Rubicon, p.6
Rubicon, page 6
It was strange that she was so quiet and withdrawn around other people; when it was just the two of them she was not like that at all. He remembered that now, as he drove up the winding road through Montecito, close to Santa Barbara: the way she used to run to him barefooted when he came home at night; the way her fine, fragile voice, full of bright lights and laughter, made him forget everything that had happened that day. He wanted to hear that voice again; he wanted to see the shining eagerness in her eyes and the easy way she moved; he wanted back again all the things he had loved and in his blissful ignorance thought he could never lose.
He turned in at the gate. The gardener must have come. The long tangled pile of Bougainvillea that had worked its way around the hinges, making it difficult to open, had finally been trimmed back. He left the engine running and started fumbling for his key, but the gate had been left unlocked and all he had to do was push it forward. He looked around, remembering how happy and excited they were the day they found it, the house they had dreamed of, with the long view of the Pacific and the lights of Santa Barbara far below, and the rustling brittle leaves of the eucalyptus trees just outside the bedroom windows. It was one of those Spanish haciendas, all white stucco and tile, set far back from the road, surrounded by tall thick hedges and vine covered fences to keep out the prying eyes of world.
The house was dark. He started to open the front door, but then he hesitated, wondering if she had heard the car.
“Helen, it’s me,” he said as he stepped inside.
“Hello, Bobby.”
Startled, he looked up to find her standing in the living room just a few feet away. She was holding her cat.
“Look,” she said, stroking the cat’s shoulder. “Bobby has come to see us.” There was a distant, lost look in her large oval eyes that read like an accusation, a silent protest against abandonment and betrayal. “We weren’t sure he would, were we?” she whispered to the cat as she knelt down and let it go.
He started toward her.
“Helen, I....”
“Want something to eat? I remember how to cook.” She turned away from him and, without another word, walked to the kitchen.
He put down his bag and followed her.
“I could make you eggs; I could....” She looked at him with the saddest eyes he had ever seen. “Oh, God, Bobby....why?” she cried in a voice from which all the light, and all the laughter, had disappeared. He took her in his arms and told her that things would be all right. She pressed her tearstained face against his chest. “Please don’t go; please don’t leave.”
“I’ll never leave you,” he promised, the way he always did. “I’ll never go.”
With a brave smile, she told him that she knew he meant it.
“Not forever, or anything like that, but now, and for a long time, you have.”
And it was there again, that haunted, desperate look, that was like a knife through his heart.
“I know I promised that I wouldn’t,” he began, the words practiced more than once on the long drive from the airport. “I know I promised when I ran the first time, but things have changed, and there are things I need to do, things....”
“I know,” she said, with a wild, helpless look. She was barefoot, wearing only a white silk nightshirt. Her hair was pulled up in back, the way she often wore it, exposing the long slender neck that was like a white pedestal for her lovely, perfect face. “You said you wouldn’t run again, you said that we could come home again. That was the only thing that kept me going, kept me sane - the thought that there would be an end to it, that each day there was one day less to wait until we could be here again.”
She took him by the hand and led him to the sitting room behind the kitchen, the room where they used to spend their evenings. She sat in the chair she sat in every night; and he sat next to her, waiting.
“I know you had to,” she said after a long silence. She looked at him with a judgment so acute as to seem almost clairvoyant. “I know there are things you have to do. What I’m trying to tell you is that I know that, and that I hope you can forgive me. I must be such a disappointment to you.” She stared out the window, thinking about all the problems she thought she had caused him.
“I tried - you know I tried - but I couldn’t, I couldn’t hide behind a vacant smile, say all the strange, empty things everyone expects you to say.” She turned her head and gave him a tender, wistful glance. “Do people really believe it when other people say things like that?”
She looked back, through the glass, out to the vast moonlit ocean, wanting to take back everything that had changed.
“Our life was good, when you just belonged to me, and I did not have to share you with everyone who sees you on television. But I’m okay, Bobby; I’m not unhappy, living here, alone. I know you think of me; I know you call,” she said, her voice growing faint as if she had made her peace with loneliness and there was now nothing more to say.
“Come back with me; live in the house in Georgetown when I have to be in Washington; live here - with me - whenever we can get away.”
“Every day I tell myself that’s what I’ll do tomorrow; and then tomorrow comes, and I’m still here.” She saw the sadness in his eyes and felt the sadness in her own. “What are you going to do, when are you going to come home? When are you going to remember that I’m the only home you’ll ever have? Do you want to save the world, Bobby Hart, or do you want to save me?”
Bobby was not sure he could do either, but he knew he had to try. He had to do whatever he could to help her, whatever the cost might be to his own ambitions.
“Remember Florence - what a good time we had there?” He wrapped both hands around his knee and leaned back, as if they had all the time in the world and he was just reminiscing. “Remember how much you liked it, and how we promised we would go back and see some more of Italy?”
A vague smile floated across her lips as she remembered and, remembering, felt better.
“The hotel with the view across the rooftops to the Duomo, and the drunk laughter in the street that woke us up every night; and the long walks along the Arno and all the old churches we went inside, and all the crooked streets and how often we got lost.... ”
“I thought we could go back - in November, after the election - rent a villa in Fiesole. You liked it there, remember? In the hills outside Florence, with none of the congestion and the noise. No one else but us; no one who even knows my name. You’d like that, wouldn’t you - if we went back? We could go other places, too,” he went on, warming to the subject. “Rome, or, if you would rather, somewhere in the south of France.”
At first she seemed to like it, something to look forward to, something that might finally fill the days and nights with hope; but then, with the strange clarity with which she could sometimes read the future, her smile faded into nothingness and she told him that perhaps they ought to talk about it later.
“Do you have to go so soon?” she asked, as she stood up and took him by the hand. “Or can you stay until morning.” He started to explain, but she looked down at him and put her finger on his lips. “I know you have things you have to do, and I know I should be there with you. I’ll try, Bobby; I promise I’ll try. But stay tonight, and come back soon, and we’ll talk some more and I’ll work at being stronger and less afraid. When you’re here, I’m not afraid of anything.”
He left in the morning, while she was still asleep; but before he did, he wrote a note telling her that he loved her and that he would be back again that night.
Jeffrey Stone was waiting for him at quarter to seven in the back booth of a motel restaurant on the beach in Santa Barbara. He had run Hart’s first campaign for the Senate, knew California and its politics as well as anyone else in the business, and had almost never lost a statewide contest. Hart was not sure he liked him and was not sure he ever would. Stone was too full of calculation, juggling numbers the way a gambler bets on races, always looking for a change in trends, the first signs of slippage or the first evidence of an advance. It was all mathematics, politics devoid of meaning except the statistics it produced. Hart slid into the booth and tried to seem glad to see him.
Stone pushed aside a cheap lined notebook in which he had jotted some notes. He took a taste of the coffee that had gone cold and signaled to the waitress to bring him another cup.
“You said six-thirty.”
“I’m late. You going to fire me?”
“If you worked for me I would. I guess I should be grateful. At least this time you made it.”
“You mean the one weekend I didn’t get out here,” replied Hart. He smiled at the waitress while she poured him a cup of coffee. “Something came up. And before you start in about it,” he continued, the smile on his mouth now a challenge, “there may be other things that come up as well. Schedule me any way you want, between now and the election, but from now on do it with the idea that it is always subject to change.”
Stone studied Hart with clinical indifference.
“Run, don’t run; show up, don’t show up; win, lose - I don’t care. But you might want to make up your mind just what the hell you want to do. I know it’s California, I know you have a sixteen-point lead - I also know,” he said, bending forward on his elbows, “that leads like that have been lost before.”
Stone was ten years older and looked it, in a coat a size too big and a shirt a size too small, a tie that was not tied and socks that even on a good day did not always match. He only ever smiled in anger, and what usually followed - a volcanic torrent of abuse - made the smile seem in retrospect almost pleasant. He had no respect for anyone who did not want to win, and not much more for those who did. He was the most congenitally unhappy person Hart thought he had ever met.
“Why are you in this business, why do you run campaigns? As far as I can tell, you’ve never liked any candidate, including me, you’ve ever worked for. What do you care if they win or not - or are you afraid that you’d take all the blame if they didn’t?”
Stone lived on confrontation, on verbal combat. His only friends were the enemies he made.
“Why am I in it? To keep the bad guys from winning.”
“To keep the bad guys...?”
“From winning. Simple enough. Want me to explain it? There are good guys and bad guys. I help the good guys - even when they don’t know they’re the good guys.”
It was like Alice in Wonderland. Hart started to laugh.
“See, Senator What’s Your Name - you’re a good guy. It’s not your fault,” he quickly added, shaking his head as if to absolve him of all responsibility. “It isn’t anything you’ve done; it’s what the other side does - the bad guys: Republicans, most of them; conservatives, all of them. I hate them, always have. I was brought up that way. My father fought in the Second World War; my mother was a grade school teacher. Until I was ten or eleven, swear to God, I thought Franklin Roosevelt was Jesus’ brother - their pictures were right next to each other, first thing you saw when you came in the house. I know - you don’t have to tell me - lot of Democrats, some of whom I’ve worked for - aren’t any better than the whores on the other side; but the point is that they aren’t on the other side. They’re on my side, the good side, the side that at least every once in a while tries to do something right. So if I tell you that you would not be the first guy to blow a sixteen point lead, it isn’t because I give a damn whether you win; it’s because it would just kill me if that idiot on the other side didn’t lose. By the way,” added Stone as he pushed across the table the latest figures showing that Hart’s lead was holding steady, “maybe you should consider running next time. You probably wouldn’t be the worst president we’ve ever had.”
“How could I lose with that kind of enthusiasm,” replied Hart, starting to like him despite himself. “Now, tell me, what have I got this morning?”
In a brisk, monotonous voice, Stone reeled off the list of places Hart was supposed to go and the times he was scheduled to arrive at each of them.
“You finish up tonight at a dinner in San Diego. You spend the night there, and then, tomorrow morning -”
“No,” said Hart firmly. “I spend the night back here. I spend the night every night I’m in California back here. No exceptions.” He waited until he caught the first caustic movement of Jeffrey Stone’s embittered lip. “Unless of course you insist I don’t; but if it isn’t absolutely necessary, then I have reasons why I should.”
Rare and almost forgotten, a slender smile made the briefest possible appearance on Stone’s crooked, jaded mouth.
“Of course, senator; there won’t be a problem. I’ll make sure of it.”
They left the restaurant and went to the airport where a plane was waiting for the short flight to L.A. Hart looked out the window as the private jet gained altitude, searching for his house among the shadowed hills. There was a kind of comfort knowing it was there, a place far away from politics and terrorism, a place where he knew Helen was safe.
For the next few hours he seemed to be everywhere at once, giving the same short speech over and over again, pausing at just the right times, saying what needed to be said about the serious threat the country now faced and saying it with a sense of both realism and hope. He seemed to feed on it, becoming stronger, more energetic each time he did it. It was a kind of narcotic: the steady diet of attention and applause, the knowledge that what he said his audience in that moment not only heard but thought; the strange sense that while he did it, stood in front of a crowd, telling them what he thought, what he believed, he could not feel anything he did not want to feel, nothing that could hurt. He had no time to think of Helen and what he might have done to her.
It was past midnight when he got home, but Helen was waiting for him, eager to talk. She was fully dressed, in a simple skirt and blouse. She had even put on makeup and done something with her hair. It was the sign of effort and Bobby Hart felt better than he had all day.
“I saw you on television - when you explained that you did not want to be a candidate for vice-president. But you would have run, wouldn’t you, if it hadn’t been for me? You would have run for president if it hadn’t been for me; if you hadn’t had to worry about what would happen, whether I could cope, whether I could….”
Hart poured himself a drink, and then sank into the sofa right next to her.
“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you; but that was not one of them. The truth of it is that I don’t like Alworth; I don’t trust him. The worst part is that I don’t think he really trusts himself. He’s like a lot of them are now, the ones who run for president: they’re whatever they think everyone wants them to be.”
“But you aren’t like that; you aren’t what everyone wants you to be.”
“I told you that if I had run, I wouldn’t have had a chance.”
She laughed a little and then the laughter died away and she put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. He put his arm around her and held her for a long time, staring out into the Santa Barbara night, and the starlight shining silver on the immense solitude of the ocean, sweeping endlessly against the shore.
He slept late, and when he got up made breakfast for them both. Under the warm morning sun, the blue Pacific was a shimmering sea of bronze. The palm trees just beyond the backyard pool stood motionless in the warm September air.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said last night. Did it ever occur to you that I might not have wanted to be president?” He held her chair and then sat down on the opposite side of the table. “I didn’t think about it when I first ran for Congress. I didn’t think about it, six years ago, when I first ran for the Senate. What happens is that other people start talking about it, and then you start wondering if you could, and then you look around and you see the people who have a good chance of getting it and you realize that they’re not really better than anyone else you know and you start to think….” He pushed his fork through the soft yolk of his eggs. “But, no, I didn’t this time, and even if I wanted to, there’s no reason to think that things won’t be completely different four years from now, or eight years from now.” He looked at her in a way that told her he had thought a lot about what he was about to say. “And besides, after what has happened, after what may happen because of it, I may not serve out my term. A year, maybe two - and then I’ll quit.” He gave her an earnest, almost pleading glance. “Do you think you can get through it, another year, maybe two?”
A sliver of a smile, brave and tentative, came out into the world, ready for whatever judgment was made of it.
“I’ll try, Bobby, I promise I’ll try.”
“Let’s get out of here for a while,” he suggested quietly. “We’ll drive up the coast, out to that beach no one seems to know is there. We won’t have to see or talk to anyone.”
They spent the day in the simple comfort of being together, safe from all the staring faces, all the familiar strangers who felt the need to introduce themselves and tell the senator what they thought. They packed a lunch, the way they did when they were younger, before he ever ran for Congress, before anyone knew his name. They did not say much to each other - they did not need to. They sat alone on a long stretch of deserted seashore, and when they felt like it, walked barefoot ankle deep in water. They left when twilight came and, after just a few minutes, she fell asleep on his shoulder while he drove the long way home. He carried her inside and, though she woke long enough to smile a protest, put her to bed and sat next to her, waiting until she was sound asleep again.
It had been a long time since he had felt as good as he did that day. He walked around the house, wondering why he had ever thought that he had to be somewhere else, doing other things. He had meant what he told her about quitting after a year or two. After everything that had happened, after everything he had seen, the only ambition he had left was to do what he could to make Helen’s life a little better than it had been.
