I met Darcy Hicks early in the primary season, at a dive in Randolph, New Hampshire. She was sitting at the bar in a blue skirt, sipping from a tumbler and looking bored. The locals had hit on her already. But they were missing it. Her edges were too crisp for the room. Her makeup was nearly invisible.
The stool next to her opened up and I sat down. A Kenny Loggins tune came on the jukebox and the bartender began to sing along. Darcy glanced at her drink, trying to decide whether another would make matters better or worse. I’d had a miserable day and was feeling sorry for myself, lonely, a little reckless. I introduced myself and asked her please not to take offense if I bought her a drink.
Darcy turned slowly. In profile she had seemed dangerously icy. But straight on her face was sweet and a little flushed.
“Jack and ginger,” she said.
I ordered two.
It turned out we were both in New Hampshire doing issue work. Darcy was pitching agricultural subsidies to the Republicans; I was pitching drug counseling to the Dems. I’d spent the past week trolling rehab centers, listening to earnest social workers and sad, unconvincing ex-junkies. At night, I squeezed into the tiny hotel bathtub and tried to wash the smoke out of my pores. Darcy was faring no better. She’d twisted her ankle that morning touring a derelict strawberry farm.
“Who farms here?” she said. “What would they farm, granite?”
“Maybe they thought they’d sent you to Vermont.”
She shook her head. “There are no Republicans in Vermont.”
The truth is, we were on the fringes of the campaign, miles from the action; our duties were more ceremonial than anything. But there was in each of us the bug of politics, a talky competitiveness, a desire to impose our sense of right on the world. We carried, along with our clattery Beltway cynicism and our Motorolas, a tremendous vulnerability to hope. And now, as we talked and drank, this vulnerability became shared property, like the pack of Camel Lights that lay between us, or the tales of Model UN coups, the geeky adolescent versions of our adult passion.
Outside, the December night was crisp. A fog had rolled in and lay draped over the pine barrens like gauze. We stood beside my rental car, shivering, swinging a little. Darcy was packed neatly into her blue cotton blend. Her hair was the color of wet straw and fell to her clavicle. A flower belonged behind her ear. Kissing her seemed the most uncomplicated decision I had made in years.
So there was that, an evening of esprit de corps, some very fine necking in the great hither and yon of the electorate. Back in D.C., the situation was a little less clear.
Darcy worked at the Fund For Tradition, a think tank devoted to—as the swanky, four-color pamphlets told it—fiscal restraint and the defense of traditional values. I was at Citizen Action, a relic of the LBJ era. We didn’t have pamphlets. Our mission was to lobby the halls of power on behalf of the disenfranchised. To piss, in other words, up the mighty tree of capitalism.
We conducted the same basic life at a slightly different amplitude. The brutal hours of apprenticeship, the hasty lunches and reports whose sober facts gummed our thoughts. We were both involved with other people, people more like ourselves, who satisfied us in a placid way. I might never have seen her again. Except that I did.
She was standing alone in the Senate gallery. Congress was on break, the tourists gone. Darcy gazed down into the darkening well of the Senate. She was wearing a peacoat and a dark pillbox hat, which now, in my memory, I have affixed with a veil, though I’m certain this was not the case.
I circled the gallery and waited for her to notice me. When I called her name, she gasped and placed a hand over her heart.
“Oh Billy! It’s you.”
“I’m sorry. Did I startle you?”
“No,” she said. “Not at all.”
“You look beautiful,” I said.
This wasn’t what I’d meant to say. It was certainly too ardent for the setting. But it was the truest thing I was feeling, and anyway Darcy had this effect on me.
She shook her head a little, then blushed. “What are you doing here?” she said.
“I’m not sure. I was visiting a friend downstairs, a guy who works with Sarbanes. I just sort of wandered up here.”
“I come here all the time,” Darcy said. “It helps me think.”
“About what?”
She pursed her lips. “Why we’re here, I guess. The desire to effect good in an arena of civility.”
“Is that Jefferson?”
“Not really. It’s me.”
The smell of the Senate rose from the empty well, old leather and something vaguely peppery, Brylcreem maybe. The place exuded a sense of quiet dignity, which was more than the absence of its usual clamor, seemed closer, in the end, to the calm we hoped to find at the center of our lives.
“Does that sound hokey, Billy?” Darcy said suddenly.
“Not at all.”
“You don’t think so?” Her face leapt from the dark fabric of her coat, sweetly arrayed in worry.
“Are you hungry?” I said.
Darcy opened her mouth but said nothing.
“Other plans?”
“Sort of. I should …” She looked at me for a moment. “Hold on.”
“If you’ve got plans, I don’t want to impose.”
Darcy laughed, a bit lavishly. “I wouldn’t let you impose,” she said, and drew the cell phone from her coat pocket.
There are so many competing interests on the human heart. For those of us truly terrified of death, intent on leaving some kind of mark, plowing through our impatient twenties with an agenda, there are moments when chemistry—the chemistry between bodies, the chemistry of connection—seems no more than a sentimental figment. And then something happens, you meet a woman and you can’t stop looking at her mouth. Everything she does, every word and gesture, stirs inside you, strikes the happy gong. The way she throws herself into a fresh field of snow. The delicacy of her sneezes, like a candle being snuffed. The sugary sting of whiskey on her tongue. Chemistry in its sensual aspects. Chemistry the ultimate single-issue voter.
We were both tipsy and tangled in my flannel sheets. We’d talked about not letting this happen, this sudden rush into the secret bodies. But Darcy, her neck, the length of her torso, the wisp of corn silk above her pelvic basin, and the gentle application of her hands, her generous, unfeigned devotions to my body—which I secretly loathed, which shamed me for its deficiencies of grace and muscle—and her hair reeling across my chest. … All these came at me in a tumble of violent emotion, stripped from me the language with which one crafts cautious deferrals, the maybe I should go, the sudden pause, the stuttered breath and step back, the gallant bonered retreat to the bathroom.
No. We made instead a ridiculous flying machine in two clamped parts. In the thick of our clumsy desire, pungent and shameless, we clutched one another by the cheeks, let the skin of our bellies smack briskly, and flew.
“So that’s what it’s like to love a Republican,” I said.
“There are other ways, too.” Darcy giggled. “Do you have cigarettes? I’d kill for a cigarette.”
I reached into my bedside drawer.
“Why do we hide them?”
“They’re an ugly habit.”
She took a slow drag and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “Oh yeah.”
Outside a light snow fell. The cars on the road made a sound like the surf. The moon lit Darcy’s face. Her nose was a little blunt. One of her incisors pushed out dramatically from the neat band of her teeth. These flaws served to particularize her beauty. One’s memory snagged on them.
“You’re my first beard,” she said thoughtfully.
“How was it?”
“Bristly.”
“Like being with a lumberjack?”
“A lumberjack wouldn’t whimper.”
“Did I whimper?”
“Unless that was me.”
Darcy sat up and peered around the room. Che Guevara stared down at her from the closet door, in his fierce mustache. My fertility goddesses stood ranked along the sill, squat figures with sagging breasts and hips round as swales. I waited for Darcy to ask me about them so I could recite my Peace Corps stories. (I’d saved a little girl’s life! A goat had been killed in my honor!) But she only took another drag and covered her warm little breasts.
“Where are we again?”
“My apartment.”
“The address, you dope.”
“Why do you want the address?”
“For the cab.”
“Oh please don’t go. I’d rather if you stayed. Or I could drive you.”
“No. I need to think about this.”
“Can’t we think together? I’d like to think with you.”
“I’m not sure you’re the best thing for my thought process.”
Darcy rose from the bed and began collecting her clothes. I watched her move around the room. I wanted terribly for her to come close enough that I could take a bite of her tush, which trembled like a pale bell. But this was not going to happen. From the other room came the slithery sound of panty hose, the clasp of a bra.
“What’s there to think about?” I called out. “Was this a mistake? Because I don’t feel like this was a mistake.”
Darcy reemerged looking combed and dangerous, like something from a winter catalogue. She took a last drag off her cigarette and dropped it in her wineglass. A horn sounded below, in the street.
“Can I at least walk you down?”
“You’re sweet. I wish you wouldn’t.” She set her fingers to her throat and said, a little dreamily, “I’m going to have a rash tomorrow, from your beard.”
I went to the window and watched her slip into the cab. There was something tragically illicit about the moment. I didn’t know what to do. The golden thread between us had snapped. How had this happened? I threw open the window and bellowed: “Why do I feel like I’ve been taken advantage of?”
Darcy looked up. Her face shone behind the dark pane. Just before she laughed, her mouth pulled down slightly at the corners, which suggested, even in the midst of her gaiety, an irrevocable sadness. I was certain, gazing down through the soft tiers of snow, the smell of her rising up from my beard, that this sadness could be undone. This was my bright idea. I was, after all, a good liberal.
But then Darcy disappeared and I was left to moon liberally through the long white weekend, during which I spoke and ate and fucked dispiritedly with the woman I was dating, a good woman, with earnest rings of hair and a powerful devotion to social justice.
I called Darcy at the office and listened to her outgoing message, whose crisp, chirpy tones made me feel renounced, and left two excruciatingly casual messages, and took lunch at the bistro across from the Fund For Tradition, and one afternoon wandered over to Capitol Hill and kneeled in the cool Senate gallery, waiting like a parishioner. By week two my heart had dithered into a boyish panic. I left a final message on her machine telling her that I didn’t understand what was going on but that I was hurt and confused and felt that something had been betrayed, the feelings that had passed between us, that these feelings felt real to me and that they didn’t come along very often and shouldn’t be squandered, and that if she felt any of these same things, even unsteadily, she owed it to herself, as well as just to common decency, to call me back, that dodging me was no solution, unless she was one of those people who offered intimacy and then withdrew, who, for lack of a better word, used people, in which case she was best not to call back at all. But that, if she was still, if she felt, even a little, I was sorry to sound petulant, I didn’t mean to, but I was upset and if could she please call me back and here was my number, at which point a voice came on the line noting that my three minutes were up and would I like to leave the message, or re-record it, or erase the whole thing, which I did.
What was this thing between us, anyway? Just some Jungle Fever of the low political stripe. Who was Darcy Hicks, anyway? Maybe this was her secret fetish: sexing up the left and reporting the details back to her Republican overlords. On and on I went, the florid improvisations of the wounded heart.
And then, just as this clatter was subsiding, I saw her again. On C-SPAN. She stood at the edge of the frame as John McCain—fresh off his win in New Hampshire—rallied the troops in an Iowa VFW hall. Darcy kept drifting in and out of the picture. She was wearing a red dress and smiling desperately. McCain told the crowd he’d come to Elk Horn for one purpose: to discuss the plight of the small family farm, and the need for renewed agricultural subsidies.
The phone rang. It was late, one in the morning on a Tuesday.
“What’s your address again?” Darcy said.
I wanted to say something caustic and clever but adrenaline had flushed my chest and all the words I had marshaled in my rehearsals for this moment seemed stingy and beside the point.
The line crackled. “Billy? Hurry up! My battery’s going dead.”
“Where are you?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Oh!” Darcy squealed, and there was a thump. Her phone began to cut out, so that I could hear her voice only in snatches, urgent little phonemes: time, get, numb—. The line went dead.
Twenty minutes later my buzzer rang. Darcy burst into my apartment. She was flushed, her lipstick was off-kilter. A purple fleece hat sat goofily on her head. She threw her arms around me and burrowed her cold cheeks into my neck. A noise of pleasure came from her throat, as if she were settling into a hot bath.
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” she murmured.
I stood there trying not to relent.
“I’m just back in town,” Darcy went on. “I was in Iowa. Trent sent me out on subsidies and ethanol production, and John, John McCain, he used one of my workups in his stump. And then he asked me—or Roger, his press guy—asked me to do advance work in South Carolina! Can you believe it? You have to meet John in person to get the whole picture. But those five years in Vietnam, I mean, he just cuts through all the bullshit. The man radiates charisma.”
I found myself (rather unattractively) wishing to torture Senator John McCain.
Darcy pulled her hat off and her hair fell in a tangle.
“Are you proud of me?” she said.
“I’m a little confused actually.”
“It’s a confusing time,” Darcy said breezily. “Election years always are. Aren’t you going to kiss me? I know you’re glad to see me.” She nodded ever so slightly at my erection.
I tried to look indignant. “I left messages for you.”
“I know I should have called. I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me. There was a lot going on. Not just Iowa. There were other things.” She slipped her hands inside my pajamas and touched my ribs. “Are you cold, baby? You’ve got goose bumps. Can we lie down? I’m so tired. I’ve been thinking about lying down with you.”
I was sore with the need for Darcy. She smelled of lilacs and gin; her body pressed forward. But I didn’t like the way I’d been feeling, and I distrusted this erotic lobbying.
“What other things?” I said.
“I’m a loyal person. What I’ve been doing has been for us, okay? Just trust me, Billy. Don’t you want to trust me?”
“Yeah. I mean, I want—”
“Then do. Just do. Quit asking questions and kiss me.”
“I just want to know what we are.”
Darcy let out a little shriek of frustration. “Would you stop being so literal? This is a love affair, Billy. Okay? Withstand a little doubt. I’m the one who’s taking the risk here.”
“Meaning what?”
“Stop being naive. The woman always loses power in a sexual relationship.”
“Not always,” I said.
Darcy sighed. She took her hands off me and stepped back. “I just flew four hours with a goddamn baby howling in my ear. I haven’t slept more than three hours in the past two days. I’m expected to show up to work tomorrow, bright and early, to host a reception for Jack Fucking Kemp. I don’t do this. I don’t come over to men’s houses. But I’m here, Billy. Do you understand? I am here. Now take me in your arms and do something, or I’m going home right now.”
What Darcy enjoyed most was a good lathering between the thighs. As a lifelong liberal, this was one of my specialties. In some obscure but plausible fashion, I viewed the general neglect of the region as a bedrock of conservatism. The female sex was, in political terms, the equivalent of the inner city: a dark and mysterious zone, vilified by the powerful, derided as incapable of self-improvement, entrenched and smelly. Going down on a woman was a dirty business, humiliating, potentially infectious, best delegated to the sensitivos of the Left.
I relished the act, which I considered to be what Joe Lieberman would have termed, in his phlegmy rabbinical tone, a mitzvah. It required certain sacrifices. The deprivation of oxygen, to begin with. A certain ridiculousness of posture; cramping in the lower extremities. One had to engage with the process. There were no quick fixes.
This was especially true in Darcy’s case. She was scandalized by the intensity of her desire, and highly aroused by this scandal. But the going was slow. If I told her “I want to kiss you there” she would grow flustered and glance about helplessly. Just act, was her point. Ditch all the soppy acknowledgment, the naming of things in the dark. The word pussy made her wince. (A tainted word, I admit, but one I employed with utmost fondness and in the spirit of fond excitements.)
I kissed my way down her body—the damp undersides of her breasts, her bumpy sternum, the belly she lamented not ridding herself of. Always, I could feel the tendons of her groin tensing. I nipped at them occasionally.
She perfumed herself elaborately, which meant withstanding an initial astringency, after which she tasted wonderfully, meaning strongly of herself, the brackish bouquet of her insides. I was careful not to linger in any one spot but to explore the entire intricate topography, the nerves flushed with blood and tingling mysteriously, while Darcy pressed herself back on the pillows and turned to face the wall and murmured the blessed nonsensical approvals of climax.
The body releases its electricity, merges with another, and together there is something like God in this pleasure. But afterward, in the quiet redolent air, there must also be offerings of truth. And so the mystery of love deepens.
Darcy’s given name was Darlene. She’d grown up in Ashton, Pennsylvania, a rural township south of Allentown. Her grandpas had been farmers. Then the world had changed, grown more expensive and mechanical, and somehow less reliable. So her father, rather than inheriting dark fields of barley, worked for Archer Daniels Midland. (Her mother, it went without saying, was a homemaker.) All three of her sisters and her brother still lived in Ashton. She was an aunt eight times.
Darcy recognized that she was different from her family. But she was reluctant to speak too pointedly about these differences. Instead, she turned the Hicks clan into a comedy routine, delivering updates in the flat accent of her grandpa Tuck.
Signs of her double life abounded. She dressed in Ann Taylor, but used a crock pot. She stored her birth-control pills in a bedside drawer, beside the worn green Bible she had been given in Sunday school. Her mantle displayed photos of the grip-and-grin with Arlen Specter, Robert Bork, Newt Gingrich. Only in the shadowed corner of her bedroom did one see a young, toothy Darcy, resplendent in acid wash and pink leg warmers, smiling from the seat of an old tractor on Grandpa Tuck’s homestead. The photo was taken just before he sold the final acres to a chemical plant, back in ’89.
As for me, I’d grown up outside Hartford. My parents had marched for Civil Rights and protested the war. Then they had kids, moved to a leafy suburb, and renovated an old Victorian. Their domestic and professional duties tired them out, left them susceptible to bourgeois enjoyments. But the way I remembered them—needed to remember them—was as young, beautiful radicals.
What we wanted from politics, in the end, was what we had been deprived by our families. I hoped to create a world in which justice and compassion would be the enduring measure. Darcy sought permission to expand her horizons, to experience her prosperity without guilt. We both held to the notion that it mattered who won office and how they governed. Nothing, in the end, mattered more.
Yet it never would have occurred to us, not in a million years, that the 2000 election would turn volatile. The presidential candidates were a couple of second-raters, awkwardly hawking the same square yard of space, at the corner of Main and Centrist.
* * *
And so we lay about on weekends, scattering sheafs of newsprint onto the sunny hardwood floors of my apartment, lamenting (silently, to ourselves) the hopeless bias of the Post and Times, tumbling the stately avenues of downtown, drowning in happy wine and letting our messages stack up.
We were both too hooked on politics to ignore the subject entirely. But we had to be careful not to push too far into ideology. Darcy was altogether suspicious of the word. “Just a fancy way of saying policy aims,” she insisted.
I disagreed. To me, the Left was a living force, animated by heroic and martyred ideas: Civil Rights. The War on Poverty. Christ Himself—as I argued in an unreadably earnest undergraduate paper—was a classic New Deal Democrat. Darcy listened to my ravings with a polite purse of her lips. She viewed me as quaint, I think.
But Darcy had her own dewy allegiances. Reagan, for instance. They’d named an airport after him. Now he had Alzheimer’s and the news told stories of his decay, over which Darcy clucked. “He made it acceptable to love this country again,” she told me. “Don’t give me that snotty look, Billy. He was an American hero.”
This was astounding to me: Ronald Reagan! The man who had allowed Big Business to run the country, slashed social programs, gorged the national debt on wacko military systems, funneled arms to Nicaraguan murderers, and just generally sodomized Mother Nature.
So, in other words, we learned to avoid policy aims.
By March Darcy was traveling nearly every week. She was unofficially on loan to the McCain campaign, which was full of reformist spunk but foundering in the polls. I expected Darcy to be devastated by the results of Super Tuesday, which all but assured Bush the nomination. But she emerged from her flight (a red-eye out of Atlanta) beaming.
“Kenny O’Brien talked to Roger about me. He wants me to do advance work for Dubya! Isn’t that amazing!”
My reaction to this news was complicated. I was thrilled and impressed. Darcy was making a name for herself. But this would mean more travel for her, more prestige, more action. While I remained in D.C., plinking out obscure proposals on how to reduce recidivism, stewing over whether to vote for the Android or the Spoiler. And missing her.
Beyond envy, I felt genuinely unsettled. Darcy had been a rabid McCain supporter—one of his true believers. She had derided Bush as a semipro, a lollygagger. It was hard for me to fathom how she could now throw her support behind him.
“We fought the good fight,” Darcy assured me. “The key is that we managed to push finance reform onto the agenda.”
“You really think Shrub is going to do anything on that?” I said. “The guy raised fifty million before he even announced.”
Darcy frowned. “Don’t be so cynical,” she said. “Have a little faith for a change. Oh, I’m hungry, Billy. Where can we get a burger at this hour?”
Winter limped into April and we barely noticed. The dirty slush glittered and the gutters lay ripe with magic. In early May the cherry blossoms reemerged along Pennsylvania and I turned twenty-seven. Darcy organized a celebration at a tapas bar in Foxhall Road, one of those places where the waiters are obliged to enforce a spirit of merriment by squirting rioja from boda bags into the mouths of particularly valued diners. Darcy, in her little cocktail dress, offered a toast, while my friends glanced in horror at the table beside us, where a pack of trashed dot-commers were plying the waitress to flash her tits.
Darcy considered the evening a triumph, and I hoped she was right. My friends were a glum and brainy lot, nonprofit warriors and outreach workers. They could see how smitten I was and spoke to Darcy with elaborate courtesy. But to them she must have appeared no different from the hundreds of other GOP tootsies cruising the capital in their jaunty hair ribbons.
I met Darcy’s friends the following week, at a luncheon held in the executive dining room, on the second floor of the Fund’s stately colonial. The maître d’ grimaced politely at my sweater. He whisked into the cloakroom and reappeared with an elegant camel’s hair sports coat.
Darcy waved to me and smiled, which instantly snuffed my doubt, made me hum a silent pledge of allegiance to our love. The men at her table wore matching dark green blazers, with an FFT in gold script over the breast pocket. Darcy stood out like a rose in a stand of rhododendron.
The servers were brisk Europeans, officious in their table-side preparation of chateaubriand. George F. Will delivered the keynote, wearily lamenting the “deracination of moral authority” to general mirth and light applause, though his platitudes were obscured by the sandblasting from next door, where workers were empaneling a new marble patio at the Saudi embassy.
I cannot remember the names of Darcy’s colleagues, only that they seemed to have been cut from the same hearty block of wood. The older fellows evinced the serenity characteristic of a life spent in private clubs. The young guys imitated these manners. They were clean-shaven, deeply committed carnivores who seemed, in conversational lulls, to be searching the rich wainscoting for signs of a crew oar they might take up.
They all adored Darcy, that much was obvious, and chaffed her with careful paternalism.
“A remarkable young woman,” said the gentleman on my left, the moment she had excused herself to the bathroom. “You are watching a future congressman from Pennsylvania.”
“Congresswoman,” I said, half to myself.
“Yes,” he answered, poking at a rind of fat on his plate. “Darcy mentioned that about you.”
At the brief reception after lunch, while the higher-ups clustered about Will, Darcy introduced me to her mentor. Trent was a thick blond fellow with the most marvelous teeth I had ever seen. “This your special friend, Hicks?” Trent said. “Good to meet you.”
“Bill,” I said.
“Bill. Good to meet you, Bill.”
He gripped my hand and held it for a few beats. It occurred to me that Trent had served in the Armed Forces, possibly all four of them.
“Darcy tells me you’ve done some work for Bradley.”
“Not really. A little volunteering.”
“A good man,” Trent said. “Principled. Shame he got ambushed by Gore. Not surprising, especially, but a shame. What’re your plans for the election, Bill?”
“I’ll probably be sitting this one out,” I said.
Trent barked. “How long you been in the District, Bill? No such thing.” He winked and drew Darcy against him. “You watch this one, Bill. She’s going places.”
Darcy blushed.
“You take care of her,” Trent said.
“Darcy does a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”
Trent dragged his knuckles across his chin and shot me a look of such naked disdain that I took a step backward. Then he wrapped Darcy in a bear hug, kissed her on the brow, and wished me well.
“He just seemed a little aggressive,” I said to Darcy later, in her office.
“Nonsense. He’s just protective.”
“You know him better than me.”
“Wait a second.” Darcy’s eyes—they were steel blue—flickered with her triumph. “You’re jealous!”
“The guy was all over you, honey. And the way he behaved toward me—”
“He wasn’t all over me. He was being affectionate.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
Darcy began to laugh. She’d had three cups of punch and was still flying. I listened to her gleeful hiccups and watched the chandelier in the foyer glint. “Trent’s LC,” she said finally. “Log Cabin, Billy. He’s gay.”
She began laughing again.
Trent the Gay Republican? “He must be thrilled with Shrub’s support of the sodomy laws in Texas.”
“There you go again,” Darcy said. She was imitating Reagan now. “Judging people. I thought you enlightened liberals didn’t judge people.”
Darcy traveled throughout spring and into summer, and this lent our relations an infatuated rhythm. My heart beat wildly as I waited for her plane to land. This was not her beauty acting upon me, the glamour of her ambitions, even the promise of sex, but the sense of good intention she radiated, a kindheartedness measured in the drowsy hours before she could assemble her public self. This was my favorite time: Darcy in the shades of dawn, warm with sleep, her hair scattered across the pillow.
There was an ease to her domestic rituals, the way she snipped coupons (which she would never use) and scrubbed her lonely appliances and listened sympathetically to the latest reports from Ashton. She fretted endlessly over what to pack for her trips. “I’m too fat for these slacks,” she complained. “I’m one big, fat ass, Billy.”
This was not true. If anything, Darcy was growing slimmer. But these sudden bouts of self-doubt were necessary to her maintenance. They were vestiges of her girlhood, of the awkward striver who lived behind the awesome machinery of her charm. They were the part of her that needed me.
I was a fool to watch the Republican Convention. But there was an element of morbid curiosity at work. I wanted to see Jesse Helms reborn as an emissary of tolerance. (What would he wear? A dashiki?) And besides, I had promised Darcy. She was attending as a Bush delegate from Pennsylvania.
What has always astounded me about the Republican psyche is its capacity for shamelessness. Here was the anti-immigration party parading its little brown ones across the rostrum, the party of Family Values showcasing its finest buttoned-down catamites. Here was Big Dick Cheney—who had voted against funding Head Start as a congressman—excoriating Clinton for not doing enough to educate oppressed children. On and on it went, and nobody exploded of hypocrisy!
Darcy called me each night, giddy with the sense of how well it was coming off. “Did you see me on CNBC?” she said. “Deb Borders interviewed me. Did you see Christie Whitman, Billy? Wasn’t she amazing? Okay. Don’t answer that. I miss you, Billy. Do you miss me? Do you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Do you love me?” she said suddenly.
“You know I do.”
“Say it.”
“I love you, Darcy.”
And I did. It was nothing I could help.
“I love you, Billy. I love you so much.”
“Where are you?” I asked. “Are you in your room?”
“I’m on my bed.”
And so we progressed, deeper into our thrilling disjunction.
By October the Bush people had taken Darcy on full-time. She was living out of a suitcase, returning to D.C. with purple stains under her eyes, sleeping twelve hours straight. I took it as my duty to offer her refuge in the cause of intimacy.
And Darcy returned this devotion. Even as the campaign drew to an end, she came at me in a dizzy operatic spin, ravished for affection, for a private domain in which she could shed the careful burnishings of her ascent. One evening, as we lay flushed on gin, she announced that she had a surprise for me and rose up on her haunches and slipped off her panties and knelt back. All that remained of her pubic hair was a single delicate stripe.
I felt touched to the point of tears. Here was this miraculous creature, tuckered beyond words, right here in my apartment on the eve of the election, flashing me her vaginal mohawk. She vamped gamely even as her eyelids drooped, and licked her lovely incisor and urged me forward. How could it possibly matter that she opposed gun control?
I called Darcy at 2:42 A.M. on election night. The networks had just issued their flop on Florida and Dan Rather—in an apparent caffeine psychosis—was urging America to give Dubya a big ole Texas-sized welcome to the White House.
Darcy was across town, at the Radisson. There were whoops in the background and the echoes of a bad jazz band.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Billy! Oh, you are so sweet!”
“Well, no one likes a sore loser.”
“It was so close,” Darcy said. “It’s a shame anyone had to lose!”
There was a rush of sound and Darcy let out a happy scream. “Stop it! Stop!” She came back on the phone. “That was Trent.”
“Can you come over?” I said. “I’d like to congratulate you in person.”
Darcy drew in a breath. “I’d love to. That would be so nice. But I promised some people I’d stay here. At least until Dubya gives his speech.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“Honey,” she said. “Are you okay? Are you mad?”
I was maybe a little mad. But I knew how hard Darcy had worked for this, how much hope she’d pinned to the outcome. She had leapt toward the thick of the race, bravely, with her arms wide and her pretty little chest exposed, while I’d thrown up my hands in disgust and voted for Nader.
“No,” I said. “I’m proud of you, Darce. You deserve this.”
“I love you, Billy.”
“I love you too,” I said quietly. “You crazy Republican bitch.”
She laughed. A chorus of deep voices swelled in the background and Darcy, carried away by some shenanigans, shrieked merrily.
I wondered sometimes why she didn’t just settle for some GOP bohunk with a carapace of muscles and the proper worldview. She could have had her pick. We both knew that. But that’s not how the heart works. It runs to deeper needs. “I’ll try to come over after the speech,” Darcy whispered. “I want to see you.”
Two weeks later we were in Darcy’s apartment, still trying to figure out what had happened. Al Gore was on CNN, imitating someone made of flesh.
“Why doesn’t he give it up?” Darcy murmured.
“Why should he give up?” I said.
“Because he lost.”
We had both assumed the election would bring an end to the tension. One or the other side would win, fair and square, and we would move on.
“You can’t say he lost until they count all the votes,” I said. “It’s just too close. Can’t you see that, honey?”
Darcy sighed. She’d cut her hair into a kind of bob, which made her look a little severe. “Why did Gore ask for recounts in only four counties? He’s not interested in a full and accurate count. Admit it. He wants to count until he has the votes to win.”
“They both want to win. It’s called a race.”
“Don’t patronize me, Billy.”
“I wouldn’t patronize you if you didn’t keep oversimplifying the situation.”
Darcy clicked off the TV. “Why do you talk like that, Billy? Why do you make everything so personal?”
“Trying to impeach the president for getting a blowjob? That’s not personal? Or DeLay sending his thugs down to Miami to storm the canvassing board? What is that? Politics as usual? Are you kidding me?
Darcy shook her head; the edges of her new haircut sawed back and forth. “I can’t talk with you about this stuff. You get too angry.”
“You’re as pissed as I am.”
“No,” she said. “I just want this to be over.”
We didn’t say anything else, but the mists of rage hung about us. And later on, after we had retired to the bedroom, this rage hid within our desire and charged out of our bodies in a way we hoped would bring us closure. We slammed against one another and gasped and clutched, did everything we could think to enthrall the other while at the same time hoping somewhat to murder, to die together, and woke instead, in the morning, bruised and contrite.
I agreed with Darcy, after all. I wanted the election to be over. I didn’t want to be angry at her, because I loved her and that love was more important than any election. I honestly tried to ignore the dispute. What did I care? Gore had run an awful campaign. He deserved to lose.
Gradually, though, the radical truth was coming clear: more voters had gone to the polls in Florida intending to vote for him. The statisticians understood this, and the voting-machine wonks, and even the brighter reporters, the ones who bothered to think the matter through.
The Republican strategy was to obscure this truth, to prevent at all costs a closer inspection of the ballots. In doing so, they became opponents of democracy. (There is no other way to say this.) What amazed me was the gusto with which Bush executed this treason. His fixers lied incessantly and extravagantly. His allies stormed the cameras and frothed.
Us Democrats never quite grasped that we were in a street fight. We lacked the required viciousness, the mindless loyalty. This has always been the Achilles heel of the Left: we are too fond of our own decency, too fearful of our anger. When the blackjacks come out we quit the field and call it dignity.
The cold fog of December descended on the capital and I sat in my apartment glaring at CNN, and fantasized about putting a bullet in James Baker’s skull. Darcy called out to me from the answering machine, her voice loosened by red wine. My name sounded vague and hopeful in her mouth.
And then, one night, just after the final certification of votes in Florida, a knock came at the door. There was Darcy, in her blue skirt and her lovely snaggled smile. She was breathing hard. I imagined for a moment that she had run from somewhere far away, from Georgetown perhaps, through the dark banished lowlands of Prince George County, or from the tawny plains of central Pennsylvania.
“We need to talk,” she said.
She fell against me, smelling of gin and lilacs and cigarettes. Here she was, this soft person, soft all the way through. I felt terribly responsible.
“Where’d you come from?”
“That bar down the street.”
“The Versailles?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What were you doing there?”
She looked up into my face. “My friends say I should dump you.”
“What do you say?”
“I don’t know. You’re a good lay.” She tugged at my jeans. But this was only an imitation of lust, something borrowed from the booze. Her hands soon fell away. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve been here. Look, I’m sorry. I haven’t quite known what to do.”
“You could start by returning my calls, okay? Okay, Mr. Fucking Sensitivity?” Darcy glanced into the living room, at the pizza boxes and heaps of clothing. She shook her head. Bush was on now, staring into the camera like a frightened monkey. “Please, Billy, don’t tell me you’re still moping about this election.”
“It’s more like constructive brooding.”
Darcy plopped onto the couch. Her knees pressed together and her calves flared out like jousts. This lent her an antic quality, as if she might at any moment leap to her feet and burst into a tap-dance routine. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”
“I’m not doing anything to myself.”
“I just don’t understand why you have to hold this against me. I don’t hold your views against you.”
“That’s because you’re winning,” I muttered.
“What?”
“You’re winning. You can afford the luxury of grace. But I’ll tell you what, if these undervotes ever get counted and Gore pulls ahead, you and the rest—”
“That will never happen,” Darcy said sharply. She smoothed her skirt with the heel of her palm and took a deep breath. “You know as well as I do that if the situation were reversed, Gore would do the same thing as Bush.”
“You may be right,” I said. “But if he did that, he’d be wrong. And I hope I’d have the integrity to see that.”
“And I don’t have integrity?”
“I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is …”
But what was I saying? Wasn’t I saying precisely that?
Darcy narrowed her eyes and waited for me to clarify myself.
“Look, I know you have a lot invested in Bush winning. You worked hard for him. And I realize we have different views on how to run things. I don’t want you to be a liberal. But I’m talking about the underlying principle. Democracy means you do your best to look at all the ballots. You try to find the truth.”
“Please, Billy. I came over here to talk about us.”
“This is about us,” I said. “We have to agree on the basic stuff. Truth. Fairness. I’m not talking about this damn election anymore. I don’t even care who wins. They’re both Republicans in my book. I’m talking about what you believe and what I believe.”
“Would you listen to yourself?” Darcy said. “This is just politics, Billy. Christ. You’re as bad as Gore.”
“Don’t reduce this to politics. Please. I want us to be able to agree here.” I wasn’t screaming exactly, but my voice kept throttling up because I could see where we were headed and it made my heart ache.
Darcy shook her head. “I knew this was a mistake. You don’t even know what day it is today, do you?” She was speaking softly now, as she did in the sylvan hours, when the ruckus of her life gave way to frank disappointments. This made me want to hold her, to wrap myself along the railing of her hip.
“A year ago, Billy. We met a year ago tonight.”
For a moment there it looked as if fairness might prevail. The Florida Supreme Court issued the ruling that should have come down in the beginning: recount the entire state, by hand. But then, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to rule that, well, something or other involving equal protection and, more obscurely, the Constitution, and anyway there certainly wasn’t enough time to clear this mess up—such a mess!—so, you know, don’t blame us, we’re only trying to help: Bush wins.
All over Washington, Republicans whooped it up. They’d managed to gain the White House and the only cost had been the integrity of every single civil institution in our country. What a bargain! I spent the evening swilling Jack and gingers, howling into Darcy’s various machines, imagining I could taste her. Our situation was unclear. By which I mean: she was no longer returning my calls. At around one in the morning I drove to her apartment.
“Go away,” she said, through the intercom. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk. I love you, honey. I wanna say sorry.”
“I’m not going to talk with you, Billy.”
“I don’t wanna talk about that. I promise. Buzz me in, honey. Please.”
She was wearing an old nightgown, the cotton soft and pilled. Her face was a little puffy. Now it was my turn to fall against her, to kiss her brow and plead. Her body stiffened.
“I was wrong,” I said. “I was a jerk. Nobody makes me feel like you. We fit, you know. Our bodies, we just fit.”
She rose onto the balls of her feet. But she didn’t push me away. “You’re too angry,” she said. “I don’t like it when you get so angry.”
I sank to my knees and hugged her waist. “I’m sorry. Something takes over. I start thinking too much.”
It is true that Darcy was a Republican. But she was still a woman, and as such susceptible to forgiveness. I pressed my cheek against her and breathed warm air into her belly. Her muscles slowly softened.
“No more thinking, Billy. No more arguing. It’s over now.” With just her fingertips, she hoisted the hem of her nightgown. The tiny blond hairs at the top of her thighs stood on end. My tongue took up the taste of laundry soap. A thick pink scent came from the hollow below.
Could I have known, as she climbed onto the bed and opened herself to me, as I kissed that softest skin, that my anger would rise once again? But who can know these things? They are products of the past, of history finding an apt disguise in the moment. I wanted only to give my beloved this pleasure, to be forgiven. Why, then, as her knees fell open, as her breath bottomed into rasps and her flesh began to pulse, could I think only of James Baker? He rose from the darkest region of my love, his tongue twisted like an old piece of steak. Loathing shimmered around him like an aura. Why was I thinking of this man while Darcy lay open before me like a blossom?
Perhaps because (it occurred to me darkly) Darcy did not view Baker as a bad man at all. She had described him as a righteous man, not unlike her grandpa Tuck. And now suddenly I imagined James Baker in the humble suit of a country preacher, presiding over my very own wedding.
Darcy was digging her fingers into the meat of my neck, murmuring go go go. Her body clenched. This was the life she wanted: a walloping orgasm and the sort of man who knew when to keep his mouth shut. I thought of my own parents, marching into the grim precincts of New Haven to register voters. They had done this. They had believed. My lips felt numb. I wasn’t entirely sure I could breathe. Up above, the shuddering began. Darcy’s thighs came together in a swirl. How I had loved this moment! The roar of the engines on the runway, the sudden flight. I closed my eyes and breathed in her body. But there was Baker again—and now he was winking at me.
I lifted my head.
Darcy’s hands pawed the air. Her mouth puffed my name.
“The Supreme Court,” I said, “has filed an emergency injunction.”
“No, Billy. Go. I’m close.” Darcy’s eyes were pinched. Her hands had slipped to her breasts, which she gently cupped. Her hip bones stood out like tiny knobs. What in God’s name was wrong with me?
“Billy. Come on. Not funny.”
I could feel my throat knotting up with sorrow.
Darcy lifted her head from the pillows. Her eyes were starting to clear. “What exactly are you doing here?”
“Once the High Court rules, there are no more appeals.”
Darcy drew back. “Do you have any idea how despicably you’re behaving? Oh Billy, you really are a sad case.” Darcy closed her legs and pulled a sheet across her chest, like a starlet. “The election is over. Don’t you get it? Over.”
“That’s not the issue,” I said quietly.
“The issue?” Darcy’s fists curled around the sheet. “Do you even know what the issue is anymore? The issue is us, okay? The issue is do you really love me. That’s the issue, Billy.”
Darcy waited for me to say something heroic. This seemed the thing to do, certainly, to renounce my stingy polemical heart, to affirm the primacy of love. What kind of liberal was I, anyway? And this is surely how it would have gone in the movies, where everything gets absolved in time for the credits. Though I loved Darcy, thrilled to the music of her body, stood in awe of her drive, I could not fathom how I was supposed to live with my disappointment in her.
Nor did I understand, exactly, how she could love me when she found my core beliefs naive and pitiable. Perhaps this was a uniquely Republican gift, the ability to ignore inconvenient contradictions. Or perhaps she was simply better at loving someone without judgment. All that matters is that I failed in that moment to tell her that I loved her.
“You should leave,” Darcy said quietly. Her voice floated down in the dark. “Get out of here, Billy. Don’t come back.”
My friends told me I’d made the right decision. They were extremely reasonable and full of shit. I knew the truth, which was that Darcy was the most exciting lover I would ever take, because I always hated her a little, and never quite understood her, and because she forgave me this and loved me therefore more daringly, without relying on the congruence of our beliefs, the dull compliances of companionship.
I watched the inauguration simply to catch a glimpse of her. She was in the crowd beneath the podium. The camera caught her twice, a pretty woman with ruddy cheeks and a wide sad smile, gazing into the frozen rain.
Soon, she would rise to the office appointed by her talents and give her passion to another man. Eventually, she would move out to Bethesda or Arlington, where the stately oaks and pastures of blue grass survive. She would attach herself to the tasks of motherhood and governance with brilliant loyalty. And she would grow more achingly beautiful by the year, as our regrets inevitably do.
Washington was her town now. I understood that much. I lacked the guile, the gift for compromise, the ability to separate my wishes about the world from the cold facts of the place. I sat on my couch as the oaths were sworn and watched for Darcy’s yellow hair, which flickered in the wind that swept across the capitol and then was gone.