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  “Then he’d say, ‘Marvin Rosenblatt?’ Just like that. ‘Rosenblatt?’ Putting the accent on that syllable that way, you know? Like ‘Not just anybody, but Marvin Rosenblatt?’ Incredulous. Shocked. But shocked in an intellectual way. Like if someone said when you combine orange juice and rubbing alcohol in a blender, you can create cold fusion. That kind of shocked. Like ‘Really? Orange juice? Cold fusion?’ He’d go, ‘You, Linda LeBrecque, are having an affair with that guy Marvin Rosenblatt, the one I met at that cocktail party at the Algonquin Club?’ He’d repeat that a few times. Then he’d go— Well, it’s what he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t get angry. Or sad. He wouldn’t storm upstairs or out of the house. He’d be, like, totally fascinated. He’d want to study it. In a scientific way. Like ‘This is so interesting. I need to understand this. This is fascinating—why a woman who could have me, who in fact has me, would choose to sleep with Marvin Rosenblatt!’ He wouldn’t be hurt at all. ‘Hon,’ he’d say, ‘do you find Marvin Rosenblatt physically attractive? Is it his mind, do you find his mind compelling? I met the guy once, and he talked about revisions to the materiality standard in the SEC regulations for half an hour.’ He’d say something like that. It makes me really angry, how he’d say Marvin’s name.”

  A melody from Schubert was playing softly on the Bose speakers. Dr. Schadenfrau listened to it for a moment, digesting what she’d heard.

  “Why do you think that makes you angry?”

  “Because it’s so disrespectful of Marvin.”

  “We’re discussing how you imagine he would say the name?”

  “Yes, of course. Because he doesn’t know. But he would. If he knew.”

  “But he hasn’t actually been disrespectful of the name?” Dr. Schadenfrau was confused and struggling to understand. It was important to get at the root of this anger, so she found herself pressing the patient rather more than usual.

  “Because he doesn’t know about Marvin. But he would if—” Linda paused, frowned. This wasn’t coming out quite right. “It’s how he would act if he knew about the affair. If he knew about the affair, he would say Marvin’s name in that kind of mocking, disrespectful way. Which makes me very angry. It would be very disrespectful of . . . of Marvin.”

  “You’re angry because you think your husband would be disrespectful of the man with whom you’re having an affair,” Dr. Schadenfrau repeated slowly.

  “Well, when you say it like that . . .” Linda’s voice trailed off. She felt that Dr. Schadenfrau had missed the point somehow.

  The doctor added more notes. This matter, she could see, ran deep.

  Linda went on, “If you might mention that Marvin Rosenblatt has made himself an extremely successful career, and that he has earned the high regard of some extremely distinguished corporations who trust him implicitly for advice on matters of the highest importance to their boards of directors, and that he earns a healthy seven-figure salary—earns by the sweat of his brow—if you mentioned that to Mr. Phineas Adams Brubaker, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “He wouldn’t care.”

  “He wouldn’t?” Dr. Schadenfrau drew the question out to express the appropriate disapproval of such carelessness.

  “Not at all. Not in the slightest. A million-four a year. Big deal. ‘Is he funny? Does he raise goats?’ ”

  The doctor looked up from her notes. “I’m sorry. Goats?”

  Linda sighed, rolled her eyes. The matter of the goats was another thing about Fritz that was just so vexing. “There’s this man Jim Feeney in Dover with these goats,” she began. “This very unfortunate man who’s some kind of back-to-the-earth type or something, I don’t know, but he wants to draw attention to himself by having these rather disgusting goats that he keeps in his yard, and the neighbors quite rightly are upset, and the town’s been trying to do something about it because it’s not appropriate, you know? I mean, Dover is a family community. There are children. You can’t just have . . . goats.”

  She made a face, as though a goat had entered the airy Victorian parlor in Wellesley Hills and started to nibble on the roses tastefully arranged in the blue glass vase. “Well, anyway, you know what Fritz says about this? We get a perfectly decent call from a concerned neighbor asking us to help with a petition to address this problem, and do you know what he says?

  “He says, ‘What’s wrong with that? Jim lives on Farm Street.’ And I was, well, Dr. Schadenfrau, I can tell you that I was quite shocked and I said, ‘Excuse me, Fritz, we’re talking about a health issue here, we’re talking about a safety issue. What does the man’s address have to do with it?’ And Fritz launches on this tirade, I mean a tirade that had me quite concerned about Fritz having a number of issues, and having repressed a lot of hostility, and I’ve been telling him for years about how he ought to think about a little therapy for himself, which of course strikes him as the most absurd thing in the world, I mean, how could Mr. Fritz Brubaker, for whom everything is so easy, how could you suggest that it might help him a little bit to consider some of his own issues and lower himself to a little therapy, oh no, not him, and—”

  Dr. Schadenfrau interrupted gently. “What was . . . what was the business about goats again?”

  “Oh well, the usual thing with him. How phony the town is. How false and phony everything is. He’s always going on about that.”

  Dr. Schadenfrau felt there was a thread here, even one that could be important clinically. But she’d lost it. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t quite follow.”

  “Fritz says they want to have a street called Farm Street and pretend it’s all country-cute farm country, but as soon as a guy on Farm Street actually has a farm animal, there has to be a petition. So he says, ‘I’m circulating a “Save the Goats” petition! If they want to call it Farm Street, then they have to let Jim have his goats!’ ”

  The Schubert proceeded diminuendo. The doctor made careful notes. Linda paused, wrinkling her brow. “What were we talking about—before the goats?”

  “I, I’m not sure,” Dr. Schadenfrau confessed.

  “Oh, I remember. Fritz would prefer the guy with the goats. That was it. It wouldn’t matter to him that a man like Marvin Rosenblatt has worked very hard to accomplish professional success. But with some man who has smelly goats and is trying to cause trouble, Fritz would feel much more affinity.”

  “Than with his wife’s lover.”

  “Right. Well, no, that’s not the point.”

  “No, of course not. I understand perfectly,” said Dr. Schadenfrau, nodding to validate her patient’s correct and appropriate rejection of this juvenile behavior. “Yes, this kind of thing can be upsetting,” she said kindly. It was therapeutic, she felt, and important to the course of therapy—particularly to a long course of therapy—that the patient feel some validation.

  The doctor smiled beatifically, her end-of-session smile, and then she leaned forward with the earnest but formal end-of-session lean. The session had drawn to a close. “The twenty-first, then, same time?”

  “Oh, is it an hour already?”

  6 OLD NUMBER 31

  FROM THE DEEP-TUFTED LEATHER of the chair in his sumptuous corner office in the Russell Senate Office Building, the senior senator from the great state of Michigan stared out the window at the dome of the U.S. Capitol, a perfect tit gleaming in the blackness. It rose up proudly in the September night, brilliantly illuminated, taunting an old, tired, fat man with its saucy whiteness and erect nipple. He sighed. These days Jack Oldcastle saw taunts all the time. The nasty, wrenching cramps in his gut taunted him, the way he wheezed taunted him, that blotchy purple stuff on his belly and around the corners of his eyes taunted him, the damned corn on his big toe taunted every step, the investment banker the Republicans were going to run against him in two years (the sonofabitch with the thirty-two-inch waist and the $100 mil in the bank)—he taunted him, too. That gal Nell had lined up for him two weeks ago Thursday, he knew she’d taunted him the moment he left Nell’s hou
se in Georgetown. Even the U.S. Capitol, his home for thirty years, seemed to have joined the chorus line of taunters. “Hey, Oldcastle, you fat old fool! You bag of pudding!” it seemed to be saying in the September night.

  For tonight there was a venomous new taunt. A single sheet of paper rested on the dark green leather inlay of the desk, a piece of pugnacity bearding him from the blotter surface. It had penetrated his sanctum, and it lay there braying at him. Hey Oldcastle—please take notice! Hey Oldcastle—if you fail to appear, judgment may be entered against you! Hey Oldcastle, you sack of shit, we’re talking termination here!

  The nerve of this paper. Dealing like this with the senior senator from the state of Michigan? Without even a telephone call or a warning? (Well, all right, the guy claimed he called a couple of times, but Christ, do you expect a United States senator to be available to take every goddamn call that comes in from every tin-pot landlord?) And now, to drop this in the mail to him, where any aide might open it—and one in fact had. To send it off to him as though he weren’t the senior senator from Michigan! As if he weren’t Old Number 31!

  An eviction notice! Was he, Jack Oldcastle, some mug on the street—someone you could hire a seedy solo-shop lawyer to evict, simply because he might be a month or so behind on the goddamn rent for his Washington apartment? Well, all right, a couple of months, but did he have time to read the mail from these rent grubbers when he was busy doing the people’s business? And we weren’t exactly talking luxury living here. It wasn’t like they paid you in rubies to be a United States senator. Oldcastle had to maintain a place in Lansing and a place in D.C. The divorce had creamed him, of course, Dolly had just cleaned out all the accounts with that. And now this—what if the press got ahold of it? The fact was, he was a bit short right now. There had been some club dues to pay, almost a year’s worth, in fact, and Dolly’s divorce guy in Lansing was a human shop-vac: all the guy did was whine and suck money out of you. He would run to the papers in a heartbeat if Oldcastle missed a payment.

  There it sat, the feisty demand, threatening him from his own desk in the privacy of his own sanctum. Threatening Jack Oldcastle, Unsung Hero trophy winner, Old Number 31! Distracting him from the people’s business! Well, he’d have to talk to Ralph Moldy about it. Ralph—or Rafe, as the aide preferred—was his chief of staff. He was a Boy Scout about campaign finance, which could be a problem. The guy was fastidious as hell, like with that Rafe business—calling himself “Rafe” as though he were some goddamn English baronet when his name had an l in it. He probably squats to pee, Oldcastle thought. But he could also get shit done. RafeRalph would have to get this particular shit done, and quick.

  How had this happened to the winner of the 1959 Michigan State Unsung Hero trophy, a legend of the Michigan State gridiron? (Well, a letterman, anyway. And he had that trophy up on his bookcase.) A decorated marine (well, a graduate of boot camp at Parris Island); a giant in Congress (and out of it, for that matter). He was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He was a senior senator. He was—Oldcastle caught sight of his face, reflected in the glass below the dome—a . . . really fat old guy.

  These days Oldcastle caught sight of himself in a mirror only by accident. He wasn’t merely plump anymore, wasn’t portly, wasn’t a big-boned man with a joe, like you might forgive in a respectable ex-jock. That thing around the middle wasn’t just a beer gut. Jack Oldcastle was a goddamn hillock.

  He sat alone at the desk, the pale light beneath the lamp’s dark green Tiffany glass illuminating the leather on the desktop and throwing the shrill letter into pearl-gray contrast, as though it were an actor about to give a soliloquy, a raucous stage villain. Sad to say, this sanctum was the one place on earth that felt like home anymore. Dolly had taken the house. The apartment in Northwest Washington they wanted to throw him out of? If it weren’t for the scandal, they could have the sonofabitch. They could have the stained beige carpet, the walls decorated in modern American motel room, the couch with sprung springs and the rest of the rented veneer furniture. They could have the single frying pan on the stove, with its quarter inch of old bacon grease. They could have the fridge with its half bottle of capers and the jars of pickled herrings and olives, the pizza boxes with ancient slabs of congealed dough and cheese fat curled into Finnish sandals. They could even have the goddamn fifth of vodka in the freezer. (It was almost empty, anyway.) If it weren’t for the press, he’d say good riddance to all of it. Sure, there had been some financial problems. Those REIT investments he’d made—the ones the bankers promised him were a sure thing—he might as well have set fire to the money. The snake developers who’d gotten him into those shopping-center deals in Wayne and Pontiac, they’d diluted him down to a sliver before selling the shopping centers for a killing. These were the same bastards for whom he’d greased a few skids on brownfield permits with the EPA. Frankly, his club tab was killing him. He couldn’t risk getting cut out of there, so he had to keep that one vaguely in sight of break-even.

  No, this sanctum was his home. It was ornate, with its oak paneling and oxblood leather couches, its plush red carpet, its flags and burled walnut desk. On the office walls were pictures—all those pictures of young Oldcastle the fire-breather, the podium-pounding Oldcastle, the stentorian Oldcastle, Oldcastle shaking Johnson’s hand, and Tip O’Neill’s, and Carter’s; Oldcastle with the English prime minister, Oldcastle with Anwar Sadat, Oldcastle with Kennedy and Cuomo and that idiot Clinton.

  He took inventory of the photographs, searching them, as he did most nights, with the watery eyes of an old lover. Old election-night shots, shots of Oldcastle and Dolly and the kids (dutiful Dolly, always that pinched, forced smile, never once looking like she could loosen up and enjoy an evening), shots of the old gang, Oldcastle and Ned Poins, old Buddy Bardolph, a party at Ned’s sister Nell’s. Lots of shots of the Gad’s Hill Society. Photos of Lancaster, too. Oldcastle and Lancaster on the sixteenth green at Gad’s Hill, when the president was still a kid and Oldcastle was still handsome, before his face had mottled—before sagging jowls, before his proud nose exploded like a yeasty muffin (before liver spots, for Chrissakes), before his eyes got so yellow and rheumy, before the blotches began showing up on his belly, before neck paunch and extra chins and the massive gut and the blubbery buttocks and the trouser-straining thighs that rubbed so hard that he had to waddle sideways.

  There again was the Christmas shot, 1974. Oldcastle before Dolly left him and the kids moved up and out. The kids . . . hadn’t had a word from any of them in over a year. Dolores, with her lawyer husband and faux château in Grosse Pointe, never called anymore. Butch, the ski bum in Aspen (or was it Steamboat?), he hadn’t heard from in years. The oldest son, John Jr., a fancy investment banker on Wall Street with a big spread in the Hamptons, you’d have thought there might be some gratitude for all his father had done. Maybe a stock tip or two, getting him in on one of those IPOs, anything. But no.

  The senator felt a shooting pain in his gut, grimaced as he looked at his watch: nearly nine P.M. He’d been getting more of these pains, but it was time for a drink. He shot a furtive look at the doorway—empty—then swiveled around to the credenza and opened the rather cleverly disguised fridge to withdraw the Stoli. Jesus, how’d it get down to a quarter bottle? He’d have to get that stocked up again. He fished a glass out of the drawer and poured himself one. You could do only so much of the people’s business in one day.

  Had to be careful, though. The doctors had found ulcers and were driving him crazy about the drinking. That goddamn Moldy was a petulant wet nurse, always materializing with a look of earnest concern, always speaking so correctly. Oldcastle glanced furtively over at the doorway again—still empty—then took a hit of the vodka. He felt the happy fire, felt the warmth crawl down his throat, tickle his breastbone, and spread like a blanket across his chest. He took another drink and smiled. That felt better, more . . . fortified. The whiny lawyer letter could fuck itself. He looked up at the white tit taunting him through h
is window.

  “And you can fuck yourself, too!”

  “Senator?”

  “Oh, not you, for Chrissakes, Moldy!”

  The senator’s senior staffer had materialized like the ghost of Banquo, right in the office doorway that a second ago had been empty. He stood there regarding the great man with a look of polite concern.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Jesus, you surprised me! Don’t you ever knock?”

  “Sorry, sir. You know what the doctor was saying about—”

  “I know exactly what the pissant doctors are saying, Rafe. Don’t start with what the doctors are saying. You look like you could use a drink yourself.”

  “Yes, Senator. But no, thank you. I was about to check out for the evening. I thought I’d drop in to see if you were all . . . if you needed anything.”

  Oldcastle grimaced and settled back into his chair. He spoke conspiratorially. “Well, actually, I could use your help with a small matter, Rafe.”

  “Yes, Senator, certainly.”

  “C’mon in here and sit down, for Chrissakes.” The senator frowned at his aide with the precisely trimmed beard and the receding hairline. He watched the young man walk across the office and take his seat. Goddamn gays. So correct and formal all the time. So fastidious. (And that Rafe business!) So goddamn helpful. You had to abuse them—they wanted it that way. Some kind of deep-seated psychological thing.

  Oldcastle went on, “There’s this misunderstanding with my landlord I need you to take care of.”

  “Your landlord? Ah, what kind of misunderstanding, sir?”

  Oldcastle waved at the notice with his fat fingers and brushed it across the desk, not deigning it the respect of picking it up. It lay there under the green glass of the dim desk lamp.

  Moldy craned his neck to read it. “Ah, if I can ask, how much do you owe, Senator?”

  “How the Christ do I know, Rafe? I have the people of Michigan to worry about, not some real estate developer in Northwest Washington! It’s probably a couple of months behind. Three, four months, maybe, I don’t know, maybe more. It’s been a goddamn busy time, as you know.”