Private Screening (3 page)

Afterward she lay on his shoulder. When he spoke, it was almost to himself. “All that effort, Stacy. But what does it mean?”

She did not answer. He never asked this again—not of what she did.

This silence embraced his campaign. Away from him, she followed it, until at times she could not help but wish to be part of what he did. But he seldom spoke to her of his ambitions; she began sensing that he wished to hold them separate. The campaign was a void between them. She did not know what happened to him there. He never asked for help.

But she could tell that it consumed him. He would loll in an armchair, looking at the Baja sea; suddenly the look would grow hooded. Then, as if feeling her thoughts, he would laugh at himself. “AWOL again,” he would say, and take her hand.

They kept the press away. It did not matter if his reason for this reticence was politics; she did not wish to speak of him to others, even to Damone. He learned to ask when Jamie was coming, and never call. His only comment was a question, “Has he asked you to sing yet?”

“He never will.”

“No? That's good, then. If that's what you want.”

“What do you mean?”

Damone's smile was no smile at all. “I just wonder if he isn't teasing you a little.”

Jamie won in New Hampshire, and then Florida and Massachusetts, and did not ask. For those three months she did not see him. In mid-May, when his campaign came to California, only one man stood between him and the Democratic nomination, and his life seemed more vivid than her own.

Ten days before the primary, after a day campaigning in five different cities, Jamie spent the night with her.

She was shocked by the change in him. On television, he seemed vital and triumphant. Now it was as if the cameras had bled him. He was pale and too thin; there were new crow's-feet at the corner of each eye, the first flecks of gray at his temples.

“You look like hell,” she said.

He stretched out on her sofa, watching the eleven o'clock news like a tired husband about to fall asleep. “They say people over forty earn their own faces. Today's my forty-third birthday.”

Not to have known this troubled Stacy. She went to the kitchen, popped a bottle of French champagne, and brought it back on a tray with two glasses. Jamie had leaned forward. A film clip of his opponent was on television, reading a speech to a group of Jaycees; woodenly, he muffed the opening joke his gag writer had inserted. Jamie watched with something close to sympathy. “Never violate your own nature,” he murmured.

“Happy birthday.”

Turning, he saw the champagne, and smiled wryly. “At my age, that'll put me to sleep.”

“You're allowed.”

They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, feet touching. Jamie stared into the glass.

“What's wrong?”

He did not look up. Finally, he said, “I'm going to lose, Stacy.”

“How can you know that?”

He angled his head toward the screen. “That's going to kill me. Right at the end.”

“You're being awfully Delphic.” As he hesitated, Stacy saw that his fingers were swollen from shaking hands. “Tell me about it—all right? I'm tired of not knowing.”

Jamie sipped champagne. “All right,” he said at length. “The simple truth is that I'm ten days short of money.” The bitterness in his voice surprised her. “In 1980 no one west of New Jersey had ever heard of me. For four straight years I've flown coast to coast shaking hands and begging money until sometimes I didn't know where or who I was. Now all that work has come down to California—whoever wins here wins the nomination. Three weeks ago I was ten points behind in a state so large and complex that I'll live or die on television. Since then I've spent four hours daily on the phone extracting checks from the last contributors in America to pledge the thousand-dollar max, pumped it all into TV spots, and cut his lead to five percent with seven undecided.” For the first time, he looked directly at her. “That finished me, Stacy. I'm broke.”

Stacy tasted her champagne. “How much do you need?”

“Do you mean, Is that why you came?”

“That's not what I asked.”

He closed his eyes. “Four hundred thousand,” he answered. “The exact amount Damone told me you could raise by singing, two years ago.”

Stacy studied the lines of his face. “Well,” she said, “next time you can pay for dinner.”

When his eyes opened, she was smiling at him. “I can't let you lose. Not if I can help it.”

Jamie could not smile. Taking his hand, Stacy realized the palm was damp.

“I'd love to have seen
that
performance,” Damone said when Stacy phoned him the next morning. “Did he suffer a little?”

“Look, John, I called to ask how long it'll take to put together a show.”

“Hasn't he noticed you haven't sung lately?”

“He's running for president, dammit.”

“So you didn't bother telling him that you came back from the European tour ten pounds lighter, 'cause you started getting sick.”

“No,” she shot back, “because I want to do this.”

There was silence. “He'll need it by next Friday to do him any good.”

“Can you set it up?”

“At the Arena, in San Francisco.” Damone laughed without humor. “I reserved the date three months ago.”

Stacy hung up.

That night, Jamie telephoned from Sacramento; in the background, a PA system called out flights. “Come out with me,” he said.

“Campaigning?”

“Uh-huh.” He sounded fresh and cheerful. “It'll set you apart from the rest of my contributors.”

“I don't know, Jamie. The press …”

“If you're going to do this for me, I want you to be a part of it.”

Stacy realized that this was what she wished to hear. “Okay,” she said. “Where do I meet you?”

Two days later, their picture was on the front page of the L.A.
Times
.

It had happened so quickly that she still hadn't absorbed it. The first day out, when the Secretary of the Interior had remarked that “if you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all,” some reporter asked her opinion. “If he'd seen even
one
,” she'd snapped, “he'd know how small he is.” It was instinct; she had answered because it felt good. But the media had loved it—she gave them glamour and a fresh angle, and Jamie had not seemed to mind.

Now, in their suite forty-five stories above Los Angeles, Stacy tried to analyze how she felt about it.

The day before they'd swooped down from the Central Valley on a campaign high, with the press pool drinking and laughing and each crowd bigger than the one before. Jamie started throwing away his speeches; surrounded by migrant workers, he joked and quoted Yeats and Robert Kennedy, and they cheered with an intensity which surprised her. By the time the plane reached Los Angeles and they scrambled to the limousine, she sensed that Jamie really could be president. And the crowds were there for him again, packed between the stucco apartments and corner groceries and whiskey signs in English and Spanish, slowing the limo to a walk. “They can't
see
me,” Jamie had murmured. Oblivious to danger, he opened the door and got up on its hood as the crowd reached out to him. The moment had a terrible beauty; Stacy wished to turn from it, but could not. Above the bobbing, shouting heads, someone raised a “Stacy for Veep” sign. Grinning, Jamie pointed to it, and then the driver opened the sunroof. She stood without thinking, waving with the sun in her eyes as the crowd cried out, “Stacy …” She could no more see faces than in the darkness of a coliseum.

But she stood all the way to the hotel where Jamie was to speak. She was part of it now.

There were more signs for her. She was sitting at the head table when Jamie rose.

“You may remember me,” he opened. “I'm Stacy Tarrant's warm-up act.”

Stacy looked up in surprise.

In their cheers and laughter, Jamie smiled at her. Stacy thought he'd never looked younger.

Two hours later, in their hotel suite, his face looked slate-gray. His hand was swollen again.

“Stacy,” one of his aides said, “your fans outside will keep him up all night.”

“I can talk to them.…”

“Probably better to cool it. The security people will chase them off.”

She glanced at Jamie.

Aides surrounded him. Someone had scrounged cold sandwiches; another had paid the hotel to keep its laundry going all night; on the television news, their motorcade looked like jump cuts from an action film. Jamie pointed at the screen. “A sixteen-hour day, and all that counts is thirty seconds.”

“Looks good,” someone told him. “A campaign on the move.”

A red-haired aide shook his head. “It's too ‘hot'—all those Latinos screaming at two celebrities. Joe Six-pack's not gonna get that at all.”

“Screw him,” Jamie murmured.

“It's okay,” the first man assured him. “The last ads are all green lawns and shade trees. No music even, just actors and a voice. Lauersdorf's bringing one by in the morning for us to look at, so we can run 'em statewide after Stacy's concert.”

Jamie's sad-faced California manager, Tim Sherman, came in with statistics from the nightly tracking. “Two hundred calls,” he told Jamie. “Mostly to San Diego. The seniors are worried about Social Security, the women about war, and the under-twenty-ones about employment—they're getting close to graduation. Hit those in tomorrow's speeches, and I'll tell the TV people to look for that.”

Jamie nodded.

Sherman stuffed the figures in his pocket. “About the cartop routine, you're not a bullfighter. I get sick thinking what could happen.”

Jamie looked up. “No help for it, Tim.”

His voice conveyed a second message. “Let's let the candidate get some sleep,” Sherman announced, and suddenly they were alone.

“What do you make of all this?” Jamie asked.

“You're good.” She hesitated. “Cynical, isn't it?”

“Practical,” he amended. “Politics is the business of getting people to let you do a little of what you want. Even your songs are written for an audience, remember?”

“It's different, though.”

“Is it?” He smiled quizzically. “Would they let you sing if no one came to see you? Would you still write?”

Stacy flicked the hair back from her forehead. “Maybe I just don't belong here. Some of your staff doesn't think so.”

“They will tomorrow night.” His tone lightened. “You're not worried about old Charlie McCarthy's ‘Jamie Jagger' lines, I hope.”

She smiled at Jamie's nickname for his rival, a former vice-president so mortgaged to his contributors that when he'd spoken at a candidates' dinner Jamie had whispered, “Watch closely—when they pull the strings, his lips move.” But still she asked, “You don't think that hurts you?”

“Not in this state. In addition to the minorities and jobless, who wouldn't care if I were a hermaphrodite, I need young singles, single mothers, and white liberals—the ones who buy your albums in the millions. For those people, we belong together, and every time old Charlie appoints you ‘secretary of stereo' you can hear them yawn from Berkeley to the Baja. He's guaranteed you'll pack them in, even on short notice.” He examined his swollen hand. “Once you sing, we can buy the airtime to run my final spots statewide, and just maybe I'll get the thing I've wanted ever since I went to Congress.”

Stacy studied him. “My being here—you've thought it all out.”

He looked up with the tactile gaze which was part of his appeal. “Stacy,” he said coolly, “I've thought everything out.”

She waited a moment. “Even what might happen to you?”

His expression grew curious and a little distant. “Spiritually, or physically?”

“The motorcade. I agree with Tim—it scares me.”

He shrugged. “It's the only time anyone really sees me.”

“Instead of an image?”

“I like to feel there's a difference.” He rose, heading for the bedroom. “Although at the moment …”

“There's a difference, Jamie. I saw it in the Baja.”

“Quiet, wasn't it?” He turned in the doorway. “It got lonely without you. I thought that out, too.”

Stacy smiled. “But what does it mean?”

He smiled back, and then his look grew serious. “That I'd have to start living with mixed motives, and that you've lived enough in public to accept them—and your own.” He disappeared inside.

Stacy was not tired. But the day remained a jumble. When she went to the bedroom, Jamie was sleeping.

His hair was rumpled as a teenager's. Kissing his forehead, Stacy turned out the light.

When she woke again, it was not yet morning.

It took her a moment to realize where she was. Beside her, Jamie breathed evenly. She could not see his face.

In the darkness, Stacy began to search her memory for a song.

It was a trick she had learned on the road: when she was frightened of performing, or afterward, when she was strung out on her own adrenaline, she wrote to remember who she was and how she'd gotten there.

Lying next to Jamie, she remembered the first time she'd made love.

The boy had parked in the Berkeley hills; they'd looked across the bay toward San Francisco from his car. The city's luminescent patterns glinted as if refracted by a diamond; the Golden Gate was an arch of lights, its traffic two opposing streams of yellow. When she had been small, wrapped in a blanket between her parents, she would invent lives and destinations for the people on the bridge. At fifteen, the memory made her squeamish.

“I love you, Stacy.” He moved closer. “I can make it good.”

His eyes were wide as a rabbit's, so innocent that he might almost believe it. She took his face in her hands. “All I want is for you to be scared with me. It's okay if you are. I just don't want you pretending not to be.…”