Hardscrabble Road(74)

“I used to go on those sorts of vacations when I was little,” Alison said. “We had a trailer, though. We didn’t go to motels. We’d drive down to Cape Hatteras and hook up and spend the week there, and then we’d drive home. It really wasn’t awful, you know. I found it very enjoyable. I know my parents did, too.”

“They wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much if they’d realized what they didn’t have. Do you know how I spent my vacations when I was little?”

“No.”

“At my father’s house in Rome. The first time I had dinner with the Pope, I was six years old.”

“I don’t think I’d have much liked having dinner with the Pope when I was six,” Alison said, “and it has nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t Catholic.”

“We weren’t Catholic, either. My father was in the diplomatic corps. Which means I grew up around very rich people without being a very rich person myself. They are what they are, you know. They’re not stupid. They know they have to pay off at least a little if they want to stay in power, or in business. So they pay off, just a little. But never more than just a little. And they present the suckers with two options: a Democratic Party that’s working for them and pretending to be trying to take care of the people they hurt, and a Republican Party that’s working for them and pretending to care about people with ‘traditional values.’ They distract Democratic voters with puny-assed programs that won’t even begin to address the problems created by global capitalism, never mind the yawning chasm of inequality it creates. They distract the Republican voters with God, guns, and gays. They despise everybody who doesn’t have a bank account the size of Wisconsin and they always win. And the suckers get themselves all worked up about Roe v. Wade or immigration law, and never even see it happening.”

“And you go on CNN and say all these things, do you?”

“Yes, well,” Jig Tyler said. “It’s good for their image to present at least some opposing views. That way, they can’t be accused of censorship. And they always get somebody like me to present them. I’m the sort of person people who aren’t rich think of as rich. I’ve got a cushy job. I’m an Ivy League intellectual. I can be presented as completely out of touch, and nobody they’d really want to listen to, so mostly they don’t listen.”

“But you do the shows anyway.”

“I do, yes,” Jig Tyler said. “There’s always the chance that there are one or two people ready to hear. They’d think you were rich, too. Do you know that?”

“Yes,” Alison said, “I do. My family does, even now. They refer to my time in college as when I went off to that rich kids’ school.”

Jig Tyler stood up. “I’m sorry to have barged in on you. I just thought you’d better be forewarned. It’s going to get fairly nuts before it quiets down. I thought you might not be used to that.”

“I’m not.”

“If I were you, I’d be careful not to make any statements to the press,” Jig said. “Oh, I’m going to, and probably most of the people on that list are going to, but you’ve never done it before. You’ve got no idea how to handle reporters’ questions. You don’t want to say anything that will land you in court on a murder charge when all you’ve done wrong is mistake the press for people who are willing to listen.”

He stood up and looked around, at her bookshelves, at her filing cabinet, at the books stacked on the floor. Alison didn’t think she’d ever realized how truly tall and thin he was, cadaverous, like a skeleton in clothes.

“You’ve got interesting books,” he said.

Then he ambled out of the room, as inexplicably, Alison thought, as he’d wandered in. She watched him for as long as she could see him, then turned back to CNN and the story about Ellen Harrigan and her list. She had the kind of uneasy feeling she got when she ate too much dairy at dinner. She wasn’t allergic to dairy, exactly, but beyond a certain point it made her queasy and restless. She had the kind of thought she hadn’t had in many years, the kind that used to drive her crazy when her parents had it, the kind that had made her early life a long wasteland of waiting to get out of where she was and into a place where people understood books and ideas and everything that went with them.

She wondered what Jig Tyler did for entertainment.

She immediately felt stupid, and awkward, and uneducated. She went back to CNN, and to wondering if Roger had let her off the hook on purpose, because he would have known it would make her look bad.