into Memphis, and Memphis didn’t care at all, and swept it away. But there was this: the strangest thing. She began to miss John’s car terribly, it was a helpless assignment of her affections, and she wrote in her diary that if she were to sit in it again she would fill it with tears. Then she tried to put it out of her mind; but every so often, and for a few years afterward, she would turn her head whenever a car of a similar blue went by on the street, knowing it wouldn’t be John, knowing it wouldn’t be a happy day even if it was. Still she turned her head, because she was looking for herself at twenty.
Walter Selby’s throat was stopped with visions; sex trickled down it like whiskey, the blood behind his eyes was doped a desperate shade of blue, and nonsense verse rang in his ears, a singsong of refraction and perfection. When the car pulled away that night, with Nicole in it, the neighborhood was quiet and he was dazed; already she was not just gone but missing. He went into his house, took his jacket off, and walked to the bathroom to wash his face, pausing before his reflection and rubbing his cheeks with his hand so that his features distorted. Then he shook his head, took one last look at himself, and walked into the living room, where he lowered himself slowly onto his couch. Over and over he went up to touch the night’s events; again and again he retreated, as if he were unsure that they were real. He opened the telephone directory and looked her up: and there she was, a plain entry in the order of names—and there was her address, a road he recognized. He gazed at it briefly and then closed the book and carefully put it back beneath the base of the phone, as if this small gesture of control would be sufficient to prove that he wasn’t such a fool after all, he hadn’t lost his dignity and he wasn’t a boy.
He didn’t sleep well that night; he didn’t work well the next day. He arrived at his office dead tired and distracted and paused in the dark cool hallway before the door pane of frosted glass. Behind that door, and every door on the floor, and every floor in every building, there were men and women conducting the business of the day.
Q: What were they making?
A: Everything but love.
He entered and his secretary looked up with a slight grimace. The Governor’s called three times already, she said.
He’s still in Nashville, isn’t he? said Walter, worrying for a moment that the man might be holed up in his suite downtown, on some surprise visit to his western constituents.
He’s in Nashville, all right, the secretary said. He’s upset about something.—The phone rang, she answered, Yes sir, she said. He just walked in.
Walter Selby nodded, went into his office, and picked up the receiver. Selby, the Governor said. He made no introduction, he needed none: his voice—soft, insistent, and musical—could not be mistaken. Where were you last night, my friend? I tried to call you about a half dozen times. There’s a senator from Knoxville who wants forty thousand dollars attached to the Parks bill for some war memorial, and we don’t have it. He’s threatening to make a big deal about it, and it’s going to make us look like we don’t care about the war dead. Forty thousand dollars. Of course, it’s his brother-in-law who’s going to build it, but who’s going to listen to me on that? War dead…. War dead…. Forty thousand isn’t a lot, but we don’t have it. We don’t have the money: we just don’t have it. And you’re off at a ball game….
The Governor knew everything, that was given; the Governor was a magic priest of populism, a genius at the whip, and Walter hardly noticed the trespass. Instead, he found himself trying to remember what he had just heard, the words and the Governor’s exact intonation, so he could relate it to Nicole when he saw her again. The Governor had become a portrait of the Governor, and all its colors were richer than real. Are you listening to me? said the portrait, its voice heavy with political emotion.
Of course, said Walter. This is Anderson we’re talking about.
This is Anderson, said the Governor. I need you to get him to back down. I need your voice: you talk to him. Appeal to him. If that doesn’t work, think about what we’ve got that he wants more than he wants a war memorial, and then tell him you’re going to take it away from him.—And without so much as a good-bye, the Governor hung up the phone.
Now, Senator Anderson, the Governor has asked me to call you and talk to you about this war memorial. The budget’s tight as can be …
I know it is, said Anderson. But, goddamn, I’ve got over two score dead boys from this district, three or four of them from the most prominent families in the state and all of them good supportive people.—Supportive of the Governor, too. They’ve given up their sons, and they’ve been waiting almost a decade for some sort of official recognition. You, of all people, should understand.
Yes, said Walter. I understand. I honestly do. And you can have the money. You can have it.
This gave the Senator pause. I can have it? he said, a little more quietly.
Sure you can, said Walter. All we have to do is find something else in the budget to take out.
Something else? said the Senator.
Yes. So I’ve been going through it again.
I’ll bet you have, said the Senator. What are you trying to tell me?
Well, here it is. It’s not your district, but Strachey right next door’s got about fifty thousand tied up in this little tree-planting business. He wants to prettify the highway from Crossville to Cookeville. Walter slipped his hand under the waistband of his underwear and gently, thoughtlessly, cupped his scrotum.
… That’s his wife’s project, said Anderson softly. There was an old silence on the line. The Senator had held his office since the days when his district was lit with kerosene, and was reelected at the end of every term on a platform of sentimentality. He had never been much of a statesman, and he was growing tired.
In time Walter spoke. Is that right? he said.
You know damn well it is. You know if you try to kill his wife’s beautification program, he’s going to come after you.
That’s all I could find. We can handle him.
God Almighty, said Anderson. He’s going to come after me, if you tell him why. I need him for the new maternity wing on the hospital. The man thinks, because he was born in his mother’s bed, that’s good enough for everyone.
Anderson was starting to drift. Walter Selby was nodding silently and absently drawing a poplar tree on a sheet of official stationery. That’s all we’ve got, he said. What do you want me to do?
You tell the Governor … Ah.—Anderson sounded close to tears. You tell the Governor I handed him this county on a silver platter.
He knows, said Walter Selby, but I’ll tell him again. The budget was safe now, and he could afford to humor the man. How’s your own wife doing? Still got a thousand recipes for rhubarb?
Yes, said Anderson, but all the life was out of him now. She’s published them in a book.
That’s fine, that’s great. I’ll have to go find
