Galilee

“That’s mine!” he said, grabbing for his camera.

“No,” she replied, very simply, and tossed it back over her shoulder.

“Don’t touch it!” Penaloza yelled. “That camera is my property. If you so much as lay a finger on that camera I’ll sue you—”

“Oh shut up,” the woman said, and slapped him across the face. The blow stung so badly his eyes watered.

“You can’t do this,” he protested. “This is a Fifth Amendment issue.”

The woman hit him again. “Amend that,” she said.

Penaloza was a reasonably moral man. He didn’t take pleasure in hitting women; but sometimes it was a necessity. Blinking the tears out of his eyes he feinted to the right, and then swung a left that caught the woman’s jaw a solid crack. She let out a very satisfying yelp and stumbled backward, but to his surprise she was back at him before he recovered his own balance, throwing herself at him with such violence she brought them both to the ground.

“Jesus!” he heard somebody say, and from the corner of his eyes saw Buckminster standing a few yards away, photographing the fight.

Penaloza managed to pull one hand free and pointed toward his camera, which still lay on the grass a few yards from the senator’s daughter. “Grab it!” he yelled. “Buck! You shit! Pick up my camera!”

But he was too late. The Bryson bitch was already there, snatching the camera up off the ground, and Buckminster—having decided he’d risked enough as it was—now turned on his heels and fled. Penaloza struggled to pull himself out of his attacker’s grip, but she’d pinned him down, her knees clamped to either side of his head, and he had no energy left to throw her off. All he could do was squirm like a child while she casually beckoned Meredith Bryson over.

“Open the camera up, honey.” Meredith did so. “Now pull out the film.”

Penaloza started to shout again; there were people coming to see what all the commotion was about. If one of them could prevent Meredith from opening the camera, he might still have his evidence. Too late! The back of the camera snapped open, and the Bryson girl pulled the film out.

“Satisfied?” Penaloza growled.

The woman perched on him considered the question for a moment. “Did anybody tell you how lovely you are?” she said, reaching behind her. She took hold of his balls, clutching them tightly. “What a fine, wholesome specimen of manhood you are?” She twisted his scrotum. He sobbed, more with anticipation than fear. “No?” she said.

“…no…”

“Good. Because you’re not. You’re a worthless piece of rat’s doo-doo.” She twisted again. “What are you?” If he’d had a gun at that moment he’d have happily put a bullet through the bitch’s brains. “What. Are. You?” she said again, giving his balls a yank with every syllable.

“Rat’s doo-doo,” Penaloza said.

ii

The woman who’d laid Penaloza low was of course none other than my darling Marietta. And you’re probably sufficiently familiar with her by now to know that she was very proud of herself. When she got back here to L’Enfant she gave Zabrina and myself chapter and verse of the whole escapade.

“Why the hell did you go there in the first place?” I remember Zabrina asking her.

“I wanted to cause some trouble,” she said. “But once I got there, and I’d had a few glasses of champagne, all I wanted to do was fuck. So I found this girl. I didn’t know who she was.” She smiled slyly. “And neither did she, poor sweetheart. But, I like to think I helped her find out.”

There’s one footnote to all of this, and it concerns the subsequent romantic career of the senator’s daughter.

Maybe a year after the Geary wedding, who should appear on the cover of People magazine, there to announce her membership of the Sapphic tribe, but the radiant Meredith Bryson?

Inside, there was a five page interview, accompanied by a number of photographs of the newly uncloseted senator’s daughter. One in the window seat of her house in Charleston; another in the back yard, with two cats; and a third of her and her family at the President’s inauguration, with an inset blowup of Meredith herself, caught looking thoroughly bored.

“I’ve always been interested in politics,” she averred in the body of the piece.

The interviewer hurried her on to something a little juicier. When had she first realized she was a lesbian?

“I know a lot of women say they’ve always known, somewhere deep down,” she replied. “But honestly I didn’t have a clue until I met the right person.”

Could she tell the readers who this lucky lady was?

“No, I’d prefer not to do that right now,” Meredith replied.

“Have you taken her to the White House?”

“Not yet. But I intend to, one of these days. The First Lady and I had a great conversation about it, and she said we’d be very welcome.”

The article twittered on in the same substance-free manner for several pages; I don’t think anything of any moment was said from beginning to end. But after the talk of White House visits I couldn’t help but imagine Marietta and Meredith in Lincoln’s bedroom, doing the deed beneath Abe’s portrait. Now there was a picture the sleaze-hounds would have paid a nice price to own.

As to Marietta, she would not be drawn out any further on the subject of the senator’s daughter. I can’t help wondering, however, if at some point down the line the fate of L’Enfant and the secret lives of Capitol Hill won’t again intersect. This is, after all, a house built by a president. I won’t argue that it’s his masterpiece—that’s surely the Declaration of Independence—but L’Enfant’s roots lie too close to the roots of democracy’s tree for the two not to be intertwined. And if, as Zelim the Prophet once claimed, the process of all things is like the Wheel of the Stars, and what has seemed to pass away will come back again sooner or later, is it unreasonable to suppose that L’Enfant’s demise may be caused or quickened by the order of power that brought it into being?

IX

So now you know how Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary became husband and wife—from their first meeting to the vows at the altar. You know how powerful a family she had entered, and how possessive it was; you know she was in love with Mitchell, passionately so, and that her feelings were reciprocated.

How then, you ask, does such a romance fall from grace? How is it that, a little over two years later, at the end of a rainy October, Rachel was driving around the benighted streets of Dansky, Ohio, cursing the day she’d heard the name of Mitchell Geary?

If this were a work of fiction I could invent some dramatic scenario to explain all this. She’d step into the house one day and find her husband in bed with another woman, or they’d have an argument that would escalate into violence, or he’d reveal to her in the heat of an angry exchange that he’d married her for a bet with his brother. But there was nothing like that in their lives: no adulteries, no violence, and certainly no raised voices. It just wasn’t the way Mitch dealt with things. He liked to be liked, even when being liked meant avoiding a confrontation that would be to everybody’s good. That meant turning a blind eye to Rachel’s discomfort if there was the least risk of stirring up something unpleasant. His former empathy, which had been so much a part of what had enchanted her about him, disappeared. If she was unhappy, he simply looked the other way. There was always plenty of Geary family business to justify his inattention; and of course the inevitable seductions of luxury to soften Rachel’s loneliness when he was gone.

It would be wrong to claim that she was not in some fashion complicit in all of this. It became apparent to her very quickly that her life as Mrs. Mitchell Geary was not going to be as emotionally fulfilling as she’d hoped. Mitchell was wholly devoted to the family business, and as she had no role in that business, nor wanted one, she found herself alone more often than she liked. Instead of sitting Mitch down and talking the problem through—telling him, in essence, that she wanted to be more than a public wife—she let his way of doing things carry the day, and that soon proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less she said the harder it became to say anything at all.

Anyway, how could she claim the marriage wasn’t working when to the outside world she’d been given paradise on a platter? Was there anywhere she couldn’t go if she wanted to? Any store she couldn’t shop in until she was tired of saying I’ll take it? They went to Aspen skiing, Vermont for a weekend in the autumn, to enjoy the turning of the leaves. She was in Los Angeles for the Oscar parties, in Paris to see the spring collections, in London for the theater, and Rio and Bali for spur-of-the-moment vacations. What did she have to complain about?

The only person in whom she could confide her growing unhappiness was Margie, who wasn’t so much sympathetic as fatalistic.

“It’s a trade-off,” she said. “And it’s been going on since the beginning of time. Or at least since the first rich man ever took himself a poor wife.”

Rachel flinched at this. “I am not—”

“Oh honey.”

“That’s not why I married Mitch.”

“No, of course it isn’t. You’d be with him if he was ugly and poor and I’d be with Garrison if he was tap-dancing on a street corner in Soho.”

“I love Mitch.”

“Right now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, sitting here right now, having said all the things you’ve just said about how he’s neglectful, and doesn’t want to talk about feelings, and so on, sitting right here right now, you love him?”

“Oh Lord…”

“Is that a maybe?”

There was a pause while they thought about what she was feeling at that moment. “I don’t know what I feel,” she admitted. “It’s just that he’s not…”

“The man you married?” Rachel nodded. Margie refilled her whiskey glass and leaned forward as though to whisper something, though they were the only people in the room. “Sweetheart, he never was the man you married. He was just giving you the Mitch you wanted to see.” She leaned back, waving her free hand in the air as though to swat a swarm of phantom Gearys out of her sight. “They’re all the same. Christ knows.” She sipped her whiskey. “Believe it or not, Garrison can be charm personified when it suits him. They must get it from their grandfather.”

Rachel pictured Cadmus the way he’d been at the wedding; sitting in his high-backed chair dispensing charm like a benediction.

“If it’s all a performance,” she said, “where’s the real Mitch?”

“He doesn’t know any more. If he ever did, which I doubt. It’s sort of pitiful when you think about it. All that power, all that money, and there’s nobody home to use it.”

“They use it all the time,” Rachel said.

“No,” Margie replied. “It uses them. They’re not living. None of us Gearys are. We’re all just going through the motions.” She peered at her glass. “I know I drink too much. It’s rotting my liver and it’ll probably kill me. But at least when I’ve got a few whiskeys inside me I’m not stuck being Mrs. Garrison Geary. When I’m drunk I give up being his wife, I’m somebody he wishes he didn’t know. I like that.”

Rachel shook her head in despair. “If it’s so bad,” she said, “why don’t you just leave?”

“I’ve tried. I’ve left him three times. Once I stayed away for five months. But…you get into a certain way of being. You get comfortable.” Rachel looked uneasy. “It doesn’t take long. Look, I don’t like living in Garrison’s shadow, but I like living without his credit cards even less.”

“You could divorce him and get a very nice settlement, Margie. You could live anywhere you wanted, anyway you wanted.”

Now it was Margie who shook her head. “I know,” she said softly. “I’m just making excuses.” She picked up the whiskey bottle and poured herself another half tumbler. “The fact is, I’m not leaving because somewhere deep down I don’t want to. I guess maybe what’s left of my self-esteem’s wrapped up in being part of the dynasty. Isn’t that pathetic?” She sipped on her drink. “Don’t look so appalled, honey. Just because I’m too screwed up to leave, doesn’t mean you can’t. How old are you now?”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.