I wasn’t as apt as he. My glory years as a physical, athletic presence were at least twenty years behind me, when, in the seventh grade, I was generally the same height and weight as everyone else; I had excelled in football, basketball, baseball, tennis. I eventually grew, but grew skinny. I realized at some point that only my head could compete. I’d always wondered what might have been had I grown to six-foot-three and two hundred pounds. Now, I had been given to Janice’s advance team by Jenkins, an ex-basketball star at CUNY, once the kind of kid I could dribble circles around before he grew ten inches and wised up enough to realize he didn’t have to chase me, he could hang back near the basket and wait for my approach. Jenkins thought I might prove effective as a kind of herald for John Kwang. Calm the crowd with my amenable Asian face.
At breakfast, Janice wanted to know what I did for money. In the rest of my life. “You seem a little old for this,” she said, sculling out spoons of flesh from her half melon. “You don’t seem to be one of those I’ll-take-the-bullet types.”
“You never know.”
“Doesn’t look that way to me. I’m sure. So what’s your deal?” she asked. “What do you really do?”
I cracked the lid of my legend.
“I’m a freelance writer,” I said to her. Eduardo glanced up from his plate. “I write for magazines.”
“Yeah?”
I picked at the scrambled eggs. “Nothing too exciting. My aim is to do profiles. This is the first big one.”
“Yeah, yeah, but there’s something else, right?” she said, aiming her spoon at me. I looked straight at her and didn’t say anything. There was almost an ugly pause. I raised the corners of my mouth, the way Hoagland taught me. The confidence grin. Then she said: “You’re doing something on the side, right?”
I didn’t answer.
“You’re writing a book or something. A true-crime novel.”
“Sort of.”
“Of course you are. This is a city of novelists. What’s it about?” she said, sitting up in the booth seat. “Wait, I know, it’s about John. I mean, it’s about someone like John, an ambitious politician.”
“I thought John Kwang wasn’t ambitious.”
“He doesn’t want to be the fucking President,” Janice sneered. “But then neither do I.”
“That surprises me,” I said to her.
“Did that surprise you?” she asked Eduardo. She put her arm around his back. “I mean come on, Eddy, was I such a hard-driving bitch right off?”
“I thought you were going for Czar,” Eduardo answered. He ordered us more coffee.
“We’re getting off the subject,” Janice said, pulling the tight dark curls of hair above his ear. “Anyway, we were talking about Henry’s secret literary career.”
“It doesn’t exist,” I replied. “I don’t have the imagination.”
“You’re just in need of my help,” said Janice, sculling again through her cantaloupe. “It’s one of those stories of corruption and scandal.”
“So keep going,” I told her.
“This is easy,” she answered. “A rising politician with nowhere to go but the top, that’s clear, everyone loves him. He’s someone like John, a decent, kind, good man and father and husband, like you can’t believe he’s actually a politician.”
“Except?” Eduardo said.
Janice repositioned herself, elbows astride her plate, her round shape pitching forward. She turned to him. “Except, Eddy, there’s some slut who knows a dirty fact about him. Maybe it’s her, or his mob ties, or that he’s secretly a drug kingpin, and she’s blackmailing him. He stupidly strangles her one night after a whole lot of kinky sex. He has a devoted staffer — we’ll call him Jenkins—dispose of the body. Trouble is, Jenkins is a self-hating closet homosexual. He’s a raging psychopath. His secret love for John compels him to hold on to her body for horrible acts of mutilation and necrophilia. And cannibalism, of course. All for John. I mean all. But he’s soon caught because of the awful smell coming from his apartment. John’s afraid that he’ll talk, so he has the captain of the precinct, who owes him a favor for covering up his wrongful shooting of a black kid ten years before, make it look like Jenkins commits suicide in his holding cell. Soon after, the captain gets himself killed in a car wreck. Meanwhile, a sharp city reporter — you — who’d heard rumors of the liaison between Kwang and the bimbo, starts adding up the bodies. You enlist the help of the savvy, sensual ADA — yours truly — and begin your own undercover investigation.”
“I see where this is going,” I said.
“You can with good stories,” she answered. She put a hand on Eduardo’s bulky shoulder. “A good story will always sell, book or movie or man. Political lesson number one.”
Eduardo shrugged. “I like a nice love story.”
“Christ,” Janice complained. “You Dominicans are so fucking romantic! I don’t understand tropical Catholics. We original ones don’t believe in love ever after. That’s for someone else. Evangelists.”
“So what are you?” he asked her.
“Polish, what do you think? You don’t need smarts to get into heaven.”
“My mother and father are good Catholics,” Eduardo said, brushing her off him. “My sisters are Jesuits and my little brother I don’t know yet. I’m nothing in particular.”
“You’re a Democrat,” Janice told him.
“I’m a Democrat like John Kwang is a Democrat.”
“Which means one who’s going to win everything,” she said. “You’re the only real thing, Eddy,” she answered. She looked at me. “Henry and I, we were secretly Reagan Democrats. Selfish cowards. Admit it, I will. I know you Koreans.”
“Never,” I said.
“See?” Janice told him. “You’re the best thing we have. Our party loves you, Eduardo. To death.”
“I love the party,” he answered, tepidly. “I love the party.”
The heavy rains suddenly stopped. Janice was already up at the cash register paying the check. She pointed outside. “Let’s do it, guys,” she called to us.
We spent the rest of the morning choreographing steps around fire hydrants and mailboxes. At Janice’s request I played John Kwang. Eduardo cleared the way. We must have looked like a small troupe of performance artists staging an imaginary event. People on the sidewalk stepped back into doorways to watch us, not knowing what they were looking at. Mostly they were focused on me, whispering, nodding, conjecturing on who I was. Someone important, maybe. Known. Powerful. I was unaccustomed to this scope of attention. With Janice and Eduardo orbiting me like flitting moons I felt like the emperor of a secret world. I put myself in the onlookers’ places and considered the scene: here is an Asian man in his early thirties. He could pass for twenty-four. He’s pleasant of face, not so much handsome as he is gentle-looking, and pink of cheek; he only shaves in spots. His gait is casual and patient and straight. He’s not looking at anything in particular, his gaze too fair. Too fair all around, as though he couldn’t offend anybody. So he looks friendly, he looks like he’d be willing to talk to you, but really because of the way his gaze circles about you, gets at your outline instead of your live center, you think he’s really stepping back as he approaches, stepping back inside and back away from you so nothing can get around or behind him.
People gathered in the street around us. Janice simply ignored them, directing us instead, figuring in her head the positions of the preachers, the crowd, Kwang, paletting their various skin tones into an ambient mix for the media. She asked that I remind her to bring along a young blonde who temped at the office to be in the throng the next day. “It’s like flower arranging,” she said to me. “You’ve got to be careful. Too much color and it begins looking crass.”