And had taken them (though Druff was certain from the way his son beamed up at her during her presentation that he’d heard it before, that he listened to her recitation as if she were his protégée and he’d had a hand in helping her prepare it, grinning, moving his lips) through the history of the Sunni-Shiite discord, telling them about Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali, Ali’s kid, Hussein, the Imam’s martyrdom by the troops at Karbala, the enmity between the Shiites and Abdul Wahhab. To Druff, already lost, the whole thing sounding a little like the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. She’d delivered the information neutrally, with a sort of willful dispassion, though Druff guessed at once — the chador was a clue — she was full-blooded Shiite.
“Well,” Druff said when she’d finished and looked toward him for a decision on the merits, “it all sounds to me like your typical power grab. We see it time and again down at the Hall.”
“Really?”
“Time and again. Year in, year out.”
“Is that so? Really?”
“Oh yeah. Sunrise, sunset.”
(Well, Nun of the World. She’d been standing during her discourse, backlit by a low-standing chrome high-intensity lamp. He could see her shape where it came away from her garment as if the chador were an X-ray photograph. She wasn’t wearing underwear. He saw Shiite snatch. Mikey beamed, and the commissioner wondered if his son might not have had a hand in that, too.)
“Perhaps you’d care for some candy, Su’ad,” Rose Helen suggested.
“No,” she said. “Thank you, but it is forbidden. There are often liqueurs in American candies. A Muslim may not eat them.”
“This is a Hershey’s,” his wife said. “All it has is almonds.”
Su’ad smiled but shook her head. Indeed, she seemed to take a sort of delight in turning down all the Druffs’ hospitality, declining whatever was offered as if it were a snare. She turned down their fruit, refused their supper. And, though she agreed to take tea — which she made no move to drink — with them in the living room, she rejected the comfortable armchair to which his son had shown her and sat instead on a kind of stool.
They talked (Su’ad drawing him out on the issues) about the national interest, world affairs, the big geopolitical stuff. He tried to tell the girl he was merely a humble City Commissioner of Streets. Su’ad would have none of it and dismissed his demurrers as if his modesty were only more Druff hospitality — poisoned grapes, tainted chocolate. There was just so much Druff would take, but when the young Lebanese rose from her stool and, looking like some feral Mother Courage, resumed her plantigrade in front of the lamp, he relented and agreed to take a few more questions. Druff, his mind on automatic while his glands took notes — he thought he could make out thighs, bush, and, when she turned, the heavy, flowing principle of breasts — drew upon the various white papers of his imagination for his answers, from the presidential trial balloons he’d floated on taxpayers’ time in his office, from his appearances on “Meet the Press,” “MacNeil/Lehrer,” “Face the Nation,” diplomatic, vague as the best of them, forceful as any, evasive as most. While discussing some options which might lead to a possible solution to the problem of the West Bank, he felt an unaccustomed erection stir in his pants and sit in his lap and Druff brought the press conference to an end.
Mikey was beaming at all of them now, at Su’ad for her tricky questions, at Druff for, well — who knew? It could have been anything — the hard-on insinuated into his dad’s pants or the way the commissioner had sidestepped Su’ad’s earnest inquiries. He might even have been beaming at Rose Helen for the drama he’d introduced into their living room. (All three had ringside seats at the shadow show.)
The second time his son brought her over she stayed the night, sleeping with Mikey in his bed. Druff made a mental note about the gaucheness, the erratic behavior of foreigners on the other guy’s turf. (This might turn out to be useful, he thought, the next time he scheduled a summit conference.) No, but really, he thought, there is something disproportionate and inept about her actions. Su’ad (maybe the kid had said something to her), so suspicious and reticent about accepting anything from them when she’d been there the first time, now made outright demands. “Excuse me,” she said, coming into the living room and passing before the low lamp — now off — where she’d paced and posed her angry questions on the occasion of her first visit, “I stripped these off Michael’s bed. Where do you keep clean ones?” She held out some sheets and pillowcases like a soiled laundry. “Tell me, I’ll change them myself.”
“The nerve,” Rose Helen told Druff later that night. “Did you hear her? ‘Where do you keep clean ones?’ I changed that bed yesterday.”
“Sure,” Druff said, “I agree with you. She calls our Mikey ‘Michael.’ ”
“Hi, Mom. Morning, Daddy,” his son greeted them, grinning, when he came into the kitchen with Su’ad for breakfast the next day.
“No coffee,” Su’ad said. “American coffee is always so weak.” And wouldn’t touch the juice Rose Helen poured because it was frozen, not fresh. Did they have Raisin Bran? Oh, good, but that was too much. Yes, that was more like it, but could Rose Helen skim off the raisins with a spoon?
Mikey beamed.
“Enjoy, enjoy. Our tent is your tent,” the commissioner wanted to tell her, if not on his own then on his wife’s poor behalf. “Just don’t push it.” But checked himself, didn’t, because he was curious, wanted to understand the sheer logistics of the thing, how she would handle it, see how it was actually done, be there when the food was brought to the veil, introduced into her mouth. (She unhooked the thing was all there was to it.) Sure, thought the City Commissioner of Streets, it attaches. I should have known. If it’d been a snake it would’ve bit me. And he marveled (who would have tested the municipal waters for safe chlorine levels and pulled the stop signs where they weren’t needed and permitted folks to pay their fines by mail, who discovered the Fourteen Points and should have known) at the simple savvy instincts of arrangements. And maybe ought even to have guessed, backlighting or no backlighting, the absence of underwear. As he had proposed other important political issues and instances. (Don’t hassle the constituency. Be sensible, use common sense, don’t stand on ceremony, do the right thing.) As, even distracted, and even while his speechifying was otherwise engaged, his cock had speculated a soft scaffolding of hair above her crotch, surmised nipples, and, last night, beside Rose Helen in bed, before falling away to sleep, he had overtaken his son (because she’d nothing to lose, wouldn’t have cared, the few thin, intervening walls between their rooms just so much more backlighting), still counseling caution and patience and wait until the old folks are asleep, worked at it and worked at it and finally managed to pull himself off.
(There was nothing Oedipal about it, no fancy spin, no English on his consciousness. He wasn’t jealous of the kid. Not to the point where it caused anger or pain or cost him votes or anything. When she’d thrown him into hard-on that time, it had been soft-core, an honest, old-fashioned, platonic hard-on, one he’d never have to deal with in real life, and which, if it came right down, would come right down.)
Only what (this part old Druff, outside his parentheses, wide awake, seeking answers) could Miss al-Najaf possibly see in his beaming boy, unless it was the beamer’s connection — God forgive me, old Bob Druff prayed sincerely, my blood heresies, for I know this part’s a sin — to the mayor’s own personal officially designated City Commissioner of Streets? Because if a man — this floated later, after the fact, now, in his office thrown in; Druff, in the wake of the bagman fellow, calling upon himself to think about that dead Lebanese girl, about that dead Lebanese girl really—could have spies, then surely he’d have to qualify for them, come equipped with all the secrets, plans, codes, microfiche, whatever the spyworthy MacGuffin paraphernalia was, whatever got slipped into Cary Grant’s pocket without his knowledge or Jimmy Stewart picked up by mistake when the girl switched briefcases on him.