AT THE CURBSIDE he quietly slips Ramon a gift. Three tickets for Opening Day. The Mets. Second deck. Not far from home plate. Bring your boys, Ramon. Teach them well. Tell Bobby Valentine to let loose the cowhide.
THEY KNOW HIM so well at JFK that it almost feels as if he should stand at the counter and negotiate from there. Your air rights. Your refunds. Your delays.
The stewardesses have a fondness for him, his quietness, his humility. From a distance he looks like a man who might shuffle through a constant gray, but up close he is fluid and sharp. His shyness carries a form of flirt.
At the British Airways desk he is taken by the arm and brought beyond check-in to what they call the Vippery. No metal detectors. No search at all. He wishes he could go through the channels, like a normal traveler, but the airline insists and they always whisk him through. This way, Senator, this way. The corridor to the Vippery is rutted and stained. Odd how badly painted the walls are. A sickly mauve color. The baseboards broken and scuffed.
He is brought through the back entrance into the gold-plated shine. Two lovely beaming smiles from the front desk. Girls in silk scarves of red, white, and blue. Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.
— Wonderful to see you again, Senator Mitchell.
— Good afternoon, ladies.
He wishes they weren’t quite so loud with his name, but he nods to them, glances at their name badges. Always a good idea to have a first name. Clara. Alexandra. He thanks them both and he can almost hear the noise of their blushes. He glances over his shoulder, the slight rascal in him, and is guided towards the back of the lounge. He has met movie stars here, diplomats, ministers, captains of industry, a couple of rugby players up to their broad shoulders in wine. The minor figures of public glory, their Rolexes peeping out from beneath their cuffs. It doesn’t much interest him, the spotlight. What he looks for is a seat where he won’t be disturbed, yet can get up and stretch his legs if needs be. He has taken to yoga in recent times, on Heather’s insistence. Felt rather stupid at first. Downward dog. Dolphin plank. Crane pose. But it has loosened him up enormously, untightened all the bolts. In his younger years he was far less supple. A certain mental agility in it, too. He can sit and close his eyes and find a good meditative point.
He spots a likely place, in the far corner of the lounge, where the rain rolls decoratively down the darkness, shifts his weight towards the window, allows the young lady to shepherd him along. As if she is the one to have chosen the seat. Her hand at the small of his back.
He keeps the briefcase between them. For distance and decorum.
— Can I get you a beverage, Senator?
He has become a man of tea. He never would have believed it. This unasked-for life, it always surprises. It began in the North. He couldn’t get away from it. Tea for breakfast, tea for lunch, tea in the afternoon, tea before bedtime, tea between the tea. He has learned the art of it. Choosing the right kettle. Running the tap water until cold. Boiling it beyond the boil. Heating the teapot with a swish. Doling out the leaves. Timing the brew. Wetting the tea, the Irish call it. He is not a man for alcohol, and it is the tea that has dragged him through many a late evening. With cookies. Or biscuits as they say. Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell. McVitie’s Digestives.
— Milk and three sugars, please.
He is careful not to watch the swish of her as she moves away through the lobby. He leans back against the seat. But Lord, he is tired. He has, in his briefcase, a few sleeping pills prescribed by a doctor friend, but he is not fond of the idea. Perhaps in an emergency. A newspaper wag said: Some calm in the Stormont. He can already feel the weight of the days ahead, the changed minds, the semantical shuffling, the nervous search for equilibrium. He and his team have given them a deadline. They will not go beyond it. They have promised that to themselves. A finishing line. Otherwise the whole process will drag on forever. The rut of another thirty years. Clauses and footnotes. Systems and subsystems. Visions and revisions. How many times has it all been written and rewritten? He and his team have allowed them to exhaust the language. Day after day, week after week, month after month. To roil in their own boredom. To talk through the vitriol towards a sort of bewilderment that such a feeling could have existed at all.
It has been, on occasion, like playing hide-and-seek with oneself. Open the door and there you are. Count to twenty yet again. Ready or not. Run and hide. Pretend you don’t know where you are.
He used to play that game with his brothers when he was young, in the small house in Waterville. He hid in the closet beneath the stairs where his mother kept the jars of figs. A familiar smell. The jars were ranged high on the shelves: his own small Lebanon, cramped and tidy. A tiny glint of light came from the hallway, leaked in, clarified the dark. He tucked himself away in the corner, at the base of the wooden shelves, waiting to be caught. His brothers got so used to him hiding in the same place that once they left him for hours, just to rile him, and to rile them back he just stayed completely still, remained beneath the stairs until after dinner when they finally came to get him out, cramped, sore, vaguely victorious.
The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap. The Waterville house backed onto the wide Kennebec River. The smoke from the mill drifted downstream. Huge logs arrived and were winched, dripping wet, from the gray river. The wood saws whined. Sawdust whipped across the wind. Railway whistles pierced the air. The town had a vigilance about it. He worked the newspaper route. Rode a bicycle with fringed handlebars. Hopped across the railway trestles. Learned the back roads and the byways. The coins in his pockets clanged. He liked the days when the river iced and he wondered about what it carried underneath: water beneath water. He watched the men coming home from the factories after long days of giving up their flesh. Mornings of fresh blue snowfalls. By the end of the day the snow was dark with grit.
He grew up in his brother’s clothes. It used to make his mother smile to see the shirts slide from one shoulder to another, as if youth were just a thing that would always be passed along the line. When he was finished with the clothes, she would load them up and drive them to the Salvation Army store down on Gilman. Ya hadi she would say. Give us grace.
He was aware of the Horatio Alger quality that hung around him. His mother was Lebanese, a textile worker. His father, an orphan, a janitor in a college. An American boyhood. The newspapers sometimes mocked it. He walked out of college into an unquiet life. Torts, contracts, deeds, the gavel. He could quite easily have been a lawyer in a bow tie, or a small-town judge living on the outskirts of town. He thrived on Webster and Darrow. A Plea for Harmony and Peace. Resist Not Evil. Mysteries dissolving into facts. As a lawyer, he hated to lose. No virtue in second place. He took his chances. Attorney, candidate for governor, federal judge. Fifteen years in Washington. Majority leader for six years. The second most powerful man in America.
He knew how to flip a coin in the air and listen to the language of how it was made to land: what amazed him was that there were times when a coin could land sideways. Vietnam. Grenada. El Salvador. Kuwait. Bosnia. Mexico. All those times when logic was perched on a rim. Health care. NAFTA. The Clean Air Act. The occasional dividend of change.