"Weird," I say. "And you?"
"Were you always weird, or is it only now a thing?"
"I was in court for my brother this morning-he"s in a bit of trouble and, oddly enough, today the charges were dropped."
"That"s fantastic," she says, raising her water gla.s.s. "Cheers."
"He"s guilty," I say, indignantly. "I was ripped off. I was counting on justice being served."
"You mentioned that you"d had a stroke?" she says, changing the subject. "How did it affect you?"
"What makes you ask? Is my face falling? That"s what it did, it slipped and fell while I was watching in the bathroom mirror."
"No reason, just trying to find out more about you."
I nod.
The waiter brings some olives and bread and tells us about the specials and offers us "a moment to think."
I tell her about Nate and Field Day weekend.
"Aren"t kids great?" she says, beaming. "But, look," she says, leaning forward and forgetting that Nate is not my child, "this isn"t about our kids, this is about us. I"ve been there," she says, "the soccer mom, standing out in the warm afternoon rain with the coach whose corporate-lawyer wife just got breast cancer and he"s so sad and lonely and wants a little action on the side. "Could you just touch it, right now, right here, under my poncho? It would feel so good to have someone touch it. Come on, I"ve got it out, feel, it wants to do a little dance for you.""
The way she tells it is both terrifying and a turn-on.
The waiter comes back. "Come to any conclusions?"
"No," I say, "we haven"t had a chance to think."
"Should we share something?" she asks.
"Whatever you desire," I say, and she seems pleased with that.
She looks up at the waiter. "The meatball pizza with no onions, and a large salad." The waiter nods and then leaves.
"So-what happened with you? You mentioned you"d come unraveled."
"I went off my medication. I"d been on it so long I couldn"t remember why I was taking it. They gave it to me for postpartum blues sixteen years ago and I stayed on it, but recently I thought it made no sense. I"m happy, I said to myself, I have all the stuff I"m supposed to have, I can do whatever I want. So I stopped taking the medication, I weaned myself off, and everything seemed good."
"And?"
"And then, a few months later, a girl I knew since nursery school dropped dead, and something shifted. Slowly, it all got away from me."
"How did it start?"
"Flirting," she says. "I would go online and send flirty little e-mails. And then I had some phone calls-very innocent, but fun. And then someone dared me to meet him in the Dunkin" Donuts parking lot-said he"d be wearing a jelly doughnut-and, well, I took him up on it." She takes a sip of her drink. "I really don"t know you very well," she says.
"Why s.e.x instead of shopping, for example?"
"Are you calling me a s.l.u.t?" Her voice gets sharp.
I lean forward. "I"m trying to understand what it means to you and why you wanted to see me today."
The waiter puts the salad between us.
She throws her head back and shakes out her hair. It"s the kind of move that looked good when Farrah Fawcett did it, but here it looks odd, like a health hazard. She sheds coa.r.s.e blond threads into the salad.
"Ugghh," she says, plucking them out. "They say not to dye your hair more often than once every six weeks, but I can"t wait that long-when I need a change I need it now." She"s blinking and seems to have a lash in her eye, which is reminding me that she wore gla.s.ses when I met her for lunch at her house-she had gla.s.ses on, gla.s.ses on a string around her neck, gla.s.ses that hung down in front of her like odd breast-magnifiers tapping against her chest again and again, as if to remind her of something, as I had her from the back.
"Do you wear gla.s.ses?" I ask.
"Yes, but I broke them. I"m flying blind," she says, putting a bite of hairy salad in her mouth.
She slowly extracts the long thread and calls the waiter over. "There"s hair in the salad," she says.
"How unusual," he says in a deadpan tone. "Would you like another?"
"We"ll wait for the pizza," I say.
"Enough about me," she says. "Let"s talk about you. So you"re teaching?"
"Yes," I say, and nothing more.
"Well, I was thinking about you and couldn"t remember if it was Larry Flynt, Nixon, or, for some reason, that guy George Wallace; he sticks in my head because wasn"t he shot?"
"Wallace and Flynt were both shot; Wallace in 1972 while campaigning for president in Laurel, Maryland, by a guy called Arthur Bremer-whose diary prompted the film Taxi Driver, which prompted John Hinckley to aim for Ronald Reagan. Larry Flynt was shot in 1978 in Georgia by a sniper while he was on trial for obscenity. These days he rolls around in a gold-plated wheelchair."
"I love that you know all that," she says.
"I"m a historian," I say. "It"s actually more layered than that. People wondered, was Bremer working for someone? Whose side was he on? Did Nixon succeed in planting McGovern campaign materials in Bremer"s apartment-if so, was it propaganda or cover-up?" I pause and look at Cheryl. I find myself wondering: how many men did she have "lunch" with during her period of insanity, and does her husband know?
"He doesn"t know," she says, as though reading my mind. "In theory, in the rules of "recovery" I should tell him. But while I may have gone nuts, I"m not crazy-he knows I lost my mind, the details aren"t relevant."
The pizza lands, hot, gooey, truly exceptional. I burn the roof of my mouth on the first bite and manage to peel it off with the third-after that I taste nothing except my own flesh.
"And what about Julie Eisenhower-are you close?" I ask, still peeling cheese off my palate.
"She"s very nice, but I wouldn"t say we"re close. I wouldn"t even know her except that we"re distantly related. Me, I"m not at all political, I"m more social, a people person. But I guess you found that out."
"Has anything like this happened to you before?"
"Anything like what?"
"Any of this."
"I had depression in college; no one knew about it. I stayed in bed for a month and then I got up."
"Did you miss cla.s.ses?"
"No, I got up for cla.s.ses and meals, and then I went back to bed."
"So you weren"t really paralyzed by the depression?"
"I felt like I was dying," she says, looking me in the eye.
"And then it pa.s.sed?"
"I was able to do what was expected." Her voice is tight, sad, like something was lost and never recovered.
"On the phone you mentioned something about "our moment"?"
"Yes," she says, licking her lips. "You struck me as someone who hadn"t had his moment yet."
"A late bloomer?" I ask.
"Big-time," she says. "I find it charming, it"s like you"re still waiting for something to happen."
"Good fortune to fall upon me," I add.
"Something like that," she says. "And you"re so charmingly out of it, it"s like you"re from another era-sweet. All I know about is what sixteen-year-old boys are interested in, and my husband talking about boats and cars and vacations and what toys he wants to get, remote-control this and that." She looks at me guiltily. "I have a real problem," she says.
"And what"s that?"
"Well, after I recovered, I remembered that I liked you-that"s what made me call. But now I have a real problem." She signals for the waiter. "Could I have a gla.s.s of wine?"
"How about an Arnold Palmer?" I suggest.
"White," she says. "A big pour of white."
"How about a bottle?" the waiter says.
"Just a gla.s.s, thanks," she says. And the waiter is gone. "In a nutsh.e.l.l-no pun intended-I still like you. I don"t know why. It"s ridiculous, but I do, and I know I shouldn"t. And I"m back on medication and I am myself, or my "better" self, but the thing is-I still want you. And, weirder yet, if you want to hear weird, I once met this guy, a young guy who collects masks of presidents, he has like forty famous faces and likes to role-play with women who maybe fantasize about getting banged by JFK, or done doggy-style by Abe Lincoln. Or how about being tied to a lectern and being made to submit by a leather-bound Jimmy Carter? His scenarios were endless, but the thing was...is...he"s not you. He"s like a fake historian and you"re the real deal. So what do I do?" she asks.
I don"t know what to say, and so I adopt what I call the "Thumper pose," one hand on the chin and brow furrowed. In Bambi, Thumper says, "If you can"t say something nice, then don"t say anything at all." Good advice, dating back to 1942. She"s still looking at me, waiting for something. "I don"t quite know what to say."
"Say you want me too," she says.
I do a couple of presidential imitations to spin off the stress.
Her gla.s.s of wine arrives; she downs it in a couple of gulps and orders another.
"Look," I say, trying to be compa.s.sionate, "I don"t think we should do anything that puts you at risk. I don"t want to do anything that would be unhealthy for you or that puts your marriage and family in peril. For now, let"s sit with it. This isn"t something that we have to solve right now." I raise my hand and signal for the check.
"We can have lunch again in the next few weeks."
"I want more than lunch," she says.
"Really, I don"t know what to say."
"Say you want me," she repeats herself.
I say nothing. The check comes, I pa.s.s the waiter my credit card without even looking at the bill-I need to get out of here.
Her eyes fill with tears.
"Don"t cry-this was nice, we had fun, the pizza was delicious."
"You"re so sweet," she says.
"Really I"m not," I say.
Together we walk to the parking lot. As I"m bidding her farewell, she pushes me between two parked cars, throws her purse over her shoulder, and gropes my crotch. "You need me," she says, giving the goods a hard pump. "I am your future."
Monday"s cla.s.s was described in my syllabus as "Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World." The line is a direct quote from the great man himself, describing his 1972 trip to China. The trip was actually an eight-day, carefully orchestrated, made-for-television view behind the Bamboo Curtain. An incredibly unlikely diplomatic achievement pulled off by a staunch anti-communist-in fact, when Nixon first presented the idea to his own men, they thought he"d lost his chips. In cla.s.sic Nixon fashion, the President appeared to back off but instead worked through diplomatic back channels via Poland and Yugoslavia, taking advantage of a fissure in Soviet-Sino relations, and mindful that the country with the world"s largest population was "living in angry isolation." The payoff of his daring detente increased U.S. leverage with Russia, prompting the SALT II talks and the slow unwinding of Cold War tensions. My favorite bit of the script-Kissinger"s July 1971 stop in Pakistan, during which he feigned illness at a dinner, left, and flew to China for secret meetings with Zhou Enlai that laid the groundwork for Nixon"s trip. The presidential visit itself was replete with the stuff of burgeoning friendship, an excursion to the Great Wall, displays of Ping-Pong and gymnastics, and of course the First Lady, indelible Pat, in her bright-red coat.
And at the infamous February 21, 1972, banquet in Peking, President Nixon raised a gla.s.s to Chairman Mao, and said, What legacy shall we leave our children? Are they destined to die for the hatreds which have plagued the old world, or are they destined to live because we had the vision to build a new world? There is no reason for us to be enemies. Neither of us seeks the territory of the other; neither of us seeks domination over the other; neither of us seeks to stretch out our hands and rule the world. Chairman Mao has written, "So many deeds cry out to be done, and always urgently. The world rolls on. Time pa.s.ses. Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day, seize the hour." This is the hour, this is the day for our two peoples to rise to the heights of greatness which can build a new and a better world.
A few days later, the telephone rings. I don"t hear the ring, only the voice on the machine.
"I trust you realize that, however we decide to proceed, our work must remain in confidence."
I pick up. "Of course," I say, without a clue to whom I"m speaking.
She continues. "At some point we"ll spend some time together, but for the moment I"d like to get a sense of what you think might be there...."
"Where?" I ask, hoping for a clue.
"In the pages," she says.
"I"m sorry," I say, "but I picked up as you were speaking, may I ask who"s calling?"
"Julie Eisenhower," she says.
"Of course, my apologies." I take a breath.
"What was it like?" she asks.
"Amazing-a dream come true. I felt like a kid in a candy store-up close and personal. It was a thrill to hold the pages he wrote on, to feel the weight of his hand, the pressure of his pen, the urgency with which he needed to express himself. It was"-I draw a long breath-"transcendent."
"And what about the material itself-what do you make of the content?"
"Well, there"s a freedom to the work, a lack of self-consciousness-the stories are surprisingly candid. And there"s a depth of imagination and feeling, perhaps call it pathos, which people don"t often a.s.sociate with your father. And more: the stories are ill.u.s.trative of a kind of knowing about the common man, about an everyday Joe, in a way that humanizes your father, giving the reader a sense of his history, his values, his own progression and development as a person. These writings add dimensionality. I guess what I"m saying is that these could help reframe how history characterizes him.... Your father is a cla.s.sic of his time, aspiring, striving, and desperate, capturing the moment where America turned, and summing up the darkness in the American soul, the change in who were pre and postWorld War II."
"So you think there may be a book in it?"
"As you know, I"m not a literary scholar, but I was enthralled, I saw a side of your father that I never knew existed, a description of a hard worker who felt unappreciated and, d.a.m.n it, wanted someone to notice. I was reminded of Arthur Miller"s w.i.l.l.y Loman." I say "w.i.l.l.y Loman" and stop short-smacked down by a historical flashback. Miller was called up to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and of course Nixon played a key role on that committee. Miller refused to name names and was cited for contempt of Congress. As soon as I say Miller"s name, I"m horrified that somehow I "forgot," which proves every idea I ever had about the importance of knowing one"s history and not forgetting. I fall silent.
"Am I right in thinking there"s a Miller play on Broadway right now? I can"t recall which one it is, but David and I were planning to go...."