All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Enormous gratitude to Ellen M., and Dawn, and Sacha. Please send feedback. Colorblind Violet
Wars and flowers.
Forty-eight hours after the play, he closes his eyes and still sees scarlet banners waving over syrupy stage death. He is still waiting for the heavy velvet curtains to descend, for the stage to disappear.
She asks him not to accompany her to Donovan's funeral.
"You don't want to come," she says, "and I don't need you to come."
He is driving her home from work. It's not very late, but she's got a five a.m. flight to the West Coast. The sunset is violent, kerosene burning along the western horizon. He tries to remember what sailors would say about this kind of sky.
"I didn't say anything about--"
"You were going to, though, weren't you?"
This in her driest voice, the whisper of wind through desiccated leaves. She sounds almost amused that he could be so predictable, like a metronome, a heartbeat. This voice seems older than she is, more hopeless than she is. He hopes.
"Maybe," he says.
"Of course you were. And I appreciate--"
She bites her lip. He looks for her face in the rearview mirror. Even at this hour her makeup is near flawless, but underneath it her eyelids are swollen, slightly discolored by the sting of salt. She's playing with the loose change from his dashboard, sorting it, sifting it between her fingers. He looks back at the road before she speaks, throwing the pennies back into the ashtray.
"I don't appreciate it. I'm sorry, Toby. I don't--they always say that funerals are for the living, you know?"
He slows for a stop sign. Rituals disguise human helplessness in the face of death; every religion, every language has a speech for the occasion. Litanies spoken into the flames of a pyre, over a box lowered into heavy clay. He steps on the gas again and nods.
"Aren't they?"
"The hell they are! They're for the dead. They're for, you know, the term 'pay your respects' isn't just a figure of speech."
This is true.
"And you didn't like him."
This is also true.
"I don't want you to be there just to babysit me. It would be rude. It would be wrong. And I'm not sure I'm thrilled about the implication that I can't handle myself. I'm actually pretty capable of functioning alone. I did it before, you know."
He hadn't suggested she needed a babysitter, but he stops himself from pointing that out. He doesn't say, doesn't dare, that there's an unlikely possibility someone's still after her with a camera and a computer, armed and dangerous. She could still be a target. Someone cuts him off in a zippy little Italian car and he curses under his breath at the taillights. She laughs, and it sounds hollow and horrible.
"I didn't," he says, "not respect him."
"Oh, fuck you."
She twists away from him in the passenger seat, rests her forehead against the window glass. Her hair is swept up in a loose twist and when he glances at her, he sees the back of her neck is a little damp as if she's running a fever. He doesn't touch her.
They say nothing more to each other until he's braked on her street. She slips free of the seatbelt and opens the door, one long leg extended to the pavement, lit up like a Hollywood starlet's by the last of the low, rusty sun. Her eyes meet his over her shoulder and he is seeing through the makeup now, seeing something raw in her eyes that makes it harder to breathe.
"There are lots of things you could have said to me about him. And some of them would be hypocritical, probably, and some would be cruel. And sometimes I'm grateful that you don't, you don't talk as much as you write. But 'I didn't not respect him'? Toby--"
He watches her hand flutter quickly to her mouth and fall.
"Anyway, I'm fine," she says. "I'll be fine. See you Monday."
She closes the door hard and walks away, disappearing into her entranceway, into the dark.
The sunset dies away. He drives home too fast, runs a light by accident, runs another one on purpose. He doesn't hear the siren until it's upon him, and he pulls over, resigned to the ticket, but it's not for him. The ambulance peels past his car, cherries slashing through the night, on its way to some greater emergency. For the rest of the drive, he keeps to the speed limit.
When he gets out of the car, he discovers he was gripping the wheel so hard it has left welts in his palms; they're ugly, but they don't hurt. He goes up to his apartment, with that stupid drum-beating, flag-waving song thrumming deep in his brain.
It's dark until he turns on one lamp, the bulb sputtering close to burnout. He takes off his jacket and his tie and pours himself a shot of bourbon. Less is left in the bottle than he expected. He holds the glass up to the lamplight, appraising the glint in the liquor as if it were a ruby. Then he drinks it in one long scalding swallow, and he feels it all the way down.
She knows him well, and she was right; he could have been cruel. He could have told her that he's just as terrified of her getting killed as she is. He could have told her, You could have picked up a better bodyguard on a street corner, and I would never have liked him, but I liked him even less every time he turned his back on you. But she wouldn't have listened. She would still have gotten out of the car alone.
He realizes that he is closing a fist around the glass, that it could shatter in his hand, and he pries his fingers loose to pour a second round. The bourbon is expensive, but it's sour on his tongue, sickening like bad wine. Somewhere between his throat and his veins it distills into pure-grain anger, and he's seeing red.
The insides of his eyelids glow as if branded, and it's not valentines he thinks of, it's scraped skin. He stares at the wall, but he can't blink it away. A woman's hair. A woman's lipstick. The inside of a woman's body.
Blood and roses.
*
The basketball is a perfect sphere in perfect motion.
The bar is called Fanatics, and there are pool tables upstairs and a strip club downstairs. For now they're just drinking beer that's surprisingly weak, since it looks darker and richer under the neon. They're half-watching a playoff game through the glare on three television screens.
He wishes she was with them.
He followed her out of the building, into hazed and humid air, onto the sidewalk where streetlights were casting pools of light like grease. She began shaking her head before he spoke, slow from side to side like an old bronze bell tolling doom, and he should have and didn't take the warning.
"It's Ed's birthday," he said.
"It's Larry's birthday."
"Are you sure?"
"I chipped in for the cake. I signed the big card with the stupid limerick. I'm sure."
This wasn't the conversation he meant them to have. He watched her walk away for a moment, stepping in and out of the lights that changed her cream-colored jacket to ocher. It was the kind of blunt light that flattered nobody. It couldn't hurt her.
"We could settle this if you came with us."
She spun around fast, reflexes like a cat, he thought, and the same claws. Circles under her eyes, skin tight over strong bones.
"My goldfish died."
"Ah. I'm sorry."
It came out like a question, because he knew there was nothing to say. She shook her head again and gave him a smile as grim and empty as a jack-o'-lantern's.
"Happens all the time. I'm on my fourth one. They're not supposed to live forever."
He squinted so that her edges were blurred and she was just one more glistening spot in the evening.
"You're not coming."
"I'm tired."
She got away from him as fast as she could go. It was becoming a habit for her, hastening in the opposite direction, building her own fatigue up around herself. She was under construction, and the barricades were high and the warning signs were bright. Two weeks of this. And he pulled himself away from the sidewalk where she'd been standing.
Now the basketball spins, hits the pine, rebounds back into ready hands. Bodies jostle, dark uniforms and light ones, and someone jams the ball into the hoop. There is scattered whistling and applause.
He doesn't even know the score, and it must mean he needs a stronger drink. Their table is cluttered: no birthday candles but birthday beer, birthday mixed nuts, birthday chili cheese fries. Josh started off with a screwdriver--celebrating Donna's absence, or perhaps Amy's absence--and arguing with Sam. He hasn't heard either of them, and it takes some effort to tune himself back into the conversation, like finding a distant frequency on the radio.
Sam is finishing a sentence. "Because she doesn't like us."
"Sure she does," Josh says. "Who wouldn't? We're empire--emp--fundamentally likeable."
"She likes us," Larry says.
Ed adds, "She doesn't like you."
He dreads it, but he has to ask.
"Who?"
"All of you. Ginger doesn't like the Senior Staff."
He wonders why his chest hurts. Discovers he's holding his breath. Lets it out with a sigh. He takes a pretzel stick from the shellacked wooden bowl in the middle of the table.
"She works for us," Josh argues. "Come on, Toby, she likes us, right?"
"She's devoted to me," he says. "She doesn't like Sam."
Sam starts to protest this, but he's ignoring them again. He eats a few nuts, drinks some beer, watches the game intently as if he cared. When he narrows his eyes, everything around the screen takes on the shine of goldfish scales. Four goldfish. Another transition she's been making without him, another failure.
A pair of huge hands bounce the basketball once on the free throw line, let it fly. It clangs off the outer rim. He likes the game better played on blacktop, on the playground or the street, but on any level there is no forgiveness for missing the easy shot.
"Toby, clear this up before somebody gets hurt."
Sam's jogging his elbow, irritating and insistent. He chews a cashew slowly, stalling for a distraction. But they're still looking at him, waiting for two cents he doesn't have.
"What?"
"The woman over there."
Josh jerks his drink toward the bar, spilling a little orange juice in the process. He follows the gesture with his eyes. The crowd is mostly men, mostly young and stupid-drunk, laughing a bit too loud for the benefit of their bored-looking dates. Standard stuff. There are a couple of women alone by the bar. The closest one is blowsy, a little overweight for the poppy-print dress she's wearing. She looks angry, he starts to notice, and then he's distracted by the other one.
Her dress is black and there isn't much of it. Her hair is strawberry-blonde and her skin incongruously brown, so that he wonders whether it's the tan or the hair that came from a bottle. She's sipping what looks like it might be a Mai Tai, and sliding curious glances through her eyelashes toward their table.
"Definitely a stripper, right?" Ed says. "I mean, there's really no question."
Good legs, not too long, but smooth and toned and crossed in a way that the woman must know compliments them.
"Yeah," he says.
Josh whines, "Okay, but that's not the point. Who's she checking out? She's looking at me, right?"
"Must be nice to have an ego so completely unconstrained by reality."
But the woman is looking at them. She smiles, and Larry nudges Ed.
"Tell her it's your birthday," Larry suggests.
"Dude, it's not like she's on duty."
Mystery solved. He feels slightly, pointlessly gratified as he drinks the last drops of his beer.
"She's looking at Sam," he says.
"She's not looking at me." Sam pauses. "Really?"
"Who else?"
"Me!"
Josh waves his glass again, rocks backward in his chair and risks toppling over. A slapstick drunk. The woman rises from her barstool, stretching, a tiger rousing itself out of a warm place in the grass. She walks toward them. She looks older up close, but still young, and they all sit up a little straighter.
"I was waiting for you to finish that drink," she says, "so I could offer you something to chase it."
Her voice is light, airy, and several seconds pass before he's aware she's speaking to him. She places her hands on her hips and leans forward almost imperceptibly. Her breasts are high and even, and her neckline descends far enough for him to tell there are no tan lines.
He reaches for a napkin with his left hand and brings it up to wipe his mouth. The neon gleams on his wedding band, red-gold like the woman's hair, as he places the napkin back on the table.
"I'm fine with what I have."
"Oh."
She breathes the syllable out, pouting, throwing her shoulders back. He looks away.
"Thanks anyway," he says.
The woman turns, and he watches her heels make for the stairs until Josh starts throwing peanuts at him.
"What in hell did you do that for?"
He doesn't answer. He doesn't have an answer.
"That was--" Sam laughs. "Admirable. Admirable restraint."
"Admirable nothing! No offense, Toby, you're not exactly a spring chicken, and that was a waste of perfectly good--"
But already he's stopped listening. He regards his empty glass as an error, an enemy, and he gets up and turns his back on it. He walks to the bar and stands there, waiting, staring at his hands on the wood. Josh is still loud enough for him to hear, until a wave of cheering breaks across the room. He looks around to see the television.
In slow motion, the basketball soars out of reach, arcing precisely into the net. The score changes.
*
Thirteen of the little fluorescent squares, stuck in a crooked row across the edge of his desk. Laughing at him.
He swivels around to avoid the Post-It notes, but behind him there are the windows, and they're filled, flooded with pure, piercing sunshine. A few dandelions bobbing on the even lawn. Out there it's one hell of a beautiful day.
The point of his pencil is already blunted from crossing out, screwing up, starting over. He taps it against the legal pad as if he could just shake out the words, complete with sense and style, manna falling from above. There are thirteen squares, each already marred by his handwriting, but the few notes he has aren't helping him. He's been reading things about Shareef.
Reading things, and hearing them, halves of words clipped from State Department briefings, phrases he's highlighted in stories off the wire. He waited in Leo's office before senior staff and looked deliberately away from the barely-open door that revealed a sliver of brocaded curtain, a single gold stripe of upholstery. Looked away from the severe frown Leo wore as he shut that door behind him.
The things he's read and heard, and hasn't heard, jangle in the back of his mind like loose coins, louder when he tries to ignore it. His attention is drawn inexorably to what he doesn't or shouldn't know. And when he remembers Iowa--when he isn't almost wishing they'd gone to see her butter cow--when he remembers Iowa, he knows he will not risk asking the question.
Cowardice.
He turns back to the legal pad and flips to a new page, a bright blank space. He's supposed to be writing the Silicon Valley speech. It's a fundraising letter in the form of a speech about free development on the Internet, the power of technological progress, and please give us your money, because the rest of the rich people are behind the other guy.
Sam would handle this part if he wasn't trying to prepare for the rest of next week's trip, to put Hollywood and morals on the same page. He's writing this so that he doesn't have to go along to California. There are meetings here he needs to take, bases to be covered, and obviously he's writing this so that he doesn't have to watch her on the plane, watch her in a hotel, watch her drift away from him like a dust mote in a sunbeam. He wonders how she feels about going, how she'll feel when she hears.
"Why aren't you coming to California?" she says.
He looks up to see her in his doorway, arms crossed, expression neutral, calm like she's been downing Valium even though the question is spoken almost as a threat. Instead he gestures at the newspaper crumpled on his desk, the sports section folded away for later.
"Lakers won," he says. "I'm happier three thousand miles from that."
"Really."
"Could be riots."
"Right, because we're taking the President to South Central."
She moves into his office, sizing him up. Finding him wanting. But he can see that she looks sallow, washed out and weary, not up to her own standards. Their eyes meet more by accident than anything else, and he knows she's waiting for him to say something.
"What?"
"It's summer," she says. "This is usually the stage in a campaign where you want to micromanage everything. Come to think of it, there isn't usually a stage at which you don't want to do that. So it's strange that you don't want to go. It's strange that you're not out there with bells on."
He hears himself say to her, Listen. We're running against a just-folks Republican in his prime, a precarious economy, a bipartisan whipping from Congress. Our enemies are dancing around the maypole and our friends don't want to know us, you don't want to know me and someone around here had a hand in a political assassination, so forgive me for not leading the brass band. He hears it so clearly that he's slow to open his mouth.
"Summer doesn't start for three days," he says. "And you've never known me to wear bells."
"No. Well. No, this is actually--it's actually fortunate because I have, there's this thing and you ought to be the one to handle it."
A smile that's too cool to be a smile. A smirk. It can't be anything good.
"Yeah?"
"Tabatha Fortis."
"What about her?"
He sounds too annoyed, blinks when he realizes it. The smirk widens and she licks her teeth a little. Checking for canary feathers.
"She's giving an interview to The Atlantic for next month's issue; they're going to ask her how her own politics line up with those of the administration. They're going to see contradictions because the contradictions are there--"
"You've read her poetry?"
"She's the Poet Laureate. So, yeah, I stopped by Barnes and Noble and picked up the greatest hits."
"Okay."
"Not being a complete illiterate."
"Okay," he repeats.
She edges up to the front of his desk, perches on it casually. Very close. Around the office he's always uncomfortable touching her, keeps a line between them that's as flimsy and as final as crime scene tape. This past month it's been that way everywhere. Her fingers slide across the surface of his desk, brushing aside a crumpled sheet from the yellow tablet.
"So you'll handle her?"
"Does she need to be handled?"
"You really don't think she's going to step off the reservation?"
"No," he says, "I don't."
"She isn't exactly all spacious skies and amber waves of grain," she says. "Forget the stuff she's said in interviews. Some of the stuff she's actually written is just as bad. For us, I mean. She's been an occasional critic of foreign policy, and if this interview happens to be one of those occasions--well, I'd just as soon not have that problem. You should give her a call."
She ducks her head; her hair grazes her shoulder, and her necklace glitters. She wears it like beads of dew that settled spontaneously to decorate her throat. Tabatha, he recalls, wore thicker, more substantial jewelry, braided hemp and heavy chunks of topaz, jewelry to stop her from floating away in a strong gust of wind, and her blonde hair was heavy but loose at the same time, liberated. Nothing like the woman in front of him.
He also recalls the minor nervous breakdown at the Georgetown reading. Nothing at all.
"You don't have to worry about it."
"You're not going to call her?"
He pauses. "Not about this."
"I liked her poetry."
She's looking down when she says this, like she's disappointed in him. Maybe she is. She's also lying. He stifles the impulse to laugh.
"Did you?"
"Sure."
"Got a favorite?"
She lifts her chin and looks at him. Something dangerous flickers in her eyes, and his amusement wanes.
"I read the book," she snaps. "I thought she was a good choice for the position. I liked the poetry. I liked her."
"I didn't say you had to."
"Have I done anything but encourage you on this?"
It's an obvious effort for her to keep her voice down. The temperature in the room drops despite the sunlight, and it's abundantly clear what they're talking about. He feels vaguely sick.
"What are you, Yenta?"
"Do you always have to deflect my serious questions with smartass remarks?"
"Do you always have to deflect my smartass remarks with serious questions?"
Silence, and her mouth tightens like there's lemon on her tongue. He looks at her even though it's hard to do.
"I make an effort not to make things harder for you," she says.
"You don't have to."
"Yes, I do! Toby, you don't always have the best judgment when it comes to--" She struggles. "People. But even if I don't have any particular liking for Tabatha, which I do, I wouldn't--"
"You don't have to like her poetry." He will not yell. "You don't have to--you didn't even have to read it. No one spray-painted it on your garage door. And you don't have to say she's any good."
He wants to say, You could hate her. I wouldn't ask you for anything else. But it would be the straw that broke the veneer of civility, and he doesn't want to see the look it would put on her face.
Cowardice.
She's keeping her composure, but it's almost a relief when she turns and the swing of her honey-colored hair obscures his view of her eyes.
"Call her," she says.
That brittle, biting tone in her voice. He rotates his chair to face the window, listens to her breathe, listens to her go. Outside, the sky is wide and cloudless, so brilliant it's painful to look at it.
After a moment, he glances down to find he's snapped the pencil in his fingers.
He separates the broken pieces and throws them like darts into the wastebasket that's half-full of paper from the legal pad. One hit and one miss. He begins to peel the Post-It notes off the desk, to rearrange them so that he can work.
*
The flavor of seaweed won't leave his mouth, as if he's been drinking straight from the ocean.
Sam came back from California with fresh hope for the campaign and a renewed appetite for sushi, and has shared--inflicted--this on the rest of the Senior Staff. It will be a while before he lets Sam make decisions about dinner again, he resolves, queasy as he heads back to his office. But the plans for the Fourth are as finalized as plans can be four days in advance. They've earned their paychecks today.
It's the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Once somebody did the math, hours of labor over salary, and concluded they'd all make more money on television, at a law firm, or driving a garbage truck. He knows this is true. Most of the time, he also knows how much he will miss this job when he loses it.
She falls into step with him. That hasn't happened in a long time, and he is careful not to react, looking straight ahead like a soldier on the frontline. She touches his arm and he stops. In the jungle she'd have gotten him killed.
"I bought a plant," she says.
There's no real levity when she speaks; she's trying, but her sense of humor sounds unready, unripe. He considers ignoring her.
"I went to my pet store this morning to get Gail the Fifth," she explains. "And I thought, well, this is good, but maybe I should also have something alive that isn't going to--"
She's going to say die, and it's going to be a cliché, and it's going to be awful.
"--need constant care. The stuff they have in the pet store, you know, the small things--they have parakeets and geckos and these little tree frogs. First of all, they're not exactly great in the life-span department. And then I could just picture a lizard escaping into the Briefing Room and crawling up Helen's skirt. It's asking for trouble. So I went by the florist--there's a florist right down from the pet store."
A pause for breath, and she realizes that she's talking too fast, babbling even. He waits, not sure why she's telling him this, leaving her no choice but to keep going.
"I got a cactus. I figure it's more likely to hurt me than I am to hurt it. And it won't be able to get away."
He's leaning against the wall a little bit, just looking at her. No words necessary to make her feel ridiculous. She shrugs and peers down her nose at him.
"You look a little green around the gills there, buddy."
"I'm not crazy about sushi," he says.
"You ate it."
"I'm even less crazy about it now than I was an hour ago."
She's looking at him with so much suspicion, distrust, and he hates knowing he's meeting it with more of the same.
"Let's go get some fresh air," she says.
As soon as the words are out she starts to pull him toward the exit, to cross the lawn. He knows this is a bad idea, but from the first step there's no chance he'll reject this chance with her.
Walking outside is like walking into a stone wall; the heat of the day is dense and uninviting, sweltering, and the tourists have retreated, presumably for an hour of fast food and conditioned air. Even the demonstrators have drifted away, if they haven't melted, and so when they cross into Lafayette Park they appear to be alone.
The bench is mostly in the shade of a tree, though the iron is hot to the touch. The leaves overhead filter the daylight so that he can see their veins. She sits down next to him, wipes a hand across her forehead, scuffs her low-heeled shoe across the grass underfoot.
"If you want to know the truth," she says, "this year sucks."
To keep from looking at her face, he concentrates on the shrubbery around the base of the Jackson statue. An antique cannon stands there, copper once, though it's mostly oxidized now to a mossy color and texture. Sometimes he asks himself what he's gotten her into. She's made mistakes that hurt the President, that hurt her worse than anyone. People have died. She could have been one of them. He could have left her in Los Angeles, with a swimming pool and palm trees and an entirely alternate universe.
He will not ask whether it's worthwhile. There's no way on this earth to know.
He says, "You bought a cactus."
"Yeah. I did. That should fix everything."
"What do you expect--"
"Don't ask me that," she interrupts. "Don't ask me that."
There are crickets somewhere under the bushes, and he wishes he still knew how to tell the temperature by counting their chirps. All he knows is that it's too hot out here. He tugs at the collar of his polo shirt so that he doesn't suffocate, rests a hand on the back of his head. Her arms are bare and so are her knees. She must have removed her stockings somewhere in the office.
She makes a thorny sound in her throat, less laughter than choking. Something about it that's alien, something that unnerves him.
"I told you what I expected and you still didn't call her."
"God, tell me we're not back to that."
"Fine. Ignore me, and don't try anything, or get anywhere."
"You haven't exactly been, you know, redefining receptive over there," he says.
She puts her hands over her face, as if she expects to be slapped. Her voice is very small.
"Like it would make a difference? It's no damn help, Toby, nothing's going to change the essential facts of the matter."
"Which would be?"
"I liked him," she says. "I kissed him. He's dead."
The faintest movement, only the thought of wind, stirs the trees and the shadows that dapple her skin. Almost against his will, he slides an inch nearer to her.
"It's not a cause and effect relationship."
Of course he kisses her then, dry lips and tongue on his, but they're hers and he's missed her more than he cares to think about. Her hair twines around the fingers of his left hand--he wants her more than he is capable of quantifying. Very quickly they've twisted sideways on the bench, her legs across his lap, his right hand already high on the inside of her thigh, and it's all humidity and the blessed beginnings of a breeze.
He makes the mistake of stopping for breath.
It's not the broad daylight that scares him, not even the easy possibility of exposure. It's the flatness in her half-opened eyes, the reptilian chill that makes him want to ask if she's noticed the weather at all, and why she brought this to a public place. She looks at him then, pupils tiny and irises as hard as jade, and he's not sure he's there at all. That's what scares him. That, and the sudden nauseous surge of jealousy.
He wonders whether she meant the day to end like this, or with grass stains on her knees, exposed this way just because there's no one to make her stop. And he grinds his teeth, and jerks his hand away.
"Your lips are chapped," he says.
This sounds incredibly stupid. She frowns, just a little, but her eyes don't change.
"I know," she says. "It kind of hurts."
He can't look at her anymore, and he is tired, horribly tired, of seeing her walk away from him. So he gets up, moves a few paces from the bench, focuses on the branches over her head.
"The air's no good out here."
With that, he leaves her behind, kicking aside a littered 7-Up can, crossing the lawn as an illegal shortcut. Not turning back. He crosses the street without looking both ways, without looking anywhere.
There is a bitterness in his mouth, like bile. Like seawater.
*
Stars, fixed in a field of cotton.
The flags stir now and then even though there isn't much of a wind, beyond the collective breathing and chattering of thousands of people. Bodies from here to the Washington Monument. He is among the smaller crowd at the foot of the Capitol steps, boxed in behind safety fencing, and the marble behind them glows in the tinted spotlights like cobalt glass. Standing apart, he lights a cigar, shakes out the match and grinds it to nothing under his shoe.
Late in the evening, well after sunset, it's still hot. They have finished with the salute to American music, played the last song, and the President's pushed his shirtsleeves up a bit, and rested his hand on his wife's back. The sky is deep, cloudless, crystal--perfect if it was only a few tints darker, and in a few minutes it will be. He exhales toward it and the smoke stays close to him, a personal miasma. It isn't enough to keep Josh and Sam from wandering over. He pretends they aren't there, tries to push them away with his thoughts.
"Good night for it."
Sam seems to be in charge of small talk, perhaps of pulling him back into the fold. But Josh follows suit quickly.
"It would be a better night for it if it wasn't still ninety degrees. Or if we could wear shorts. Or if, you know, we all got free Pepsi or something..."
He raises his eyebrows, tapping ashes onto the ground.
"..but yeah," Josh says, "it's a good night anyway."
"Were there options?" he asks. "Were we going to move it to another night? Take it indoors?"
"It could've rained," Sam points out. "Those quick storms come up a lot, this time of year. You know, one minute you're walking down the street and the next you wish you were building an ark."
"I live here too, Sam, and you've proven your expertise with the weather before."
The sarcasm is sharper than he intended, and he sees Sam's slight blinking recoil and feels almost sorry. He lowers his voice, brushes a stray speck of ash off his jeans.
"Anyway," he says, "Is there anything to drink?"
Josh passes him a plastic bottle of Volvic and he takes a gulp, wishing the water was gin, keeping it in one hand so he can smoke. He watches the crowd, all kids in cutoff shorts, mothers in gingham blouses, patchwork picnic blankets. Too many people to mean anything in particular, not enough people to make a Democratic state on an electoral map.
"I always liked the Fourth of July when I was a kid," Sam's saying. "Sparklers. I loved sparklers. My mother was terrified of them and my father bought 'em anyway."
"We always watched this on TV," Josh says. "A couple of weekends later they'd have a beach carnival and we'd have our fireworks then. I think they were done by the same people who did the big ones, though. I don't remember the name.."
"Grucci Brothers," he replies. "You could watch them from the roof of the building where I grew up."
He drinks some more water, and Josh looks at him with skepticism.
"Where you grew up?"
"Sure."
"You're telling me you weren't born forty-five years old?"
"That's right, Josh. I just strolled up out of the East River one day, fully grown."
"You know, usually with the East River it's the other way around."
He doesn't answer, remembering that he didn't want to participate in their conversation. He strains to narrow his field of vision so that he can only see one person, fixes on a little girl in a Cookie Monster T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, twirling in a barefoot circle, waiting without patience. Above her, the deepening darkness shimmers like the air around a gas flame.
"Not much longer now."
"No," Sam agrees. "Hey. She looks good, doesn't she?"
He's avoided looking at her all night, but this is inevitable, irresistible. He looks over and sees her, laughing with the First Lady, wearing a turquoise sundress, gentle and loose over her hips. Sunglasses resting on top of her head, bare legs and strappy sandals. Her hair is knotted back and the light sparks on sapphires, tiny ones set into enameled earrings, and even from this distance, he's pretty sure they're American flags. Yes, she looks good. Yet he can see she's gotten thinner, even from this distance, the veins showing through her translucent wrists, the hollowness about her face. She doesn't look as good as she should.
She might catch him looking, so he tears his eyes away to her silhouette on the sidewalk, the image instead of the form. He takes a serious drag on his cigar, lets it sting in his lungs as long as he can stand it, which is a long moment.
"Of course she does," Josh says. "She bounces back, you know?"
It occurs to him that these are questions. They're asking him. He could tell them that they've got the wrong man, that she wouldn't let him have any idea. They would take it as a complaint, and they would sit down with her and try to do something about it. They believe in solutions.
He says, "Don't make it harder for her."
They look at him, incredulous. Innocent.
"We're not--" Josh chuckles. "We're not making it harder, Toby. We're not over there like the mental health police shining a flashlight in her eyes."
"I know you guys."
"We're not being those guys," Sam promises. "We're just saying, to you, all the way over here, she's been doing better. She was good in California, and she looks--she looks good. Doesn't she?"
They believe in solutions, and he's so tempted to shake them out of it. Tempted, almost, to tell them he might even be glad that she's not speaking to him. She makes everything harder, sometimes--most of the time--and it would not take much for him to return the favor.
"Yeah," he says.
His water's gone, and he walks away to find a trash can for the bottle, finishes the last of the cigar standing there. As he returns he feels an edgy electricity flickering through the crowd. He looks up. It's dark enough now.
Voices diminishing to murmurs and then to silence, and finally the band begins to play. Three cheers for the red, white, and blue.
He stands next to Josh and Sam, not minding them now that they won't talk, now that the sky is exploding over the Monument. The smell of cordite assails them, and he glances unintentionally to the side. Her head is tilted back, mouth open, eyes wide, but he can't tell whether she's faking it, so he looks up again, leaning back, watching. The fireworks are a split second off the beat.
Stars, blooming and dissolving in a smoke-streaked sky.
*
Between the end of twilight and the beginning of pitch black, the storm comes up.
At seven minutes before ten on a Saturday night, he is working, laptop open on his coffee table while the Yankees wind up another one at home. Pathetic, this, but there's work to do. He gets through minor things, small strategic questions, solo meetings; greater problems multiply and he falls behind. She turns such a graceful and subtle cold shoulder that she can spoil day after day for him and no one will notice. He avoids her when he can, but it still ruins his mood, darkens it well beyond what his mother used to call a blue study.
First the sound, guttural, a distant roar of destruction, and he gets up and walks to the window. There is another flash, a hairline fracture seared across the sky and into his retinas. Clouds lumber across the cityscape, the colors of a very deep bruise. When he blinks the lightning remains hanging before him, pinpricks inside his eyelids ranging from ultraviolet to infrared.
The next thunderclap follows closely, and he is ready for the first raindrops to hit the window. Rapidly it becomes a full downpour, sheets of water gliding smoothly down the glass, smearing the view until everything blurs, sound inseparable from sound, light indistinct from its absence.
He's not sure how long it takes to hear the knocking on the door. For a moment he isn't even sure it's real.
Then it gets louder. Harder. He doesn't want to, but he knows that it's her hand, his ear attuned to the bones beneath her skin as to a unique musical instrument. He isn't going to answer her, isn't even going to acknowledge her. He is not home to her.
"I know you're there!"
Her voice sounds strained, sore. His hands tense involuntarily on the windowsill.
"Toby! This is ridic--" She halts. "Listen, just listen, okay?"
The wood is rough and cool against his palms. Lightning shrieks across the sky.
"This is ridiculous," she says. "I went into the office today, and you weren't there, and I was so glad not to see you. I was having a really good day and then--
Thunder, over the next words.
"What?" he says.
He hates himself for it.
"I drowned my stupid cactus!" she yells. "I was standing there watering it from an Evian bottle. Too much. I probably ruined it. So I went home and changed my clothes and thought--I am not having a good day. I haven't had a genuinely good day in two months. And it isn't your fault."
He thinks he hears a revelatory tone to this. It turns him around and he leans his back against the cold window. Behind him, the rain is already slowing. He folds his arms and watches the shadowplay on the walls. And the door.
"Neither of us has been very mature. If we were different--but we're not different, and it wouldn't matter. What happened isn't your fault. And it isn't mine."
Another pause for breath, and he can't help taking a step forward.
"I'm tired of punishing both of us; aren't you tired of it? Aren't you--Toby, I ran up here from my car in the pouring rain, I'm bedraggled and I'm hoarse and this is so fucking stupid, couldn't you just open the door?"
"Use your key," he says.
It isn't quiet, because of the rain, but there's a pause for the words to linger on, a dizzy sense of absurdity. It isn't this simple, it was always this simple. He crosses to the door while she is, he imagines, digging a cumbersome keychain out of her purse. They can always get into each other's apartments. She unlocks the door, opens it and stands there dripping all over the rug, her hair dark and clinging, beads of water accentuating the dark smudges under her eyes. Not quite smiling. She drops the purse and shoves him hard on the shoulder.
"Idiot."
He catches her wrists and holds them and they're both reeling toward the wall. He reaches up to kiss her. There is a salty taste to her lips, and he realizes he has to get her out of these wet clothes.
Peeling the tank top off is one thing; her jeans give him trouble, brand new ones with a zipper that sticks. When he finally gets them down he can see that they've bled onto her skin, leaving patterns of indigo dye like those woven into a prayer shawl. A muted blessing.
She bends her arms back to unhook her bra, pauses for a yawn that shakes her whole body. He always craves her and it's been worse since Lafayette Park, but now he's not thinking about sex so much as how long it must have been since she slept properly, and he's rather confused. So he leads her down the hall into the bathroom, and she dries herself with two of his thick, soothing towels, her body undulating between them like the pale lightning in the dark sky. She can't stop yawning, so hard that it must hurt.
Soon he's steering her toward the bedroom, hands on her shoulders, almost holding her up. She slides between the sheets, eyes fluttering shut. Maybe she says she's sorry, but before there's time for him to be sure she's folded in on herself and fallen asleep. There's nothing to do, so he sits on the edge of the bed and watches her until he's tired, and then he lies down next to her and watches her some more.
Sometime, later. If he's slept at all he doesn't know it. She turns onto her side, wrapping the covers around her, and sniffles into his pillow. One of her hands slips under his T-shirt, rests on his stomach.
He hesitates. Keeps it there.
The storm has been gone for a long time, but it's only now that he notices. There is just enough moonlight through the blinds to highlight the curve of her shoulder and a few of the furrows in the sheets between them.
*
Dawn steals in, a watercolor midsummer morning, and the kind of light that opens flowers opens his eyes.
He does not remember dreaming, though time has passed, and it's surprising that she's not still at his side. Then his eyes and mind adjust to being awake, and he sees her at the window, peeking out through the blinds. She's wearing one of his dress shirts, unbuttoned, and nothing underneath but reflected amethyst light. He clears his throat as he sits up.
"I was cold when I got out of the shower," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
It is a little cold, though, so he wanders into the living room, where her jeans are slung over the back of his desk chair, nearly dry. He adjusts the thermostat. By the time he gets back she's raised the blinds and tugged the window itself up a few inches. He stands behind her, breathing next to her damp hair and the collar of his shirt. Her knees bend a little, and she lets him put his hands on her waist. The warmth of the morning drifts in, surrounding them softly like the scent of lilacs. Cities don't really smell that way, though, and it's impossible that there could still be traces of perfume on her neck.
He's going to bring her back to the bed, starts to draw her in, but she stops him by turning around. She places a kiss snugly between his cheek and the corner of his mouth. A friendly kiss, and it dispels, for the moment, all his frustration. Of the many irreplaceable things he misses when she's not with him, her friendship is the most irreplaceable.
"Come to work with me."
He doesn't reply right away, thought processes slowed by the mere fact of her closeness. It's difficult to distract himself long enough to react.
"It's Sunday, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but I left my office messy." She smirks. "And I'm sure you can find something to occupy yourself. Or else I can find something to occupy you."
He lowers his eyes. Catches himself staring at her and forces himself to look at the floor.
"And that's a threat," she adds.
Her feet are bare on the wooden floor, toenails painted the color of plums. It occurs to him that no one in the office today will know this except him; her hands are French-manicured. This is something he can keep for himself. He can't help letting his gaze pan up her slender calves, up to her knees, up--and she nudges his chin with her thumb and brings his eyes back to meet hers.
"Positive reinforcement," he says.
"What?"
He's pleased to have thrown her off for a beat, takes advantage by shifting even closer to her.
"Positive reinforcement. Haven't you ever read anything about conditioning? Don't threaten me. Tell me why I should come to work."
She raises a hand to push a tangle out of her hair, arches her back in a wicked way that can only be intentional. He reaches for her waist again, but she puts her hands on her hips and grins.
"I'll make you breakfast," she says.
"You'll make me breakfast? You'll make me breakfast?"
"I can cook."
He waits.
"Okay, I can't, we both know that, but I can put together breakfast. I'll make you toast and coffee and a bowl of--what cereal do you have?"
"Raisin Bran," he says.
"A nice bowl of--Raisin Bran? Fine. Whatever. You go take a shower and get dressed so we can go to work."
She's made up her mind, and she hustles him out of her way. He considers saying, You'll have to get dressed too. But he doesn't want to encourage that, and it's hardly just the image of her nail polish that he'll keep in mind today. His shirt rustles as she leaves the bedroom, looking much finer on her than it ever could on him. Royal velvet.
There is an old bottle of her shampoo on the ledge of his bathtub; he has no idea where it came from or how long it's been lying around. He sniffs it and recognizes the floral scent right away, and he showers quickly.
He'd like to send her flowers, he decides, as he picks out a shirt to wear. Certainly not roses; he will never give her roses. He doesn't even want to include a card. Just a friendly gesture, something small to replace the prickly cactus on the corner of her desk. Maybe herbal, maybe lavender--but he's sure he couldn't pick lavender out of a lineup.
When he's dressed, he goes out to find her in the kitchen, dressed in her jeans--flattering, fitting her perfectly--and she's rolled up his sleeves and tied the shirt in front, above her navel. He sits down at the breakfast counter and she slides a cup of black coffee to him.
"Can you see what I'm not doing?" she demands.
"What?"
"I am not making you a nice bowl of Raisin Bran. Know why?"
"I do not."
"Because you put the box back in your cabinet after it was completely empty."
She sets the box in front of him, leaning down toward him. He sips his coffee to hide the quirk at the corner of his mouth.
"Well, you'll have to find some other type of positive reinforcement."
"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?"
"I was contemplating dinner," he says. "You know, I'd even take you grocery shopping, pick up some ingredients. How are you with eggplant?"
He hopes he can hold the deadpan longer than she can. He does. She laughs. It's real.
"Or," he adds, "We could just not go to work."
"We can never not go to work," she says.
This is probably true, and he ought to be writing, or at least straightening out some of Sam's purple prose. She refills his coffee and pours one of her own, comes around the counter and out of the kitchen. In his apartment, she carries herself like she's home. Or, at least, at peace.
"I'm going to fix myself," she says. "Don't go getting any funny ideas, by the way. I'm driving."
She touches his shoulder with two fingers and goes down the hall. He almost wishes she wouldn't dry her hair and make up her face. Sometimes, right now, he likes her best the way she wakes up.
He finishes his coffee and walks over to the living room window, pondering the idea of violets, delicate and soft. Too soft, maybe, too fragile. Hothouse flowers. He would never give her anything knowing that it could fall apart at a touch, a breath.
Maybe wildflowers. He wonders where the best place is to order the type of thing he's thinking of, deep-throated irises and those things with blossoms shaped like bells. Without a card. He can find out.
A faint haze forms on the horizon, clouds piled up like distant mountains, and he might be smiling.
He's going to send her wildflowers. The morning light is sweet and fertile and forgiving.