Lust, Loathing, Lunacy: A Cautionary Emanation from Within the Imperial Starship: a Novel

By Frank Sherry

Philip Francis Parkman, Democrat Congressman from the 14th District of New Jersey, fortified by his unexpected victory at the polls and motivated by high ideals and good intentions, embraces his perceived role as not only spokesman for his constituency, but also as caretaker of the Constitution of the United States. However, intervening reality soon crushes his idealism and vanquishes his hope he can make a difference.

Thus begins his slide on the greasy griddle as he calls it. He turns to alcohol to alleviate his disappointment. On his way down, forty-eight-year-old Parkman falls under the spell of a precocious teenage seductressCatherine Taylor Quinter, the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of his political mentor. Parkman is, at the same time, falsely charged with campaign fraud and faces disgrace before the Ethics Committee. His long-suffering wife, Elaine, embarking on her own personal journey to secure her identity while professionally experiencing success, finds she must choose to save her own life or her husbands.

Parkmans slide lands him in a mental institution, called the Facility by the inmates, where he meets the enigmatic Winslow whose wisdom provides him with a new vision on life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491761977

Frank Sherry

Frank Sherry is a former journalist whose non-fiction work includes Pacific Passions: The European Struggle for Power in the Great Ocean in the Age of Exploration. He lives in Missouri.

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Copyright © 2015 Frank Sherry.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6198-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6199-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6197-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015903488

iUniverse rev. date: 03/16/2015

Contents

One: On the Greasy Griddle

Two: Non-feasance, Mal-feasance, Dumb-feasance

Three: Impressions, Fancies and Conceits

Four: Bungee Jump to Ruin

Five: Randolph’s, Rhonda, and Refuge

Six: Harold’s Hope

Seven: The White Bears

Eight: The Cranial Crew

Nine: Role Playing

Ten: Deception

Eleven:The Road to Damascus

Twelve: Onus on the Olfactory

Thirteen: All Faw Down

Fourteen: New Age Babble

Fifteen: Wry Catcher

Sixteen: Night of Horror and Guilt

Seventeen: The Thin Man Revealed

Eighteen: Sense and Sensuality

Nineteen: The Power of Love

Twenty: Reprieve?

Twenty-One: A Mélange of Emotions

Twenty-Two: Animadversions

Twenty-Three: Penitential Destruction

Twenty-Four: Gone. To Aspen

Twenty-Five: Going Down

Twenty-Six: Facing the Fire

Twenty-Seven:The Mills of Justice Grind

Twenty-Eight: The Demented but Dangerous Truth

Twenty-Nine: Remorse?

Thirty: The Facility

Thirty-One: Winslow

Thirty-Two: Melancholy Truths

Thirty-Three: Unorthodox Methods

Thirty-Four: Wrapping the Rap

Thirty-Five: Terms of Surrender

Thirty-Six: Paradox, Everywhere

Thirty-Seven: Absolution?

Thirty-Eight: Je Ne Regrette Rien

Thirty-Nine: The Lie that Sets You Free

Forty: All Fools Day

In Memory

Jimmy, Kathy, and Meg

One: On the Greasy Griddle

A photograph depicting a naked female on a motorcycle lay on a kitchen table. A middle-aged man clad in a stained and ragged turquoise bathrobe stood looking down at the photo which was illuminated by a bar of morning sunlight as he swallowed a third cup of black coffee to combat his daily hangover. The man was Philip Francis Parkman, Democrat Congressman from the 14th District of New Jersey. The nude in the photograph was Catherine Taylor Quinter, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the congressman’s closest friend in Washington, D.C. Beauteous Catherine and the Honorable Philip Francis Parkman had been lovers for the past four months. In the five-by-seven digital print out which had just arrived that morning by FedEx at the congressman’s apartment glorious Catherine, thirty years younger than her lover whom she always addressed as Phil instead of the Philip he preferred, perched in naked glory on a maroon Harley that was surely too powerful for her to control. Thus the congressman wondered who might be the owner of bike. He who had taken the picture? Turning the photo over on the table Philip discovered that on the back of the print Catherine had inscribed in red ink a note to him that answered both his questions: Hi Phil! My cousin Ron took this at the Cape last year. You like? Did he like? Yes, he liked. He more than liked. He lusted and the world would soon shun him because he did; that much he knew with metaphysical certainty.

Philip poured himself a fourth cup of coffee. He was alone this morning. Elaine, his wife, had gone to her office. It was so quiet in the apartment that Philip could hear the clock in the living room counting off toward noon. Cup replenished, Philip returned to the table where the photo lay. It seemed to pulsate like a living heart in the morning brightness. Unable to resist its allure Philip picked up the photo again. He examined it from a variety of perspectives: upside-down, sideways, east and west, near and far. From any angle Catherine radiated splendor and he wondered what he had gotten himself into this time.

In the photo Catherine was facing into the camera her mouth open in a smile of invitation. Honey-colored hair framed her face and fell to her breasts. Without willing it Philip found himself recalling the silkiness of her breasts. The memory sent a tremor of desire through him. A heart palpitation followed, a sensation he attributed not to the coffee burning in his gut, but to the self-loathing he carried within him—the price of his passion for the girl in the photograph. Even in this amateurish depiction the girl flaunted her beauty with all the poise she had acquired as an adolescent fashion model. Here was the mouth offered for tasting. Here was the deliciously-muscled thigh extended for a visual caress. Here was the sumptuous torso displayed for the beholder to stroke in fantasy. The girl knew how to do it all. The photo proclaimed what Philip had already discovered first-hand: this budded rose, mounted on her throbbing Harley also knew well how to enthrall the slavering lechers of the world among whom he counted himself. Yes, Catherine shone with the luster of young beauty. Yet in the photo was there not also a hint of fragility? Didn’t this depiction of her also insinuate that beauty must fade, love must wither, and rapture must crash in flames of regret?

To suppress further reflections along that melancholy line Philip finished his coffee and went into the study where his computer regarded him with the blank bewilderment of a disabled beast. Like so much else in Philip’s life the beast had crashed weeks earlier and he had left the wreckage where it lay. Philip would have to respond to Catherine’s note and photo in his own shaky hand. Accordingly, he rummaged through his desk in search of writing paper.

The desk was overflowing with the detritus of his congressional career: file-folders ringed with coffee stains, post-it notes from his secretary that he would never acknowledge, piles of newspaper clippings forwarded urgently, phone messages that he would never return, downloads from bloggers that some enraged someone thought he should read, abstracts of legislation that he would never examine, and correspondence from constituents that he would continue to ignore. Philip knew that his office in the Rayburn Building which he had not visited for weeks also teemed with evidence of a life speeding toward disaster. As for his district office, Philip hadn’t visited it since, he couldn’t remember when. Thus, his political life lay in shambles.

Amid the jumble on his desk Philip found a new file folder that Ilona, his faithful and long-suffering secretary had sent over together with her own handwritten entreaty that he please, please, please call her. Things are happening, she had written, that I need to talk about with you. See inside this folder: PLEASE. Momentarily curious, Philip peeked as instructed. The folder was overflowing with various pleas all from Shelley Brune, the Democrat Party’s State Chairman in New Jersey. Shelley was the man whose backing eighteen years earlier had secured for Philip Francis Parkman the Party’s nomination for congress in a newly-gerrymandered and thus safely Democrat district. As revealed in the folder’s contents Shelley was in a monumental rage about Philip’s neglect of office. Quickly, Philip scanned the latest of Shelley’s missives in which the Party Chairman expressed his outrage at Philip’s contempt for the Party by which Shelley meant himself. The furious note also contained a warning that Philip had better straighten out at once or he would face a primary election in which the Party would back another candidate. The Chairman finished with a demand that Philip return his phone calls without delay. Philip tossed the bulging file folder into an already-full wastebasket. It was Catherine who was on in his mind now not Shelley Brune.

At last Philip found a sheet of stationery that bore the seal of his office. Was he still entitled to use it? Well, why not? The voters hadn’t thrown him out yet. He began to write in ballpoint:

Dear Catherine,

I adore the picture you sent me. Thank you. You are so lovely you make my heart hurt. May I photograph you too? Just tell me when and I’ll come and take a thousand pictures of you, unless, of course, I’m in the loony bin, which is a distinct possibility because I’m most certainly crazy, dear C. Only a nut would adore you as I do. Not that adoring you is crazy in itself. No, no. You are divine. But when a forty-eight-year-old servant of the people (which is what a congressman is supposed to be after all) makes love to the still-young daughter of that congressman’s dearest friend that’s crazy. But what can I do? You have enslaved me. You are my drug. I have become addicted to you. When I hold you in my arms, Sweet C., I am connected to a universe where madness equals ecstasy.

Philip paused. Madness equals ecstasy. True, but was it not more than a little pretentious? He left it in anyway; Catherine wouldn’t notice.

There was much more he could add to this note to Catherine. He might tell his Siren-girl about the guilt that twisted his soul in the dawns that followed their nights together. He might tell her how the time apart from her thundered past him in a tumult of self-disgust and alcohol. He might write of the fury of his wife, poor Elaine, who knew nothing of his obsession (might he call it that, obsession?) with Catherine and thus raged every day against what she viewed as his irresponsible behavior toward the people who elected him to office. Despite it all Elaine still strove to love her bewildered husband God help her. He might even write to Catherine about the reality she refused to entertain: that the day of reckoning was coming, that their liaison was bound to be discovered and uncovered by someone, perhaps even her father. What kind of explosion would occur when the truth was learned that he was Catherine’s latest lover? Finally, he might tell his inamorata that he was already frying on the griddle of self-destruction for love of her. Love? Was he entitled to use that word to describe what he felt for her? Surely lechery was the more accurate term and loony lechery at that. And yet Philip could not deny that theirs was also a kind of love-story for he did love Catherine in his crook-back way, didn’t he? Or was that notion merely desperate sophistry from a guilty despoiler of young beauty?

Philip decided that he would not write to Catherine after all. How was he to explain his contaminated psyche to an eighteen-year-old seething with delight over the exhilaration she felt since her conquest of him? She wouldn’t understand what he might write anyway. She might even yawn and say beneath her breath whatever and toss his anguished apologia into the trash where all such anguish belongs when you are young, adorably beautiful, and know it. Thus, face-to-face once again with his reality Philip tossed his scribblings into the wastebasket. He would not complain to Catherine from his griddle of guilt. After all, what had she to do with it anyway?

Having imbibed sufficient coffee to re-ignite his brain always extravagantly focused on its own lunacy these days Philip went to the bar in the living room to begin the daily process of muffling his mental percussion with alcohol. He poured himself two ounces of straight vodka. He stood at the window and looked down at the traffic. Sipping his drink—how nicely it stung the tongue!—he found himself pondering yet again the mystery of his descent to the griddle. As always, in these reflective moods, he had no trouble tracing the route of his going down, the how of it. He could identify with certainty the time, the place, and the occasion of his first plunge towards the griddle. The time: four months ago in May. (Check!). The place: Aspen, Colorado. (Check!) The occasion of sin was the Siren-girl herself. (Check!) It was the why of the affair, the casus belli so to speak, that continued to perplex him all these weeks later. What was it in him—what weakness of spirit, disability of soul, disgust with self—that had rendered him so eager to dive into the morass? Such reflections on his slide to perdition always had to begin with the fact that he had reached a crisis point in his life back then.

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Philip had been re-elected in ’08 to his seventh term in the House in an historic election that put the pompous Obama into the White House and oh how weary he was of the never-ending media bombast over that event! The election had also granted Philip’s Party an almost virtual dictatorship over all three branches of the American government. Thus, Philip had realized very quickly that as a self-styled classic liberal in the Truman-Kennedy mold he could not subscribe to the seething ideology that now drove his Party’s fanatic progressive majority. Accordingly, while keeping his defection to himself until, he told himself, he could gather his courage to make it public, he had allowed his participation in the jubilant affairs of Party and government (much the same thing now) to dwindle to near zero.

In fact it was in the aftermath of his Party’s coup that Philip saw clearly that his final revulsion with the Party had reached the flood at last, but only after a long and painful process which had been in motion since the final years of the Clinton administration. For more than a decade he had watched in mounting horror as the Democrat Party to which he had devoted much of his adult life had gradually abandoned the liberal principles that he held dear such as unfettered speech, civil discourse, cultivation of common purpose, respect for opponents, truth as the ground of policy and had instead embraced a quasi-religious ideology that while espousing utopian visions actually promoted a brutal political tyranny (Party uber alles), adopted in the name of justice. Philip saw how his Party advanced divisive programs that pitted one segment of society against another all while trumpeting nostrums that under the banner of a spurious progressivism actually curtailed many forms of individual responsibility and liberty.

But what had most appalled Philip about the steady march of progressive theology within his Party was its devotion to the despotism of political correctness and diversity. It was clear to him that these doctrinal viruses which had already infected most of Western civilization were well on the way to paralyzing all effective political action even against the evil of terrorism.

In the aftermath of 9/11, for example, Philip had found himself in sympathy with the hated George W. Bush over the Iraq war. What else could any U.S. President have done, he wondered, other than strike out at a tyrant who boasted of his WMD’s especially in view of intelligence—however flawed after the fact—that indicated those weapons most likely existed? It was Bush’s job as Commander in Chief to safeguard the American people, was it not? Thus, Philip thought, the man had acted in accord with the information available just as FDR had when he ordered the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII. Once the Iraq war had begun, Philip had considered it necessary to see it through. His progressive colleagues, however, had regarded him as a traitor to the Party because he, almost alone among them, actually knew something of the history of Islam’s centuries-old struggle to destroy Western civilization, and thus had voted in opposition to the progressives’ blind dogma.

When the Party had achieved its triumphant ascendancy in the ‘08 election, therefore, Philip had seen it as the apotheosis of the progressive faith and he was finally convinced that his Party was now irrevocably committed to a statist religion that claimed for its priestly elite the right even the duty to prescribe how lesser citizens should live for their own good. It was a creed that Philip was unable to profess especially under the aegis of the pompous ideologue Obama whose stated aim was to redistribute the wealth of America.

The Inauguration had deepened even further Philip’s disgust with the political hysteria which had seized the country. The new President seemed to Philip to ooze a self-righteousness that only the most sanctimonious of hypocrites ever achieve. Obama was also bathed in the adoration of the media. Hosannas had flown from the lips of the elitists who seemed to have found their messiah. Where, Philip had wondered was the decent humility of Truman? Lost in a progressive fog.

Thus, disillusioned and heartsick over the abandonment of principles he revered Philip admitted that he no longer had the stomach for public service as he used to call it in the era of his zeal. Yet, to his self-disgust, he also had discovered that he could not summon the will to resign his seat as honor demanded. Instead, in what he would later view as a first step into moral inanition, he continued to swab himself with the comfortable perks available to a member of congress and continued to dull his heart and mind with drink. He had clung to his office despising his weakness all the while. To complicate matters further, Elaine and Philip had arrived at a point in their marriage when neither of them could comprehend the other’s needs, nor did it seem possible that they could help each other even if they wanted to do so. Nevertheless they persisted in holding onto the broken bones of their love hoping for a miracle to knit up the shattered skeleton of their once-happy union. Moreover, throughout the critical period just before the advent of Catherine, Philip had given up his life-long struggle to achieve understanding and belief in God. It no longer mattered to him whether God existed or did not. The world, he had concluded, was a mystery and always would be. And that was that.

Caught in the confluence of these streams of nihilism and having forsaken both God and politics Philip found himself terrified by the prospect of empty days ahead and of a meaningless end to a meaningless life at the finish. It was at this juncture of despair and befuddlement that Catherine’s father, Harold—Philip’s long-time friend and former Washington mentor—invited him to spend an interlude at his vacation home in Aspen.

Tall, thin, beak-nosed, bald except for a fringe of gray over his ears, horn-rimmed glasses framing melted-chocolate eyes, Harold—twelve years older than Philip, and a loud convert to the progressive creed—was, in fact, one of the somewhat-lesser luminaries of the Washington social scene. As an Assistant Secretary of State, however, and married to the heiress of a real estate fortune whose money he dispensed freely Harold was usually on the A-list for the top D.C. events. He had contributed heavily to the Obama campaign in the conviction that an imperiled country could only benefit from a Messianic dispensation of vague hope and even vaguer change. Whenever Philip had ventured to point out some of the more cultish shibboleths floating in Obama’s political flatulence, Harold would only respond: But the man is wonderful!

Philip, realizing he couldn’t punch any holes in Harold’s adoration, for Harold was clearly infatuated as were millions of other white liberals who, bent under a self-assigned load of guilt for the historic crime of slavery for which neither they nor many of their ancestors were in any way to blame, truly believed it possible to purge their guilt-ridden souls by casting their votes for a black man. Never mind that their favorite’s campaign for office consisted chiefly of bombast and bamboozling, he was in progressive’s eyes both black and brilliant and those were qualifications enough. Accordingly, Harold was impervious to reason when it came to his messiah and so Philip had given up the effort to point out to Harold his savior’s feet of clay. Instead he consoled himself with recalling that Harold had also adored the Clintons until the advent of Obama had showed him his error. Philip hoped Harold might eventually detect a similar error in his judgment of his new idol. But Philip doubted that anything short of political or national disaster could ever undermine Harold’s love for his lord, for Harold had not only converted to the progressive faith, he preached its tenets with the fervor of a religious fanatic. Harold had bridled when Philip had pointed out to him this religious aspect.

I have no religion, Harold had rejoined.

In fact Harold, though born of a Jewish mother, was always eager to mock Judaism. He was even more avid to make it clear that he despised Israel as an aggressor state.

Philip, however, had challenged Harold’s claim to be irreligious. Your religion is progressive politics.

That’s hardly a religion, Harold declared.

Philip had persisted. No? The desire to create a heaven is certainly religious. To cling to absurd dogma in the face of contrary evidence is certainly religious. To view any opposition as evil that’s religious. To condemn the likes of me as an apostate that’s surely religious.

I’m just trying to save you, Philip, Harold said.

There you go. Religious, said Philip.

Oh, forget it, said Harold. You’re just lost.

Religious, retorted Philip.

Philip was also prone to nettle Harold with examples of progressive wrong-headedness both past and present. Among samples of such wrong-headedness he cited progressive blind support for Marxism and the Soviet Union; progressive certainty about global warming; and the progressive willingness to blame America for most of the world’s ills. Harold answered Philip’s charges only with silence and sneers.

Despite the increasing friction that marred their relations with the advent of the Obama presidential campaign, both Philip and Harold shrank from causing a final fracture of their now-sticky friendship. Philip’s unwillingness to do so stemmed from nostalgic memories of Harold’s past kindnesses. He could not forget that Harold had taken him under his wing when Philip had first arrived on the Hill as a freshman congressman. Harold did so not because they were friends but chiefly because he and Philip shared the same Party affiliation, though Harold had later joked that he had done his good turn only because, as a new member of the House, Philip had looked too stupid to find his way to the Hill on his own. Philip had soon discovered that barbs of this sort flowed regularly from Harold’s lips in Washington. Despite Harold’s often-caustic personality, however, he and Philip had developed a new-uneasy friendship one in which Harold assumed a sometimes testy avuncular role while Philip was cast as the bemused neophyte in need of uncle’s guidance. It was a role that Philip had soon outgrown though he continued to play his part when necessary for the sake of his so-called friendship with Harold.

Thus, when Harold had invited Philip to spend a week in Aspen with him, his heiress wife Colleen, and his precocious daughter, Catherine, Philip in the midst of personal turmoil over his political apostasy accepted with alacrity. Career obligations kept Elaine in Washington so Philip had traveled alone to Harold’s house in Colorado. Phillip’s intention had been to use this respite in the mountains to decide a future course for himself and his life. Instead, he had succumbed to the basest temptation in the lexicon of mid-life sins: he had made love to his host’s teenage daughter.

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After the fact and in his muddled mental state Philip often asked himself if he had seduced Catherine or if she had seduced him. Now, months later, he still couldn’t decide. But he knew it didn’t matter. The fact was that the burden of the wrong lay with him for he had brought to the coupling some knowledge however chaotic of the world, while Catherine seemed to have brought only a ravishing beauty’s raw confidence in the power of her supreme beauty. Looking back on that tumultuous event, Philip could not help believing that he had cautioned himself, thinking I must not. But the perfume of the girl’s skin and the smooth contours of her young body had turned I must not into I must and be damned. Reckless lust—another name for lunacy—had murdered reason.

Nevertheless, Philip often told himself after the fact that he had never sought to excuse his fall by blaming it on the demons that were then and were still whirling their dervish-dance in his being. From the first moments following his transgression he had recognized his culpability. But why after his first encounter with Catherine hadn’t he renounced his infamy at once whatever the cost? Why hadn’t he fallen on his knees before Harold and before his own faithful Elaine as well, confessed his indiscretion, and begged for mercy?

Even in the immediate after-panic of his first offense Philip had realized that unless he purged himself of this wrongdoing at once a black hole of lechery would suck out of him any store of judgment and decency he still possessed. Yet, instead of veering away from that black hole he had hurled himself into it. With his conscience inoperative Philip had embarked with Catherine on an odyssey of sex under the very noses of her parents and his own blameless wife. Why? And why did he now continue to pursue this lunacy with the blind ardor of the obsessed despite the guilt of betrayal that gnawed at his soul? Perhaps, Philip often thought, he did so because he secretly longed for self-destruction. Or perhaps, inane rationalization!, it was because he hoped that if he plunged far enough into iniquity the blazing enormity of his offense would somehow have burned his soul clean by the time he emerged again. In his more lucid moments, however, Philip acknowledged that such convoluted musings amounted to no more than self-indulgent chicanery. In truth he knew full well that his sexual journey with Catherine had only landed him on the griddle of shame and selfish desire and that now he must fry there until Judgment Day which would probably dawn any time now.

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As always when Philip reviewed the course of his descent to the griddle it ended in bafflement. Thus, standing bemused at his living-room window on that sunny morning of Catherine’s digital photo Philip once again abandoned the effort to account for the lunacy of his actions and his ongoing ardor for Catherine. Instead he finished his vodka and poured another. With a sigh he sprawled on the couch and opened the break-page of the Post. There, to his astonishment, he found an item reporting that the House Ethics Committee planned to investigate him for fundraising irregularities in his recent election campaign. Philip’s heart thumped as he read further. The article said that his former congressional aide, Matt Vernon, a gossipy Washington pro whom Philip had hired but never trusted and whom he had fired (or had Matt quit?) two months earlier was cooperating with the inquiry. According to the Post, Matt, a man so pretentious that Philips’s office staff (when he still had an office staff) used to call him Mount Vernon behind his back was alleging that Philip had solicited contributions from foreign interests and had then converted the funds to his personal use. Appalled, Philip thought: How preposterous these charges; who would believe such crap? But then he reminded himself that, as illustrated in the last national election, conspiracy theorists, no matter how absurd their assertions, continually spewed such poison successfully from coast to coast. Nothing was now too ridiculous to repel either the media or the populace.

By the time Philip finished reading the Post account indignation had morphed into doubt. Yes, the story seemed just vicious nonsense. But was it really so ridiculous? After all, Philip had been frying on the greasy griddle for so long now that he had indeed neglected most of the business of his political life. What letters might he have signed in his moral coma? What disjointed phone calls might he have made at the urging of Matt or some other? What incriminating emails might have flown from his computer over his name? Maybe he was in trouble. But why hadn’t he heard about this investigation before now? Why did he have to read about it in the busybody Post?

Philip’s wrath quickly subsided, however, for he realized that his secretary, the ever-efficient Ilona, probably had alerted him and he had just as probably ignored her warning. Philip scanned the article again. His photo accompanied the type. It was the picture of a genuine doofus, campaign grin and waving arms from the days when he could still make himself believe inanities such as hope and change. Suddenly he found himself wondering why, in a world gone mad with hatred and terror and murderous theology, the Post would choose to devote space to such a goof? He knew the answer. He had long ago learned that it was idle to wonder at the compulsion of the media to suck muck. But, he wondered, had it always been so?

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Philip had spent fifteen years in the news business before succumbing to the political virus. In that era journalists, himself certainly one of them, thought the news, ideally, as the recounting of significant events related as truthfully as possible. That sounded corny. It wasn’t cool to talk of obligation. Yet that’s what it was after all, partly anyway. The rest was a more esoteric need: the reporter’s need. The need to know. To get the story.

Although Philip could not deny that during his career he had often acted callously and always held strong opinions he had never (of this he was certain) used his accounts of the news to destroy an opponent or to promote his own beliefs both common practices among the self-righteous hypocrites who filled every media niche today. How had it happened? How had journalistic standards tilted so radically away from attempts at objectivity (of course never completely attained) and toward ideology as the criterion for reporting news?

Philip’s own (theoretical) answer to that question was rooted in the fact that contemporary journalists like virtually everyone else had been indoctrinated from their earliest years with the dominant dogma of the utopian left. They had also persuaded themselves that they had a duty given their self-described intellectual superiority to spread the gospel whatever the cost in personal integrity and debased news. Well, thought Philip, it is what it is.

Usually, he was able to ignore or discount the mush that passed for information. But it was difficult to do so when the mush was about you. Sighing, Philip tried to console himself with the thought that the Post story might blow over or get buried under the fallout from muckier scandals beyond the Beltway. But he knew that species of hope was mere whistling past the graveyard. Clearly, when the hand of retribution came down on him (as it was bound to do) he would be charged not only with sexual depravity (a charge he certainly deserved) but also with political corruption (a charge he most emphatically did not deserve.) The future ignominy was inescapable for as much as he dreaded it disgrace, warranted and unwarranted, was his destiny.

The phone began to ring in the bedroom. This phone was Elaine’s private line and thus safe to answer. No slathering reporter would be panting at the other end. Philip went to the bedroom, drink in hand, and cradled the instrument against his ear.

Phil? It was Elaine herself calling from her office on the Hill. "Did you see the Post story about you?"

I did, yes. Philip felt that his voice remained steady, or steady enough, and his façade was still in place. Unflappable Phil, he thought.

Elaine said, Phil is there anything to this claptrap?

Claptrap? How loyal of her to call it that. Forcing bravado, he said into the phone, Nope. It’s all bogus. The Minority’s goons are just playing games. If the Minority were goons, Philip thought, the Majority, at least when it came to the apostate gentleman from New Jersey, were ravenous inquisitors.

Elaine was not reassured by Philip’s bravado. I wish I had your confidence, Phil. I can’t help thinking you’ve been so screwed up lately you might have done something you don’t even remember.

Nothing to worry about, Elaine, I’m clean.

He was faking a certitude he didn’t feel.

Okay, Phil. Listen, I have to be out late tonight.

Me, too, said Philip.

In fact he had arranged a tryst with Catherine.

They hung up.

Returning to the living room Philip poured himself another vodka. He didn’t want to think any more about the implications of the Post story. Que sera, sera. Instead, he found himself reflecting on Elaine, specifically on the changes she recently had made in herself after the twenty years of their marriage. Elaine was now writing a twice-a-week column for her syndicate. It was already running in twenty-nine papers in the U.S. and Canada. She wrote her columns with dead-on political correctness about relationships, society, and women. Elaine had also begun appearing on talk shows. She had been impressive on an Oprah epic about incest. No one looking at Elaine would ever guess that she was forty-five. She was still lovely—black hair and eyes so dark they seemed all pupil. Soiled as he was by doubt and infidelity with a teen siren, he had never stopped loving Elaine, even though their love-making had dwindled to occasional forays which only need or memory could ignite. Paradoxically, Philip found it a struggle to make love in a bed soaked with the sweat of betrayal and deception. Did this fact, he wondered, signify that he still possessed some moral sense?

Although Elaine seldom mentioned it anymore, Philip knew that his failure to scale the heights in the political arena (her euphemism for the intra-party knife fights that so often determined who would, and who would not, wield power) had greatly disappointed her. When Philip and Elaine first arrived in Washington late in Clinton’s second term, Elaine had harbored lofty ambitions for both of them to become a power couple as the phrase was then. That failure had mystified her but Philip’s self-immolation, as Elaine called it, over recent months had both appalled and infuriated her.

Not long ago, during one of their nights of booze and bickering, Elaine had said to Philip, I think I still love you Phil, but why should I let myself become a casualty of your craziness? Don’t I have a right to a life? Why should I go down with you?

Why indeed? Philip had wondered but not uttering the words aloud.

A week ago Philip had clipped one of Elaine’s columns because it contained a paragraph that seemed to express her predicament as an ambitious woman stuck with a deficient spouse:

When one of the partners in a marriage begins to falter, to stagnate, or to break down, what should be the responsibility of the still-strong partner? This is often a dilemma faced by women who only begin to achieve their full growth in what used to be called ‘the middle years’. Often these late bloomers outstrip their marriage partners, and thus, inadvertently, contribute to a diminution of the partner. The situation becomes all the more painful, if the growing partner still cares for the weaker one. Frequently the situation resolves itself into a single, cruel question: Survival, or love?

Of course Philip understood the basic law within the Washington bubble: survival trumps love every time. Thus he was sure that when Elaine learned of his entanglement with Catherine, as she surely would sooner or later, she would leap to turn up the flame under the greasy griddle—a fate, Philip acknowledged, that he amply deserved.

Later that day, while shaving and showering for that evening’s rendezvous with Catherine, Philip reflected on the fact that although he was now well into middle age and his face showed the ravages of both drink and disappointment there were some women of his acquaintance (other than Catherine) who still found him attractive. This was a fact that pleased him for he was still in possession of his politician’s vanity. He was six feet tall. He still had most of his once-blond hair now turning brown and sections of which had already showed signs of turning gray. Philip smiled recollecting with pleasure that Catherine had once described his hair as brownish-blondish-grayish, very sexy. Catherine had also described his eyes as gray as heavy rain. He liked that. Gray hair. Gray eyes. Even his chest hair was turning gray. Looking into the mirror, he saw that he was becoming a Gray Man.

Guilt, vodka, and life on the greasy griddle—these would make any man gray, Philip thought, and turn his brain to mush. But Catherine, God help him, thought he was gorgeous. And cool. A cool, gray, man. Vanity, he told himself, thy name is Philip.

Two: Non-feasance, Mal-feasance, Dumb-feasance

Philip and Catherine lay together in the music room of her parents’ house. A cyclopean flat screen television set—sound turned off—provided their light. Harold and Colleen, the unsuspecting parents, had gone to Kennedy Center to hear the touring Boston Pops