His lips quirked into a half-smile.
“What exactly are you telling me, Claude?”
The older man hesitated knowing the time to beat about the bush was over.
“May I speak plainly, sir?”
The Vice President scowled.
“I reckon there’s a first time for everything,” he growled.
“If you can rally the Southern Democrats I will deliver sufficient votes from New England and the northern states to carry the Atlantic City convention,” Claude Betancourt said quietly. “That is what I am telling you, sir.”
Chapter 32
He had lain on her and in her a long time in the dark, sweaty warmth of the summer night. Caroline had like that. She had clung to him, wrapped herself around him, stroked his wet back, giggled as his lips nuzzled and tickled her ears, they had kissed many, many times and his weight had pinned her down among the crazily confused sheets for a blissful age.
Eventually, something like reality had impinged.
“I have to go to the John, sweetheart,” she had murmured in his ear.
With a slothful, reluctant groan he had raised himself on his elbows.
He started kissing her again; and initially she had not discouraged him.
“I have to go now,” she had apologized eventually. “I really have to go… ”
Nathan had rolled off her and she had scampered out of the room in an undignified rush, only just making it to the bathroom in time. Then as she recovered her breath and something like her presence of mind as she sat beneath the swinging single bathroom lamp she had vented an inadvertent, entirely spontaneous giggle; and immediately afterwards, another. She had almost but not quite forgotten the delicious indignity of sexual intercourse. Well, fucking really. Coming back from the Berkeley Campus she had let her lover maul her inside the front door. Naked in the bedroom she had demanded to go on top. He had been so hard she was afraid he would split her in half. Nevertheless she had impaled herself upon him, taken him deeper inside than she had thought possible and ridden him until she could bear it no longer. He had exploded inside her long before that; all she had cared about was prolonging the ecstasy. Eventually, she had collapsed on him, possibly she had fainted. In any event she had awakened bathed in a dripping sheen of perspiration. Later — she had lost all sense of time — Nathan had turned her on her back and worshipped her into renewed insensibility.
She stood up, viewed her reflection in the mirror above the small hand basin. Her grey-streaked hair was wild, plastered this way and that across her face. She pushed the matted strands off her brow, looked down at the white nakedness of her torso contrasting sharply with her tanned lower legs and arms. The California sun had reddened her shoulders, painted a v-shaped arrow from her throat to a point just above her small breasts; which sagged as they had every right to sag at her age even if Nathan seemed as insatiably hungry for them as a baby in arms…
How twisted was that?
There was a quiet knock at the half-open bathroom door.
“You okay?” The man asked from outside.
“Never better,” Caroline replied.
Except that the woman in the mirror was crying.
“Caro?” The kid was really worried, scared.
She opened the door.
“It’s just me, okay,” she sniffed.
Nathan held her close anyway.
“This is all kind of weird,” he muttered. “I’m sorry… ”
“Don’t be. I’m happy… ”
They went back to bed and lay on their backs contemplating the stygian darkness. In an hour or so the first glimmer of the new day would intrude on their intimacy.
Caroline could not sleep.
Her senses were wearily supercharged by love-making and drawn back time and again to the oddly religious denouement of the previous evening’s rally in the Wheeler Auditorium of Berkeley University.
‘My name is Miranda Sullivan… The man I loved is dead. He died standing between Doctor Martin Luther King — the greatest living American of our time — and the assassin’s bullets… ’
Afterwards Caroline had learned that Miranda Sullivan was the daughter of the movie stars Ben and Margaret Sullivan, a young woman who by her own admission had ‘dropped out’ and ‘lost herself’ in the year before the October War but since re-dedicated her life to being a better person.
It sounded so trite, so invented and yet there had been something positively charismatic in her story. The fable concerning a journey from spoiled rich kid disinterested in anything and everything that was not to do with her, to being the woman she was today and hoped to be tomorrow.
The great unrequited love of her life was a black man who had befriended an abused white woman and run away from a likely lynch mob in Georgia. She had met him by accident on the night of the October War, never expecting to see him again. Fate had decreed otherwise and she had found love.
The bullets which had ripped the life out of Dwayne John’s body would have done the same for Doctor King also, had not their passage been slowed by the flesh, blood and bone of the man Miranda loved…
‘I never told Dwayne I loved him. I think we both knew. When he went back to Atlanta the last time it was like a piece of me boarded the Greyhound to the east with him. I planned to tell him everything when he got back to the West Coast. I knew things would be hard for us but,’ the young woman had raised her hands in supplication, ‘sometimes you just have to have a little faith… ’
Caroline stared into the gloom.
“Sometimes,” she murmured, inadvertently speaking her thoughts aloud, “you just have to have a little faith… ”
“What’s that?” Nathan asked, turning on his side to face her.
Caroline moved likewise, kissed him.
Inevitably, she felt him hardening against her. She pushed him away, very gently, took him in her right hand, squeezing and stroking his rapidly engorging penis. He was in no hurry and neither was she before tendrils of cramp twitched up and down her arm; she worked on him with gathering urgency as he drew her to him, flesh to flesh. Later they slept, heedless of the new day deep into the sultry California morning as if nothing that happened outside the wall of the bedroom mattered.
She slept until noon and awakened alone.
Around her the house was quiet.
Getting up — in stiff, aching slow motion — she pulled on the first of Nathan’s shirts hanging up in the bedroom’s one cupboard. It came down to her upper thighs and providing she kept her legs together offered a semblance of decency. She stumbled into the corridor.
The note pinned on the inside of the front door read: ‘Caro, gone for a run, Nathan.’
There was a fresh loaf of white bread on the wooden carving board in the kitchen, a bottle of milk and eggs in the small refrigerator. She toasted a couple of slices of the bread, made herself coffee, throwing beans into hot water. She visited the bathroom, not daring to risk a look in the mirror because she suspected she looked as old and worn as she felt.
Back in the kitchen she mechanically munched half-burned toast leavened with blotches of butter and sipped coffee, hoping she would be feeling half-alive whenever her young lover returned.
“That looks better on you than me,” the man observed, pulling up a chair at the table. He was wringing with sweat, his face reddened as he toweled his head. He sucked down the glass of milk Caroline handed him in one gulp.
She looked down at herself shyly.
“It’ll be all creased. Sorry. I know how much care you take over your stuff,” she apologized.
Their eyes met.
“I must look awful,” Caroline blurted.
The man shook his head.
“You look like a million dollars to me,” he retorted. “You always do… ”
“Nathan, I’m… ”
Again the man shook his head.
“Twenty million dollars!”
Caroline was silenced by his quiet vehemence.
“Look, I’m this mass-murdering war criminal,” Nathan said, ruefully running a hand through his sweat-slicked short hair, “with this crazy woman mother who tried to murder the President. But for you I’d have blown my brains out by now. I think I love you… ”
“Nathan, I… ”
“Everything’s crazy, right?” The man rejoined, leaning towards her. “The Russians are fighting the Brits, there’s bad stuff going in the Midwest. Heck, California and the whole South West could secede from the Union any day. Then what happens? Another Civil War but with nukes this time! It’s like Miranda Sullivan said last night. How dumb is it to die wondering? How crazy is it to worry about what anybody else thinks about anything? Maybe I don’t love you. Maybe I do. I think I do. I’ve never been in love before and the way I feel about you is so weird I don’t know what else it could be. But I do know I care about you a lot and I want to be with you. I do know that every time we get naked I get so hard it hurts. And I do know you like me.”
And there it was; the clinching argument.
“Baby,” Caroline muttered, bewildered and frightened, “I don’t just like you. The reason I came back here is because there’s nowhere else in the World I’d rather be right now.”