Gossip Read Free

writing speeches for the dean. A gift for snappy phrases that Nancy herself dismissed as “the thousand clichés of light” caught the attention of the president of Bryn Mawr, a former state representative who’d decided to run for the Senate. She hired Nancy as a speechwriter and, when she won in an upset that pundits ascribed to female anger over the incumbent’s cross-examination of Hill, took Nancy with her to D.C.
    “Does your crisis have anything to do with Melissa?”—the lawyer Nancy had been dating since August.
    “Oh no. That’s turned out to be purely social. We squeeze each other in once a week, if we’re lucky. If either of us had time to meet someone new, we’d quietly disengage. Just as well. I can’t be myself with her. You know me, Ralph. I have to present a tough front. Which brings out the pathological liar in me. Even with Melissa.”
    “It’s not pathological. It’s just—”
    “Neurotic. Okay. I’m a neurotic liar. Who’s become an institutional liar. Because everyone here is like that. Nobody can afford to show themselves in a bad light. So there’s nobody who can make me honest.”
    Nancy wasn’t as fearless as she pretended. Her dishonesty was mostly in her own mind, although she often found it hard to tell a story without giving herself the last word she only wished she’d delivered.
    “And that’s why I need to see you, Ralph. So I can be honest for a few days. Plus we’ll have fun. You’re not visiting a basket case. We’ll talk and do coffee, talk and do tea. Just like the old days.”
    When I thought about Nancy in her absence, I almost always pictured her as she was in college: a galumphing girl in overalls with a squashed haystack of frizzy hair, emphatic elbows and, under her eyes, the crepey circles of a debauched courtesan by Edward Gorey. Only the circles remained, but I retained the old mental photograph, as if it were the true Nancy, the real Nancy, my pal and equal. New York friends couldn’t believe that someone like me knew someone in Congress. I enjoyed confusing their assumptions. I didn’t envy Nancy’s new importance or feel judged by her success. I was proud to know someone who did work so far beyond my capabilities.
    But I was happy with my own life. I had a job rather than a career, yet preferred it that way. I passed as an adult at Left Bank Books. Only Elaine, the manager, and Howard, the buyer, had been there longer. I’d recently been promoted to assistant manager but two other people had the same title and, except on Sundays, when I ran the store, my domain was the basement. I liked working down there in the clutter, bad lighting and old-fashioned smells—the cocoa-like cardboard, the sour curdle of wet pasting tape. I enjoyed the reverse snobbery of being a manual laborer in letters. Lugging and tossing heavy boxes kept me in shape without joining a gym. And I did not take the work home with me, which left plenty of psychic space for the rest of life, such as reading and activism and affairs of the heart. I hadn’t attended a political meeting in months, and even my last routine romance was over a year ago, but I was having a spell of downtime and knew I should enjoy it while it lasted.
    The sun was setting as the train flew over the rivers that empty into Chesapeake Bay; a shadow train raced across the orange fractals of water and sputtered out in the woods. Then came suburbs, then the white lights of the railway yards and, in the distance, the bald dome of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
    I already knew Washington, the stage set if not the life backstage. Growing up in North Carolina, I once thought it was the Big City. Now I enjoyed its artifice. Union Station was a vast neoclassical shopping mall. The Metro seemed spookily smooth and civil after the bang and stink of the New York subway, the homogeneous white-collar crowd exotic in the theatrical lighting of coffered basilicas buried below the earth. I rode up from the depths at