7

There are a number of qualities that are essential for a successful vice president, most of which aren’t easily found in the sort of people—ambitious politicians, that is—usually asked to do the job. Patience and humility are important; the very best vice presidents have a flare for obscurity. Public displays of intelligence must be tasteful and understated. Spontaneity is to be avoided at all costs. And, most important: in private discourse with the president, one must be able to fawn with a maximum of enthusiasm and a minimum of irony. Charlie Martin was not very good at any of these, and Jack Stanton knew it—and Hilton Devereaux saw it, and he winced privately at his boss’s determined but futile efforts to demonstrate fealty to his party’s nominee for the presidency that June Sunday in Mammoth Falls.

“Hey, Jack, congratulations,” the senator said, unfurling himself from the rear of the Ford Bronco that Stanton had sent to retrieve them. A laconic, Sunday-duty flock of camera folks and reporters gathered behind a yellow nylon cord, off the oval driveway in front of the governor’s mansion. Susan Stanton stood on the far side of her husband, still dressed for church in a dark pants suit and a scarf. “Hi, Susan.” Charlie waved.

“Good to see you, Senator,” Stanton said, greeting him with a warm smile and a comfortable, slow-motion handshake. He was dressed less formally than his wife: a jacket and slacks, a teal button-down shirt open at the collar. He put his left hand on Charlie’s elbow—and, with Donny O’Brien facility, assembled the three of them symmetrically, facing the cameras. Smile. Smile. Click, click, click. “When are you going to announce your choice, Governor?” a reporter asked.

“In good time,” Stanton said. He had changed, Charlie thought, grown quieter, moved slower—in public, at least, the appearance of thoughtfulness was what passed for gravitas. The presence of a dozen Secret Service guys didn’t hurt, either. Charlie had left the presidential campaign in its retail phase, the candidates still working small crowds, face-to-face. This was different, bigger now and more serious. The return to center stage caught him off-guard. He’d spent most of the plane ride from Houston thinking about Calvin—their distant and yet emotionally exhausting meeting. He was disappointed by his own ambivalent reaction to the boy. He wondered if he should call Thua and try to learn more about the kid. And then he thought: I may know as much as she does. I can tell her about Buzz.

He’d prepared himself for the Stanton meeting, too, but it was an afterthought, and he’d prepared for the old Jack—the preanointed one.

“Is it gonna be Senator Martin?”

Stanton smiled grandly.

“Has he asked you, Senator Martin?”

Charlie smiled, not quite so grandly.

“A few months ago, you said Jack Stanton was damaged goods,” an ambitious reporter asked. “You think he can win in the fall?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said, but not quite from the heart. He’d stumbled over the very same word with Calvin, the day before.

And that was about it for his vice presidential campaign.

The press didn’t notice the equivocation; Charlie seemed stone confident on the evening news that night. But Stanton, who had an otherworldly ability to read the microscopic striations of nuances, understood that it wasn’t an unequivocal “absolutely” and never would be. Charlie felt the chill breeze from the nominee. And Hilton Devereaux read the body language.

Hilton had never experienced Jack Stanton firsthand before. He was struck by how large the man was, and how needy: he needed absolute “absolutely’s.” He was surrounded by bustling little absolutophiles. He was yelling at one, as they moved inside: “Perry, you’ve gotta make the numbers work. You can’t fuck with this. Call Walt Wheeler up in Boston. Call Bill Robinson. I want this out, and done right, before the convention.”

“But, Governor—” poor Perry persisted. “The tax cut is killing the numbers—”

Stanton stopped. Glared at Perry, who was sweaty with satchels and files and computer printouts. “Wheeler said it would work,” Stanton said. “He’s got a Nobel goddamned prize in economics.”

“His numbers,” Perry gulped, “are off.”

Stanton rolled his eyes. “You’re telling me—”

“We have to cut the tax cut,” Perry said.

“Henry!” Stanton called. They were moving down a hall, through a kitchen, into what seemed to be a family room. There were three televisions in the room; they were all on—a basketball game, golf and CNN.

Henry Burton appeared. What a good-looking guy, Hilton thought as he dispatched himself to a chair off in a corner, away from the action. Burton was neat, calm, small and mocha-colored: the young Julian Bond, a human decaf cappuccino, wearing a pumpkin-colored knit shirt and perfectly faded Levis. “Hi, Senator,” he said to Martin, friendly and confident.

“Henry, can you supervise Perry on the numbers?”

Burton nodded, steered Perry off, away. There were other aides, other people dashing about. Hilton tried to imagine himself one of them: Jack Stanton seemed both more accessible and more remote than Charlie Martin. No sense of humor, for starters. A distinctly southern, and rather feminine, combination: charming but unironic. And now Stanton sat down, suddenly entranced by the sports on the television, ignoring his guest. Hilton was struck by the rudeness of it; Stanton’s charm was electronic—he could turn it on and off.

“How was Vietnam, Charlie?” Susan asked, filling empty space. “Was it tough going back there?”

Everything she said had some distance, a formality to it. She doffed her suit jacket and had on a canary-yellow silk blouse; dark slacks, black velvet headband.

“It was—” Charlie started. “Quite something.”

Hilton was finding that after several months he could think along with his boss: a serious answer would have meant a serious conversation, which would have been far too personal for this sort of situation. For Charlie Martin, seriousness was serious; it wasn’t an act you put on for political reasons—informality was the act you put on for political purposes. This wasn’t, Hilton thought, going very well: the boss had prepared himself for an actual meeting, a discussion of the vice presidency. Not a really real discussion. But the sort of canned earnestness that passes for candor when politicians attempt to communicate with each other privately. This wasn’t even close to that, and Charlie hadn’t prepped himself for irrelevance.

“It’s amazing you were able to bring that man out,” Susan said, as if the conversation were taking place on television. “The administration was just sitting around—Jack, wasn’t it terrific that Charlie was able to—”

Charlie was a bit distracted. Hilton saw him floundering. Would he tell her that he’d been working indirectly at the behest of the Republican president—their enemy to the death now? Stanton seemed distracted, too: listening to the conversation, sort of, but very deep into the games he was watching. “How’d you get in there?” Stanton asked, not quite looking over at Charlie.

“Lincoln Rathburn called me,” he said. “I think the administration had called him. They want to normalize relations, but they can’t—”

“Yeah, the vets’ groups,” Stanton said. “It’s a bitch. And if the Republicans can’t, I sure as hell can’t, and I believe we probably should, don’t you?” Stanton suddenly looked directly, and rather desperately, at Charlie, hoping for reinforcement, wanting to hear him say that his nonservice in Vietnam didn’t matter.

“Absolutely,” Charlie said.

“Absolutely,” Hilton thought, was not a very good word for an honest politician—too many syllables out there to be equivocal with. He would advise the boss to try “sure” next time. “You know, Jack,” Charlie continued, with significantly more squish than was his norm, “even in the toughest moments of the campaign, when the press wanted me to take you out on this—”

“Yeah, I know,” Stanton retreated, slightly miffed, not having received the absolution he’d been hoping for. “God, look at Mickelson clear that bunker!—and yeah, I appreciate that, Charlie.”

Charlie was trying to grovel, and Stanton was back to watching golf. Hilton was infuriated; Charlie, nonplussed. Even Susan seemed a wee bit disgusted with her husband. “The Republicans won’t be as kind as Charlie,” she said to him. Then, to Martin: “How would you deal with them when they come after Jack on the war?”

“I’d be happy to help, any way I can,” Charlie said, too quickly. Hilton had the feeling that even though Stanton was making a visible effort not to pay attention, he was reading every tea leaf, aware that Charlie was attempting the limited, qualified suck-up route, and thinking less of him for that. Sucking up is an art; it has to be effortless, seamless—anything less than totally convincing is a disaster. Hilton knew his boss didn’t have the chops. In a way, he was happy about that.

“It might not be a bad idea,” Charlie tried again, “for you to have some Vietnam guys—surrogates—organized and ready to support you if and when they come after you.”

Stanton seemed to ignore the offer of help. Burton was back, whispering in his ear. “Tell them three minutes, Henry,” Jack said.

Charlie glanced over at Hilton, who rolled his eyes.

“Rathburn’s working with the administration?” Stanton asked.

“No. But they know he knows the area, and he’s discreet,” Charlie said. “They didn’t want their fingerprints on it, but they wanted Mustafa out.”

“And what about Rathburn?” Stanton asked. “What do you think of him?”

“He’s the most talented diplomat in our party,” Charlie said.

“I hear he’s something of a self-promoter,” Susan said.

Well, yeah. But so what? Charlie assumed Gideon Reese had been filling Stanton’s brain with this stuff—subtly, as Gideon always would. He decided to try some counterspin. “You know, Jack, we all knew each other back then—me and Gid and Linc and Sly Parkinson—back in Saigon,” he said, then thought: should I be calling him Jack? Hilton saw the hesitation and thought: how un-Martin. The boss couldn’t quite get himself untracked in Stanton’s presence.

“And we all felt pretty much the same about the war—pretty much like you, ultimately. And Gid did his rebellion in public, which was fine. I didn’t begrudge his resignation in protest, or the speech he made at the Washington Monument. But Linc kept plugging away from the inside, always working to end the war. You can nitpick why he did what he did, but—” Charlie was struck by a belated insight: Gid, who was so much more publicly austere than Linc, had had a far more extravagant reaction to the war, resigning in protest from the foreign service, going to teach at Georgetown, starting AAW (Academics Against the War); Linc’s response had been more juridical, staying in the State Department, lawyering the codicils of the Paris Peace Accords even after the Nixon election.

“Anyway, Linc.” Charlie tried to remember what he’d been saying, but was interrupted by another thought: Gid and Stanton were linked by the need to overcome anti-Vietnam activities that both now considered embarrassing. “Linc has this thing about loyalty. And loyalty’s a quality, I hear, that presidents value.”

“I understand Rathburn’s very loyal,” Susan said, “to you.”

Burton was back; he and the Stantons communicated with a glance. Jack stood up, getting ready to end it. “Well, it’s really good of you to come by,” he said, as if Charlie had just made a trip around the corner. “I appreciate your coming here and offering your support like this. It’s important to put our past disagreements behind us.”

“Jack,” Charlie said, taking one last run at it—for Donny O’Brien’s sake. “I really do think you can win this thing, and you should. I want to do what I can to help.”

Stanton nodded. He didn’t believe a word of it. “Thanks, Charlie, I may have Richard Jemmons call you about organizing the vets.”

Without pushing, he was herding Charlie and Hilton toward the door—as if they were on a moving walkway at the airport. “Oh, Jack,” Charlie said, pushing back against the tide. “Don O’Brien wanted me to say hello for him, and he says that it might be a good idea if we start thinking about how we’re going to coordinate the presidential and congressional campaigns in the—”

“Tell him to have Dov Mandelbaum call Richard,” Stanton said, stopping at the door. “Great to see you, Charlie.”

Outside, there was a barrage of clicks and lights and questions. “Did he offer you the vice presidency, Senator? Senator! Hey, Charlie, over here. . . .”

Charlie smiled, waved, did the hokey-pokey and turned himself around, and got into the car with Devereaux.

“Jeez,” he said.

“I wonder what his next meeting was,” Hilton said.

“He’s a busy man,” Charlie said. “There are vice presidents to pick, golf to watch, hairdressers to boink. . . .”

“I thought you did Rathburn a good turn.”

“Susan caught me up on that.”

“She’s sharp,” he said. “Sharper than him, I think.”

“Not in a million years,” Charlie replied. “So, who does he pick? Who’s the veep?”

“Someone for whom adulation is not an effort,” he said.

“No flies on you, D-2.”

“Senator, I appreciate the compliment,” Devereaux said. “But if you call me D-2 one more time, I will surely scream—”

“What should I call you?”

“Hilton sufficed for my parents.”

“You never had a nickname?”

“Some of the kids in high school used to call me ‘faggot,’ ” he said. “I always thought nicknames were kind of butch.”

“How about ‘Butch’?”

———

Too much rectitude roils the soul. Charlie had been a good soldier, a good boy, and Every Good Boy Does Fine—but rectitudinous boys wind up with spiritual arthritis. He was getting bored with himself. He’d been so good. After Mammoth Falls, he went back to Des Pointe, gave an extended interview to Bob Hamblin of the Register-World, offering Mustafa details that no one else had and making up some “color” about the meeting with Stanton. Then he reacted with great public enthusiasm when Stanton picked Senator Thomas Atkinson III of Missouri to be his vice presidential nominee. Atkinson was someone he’d often voted with, but never befriended. He seemed eminently vice presidential.

In truth, Charlie didn’t care very much about the presidential campaign anymore (although he was quietly pleased that desperate Democrats around the country had begun asking him to make campaign appearances). He spent his time working the home turf, tending to business. A small but irksome part of that business was accepting the fact that Mustafa just wasn’t going away. When he wasn’t driving the Goodwill truck, he was hanging around Charlie’s office: not a bother, exactly—he tried to make himself useful, and too often succeeded—but a complication. He did dry-cleaning runs, food shopping for Donna, stray messenger work. “Moose’s weird,” she told the boss, “but dependable.”

Still, Mustafa existed at the periphery of the senator’s radar screen; as did the other enduring consequence of his Vietnam trip—Calvin. Charlie called his son regularly. The calls were uniformly awkward. He found himself pushing the kid to come visit, come on the road with him. The harder he pushed, the more reluctant Cal seemed, as if he knew Charlie couldn’t figure out anything else to talk about. But Charlie kept trying—not a full-court press, but frequently enough to convince himself that he was making the effort. He bought a Red Hot Chili Peppers CD (Calvin had said they were his favorite band); he listened to it several times and found himself depressed when several of the songs stuck in his mind, like gum on a shoe.

All of which is to say that he was ready to kick back and enjoy himself at the Democratic convention in New York.

There are plenty of ways not to have fun at a Democratic convention. You can take part in panel discussions about the need for campaign finance reform, you can give speeches to special-interest groups obsessed with abortion rights and voter registration. You can have labor skates bend your ear about the perils of free trade, over soggy cheese puffs and jug wine. Charlie was scheduled to do his share of that stuff. But he also had been invited to frolic on the wilder shores of Democratic social life, the places where married senators from, say, North Dakota, are never seen. On the Sunday night before the convention, he attended a reception that Rolling Stone magazine and GreenPAC, a Hollywood envirorock-and-roll lobbying group, were having in an Upper East Side art gallery.

Charlie was swarmed when he walked in. He was, in this entertainment industry-cum-cause-junkie crowd, something of a celebrity. He stood near the door, shaking hands while scoping the room, not quite fixing on the people he was shaking with, smiling a lot, laughing a notch too easily, acting like a politician. The place was jammed, there was just too much to take in—the exposed-brick walls were dotted with minimalist modern art that seemed much less engaging than the prairie portraits in his office—but something across the room immediately caught his eye. It was a woman’s back, a perfect one. She was wearing a lavender sundress with straps somewhat thicker than fettuccine and a kind of shoelace latticework starting just below her shoulder blades, plunging downward, not too deep, but deep enough, in a perfect V. She had terrific shoulders and thin arms, and a sheen of thick onyx—Asian—hair. Then she was gone, lost in the crush. He extricated himself and began to work his way in that direction, searching for lavender, a controlled primordial lunge, smiling and shaking hands all the way. He saw her again, halfway across—she was talking to a blond, surfer-staffer sort of guy, a younger guy. A bit closer, Martin saw her profile—fabulous, dark eyebrows, pale skin.

And then she looked directly at him and said, “Oh! Hi!”

She was younger than her body. Somewhere in her twenties. But she was great-looking and heading his way. “Senator Martin?” she said. He nodded and smiled senatorially. “Hi. Hello,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m Elizabeth Makrides. I think you knew my father.” She took his disappointment—her father?—for incomprehension, but she was right: Charlie did know her father. “Harry Makrides,” she said. “He was in Saigon with Reuters.”

Yes, he was. But Harry Makrides was goggle-eyed and slouchy with Brillo hair, and looked a lot older than he probably was. How could he possibly be the father of—

“Oh sure,” Charlie said. “Great guy. Older than me, I think—just leaving town when I arrived. How’s he doing?”

She sobered, looked down. Long lashes; Harry had given her a narrower, more angular face than most Asians. What a knockout. “He died a few months ago,” she said. “Heart attack.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, having no trouble with the projection of sadness: life can be so cruel.

“You were in Vietnam recently?” She looked at him very directly now, dark eyes shiny and intent. “I’ve never been. I’d give anything to go. What was it like?”

“Lovely,” Charlie said, distracted by the memory of how astute Calvin had been on the subject of Vietnamericans and the home country: of course she’d never been. “Back to what it was, what it’s always been, despite us and the Chinese and everybody, ever since the dragon flew south.”

“My mother always said that,” she said, squeezing his arm, “about the dragon.”

“That’s when it all began, right?” The legend was that a dragon had flown south to marry a fairy princess and create the Vietnamese people.

“It’s where the toughness comes from—from the dragon,” she said.

“The way I always heard the story,” he said, “it was a gentle dragon.”

“But it was still a dragon,” she replied. Then, with a twinkle: “My dad always said you were a very cool guy.”

“He did?” Charlie had barely known the man.

“No,” she said, with a smile—and with intent, he thought. “Not really. But I always thought you were kind of cool, when I saw you on TV.”

What could he say to that? “Are you in town for the convention?” he asked. “Are you an elected official?”

She laughed, lots and lots of very white teeth.

“A delegate? A dedicated party worker? A lobbyist? A—”

“A journalist,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “I want you to know,” he whispered, “this whole conversation is on background.” She laughed again, nice and easy. He realized he might be headed for serious trouble. But, WTF. “What kind of journalist are you?”

“I’m a consumer reporter—for Channel 5 here,” she said.

“What a coincidence,” he said. “I’ve been consumed by reporters.” Someone knocked into her, knocking her into him; he supported her with his right arm, which somehow found its way around her waist, which was tiny. She was a feather.

“What did you say?” She tilted her head up, her lips brushing his ear.

“Reporters have had me for lunch.”

A tap on his shoulder. Rathburn. Rathburn smiling, glancing at the girl. “Senator,” he said, making it three syllables filled with mock portent.

“Hey, Linc.” Charlie had known Rathburn was going to show up. “This is Elizabeth Makrides. . . .”

“Harry’s daughter?” Linc said. How did he always know everything?

Linc was with a date, but she didn’t seem his usual sort: older, not as flashy. But not unattractive. He didn’t introduce her immediately; he was consoling Elizabeth on the death of her father. Charlie was watching this, a bit too intently, still transfixed by the stunning young woman who seemed to be making a move on him. So Rathburn’s date introduced herself. “Arabella Palmerston,” she said, extending her hand and looking Charlie straight in the eye. She was tall—and interesting-looking, curly blond hair the color of old brass, like Milky Flancik’s cornet; her voice was a cornet voice, too—deeper than a trumpet, mellow but sharp.

“Arabella?” he said.

“Family name. I come from a long-named family. Call me Nell,” she said. “And you’re Charlie Martin, of course. I’ve been waiting to meet you: Rathburn says you’re not boring. That would be nice. So far, all his friends have been incredibly busy saving the world. Foreign policy this, economic policy that.”

“You want to talk about Most Favored Nation status?” Charlie asked, thinking: she’s right, Rathburn did tend to hang with a deadly serious, banker, lawyer, former-diplomat crowd.

“Italy,” she said.

“Italy?” She had a long, thin nose with a slight bump in the middle and an aristocratic upturn at the tip—an intermediate ski slope; her eyes were blue-green-gray, oceanic, calm and sad and smart.

“My most favored nation,” she said. “And Florence is my most favored city. What are you doing here?” she asked, glancing over at Elizabeth, who was listening intently—or seemed to be—as Rathburn regaled her with stories of her father. “Day care?”

“That’s cruel,” Charlie said. All of her features were interesting—quite wonderful, in fact—but they didn’t exactly fit together, or maybe they did in an unexpected way. She was dressed in a gray linen shift with a boatneck, cut perfectly to follow the line of her collarbones; she had small pearl earrings and no other jewelry, except a gold signet ring on her left pinky. Charlie found himself staring at her stupidly; he couldn’t decide if she was plain or extraordinary. So odd for Rathburn to be with someone like this: he usually trafficked in straight-ahead beautiful women. This one was a winding road. “What are you doing with Linc?” he asked, or maybe blurted.

“Defrosting him,” she said. “It’s tough going.”

Charlie laughed. “He’s the only man I ever met who never had an armpit stain in the tropics,” he said.

“What’s that?” Linc turned toward them. Elizabeth moved to Charlie’s side quietly, curled her arm inside his left elbow, her index finger on his wrist, resting lightly on the scar tissue, causing the hair on his arm to rise.

“Senator Martin was remarking on what a cool customer you are,” Nell said, with a mischievous smile.

“Nell’s teaching me how to be fashionable,” Rathburn said, putting an arm around her waist—which, Charlie noticed, was more of a waist than Elizabeth’s, but not bad for a grown-up.

“The truth is,” he said, “we were discussing Most Favored Nation status.”

Rathburn looked hopeful.

“Nell said, ‘Italy.’ ”

“God only knows what she would have come up with,” Linc said, “if you’d mentioned arms control.”

But Charlie knew: Nell had spotted Elizabeth’s arm in his, her fingers tickling his wrist. She looked there, then up at him. They seemed to have fallen into a very intense unspoken conversation.

“I’ve seen you on TV,” Nell said then, to Elizabeth. “You’re very lively.” She glanced at Charlie again: he sensed that she wanted to say “perky,” but had restrained herself. He was surprised, and pleased, to be thinking along with her.

“They like lively,” Elizabeth said. “They like me to call myself Betsy. The anchor guy pronounces it ‘Bitsy.’ They want their Asian women reporters bite-sized. It’s part of the job. It feels foolish sometimes, like when you’re talking about E. coli outbreaks. But I guess everyone has something that’s awful about their work. What do you do?”

“I’m a designer,” Nell said. “Swimwear.”

“Cool,” Elizabeth said. “For what company?”

“I have my own,” Nell said. “It’s small.”

“Have I heard of it?”

“Probably not.” Nell shrugged, but she had done another interesting thing—she seemed to have completely forgotten about Linc and Charlie, and was focusing all her attention on Elizabeth. Women in Washing ton didn’t do that very often—at least, not in the senatorial circles he was used to. (On second thought, maybe they did and their men were too self-entranced to notice.) “It’s called MerMaid,” she said, with a very authentic French lilt on the “mer.”

Elizabeth laughed. She got the pun. Charlie was heartened. “Sounds pretty high-end,” she said. “How many seasons do you do?”

“Two,” Nell replied. “We just showed ‘Cruise.’ Now I’m making the rounds, trying to get orders.”

“You don’t have a sales staff, an agent or something?”

Linc rolled his eyes, but Charlie was fascinated. How refreshing: a conversation that was not even tangentially related to politics. He considered easing Linc’s pain and gossiping a little—there was plenty to talk about. But he was enmeshed in the swimsuit business. He wanted to know all about sales. He could gossip with Linc anytime; they gossiped constantly.

“Oh, sure, I have sales reps,” Nell was saying. “But I still have to go out, keep up the personal relationships I’ve built over the years. The customers expect it. . . . What kind of suits do you wear?”

“Well, I really am a swimmer,” Elizabeth said, with a perfect pause for effect. “So I don’t shop for suits.”

“Of course not.” Nell laughed and predicted: “You go conservative, Speedo sort of stuff—one piece, solid color, something you can actually swim in without falling out of it.”

“You got it,” Elizabeth said. “Sorry.”

“No problem,” Nell said, and sounded as if she meant it. “It’s amazing how much of the market is designed for just sitting around the pool—Lycra lingerie. . . . But I do have a few real swimsuits, too—I’ve been getting into prints, designing my own.”

“That’s great,” Elizabeth said. “Like what sort of thing?”

There was a rustle in the room, strong enough that Nell looked up, away from Elizabeth, to see what was going on. It was Stanton coming in. He was shaking hands on the far side of the room, moving toward a makeshift podium with Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone publisher—who was beaming—and they were accompanied by an attractive woman with startling red hair, the star of a television series Charlie had never seen and the spokesperson for GreenPAC. The crowd noticed the movement and began to applaud, first tepidly, then more enthusiastically. Charlie applauded, too, in his proudly abridged fashion, slapping the back of his left hand, what was left of it, into his right palm.

Nell leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I’ve always wondered about the sound of one and a half hands clapping.”

He pulled back, startled. No one had ever said anything quite so bold to him before—but she was smiling, enjoying her double entendre: she had been referring to his relationship with Stanton, too. He smiled back at her, desperately trying to rearrange his face after the shock, and then he began to laugh. She grinned, mostly with her eyes—they were, he thought, the color of the North Atlantic. The woman seemed to have taken his measure. She’d known that he’d be titillated, not offended; she’d known precisely what the traffic would bear.

And another thing: as she leaned in, he caught a whiff of her perfume. He didn’t like perfume much; it seemed a vestige of less forthright times, a diversionary tactic—harsh and garish and sticky sweet. But Nell’s perfume blended with and augmented whatever it was that came out of her pores. It was subtle, narcotic, adult and entrancing. He found himself trying to figure out a strategy to lean over, whisper some clever reply to her and smell it some more. But he had no clever reply; she had aced him.

Stanton’s speech that night wasn’t memorable: campaign blah-blah, and mercifully brief. He looked presidential. When it was over, Linc put his arm around Nell—she draped her arm, casually, on his shoulder—and said, “We’re going over to the Vanity Fair party, you guys want to come along?”

Elizabeth skidded a nail along Charlie’s wrist; he felt a shiver down his spine. “No thanks,” he said. “One celebrity party a night is about it for me.”

Nell smiled; she caught, or perhaps sensed, Elizabeth’s move. They shook hands. “Next time,” she said to Charlie, “arms control.”

“We could focus,” he said, “on biochemical weapons.”

Charlie and Elizabeth grabbed an immediate cab. She gave an address, turned her head back toward him and there they were, kissing. It seemed an entirely natural act; gropeless, easy. She was lovely. But Charlie found that he was thinking about Arabella Palmerston.

*     *     *

“So, who is she?” Charlie asked Linc as they sat in the nether reaches of Madison Square Garden several days later, watching Senator Bob Draboskie of Delaware, a former professional football player, fumble the keynote address at the Democratic convention. The floor roiled with delegates doing everything but listening; Draboskie was a mediocre piano player in a very chatty cocktail lounge, lost in the disrespectful din. Charlie had momentarily escaped the clutches of his home-state delegation; he could see them down below, on the jammed convention floor, brandishing cornstalks and pig placards. He admired their enthusiasm.

“Who is who?” Linc asked.

“Your date the other night—Nell,” he said. “She isn’t your usual type.”

“My usual type, that’s nice,” Linc said. “What does that mean?”

“Beautiful. Brilliant. In need of career counseling,” Charlie replied. Linc was, at times, the world’s most exclusive finishing school. “This one has been around.”

“I’ll tell her you said that,” he replied.

“You know what I mean,” Charlie said. “She’s an adult. And sharp.”

“Isn’t she extraordinary?” Linc asked. Casually. Rhetorically. “She’s a Darbyshire.”

“What’s that? Anything like a Black Angus?”

“You remember the family,” Linc said, ignoring Charlie’s contrived farmboy act. “Distant royals, five children, very eccentric. They all wrote memoirs. One was the aviatrix who crash-landed near Kiev and married the Ukrainian mechanic who fixed her plane, one converted to Islam and attended Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in a black chador; one was the writer—Jane Palmerston—and there were several brothers, less notable: the one who didn’t die of syphilis, Harry, married an American, a Coxley. You know the Coxley family, right? Faulknerian southerners?” Charlie didn’t. “Randall Coxley. Coxley Power?” Distantly. “His daughter, Susannah, was a great beauty; they were spectacularly alcoholic together, Harry and Susannah—Arabella is their daughter.”

Charlie wanted to know more about who she was, and how serious Linc was about her, but these were not the sort of things guys talked about with guys. The ground rules were precise, if implicit: they could praise the looks or smarts of each other’s latest triumph; they could tease each other—tastefully, vaguely—about sexual escapades. They could gossip about other friends’ women. But serious discussion of real-time romantic situations, especially difficulties, were off-limits, unless a relationship was in the process of being terminated. Women were either “extraordinary” or they were nonexistent, or they were gone.

Rathburn had successfully avoided marriage since his first one—to a very wealthy Bostonian named Abigail Porter, slightly older than he—failed in the early seventies. Gideon Reese had introduced Linc to Abigail. She’d been a childhood friend of Gid’s sister; the Porters owned property next to the Reeses at Bar Harbor. Abigail was a very serious botanist; Linc was a Hoosier, trying to pass for proper. Gid had been stonily perturbed with Rathburn for stepping out on Abigail in Saigon: it was wartime, flings were allowed. But he was furious at Linc, later, for never quite making it all the way home to Abigail after the war.

Gideon Reese had always been prohibitively Presbyterian: even his anti-Vietnam rebellion had been a dry, moralizing, New England abolitionist sort of fury. His fierce reaction to the divorce had seemed, to Linc, an object lesson of a perverse sort: if you involved yourself in a friend’s romantic business too deeply, the friendship might suffer. But Rathburn also was convinced that Reese’s pinched righteousness about the marriage had its roots in other resentments.

Linc had been determined to remain loyal after Gid defenestrated himself from the upper reaches of the State Department—the sixth floor, assistant secretary level—in 1968, landing with a thud at Georgetown University and in the antiwar movement. They even became closer for a time: Linc was Gid’s lifeline to respectability, to the world he had rejected and that now considered him a pariah; as long as Linc treated him with the same respect as ever, Gid could believe there might be a way back to government service when the insanity subsided.

But Linc’s devotion was grating, too. He was a bit too conscious of the ennobling power of an inconvenient friendship. Of course, Reese would have come to resent Rathburn even if the friendship hadn’t come with a price: Gid detested dependency as a matter of principle; he despised his own neediness. He had always stood apart, and above, even on those rare evenings when he agreed to carouse with Linc and Charlie in Saigon. He was never quite able to achieve informality. He never finished a beer.

And so the friendship had an excuse to shatter when Linc finally bailed on his marriage, and then on his diplomatic career, in the early seventies, moving to New York and private law practice. Charlie was in Des Pointe during the Great Linc-Gid Dissolution (which, in Linc’s mind, was more devastating—certainly more unexpected—than the divorce), and he felt a renewed surge of interest from Rathburn. Suddenly, there was an urgency to Linc’s calls; their friendship, perfunctory for several years, resumed Vietnam intensity. Charlie was arriving in Washington, a freshly minted congressman, just as Linc was leaving; Linc was discovering the world of postmarital delights just as Charlie was beginning to look for an escape hatch from Johanna. The daily phone calls began. For Linc, a compulsive observer of the events of the moment, Martin replaced Reese as prime interlocutor. For Charlie, still a political neophyte, Rathburn became an unofficial adviser and a portal to the world of fancy women.

“So, what did you think of her?” Linc asked now, which worried Charlie: he wasn’t sure why Linc was suddenly reasking something so . . . personal.

“Of who?”

“Of Nell, of course,” Linc said, then—happily—proceeded before Charlie could answer. “She’s impossible. She thinks all my friends are jerks.”

“All your friends are jerks,” Charlie said.

“Except you,” he said. “She said you were a babe.”

“A babe?” Charlie laughed.

“You seemed to get on with her, too.” Linc was staring at him intently now, assessing.

“She’s fun,” he said, “for a Darbyshire.”

“Hey, by the way: don’t tell me you played hide the salami with Harry Makrides’s daughter. . . .”

“Jealous?”

“Curious,” Linc said. “And appalled.”

Charlie shrugged, smiled, patted Linc on the back.

“Anyway, about Nell—” Linc began again.

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Charlie interrupted, initiating diversionary action. “I sat down with Bramlette to talk about Vietnam. About normalization.” Bartle Bramlette, a middle-aged southerner who bore a passing resemblance to Spanish moss, was the chair of the Armed Services Committee.

“A suicide mission if there ever was one,” Linc said, easily distracted, as always, by policy.

“Yeah, he said, ‘Tell it to the vets.’ ”

“You think Bart is looking for a job?” Rathburn asked. “If Stanton wins?”

“Of course he is. Maybe secretary of state,” Charlie said, flexing an eyebrow, torturing Linc—who hoped for the job himself, but knew that Gid would prevent him from ever getting it. “He thinks of himself as more than an aircraft-carrier-enabler these days. He’s a statesman. . . .”

“Yeah, sure he is. If he had half a brain, he’d listen to you about Vietnam,” Linc said. “He could provide cover for Stanton, coming from Alabama, Mr. Military and all. Good thing he’s too proud for that. He won’t give Stanton an inch, and then he’ll be pissed that Jack never calls. And he’ll be even more pissed when Parkinson becomes secretary of defense. Got to give Sly credit for latching on to Stanton like that—he saw his chance and he took it.”

“You talked to Slick lately?” Charlie asked. “He’s all over me.”

“All the time. Before he runs a defense idea past Stanton, he tests it on me. Barney Rubin has got him taking TV lessons.” Barney was Sly’s Donna, with degrees in history from Harvard and physics from MIT. Linc paused; Draboskie droned on about the shame of the cities. “Charlie,” he said, “there are times that I think I may ask her to marry me . . . and times I think—”

“Who?” Charlie asked, disgusted with himself for stepping on the second half of Linc’s sentence, the important part, the caveat—astonished that Linc had returned the conversation to “private” business and even more astonished that Linc was contemplating marriage. “What?”

“Nell,” he said. “You’re right. She is different. She’s been through a lot. Her first husband has AIDS. She’s a good mother, her business is like an extended family. We don’t have very much in common, but she has this quality—I just can’t explain it . . . She’s unusual,” he said, making it sound wildly exotic. “Don’t you think?”

“As I said, not your usual type.”

“Yeah, but you meant my usual type. You’ve now changed the emphasis to suggest how unusual she is,” Linc replied, and Charlie was struck, as ever, by the precision of Rathburn’s auditory powers: the mark of a good diplomat.

“And so?” Charlie asked.

“And so, I don’t know,” Linc said, and then asked again. “So what did you think of her?”

“Can you believe Draboskie?” Charlie said. “Going on about the Japanese?”