalf, but as the senator's emissary, I'm ashamed to say, I became good at putting just the right spin on these invitations: It was important that candidates understand it wasn't actually their opinions on the health-care question that were being solicited, the senator not having time to waste on preliminaries, while it was also important to communicate all of this by implication, deniability being crucial in case the lady in question was unreceptive. I'm sorry to say there weren't many refusals.

There was a type: slim, no a.s.s, big t.i.ts and long blond hair. Not that he wouldn't compromise his standards in a pinch, politics being the art of compromise, after all.

And now that I've given you every reason to despise the man, let me also say that I loved him. The women weren't drugged, or coerced. Neither were the voters. In a democracy, seduction replaces rape. He was the most magnetic individual I have ever met. When I arrived on the Hill during the dark days of the Republican ascendancy, all the young Democrats wanted to work for Senator Castleton, the fresh-faced, sandy-haired Solon of his day. At that time he was becoming known as a champion of comprehensive national health care and tax reform. The press liked him because he was young and photogenic-the same reasons for which they'd later dislike him.

He came out of the high plains, his exact origins obscured in a cloud of red prairie dust and self-invention. The campaign biography stated that his father had died in combat in World War II. That was the start of the trouble, when an enterprising reporter found the birth certificate that named his father as "Unknown." The fallout from this revelation was mixed, the senator perhaps gaining as much sympathy for his fatherlessness as censure for his mendacity. After the first disclosure, the second-day press coverage was somewhat cautious, accompanied by sidebars about compa.s.sionate man-on-the-street reactions, as well as a smattering of breast-beating editorials about the role of the press. Subsequent revelations about his background-the mother's lack of visible means of support, the hospitalizations-were handled gingerly, almost apologetically. The senator was perceived by many to be the double victim of an unfortunate childhood and an insensitive press. Trey Davis, the former administrative a.s.sistant who worked on the campaign, used to joke that this episode bought him an extra planeload of blondes.

The senator himself was reticent about his background, and in the end I'm not sure he could separate his own inventions from the facts. But one day in Georgia, during his first presidential bid, he told me about his mother. He'd just addressed a group of students at a private university and had been confronted by a shouting delegation from a nearby Bible college, whose members denounced his opinions on school prayer and abortion. Standing up to the protestors, he called them "narrow-minded religious bigots;" the event had ended in an uproar, with part of the audience chanting the Lord's Prayer to drown out the voice from the podium. Driving back to Atlanta, he was seething. After many miles of silence, he suddenly told me that his mother had been involved with a group called the a.s.semblies of G.o.d, to which she t.i.thed much of what little money she was able to beg from relatives or collect from the state. His jaw clenched, the Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand shaking, he said she'd once driven him into a small Missouri town and made him beg money from strangers. Two days before, she'd signed over a Social Security check to a minister who promised her the Lord would provide. Later, he said, when his mother went back to complain, she was told that her wallet was possessed by Satan, who encouraged her spendthrift ways. The future senator had watched his mother perform an exorcism on the kitchen table, pounding on her wallet, chanting "Satan be gone." I tend to believe this story because of the clenched fury in his dripping face that day, the kudzu-strangled telephone poles ticking past the back window of the steaming Lincoln, and because I never heard him tell it again.

Between fits of religiosity, his mother drank, and as an adult he had little patience for drinkers, which made him some thing of an anomaly in the Senate. At any rate, she died when he was fifteen and he went to live with an aunt and uncle, attended the state university on a scholarship, married his first sweetheart, went to Harvard Law and joined the Kennedy administration.

These are the facts, the campaign bio. But try to imagine the distance between these points. Far easier to walk on your knees over broken gla.s.s from the state capital to Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Washington, D.C., than to do it as he did. Try to picture the days and nights devoted to work and study; you are obviously obsessed and driven to succeed, or you never would've made it so far. When finally you slump over on the desk, or turn off the light in your room in your uncle's bas.e.m.e.nt, imagine the howling demons of fear and loneliness coming in off the plains like tornadoes and rattling the windows. Imagine those few moments suspended over the abyss between work and exhausted sleep. At dawn, the ordeal will begin again.

One morning-in New Hampshire, I think-I was due to wake him up. He had a breakfast speech with the Elks or the Moose, some antlered fraternity. I was just outside his door at the Holiday Inn when I heard the woman's voice, pleading, calling his name, and remembered her from the night before, the waitress from the c.o.c.ktail lounge downstairs. When she started to cry, I used my key to open the door. They were in bed. She was on her side, facing out, and he was wrapped around her. She'd thrown the covers off but couldn't extract herself from his sleeping arms, which were clamped fiercely around her torso, his left hand with its wedding band clasping a breast that bulged pinkly between his clenched fingers. I managed to rouse him, and to free her. It would happen again, and even some of the women who managed to free themselves in the morning remarked on his tenacious reluctance, once asleep, to let go.

He graduated fifth in his cla.s.s at Harvard Law and then signed on with Vista, the fledgling domestic version of the Peace Corps. JFK was his hero, and they became acquainted. I often wonder if he knew then about JFK's satyriasis, or if his later behavior was influenced by the eventual rev elations. According to those who knew him back then, he was the straightest of arrows-like me, I like to imagine-and devoted to Doreen and their two children, avidly creating the family he'd never had.

On the anniversary of that infamous day in Dallas, I sat with him in a coffee shop in Iowa, where we were stumping for the caucuses, and he said he'd cried when he heard the news, sobbing uncontrollably as he hugged his secretary. Tears stood in his eyes as he told me this. "And then," he said without a trace of self-consciousness, "I decided I would take his place."

He had gone back home to run for Congress, then, after two terms, for the Senate. He took care of his state even as he refused to share its most conservative convictions. When he came out against the Vietnam War, early on, all agreed that his senatorial bid was ruined. His victory was seen by the national press as a signal event in the debate over the war; almost from the start, he was a national figure. He was, as unfashionable as it sounds, a hero of mine. Hero worship was especially unfashionable in the wake of the sixties, yet I was not alone. Most of us would've worked for him for nothing. In the end, some of us did.

I grew up in the sterile, fertile state he represented, not on one of its amber-waving farms, but in an aluminum-sided suburb rimmed with shopping malls. My father sold insurance. I was a 4-H captain, a stamp collector, an apple-polisher in white socks. A young nerd with aspirations to public service, I represented my state at a national high school conference on government, flying to Washington for three days of make-believe legislative sessions and inspirational speeches from lawmakers. Castleton spoke to our group and later invited me to his office. He had a face that seemed incapable of harboring deceit or insincerity, a visage like an open book. We chatted for ten minutes. His speech about the virtues of hard work and the joys of public service might have been lifted out of a civics textbook, but I believed every word. Unlike most of the other congressmen I'd met, who seemed to be speaking by rote, whose gestures and phrases sounded stagy and false even to a seventeen-year-old teacher's pet, he seemed absolutely genuine. Like a real person, talking man to man. What I sensed then was how much it actually seemed to matter that I liked him. I wanted to go to work for him then and there, but I had to wait five years. He wrote me a letter of recommendation to Harvard, and though I was accepted, my father made too much to qualify for financial aid and too little to pay for tuition comfortably, so I went to the state U. A week after my graduation, I was installed as an intern in his Senate office in the Dirksen Building.

The years I worked with him on the Hill seem, in retrospect, the best of my life. That first year, I shared a dormlike house near Lincoln Park with half a dozen other unpaid or underpaid press aides and interns. We walked to work, did most of our eating from canape platters at nightly receptions and Capitol events. Later, when I became a legislative a.s.sistant, I moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Adams Morgan with Trey Davis, who also worked for the senator. Davis was a New Yorker, the first I'd ever met, and had a year's seniority and a world of experience on me. He'd grown up on Fifth Avenue, attended Buckley and Hotchkiss and Williams, where he'd been the protege of James McGregor Burns. Initially I was put off by his dangerous good looks, his arrogant and cynical manner. As my immediate superior, he subjected me to a species of hazing the first few weeks and referred to me behind my back as "the lemur," an allusion to my putative wide-eyed innocence. His own eyes, beneath heavy bat-wing brows, seemed knowing and cruel.

At the end of the first week, he looked me up and down and said, "You're an aesthetic menace. The polyester has got to go." He took me to Brooks Brothers and picked out a pair of gray flannel slacks, a pair of chinos, three oxford-cloth shirts and a blue blazer, charging them to his own account. When I protested, he said I could pay him back in installments. Somehow, we became friends. I think I was like the plain girl who becomes the confidante of the beauty queen; he needed a protege, an appreciative audience. When he moved to the apartment in Adams Morgan, he asked me to share it with him. Neither of us spent much time at home anyway. Mostly we worked. Trey would sometimes take the shuttle to New York for the weekend, returning, haggard, with tales of nightclubs and parties populated by dirty debutantes. He tried to explain the difference between downtown and uptown to me. I was content to stay in D.C., which was more than worldly enough for me. Occasionally I would have a beer at a neighborhood pub and attempt to impress ambitious young women in Talbot's suits. Though I didn't know it at the time, it was the heyday of the Pill, after Roe and before AIDS. I had a few dates and a brief, awkward romance with a Georgetown student who was interning in Senator Kennedy's office, during which I managed finally to shed my virginity at the age of twenty-three. But I wasn't very good with women. I think I was too earnest, even for serious young ladies with Phi Beta Kappa keys and Ba.s.s Weejuns who'd come to the Capitol to serve their country.

When the senator announced to the staff that he was going to make a run for the White House, we were ecstatic. We would all rise with him. But more than that, we believed in him, though by then I'd learned that heroes have a few warts. We all knew he'd had an affair with one of the a.s.sistants, whom he later placed in the office of the senior senator. And one night when I went back to the office late to retrieve some papers, I saw him emerge from the inner office with a disheveled female reporter. His face was flushed and glistening with a film of sweat. They were both giggling, until they spotted me and hurriedly donned their coats, the senator wishing me a curt good night.

Neat, housewifely Doreen had come to the office for the announcement. She smiled and hugged us, seeming more like the candidate's spinsterish sister than his wife. I couldn't help wondering what the campaign really meant to her. Bad enough to be the wife of a senator. But maybe he was a victim, too, married early to a woman he'd soon outgrown. She must have looked much different to an orphan at the state university than to a rising U.S. senator. After she left, several of us overheard Joe Cleary lecturing him from inside his office. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, you've got to keep it in your pants, or you're going to f.u.c.k the whole thing up," he roared. I couldn't make out the senator's response. Cleary was a tough old Boston politico who'd worked for Kennedy and alongside Castleton since his congressional days. Shambling red-faced out of the office, he turned to me and asked if I knew the three b's b's. "The three whats?" I said, looking up at the craters and exploded veins on his broad, florid nose. I was afraid of him, of his caustic whiskey breath with its whiff of decomposition and corruption. He seemed to me the ant.i.thesis of the new political order we were trying to create. "Broads, bribes and boys," he said, then ran his sleeve under his nose. "Sooner or later ..." Cleary shook his head and left the office, the sentence unfinished. I was glad to see him go. Although I might have concurred with the sentiment, it seemed out of place on this special day, the dawn of an era. I was full of liberal indignation at his crude and chauvinistic term for women, a word I'd certainly never heard on the senator's lips.

"What about booze?" Trey said from the next desk over, and we all had a good laugh.

I volunteered for the campaign staff. Within days I was on the plane with him to Iowa. Those first few months we were romantic underdogs, tilting at grain silos and cooling towers, drawing on a modest fund of skeptical goodwill. But the senator was charismatic, and if we could get five hundred people in a room, four hundred of them walked out believing. More often, though, it was forty. On one occasion four citizens came to hear him speak at a public library, one of them a reporter from the local weekly. But he reached out to those four as if they were convention delegates, turning his chair around backward and sitting among them, lingering to chat with the blue-haired librarian, who blushed and fussed with her hair as though sensing her womanhood for the first time in a decade. And the way I looked at it, that was five more in our column. Late at night, awash in lasagna indigestion and Trey's snoring from the next twin bed in the Ramada or the Holiday Inn, I would add them up in my head like a good little accountant-the number of mouths at the church supper, the number of hands shaken outside the factory gate. And one more late convert-the eceptionist who'd gone off duty at eleven and joined the senator in his room.

His close second-place finish in New Hampshire was interpreted as a win, given the large field and his last-minute gains against the polls. Suddenly money was pouring in, and the camp followers flocked: pollsters, consultants, volunteers, fund-raisers, local brokers, party leaders, single-issue nuts, social-climbing hostesses, reporters-and women. That was when it began to get out of control.

From New Hampshire, we flew straight to New York City, where they were waiting to shower Castleton with money and attention. That was where Carl Furst signed on, the most sought-after of Democratic political consultants, a red-faced left-wing a.s.sa.s.sin. He'd worked with the better-funded front-runner early on, but we'd been hearing he was unhappy with his candidate, and after New Hampshire, no dummy, he joined us. There were mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it was good for the team, like signing a great pitcher. But some of us, particularly Trey, who had been practically running the campaign up to this point, resented this fair-weather friend, this bullet-headed mercenary. Since Furst would be stepping in at the top, everyone moved down a notch. And, in fact, the senator quickly became more and more isolated from those of us who'd started out with him, coc.o.o.ned in the smoky scrum of Furst and his pollsters and spin doctors.

The night before the Furst meeting, we went to a Park Avenue party given by a fat man who owned a chain of stores and whose thin wife was a former lover of JFK. If you're wondering how I know this, they told us. That was my introduction to New York-a city I thought should be gerrymandered right out of the republic and bequeathed to France, or maybe Turkey. At any rate, I was part of the advance team, arriving at the apartment with Trey Davis and two Secret Service men. Our host and hostess greeted us with the special consideration that our a.s.sociation with the newly important senator conferred. They eagerly greeted Trey by name, reminding him that their son had been at Buckley with him, though he seemed distinctly cool about this. Giving us the tour, they pointed out the more prominent paintings, which were framed in gilt and had little museum plaques to identify the artist. Our host explained that he'd been a major supporter of the Democratic Party for years. "And Evie was JFK's lover when she was at Va.s.sar," he said, nodding toward his wife-who was adjusting the lilies in a large crystal vase-and beaming as if he'd just commended her cooking or business ac.u.men. I thought this was bizarre enough with his wife out of earshot, but later, with his arm around the tanned and beaming Evie, he repeated it to the senator. If she'd been any younger or prettier, I'm sure he would've been very keen on this admission.

That party was the beginning of the s...o...b..z phase. Several movie stars were on hand; apparently, some of them lived in New York, though I can't imagine why. The writer Norman Mailer arrived with his beautiful new red-haired wife. As with most of the women in the room, she was much taller than her companion. Dressed like a banker, Mailer rocked back on his heels when he listened and jabbed his finger into Castleton's chest when he talked, while his wife smiled impishly. The senator was enamored. He kidded with Mailer as if they'd known each other for years, and flirted with Mrs. Mailer. It was hard to say which one he was more interested in, and it was the first time I'd seen him starstruck. Doreen was at the party, but, like most political wives, she had the gift for receding into the background, and after posing for photos, she left early to catch the last shuttle back to be with the kids.

I stood in the corner and watched the rich people. You could tell they were rich not only because of how they dressed but also because it cost a thousand dollars a couple to shake the senator's hand and exchange a few words. But since he was gifted at making that kind of encounter seem meaningful, I doubt anyone went away feeling cheated. Before he left, he did his best to make sure everyone in the room loved him. Yet, listening to his remarks, for the first time I heard in his voice the third-person self-consciousness of a politician addressing the ma.s.ses. What he said wasn't new; I'd heard many of the same remarks a hundred times before, but each time he'd seemed to be speaking his mind and his heart directly, to individuals, no matter how large the group. This was one of his talents, that he didn't sound like a pol. Now, suddenly, he seemed insincere, as if his recent success had made him conscious of these sentiments as a winning formula. The phrase "what the American people want" was repeated a little too often for my taste.

That first night in New York, he started the liaison with Amanda Greer, which we all read about years later. Against everyone's advice, he accompanied her to a nightclub. Trey and I tagged along in our Town Car, trailing the actress's limo. Trey was furious. He explained that there were photographers outside these places and sometimes inside, that drugs were consumed openly on the premises; under normal circ.u.mstances, it was his kind of scene, but we could kiss the nomination good-bye if anyone got a good shot of the senator with his tongue in this actress's ear.

He jumped out of the car at a stoplight and ran over to the limo, rapping on the smoked window until it finally slid down. After a heated exchange, he finally negotiated a compromise. "Look," Trey said after he ran back to the car. "You go take her in the front door of the club. I'll sneak our hero in the side door-I know the owner-and we'll meet you in the VIP room." The senator emerged from the limo and jogged to our car, grinning sheepishly as I pa.s.sed. In a daze, I walked to the limo and climbed in.

She was curled in the corner of the seat, her legs folded up beneath her. Regarding me quizzically, she appeared ready to burst into laughter. Tiny as she was, she had an enormous specific gravity; I could sense the car listing toward her side like a boat beneath us. She was more real than anyone I'd ever seen, her hair redder, her eyes bluer than anything in nature. Despite the unexpected wrinkles around her eyes, or maybe because of them, I thought n.o.body could be more beautiful. I imagined that others, those who worshiped her from the movies, would be surprised by the wrinkles, whereas I could look beyond them. She was smoking a cigarette, and when she spoke, her voice was husky and low.

"Wouldn't we like to play Mrs. Robinson to you," she said. She unfolded her legs and leaned forward to pour more Champagne in her gla.s.s. She seemed a little worse for wear, her words semislurred. All I wanted to do was to protect her from herself, and from all the people who wanted something from her. As we glided above the rutted streets of New York, she talked to me like an old friend and asked where I was from. I was astonished to learn she'd been born and raised on a farm not fifty miles from my home. She told me about her family, about leaving at seventeen to come to the city and study acting. When we disembarked in front of the club, she took my arm as the flashbulbs began to pop. There were perhaps a hundred people waiting outside, but right away a path opened up for us. I heard her name repeated like a mantra. Someone asked, "Who's the guy?" And at that moment I felt the envy of strangers and almost believed I deserved it. Whatever the circ.u.mstances, I had become part of her world.

I was bereft when, at the door to the VIP room, I got separated from her by the ponytailed bouncer. Seeing her disappear inside, I was furious beyond reason, as if I'd been deprived of my rightful place by her side. I insisted that I was with her, to no avail.

I can't say what the VIP room was like, but what I saw in the bathroom and out on the dance floor gave me nightmares for days. After exploring the premises, I was waiting sullenly outside the door, when suddenly Castleton appeared, looking out into the crowd. Seeing me, he waved me in and the now-diplomatic bouncer stood aside. I glared at him indignantly. Then the senator put his arm on my shoulder and said, "I want you to take Amanda to her hotel suite and wait for me there. Don't let her out of your sight. And wait for me." Looking around the small, smoky room, I spotted her gliding toward us, a cigarette in one hand and a Champagne gla.s.s in the other, the eyes of the crowd tracking her as if attached by wires. Even in her cups she maintained a kind of dignity, her liquidity contained in a graceful vessel. "If it isn't my old friend Benjamin Brad-dock. My young friend. My new true-blue baby boy."

"Cal's going to take you home," the senator said.

"Home is where the hat is," she said, "and I don't wear hats. I don't wear hearts, either, except on my sleeve. Home is where you can't go again. It's in foreclosure." She kissed him on the cheek, then held her hand to her mouth in mock chagrin, looking around to see if the gesture had been noted. Then she took my arm and marched me out of the room, down the stairs and across the dance floor. If she had seemed tipsy, her stride was now quick and purposeful, a practiced gait that blurred her pa.s.sage and left bystanders doing double takes, a just-short-of-running gait-like the rack of a Tennessee walking horse-which is unique to famous people who want to move between two points without getting dragged into contact with the spectating cla.s.s. The senator resorts to it on occasion, when rushing for planes, though usually he's a glutton for handshaking, chats and photo ops.

She raced me out the side door, around the crowd. Her driver, spotting her, jumped out to open the door as a photographer snapped her picture. Suddenly she put her arm around me and posed, laying her head on my shoulder, then kissing my neck. Two other photographers materialized and someone shouted, "What's his his name?" My vision was bleached out by the flashbulbs, and then we were in the limo, pulling away. name?" My vision was bleached out by the flashbulbs, and then we were in the limo, pulling away.

Laughing, she said, "I like to think about the photo editors and gossip columnists scurrying around tomorrow while I'm still asleep, trying to figure out who you are so they can run the picture. And the funny thing is, they'll never be able to figure it out."

My exhilaration vanished as I realized what she was saying-that in her world I didn't exist. She must have seen this, because the next moment she took my hand and said, "I didn't mean it like that. It's just so awful if you take it too seriously. Sometimes I want to drop my skirt and moon the silly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. But you are are awfully cute." She leaned forward and kissed me, caressing my lips with her tongue. I had never been kissed like that. When she drew away and reached for a gla.s.s, I wondered what to tell the senator. She poured herself another drink. I saw myself rescuing Amanda Greer from this life of liquor and limousines and nightclubs and false adulation. I would take this fallen angel back home and plant her in the rich black soil of the heartland, buy a farm and raise children. I would run for Congress, and she'd campaign for me. I didn't see the contradiction between this vision and all the glamour that had dazzled me in the first place. awfully cute." She leaned forward and kissed me, caressing my lips with her tongue. I had never been kissed like that. When she drew away and reached for a gla.s.s, I wondered what to tell the senator. She poured herself another drink. I saw myself rescuing Amanda Greer from this life of liquor and limousines and nightclubs and false adulation. I would take this fallen angel back home and plant her in the rich black soil of the heartland, buy a farm and raise children. I would run for Congress, and she'd campaign for me. I didn't see the contradiction between this vision and all the glamour that had dazzled me in the first place.

"The thing about fame," she said, "is you think everyone will love you, that it's a way to become close to people." She stopped and took a sip of her drink, and just when I'd decided she'd lost her thread of thought, she continued. "And then, when you are famous, it drives a wedge between you and the rest of the world. A wall of gla.s.s." She tapped the smoked gla.s.s of the window with her fingers. "I don't think your senator knows that yet." I wanted to tell her that I understood, but she reached overhead and punched a b.u.t.ton that flooded the rear compartment with loud music, then laid her head back on the seat and closed her eyes, nodding lightly in time to the music, her lipstick, I noted happily, smeared from our kiss.

At the hotel, she carried her drink in with her, and the doorman greeted her reverently. She hadn't spoken another word to me. In the elevator, I asked how long she was staying there and she looked at me as if she didn't understand the question. Then she said, "I live here."

The suite was, to my eyes, a nest of luxury, with its pale peach floral carpet and antique furniture. It was nothing like any hotel room I'd seen on the campaign. She went to the bar and poured herself another drink, half of which she spilled on the carpet, then picked up a phone and dialed. I sat down on the edge of a sofa. She was talking to someone named Gloria. I tried to imagine the course of the night, the course of my life. Should I go to her now, hang up the phone and take her in my arms?

Then there was a knock on the door. She put her hand over the receiver and pointed to it, kissing the air between us. The senator was waiting in the hallway with a Secret Service man. Somehow, I hadn't expected him this soon. I tried to think of something to say, thinking of what had happened in the limousine, but he nodded to me and said, "Thanks," then walked into the room, leaving his security guy in the hall. Amanda waved to him, the phone crooked in her arm. He paced around nervously, picking up a porcelain vase from a side table and flipping it over to check its provenance. When he saw me standing in the door, he looked irritated. "That'll be all, Cal," he said.

Emboldened by what I believed was love, frightened but firm, I said, "Senator, I think you should go back to the hotel."

He stared at me as if I'd just offered to shoot him.

"The lady's not herself," I said, "and I don't think we want to risk any scandal at this point."

"You little s.h.i.t, how dare you-"

By now I was terrified, but I couldn't stop myself: "I would like to remind you, sir, that you're married."

At that moment, Amanda hung up the phone. From behind, she threw her arms around him, though he was glaring at me and looking as if he might charge, like a bull, but for her restraint. Peering over his shoulder, she saw me and smiled. But there was no recognition in her glazed eyes and it was a crooked, intoxicated smile, the kind she might flash at a fan who'd managed to catch her eye. She lifted her arms and pulled his face down to her own, locking him in the same embrace that I'd enjoyed only a few minutes earlier. I kept waiting for the kiss to end, waiting for inspiration. Finally I turned and walked out, my face burning, not wanting to be standing there when they finally broke apart. Crying with rage, I walked from the Carlyle to the midtown Sheraton, hoping I would be mugged or challenged, then lay sleepless in my bed till dawn, feverish with jealousy and yearning.

[image]

Two days later, a tabloid featured a smiling picture of the senator entering the nightclub and another of the actress, but the two were not linked. I bought all the New York papers that morning, foolishly hoping that a printed picture of Amanda and me might lend some substance to my folly. Anyway, that night marked a new level of recklessness on the part of my senator. And it changed me.