“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