The President knew he was going crazy. He could no longer control his feelings, which swept through him like summer rainstorms—tears of horror or sorrow would be followed only hours later by delirious joy—or rapture, at the sight of … nothing! A vase of irises, for example, in the upstairs hall. He could have fallen to his knees in worship of the color blue, each petal licked by a gaudy yellow tongue. The spring flower had been flown in especially for the upstairs hall, and was exhibited against a stark white wall. He felt he had never seen before, as if his eyes had been veiled by cataracts, which, stripped away, left him dazzled by ordinary sights.
One day he saw a secretary walking up ahead and stared as if he’d never seen the human form before. He was startled by his gratitude. Jim, seeing it, clucked his tongue in shared respectful lust, and the President, grown cunning in his madness, laughed and slapped his aide on the back and gave a rueful shake of the head. But his heart twisted in his chest like a dishrag, because what he had seen had everything and nothing to do with sex. Earlier that day, he had glanced out the window at an elm and been caught by the space between the branches, so that for a moment he felt the tree was he himself, and if he cut into the bark, he would hear it scream and see its blood, and his own arm would bleed in sympathy and his own tongue give cry. It was the same with the girl. She was Matt, he was her, though he had never tottered on high heels.
He jerked himself back to being President. “Not here,” he muttered to his erection. He knew he was not well. He took to rubbing the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, then sliding them out to the corners of his eyes to wipe away the tears.
Or he turned gruffly away from his aides and staff, lest they see how moved he was.
He wanted the angel to come back. He looked for it. He had questions to ask, but it did not reappear.
Sometimes he woke up in the mornings, his heart flooded with joy and his body with a radiance so exquisite that he would lie in bed, eyes closed, quivering as the waves of light pulsed through him. He was being made love to by waves of warmth and light. Then he turned to the window and saw the dawning of the new day, the cloud formations piling up beyond the trees, and felt his heart pulled out of his body by the rush of gratitude.
He wondered if anyone could see his rapture. Sometimes at work he pushed the papers aside, or cut the conversation short, unable to bear one more word of distrust, or to play “put-down,” a game he had always enjoyed, though he’d called it “competition” then, or “playing to win.” Why had he wanted to smash and shame the other fellow? To win a point? For what? To triumph over another, only to discover he was alienated from humanity.
He was too crafty to say all this out loud. He would push aside the papers and rise to his feet. “Gentlemen, we need more information. Write me a memo, Bob.” (Or Jim, or John, or Jeffrey, or Jed.)
Neither could he bear the mystery novels any longer. He wanted something with more meat, though he could not have said what that meant. Or he wanted nothing to read at all. He wanted to dissolve into radiant light.
Here is another reason he knew things were awry: His feelings toward his wife began to change. He looked across the dining room table at this woman with whom he had lived for thirty-eight years, mother of his sons, and there was the fresh-faced college girl now hidden behind a matron’s face, cheeks going heavy, and the skin of her eyelids wrinkling over her brown eyes.
When you live with a person for many years, you think you’ve learned their ways. You set them in a frame and see that portrait even though it may not represent that person anymore at all, but merely the image that she (or he) has become accustomed to holding up to you.
They had not shared their lives in years. Except in public. Political pretense, at which they both excelled. They held hands and smiled at each other’s grins on camera and waved triumphantly from platforms. He could put an arm around her shoulder and hug her to him, and she would wind her arm around his waist as the cameras ground. But as soon as they moved out of the crowds, she shifted almost imperceptibly under his arm, which he dropped; she moved away, her face composing itself into its normal wary look. Now the President found himself observing the heavy stance of her plump body, set foursquare against her anger and pain, the tension in her neck, or the looks she gave him these days when she said good night, a piercing, questioning glance. She knew something had happened to him. She assumed it concerned another of his easy ladies, affairs thrown in her face.
One night he woke up at the usual four A.M. He opened his eyes to the dim light of the empty room. “Not here,” he said aloud, remarking on the absence of that one angelic image that now tugged always at his mind. Behind his eyes rose memories. It is impossible to get to the monarchy without having performed Aztec sacrifices, and lying there, alone and unprotected, he was assailed by his own betrayals.
How many deaths had he dealt out? Most frequently it is the human heart we kill—ambitions or love or the creative instinct. But he was head of state, and the blood of living men and women lay on him as well. His policies, his acts, affected everyone.
Nursing homes and nursery schools, food, transportation, business opportunities—all the stuff of living and dying lay in his hands.
“I never meant to harm,” he cried aloud, and suddenly he was walking with Anne, hand in hand, across a college campus under the falling red maple leaves. “You watch. I‘m going to be President,” he announced. Her head was thrown back, eyes sparkling as she looked at him. He’d not thought of that in years. Or of their first two-room apartment, when he was still in law school and held a night job on the side, while Anne, then pregnant, worked at the university. They hardly had time to meet, against opposing schedules, and when they did, could barely tear themselves apart. The passing years were marked by larger apartments and houses, and moves from his home state to Congress (a house in Georgetown), to Governor (the mansion in the home-state capital), and each move took something out of Anne, though she smiled gallantly and made a joke about a rolling stone. In that period she developed a twitch at the corner of her mouth. He wondered if she drank in the afternoons, but had no time to worry about it and bought her a maid instead, and got her a membership in the country club so that she could play tennis or golf with other political wives, and entertain at the club, if need be, and not bother him with her troubles.
It was four-thirty in the morning, and no angel had appeared. His thoughts were lions roaming round their cage. Then—without warning—both his boys pounced on him, and he scrambled to recover his wits, for these were memories he never permitted to himself. Nonetheless they roared onto him: his sons, just little guys, tough and compact of body, not two feet high and swinging at baseballs or flailing at the water when he took them swimming; or later, as adolescents, wrestling one another in the pool with the splashes of whales. They were growing into fine, young, muscled men; and frantically he tried to jerk his thoughts onto another track—his work, a woman—Eileen, Rebecca—the Peruvian problem to resolve—but they pressed in on him, those two great grinning, awkward, clownish boys with their huge hands and gawky feet, the elder having hardly achieved full height, but taking out girls, starting to drink now and also make speeches in the congressional campaigns, when they took the car for that fatal ride and left their bodies under the tractor trailer on the Beltway, their blood and muscles slippery on the road.
He screamed. The highway smeared with blood.
His heart was pounding. His skin had broken out in sweat.
The door opened. Frank: “Sir?”
“Go away,” he growled. “Get out. I‘m thinking.” But he threw his feet on the cold floor and padded to the angry bathroom to relieve himself, and the tears were running down his unshaven cheeks as he stood before the toilet and pain seared all his joints. His shoulders shook. He could not stop the tears.
Afterward he gulped cold water. He washed his face. He threw himself still trembling back in bed—uncoupled, he was, by his dear dead boys who had taken with them all his love and dried good, lusty ambition into dust.
Instantly he was Anne, scorched by hate at how he’d used their deaths. His teeth began to chatter. He threw off the covers and slipped to his knees beside the bed. “God, help me. Help me,” he prayed, as if a deity were not imaginary. “Help me,” he prayed. Until suddenly he was kneeling in his imagination at Anne’s feet, kissing Anne’s feet in love and supplication. But before she could extend forgiveness, the image broke into the figure of the boys, who reached down and hauled him up, enfolded him in their great snuffling embrace, which turned to shoulder-pummeling and leg-wrestling and then to one of those wild racing rough-houses that shook the lamps as they all three thundered from the living room up the stairs and through the bedrooms and down to the basement again, the house rocking with their roars. No cushion was left in place where they had played. Laughing, they threw themselves on the floor.
The vision changed. He was staring at the image of his half-grown sons. They stood before him enveloped in a light beyond imagining, and they weren’t doing anything, just standing, looking, smiling at the air.
The President woke from his trance and pulled himself exhausted into bed. He was drained. Now his tears were not for the boys or Anne or even for himself (though God knows he had wept for them before), but for all suffering in this life, this short-lived, fragile, little life. So frail, he thought. So fragile that nothing is given us to keep, but only to lose, to lose, to lose.
It seemed to him, lying there with the first pearl light creeping across the sky, that all of life is no more than that adjustment to loss: loss of pets, loss of parents, loss of children, loved ones, loss of homes and dreams. Whatever we value is taken from us. It was intolerable. But then it occurred to him how just this was, how right, how incorruptible, and how our task was merely to accept our loss, and grieve appropriately and give it away, because at some level there is no loss, he thought, hovering on the edge of insight and struggling to hold the idea that was already slipping from consciousness, another loss. For a moment he caught the concept that during our lives we must undergo loss again and again, loss of love, loss of people, loss of possessions, until we lose our possessiveness and see that only with loss is there possibility of … and he lost the words as he lost consciousness. It flashed across his mind—there is no loss—before he fell into sleep so sweet that Frank had to shake him awake in the daylight morning, where he lay in bed marveling at his serenity after such a stormy night.
The next morning, he found Anne in the breakfast room, reading her mail through her half-specs and dictating answers to her secretary.
“I saw the boys last night.”
She looked up, disgusted. “Oh, Matt.”
“Go away,” he said to her secretary, seating himself at the table, at which Anne quickly stood.
“Stay, Marie,” she ordered. But the secretary had more discretion than her boss.
“I’ll wait outside.” She slipped away, hearing only Anne’s voice rising in annoyance to her husband:
“Really, Matt. Must you?”
“Sit down,” he said quietly.
“I don’t want to hear your recital.”
“I think they came back to say that they’re all right.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” She paced the room in agitation, pulling at her ring.
“Annie, it was all right. I saw them, I tell you. They stood in front me, both boys, looking at me so lovingly. They were happy.”
“You’re such an egoist, Matt. I cannot imagine why—”
“Annie, they came to tell us something.”
“Then tell them to come to me,” she said. Then in a burst of frustration, “How could you do this to me? How dare you? I am sick of this charade. I will not put up with it anymore. You have your presidency. You have what you wanted. Glory. Power. So live with it. But don’t come to me with your guilty conscience.”
“Goddamn it, Anne. I didn’t kill them.”
“You might as well have. And if not them, then all the other boys you’re killing in this war.”
“Goddamn you!”
“I do my business. Just don’t ask anything more of me, understand?” They faced each other eye to eye, before he turned on his heel and left, muttering about murder and wives.