Private Screening Read Free Page B

only when I can take something that doesn’t exist outside me, and put myself out there to give it to other people, that I feel complete. There’s nothing I’ve ever felt as strong as that.” Speaking this, she realized how much it scared her. “Sometime, I won’t have that anymore. Maybe they’ll stop coming. Maybe, some night, I won’t step through the curtain.”
    â€œAnd if you can’t, then who will you be?”
    She turned to him. “I’ve never really known.”
    Jamie reached out, brushing the hair back from her face.
    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?”
    â€œHe never will.”
    â€œNo? That’s good, then. If that’s what you want.”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œHappy birthday.”
    Turning, he saw the champagne, and smiled wryly. “At my age, that’ll put me to sleep.”
    â€œYou’re allowed.”
    They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, feet touching. Jamie stared into the glass.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    He did not look up. Finally, he said, “I’m going to lose, Stacy.”
    â€œHow can you know that?”
    He angled his head toward the screen. “That’s going to kill me. Right at the end.”
    â€œYou’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