The American Ambassador (33 page)

They took themselves oh so very seriously.

Elinor's estimate of one Great Man who had left his wife of thirty years to set up housekeeping with a woman young enough to be his daughter: “I think he just wanted to get laid. He probably hasn't been laid recently. Probably he has never been laid properly. Look at his wife sometime. Of course he's no prize either. He is not one of the men that we think about when we think about sex. But he's on the front page of the newspaper, deciding the fate of the nation, and she isn't. So he gets the chippy. And she gets to go home.” The silence that descended on the table that evening, the men so silent and embarrassed, the women aghast. Elinor had a way of going to the heart of things. He had delivered a long lecture to her when they got home. It was a lecture stressing the need for discretion, there were powerful people at the table. It was all right to think it, but it wasn't all right to say it. Really, she should have some consideration. People's lives were never what they seemed, and it was well known that the Greats had an uncommonly unhappy marriage, and he worked so hard. She had looked at him and giggled. Oh, come off it, Bill.

He was smiling now, remembering that; she didn't have to say anything else, and it was in the background always when he lectured her on the need for decorum and restraint. And the lectures were fewer, too; there hadn't been one now for years. Bill walked on, remembering the old days. He thought he would walk to the park—the park down the street from their old house, the vertical dungeon, where Elinor took Bill Jr. in the afternoons, to sit on blankets on the grass and talk with her friends and watch the children play—and keep an eye on the tennis. There was often quite good tennis. He paused at the corner, listening. From somewhere nearby he heard a violin. He listened hard, his emotions beginning to tumble. The music came from the second floor of the house across the street, he could see the open window. The notes hung one by one in the thick warm air, then a thrilling arpeggio, the last note traveling to the breaking point. He held his breath, the better to preserve the single note, and when it began to fade at last (he imagined it soaring to the heavens) the fault was not that of the musician but of his own concentration. He tried to imagine the violinist, practicing Baroque music on 34th Street on a warm Wednesday afternoon. The sound seemed to be for him alone, an audience of one. The street was empty, it could have been high summer, with everyone in the country or on Cape Cod or Long Island, the capital desolate.

He moved along, across the street. The music began again, fading at the sound of a motor. A helicopter overhead, and the sound of a horn on Wisconsin Avenue. A limousine slipped by, its smoked windows concealing the passenger or passengers within; it had official plates. Georgetown's narrow streets were not designed to accommodate twenty-foot Cadillacs, and this one navigated as carefully as a yacht approaching a dock. The limo stopped in the middle of the block and a woman with a briefcase got out. She paused to say something to the driver. The limo pulled away and she looked warily up and down the street before she rang the bell of the brick row house, and was admitted at once. He used to know who lived there. It was a senator from Pennsylvania. Either Pennsylvania or Michigan; he had been dead for years. The woman with the briefcase had the combative look of an attorney. But she had smoothed her skirt before looking up and down the street, raising her chin a fraction before taking off her eyeglasses. Not an assignation. She was dressed for success, not passion.

She had taken no particular notice of him. But neither had the troubled young woman across the street from his own house. They were both preoccupied, as self-absorbed as he was. He was anonymous, an invisible man, no threat or opportunity to anybody, an object of brief attention only because he was a pedestrian and there were so few pedestrians in Georgetown. The chopper had flown away and the street was silent again, stiff and formal as an old print. The violin music remained in his memory, however. He was suddenly depressed, walking lethargically toward the park, only a block away now. This part of town was a museum and he was one of the permanent exhibits, Stuffed Diplomat. He knew that he must look a very old man—hesitant, without vigor, not in heat, a convalescent. And truthfully, he felt cold and weary, without weight, slack around the edges, dull. An old fart out for an afternoon constitutional, when serious people were at their offices or arranging assignations. He flexed his left hand, and noticed that in the heat his wedding ring had become tight on his finger. His hand was alive, though, and there was no pain. It had been seven days since his release from the hospital.

“Sir?”

He turned, one more young woman walking toward him, looking at a piece of paper in her hand. She seemed in a great hurry.

“May I trouble you? I am looking for Dent Place?” Breathless, almost. She did not look at him, she looked at the paper in her gloved hand, a postcard from the look of it. She was smartly dressed in gray slacks and a sweater, ascot around her neck, tiny gold earrings.

“It's three blocks up,” he said.

“Only three blocks?”

“Straight on,” he said. She wore enormous sunglasses, of the sort that reflected your own image; in the mirror he appeared round-faced, almost healthy.

She looked at him at last, or over his shoulder; straight through him. She offered a brilliant smile, and thanked him, and hurried away, dropping the postcard after she had gone a dozen steps. Or not dropping it, throwing it to the sidewalk, as if it had no more use.

Careless young woman, he thought. People who littered, it was probably what she did in Paris or wherever she came from. She was much too chic for Washington, and she had an accent. He moved ahead and picked up the postcard, looking for a trash bin. It was a reproduction of one of Kirchner's lithographs, a street scene, Hamburg. And the card was from the Kunsthalle, Hamburg. There was nothing written on it. He stood a moment, looking at the card, turning it over. The Kunsthalle, he knew it well, a great repository of the Expressionists. He had last visited it in 1979, with Elinor and Bill Jr. The street was empty now, the young woman gone in accordance with his directions. She had looked right through him, as though he were a pane of window glass. He put the card in his pocket and stood a moment, lost in thought. He turned, thinking he would go back home, share this news with Elinor; then he thought, No, and walked on. Perhaps it was dangerous news, and perhaps there was more to come.

Two young men in white were playing slam-bang tennis, serve and volley. At the far edge of the park a woman walked her dog. He looked left and right, like a general surveying the battlefield, then sat on the wooden bench under the shade tree and watched the tennis players. The bench was covered with initials. He ran his hand over the grooves and wondered if somewhere there were Bill Jr.'s initials, or Elinor's. Perhaps the women had carved the names of real and imaginary lovers two decades earlier when they gathered in the park to talk about sex, giants, and runts, and what the future contained. He traced a heart with an arrow through it. Populated with ghosts, the park seemed alien to him, a zone of insecurity, not at all what he expected. His forehead was beaded with sweat, and he thought of Elinor cool in her studio, listening to music, rock and roll or Mahler, “I have become a stranger to the world.” His mind raced, remembering the old days; the past was close enough to touch but the future seemed out of reach, obscure and inscrutable. It couldn't even be imagined, even if he had the strength to try to imagine it. Trying to connect this to that, he foundered, his thoughts incoherent, and he was sorry now that he had left the house, and the safety of the portentous and impressive autumn of 1957. Things then were near to hand. He stretched his legs and closed his eyes, hearing the thump of the ball and the grunts,
unh-unh
, as it was served and returned. He tried to concentrate on a single thing, to take his mind off the young woman and her dropped postcard, Kirchner, the Kunsthalle at Hamburg, the mordant message from his son, if that was what it was, and he couldn't imagine what else it could be.

 

Of course he would choose that bench, it would be familiar to him. Always, people returned to that which was familiar. It gave them a sense of security, the past being inherently more stable than the present. He watched the ambassador's fingers move over the rough wood of the bench, tracing initials. Everything in the park was familiar, the swings and teeter-totters, the tennis courts, the baseball diamond, all of its ringed by low row houses, obscenely expensive, houses of the
haute
bureaucracy. Their reward for the burden of public service, sigh. The trees were bigger and leafier than he remembered, but it had been a few years. The light was so fine and golden, it glowed with well-being, a spirit of public happiness, autumnal, an agreeable middle age; that, too, was familiar. He looked at the diamond, the dusty infield and wire backstop, and remembered a long-ago baseball game. He was nine or ten years old. He was playing third and someone hit a high pop fly. He went back and back, and when he looked up the golden sun blinded him. He flung up his mitt hand to block the sun and the ball fell into it, plop. People clapped and cheered. It had been the play of the day.

Bill Jr. drummed his fingers on the dashboard of the car, a Japanese sedan with tinted windows. Easy to see out, not so easy to see in. He had watched the ambassador's progress up 34th Street, watched him give directions to Olga, watched Olga drop the postcard, watched the ambassador pick it up, look at it; watched his head tilt, his hand go to his chin; watched him squint at the card, watched the light bulb ignite as Olga hurried away. Olga wiggling her ass just a little bit more than was necessary, not that the ambassador would take notice of
that;
the ambassador looked a little bit beyond
that.
Olga adjusting her big sunglasses, turning the corner and breaking into a run. A young girl running to an appointment, running to catch her bus, meet a lover, whatever. It was ludicrous. God, he looked old as he stood swaying in the street. His clothes didn't fit properly, and he needed a haircut. He looked a hundred years old. And he was pale, the ambassador who had always had a ruddy complexion. He looked as if a breeze could blow him away. He had watched the ambassador hesitate and turn, as if to retrace his steps, go back to the house on O Street, cry on his wife's shoulder, then decide against it; decide, perhaps, that the afternoon held promise, that there was an act yet to come, that if he went the last inch—why then, the drama might reveal itself.

Whose phrase was that? It was the egoist Solzhenitsyn, the Vermont squire. A dying man was obliged to go the last inch, to fully feel and appreciate the magnitude, the momentousness, of death. Otherwise it was just another event in a life. No poison, no bullet in the brain, no matter how painful or squalid the disease. It must be felt, or it was meaningless.

Christ, this was nerve-racking.

Bill Jr. watched the tennis players in the distance; young men from the look of them. On the edge of the infield, a woman walked her dog. The ambassador was sitting slumped on the bench. He looked almost to be dozing, except from time to time his hand would go to his chin. So he was not dozing, but thinking; and his eyes would be wide open. But the question was, How much would he see? What would he recognize? Bill Jr. reached over the back of the seat to touch the package on the floor. A plain brown paper bag, the sort of bag that might contain a bottle of wine. The ambassador was not being watched; he was certain of that. The tennis players were intent on their game; they had been playing for an hour. The woman with the dog was—a woman with a dog. At the last moment, Bill Jr. had trusted his instinct, that the ambassador would go to the park, and choose the familiar bench, the one with the carved wood, and the convenient trash barrel beside it.

A young woman in black crossed the street in front of the car. She reminded him of Gert. He watched her walk into the park, and stand a moment in the sun. She moved aimlessly, as Gert often did. He looked away then, sad beyond measure; he felt tears behind his eyes. He wanted her now. He worried about her, where she was and how she was keeping. Well, he knew where she was; she was well looked after by people who liked her and were kind to her, but he worried just the same. Gert was unfathomable, and that was part of her allure. But sometimes she went so far inside herself that she became lost, as anyone would in an uncharted ocean. When she was lost she panicked, terrified. Her instinct was not to retreat, but to advance. He feared always that she would disappear, and be lost to him forever. And he could not live without her, literally; she was his other half, his secret self. She defined him. Without her, he was just another abandoned American boy. If she were lost, she would never be found; and he would break down. Up the street, behind the maple tree, was the little house, the first homestead; two stories high, twelve feet wide. The Bertram stories, Dr. Seuss. People in and out of the house, friends. He tried to imagine him and Gert living there, sleeping in the front bedroom with the rattling air conditioner, cooking outside in the back yard on warm evenings. What was the life they wanted for him? He would be a second-generation Washingtonian, a certified cliff dweller, involved some way in the government. Government business, the family firm. He stared at the house. It had a new coat of paint, but it did not look lived-in. He imagined Gert at the second-floor window, looking out at the park, remembering Germany, trying to fit that into this. She would look into the park and see dead men. She would watch a simple baseball game, see a little boy go for a fly; and she would hate him. She would despise all of it, and one day she would wander away and never return.

He shuddered; shook his head to clear it. The woman in black was circling the park, staying in the sunshine. She had a free and easy gait, a kind of sexy swing, a young woman alone in a public park on a lovely afternoon in early November, unseasonably warm. She cast a long shadow that undulated over the brilliant leaves. The ambassador was watching her or seemed to be. Sexual thoughts creeping into his dead head? A little stirring of the groin, thoughts of the way things used to be? Doubtful: he was so out of it. She moved around the perimeter of the park in the direction of the tennis courts. The boys in white were beginning to slow down, it had been a long game. Something about their movements on the court suggested European tennis. They tended to stay back, and their footwork was unusual; perhaps there was something about their outfits, too. Hard to know. Hard to know exactly what it was that alerted him. Bill Jr. looked left and saw a black Mercedes slip down 34th Street, pause, and pull into a parking place. A Mercedes on 34th Street, and a limo idling on the other side of the park.