“You look good,” he said. “You always look younger than I expect you to.”
“Well, that’s good, I suppose. You look miserable. Is that because of our friend the canary down the hall?”
“Sort of. It’s a new world, you know. I don’t think I’ve caught up to it.”
“Is Mrs. Harrigan going to continue with her accusations against Sherman Markey?”
“I don’t know,” Neil said. “I suppose she might. She’s desperate to deflect suspicion from herself. That’s what today has been about. She gave a press conference. Did you know about that?”
“I saw it.”
“We set it up for her.” Neil sighed. “We’ve got to do these things. It’s some kind of Faustian bargain—no, whatever is the opposite of a Faustian bargain. Faust got knowledge and wisdom out of his bargain with the devil. We only got power. And it’s an attenuated sort of power. It means being completely and utterly helpless when it comes to the most important things.”
“It’s useful to have, though. Power.”
“Of course it is. And I’d rather have the mess we have than be back in the sixties and stuck with the Democrats. Franklin Delano Roosevelt nearly ruined everything that was good about this country. But it’s as if we turned a corner somewhere. It’s as if there isn’t room for civilization anymore. It’s all pork rinds and NASCAR and kitsch religion.”
“Well, you know the word ‘kitsch.’ You wouldn’t have, thirty years ago.”
There was a knock on the door, and Neil yelled for whoever it was to come in. It was the waiter from the dining room, bringing a tray, just like room service in the best kind of hotel. The teapot was made of silver and as large as a samovar. There were no tea bags in sight.
Neil waited until the waiter had set everything out on the desk—his club sandwich, his mineral water—and then positioned the cart near Kate, so that she’d have a place to put her tea. Then he waited while the waiter went out the door and closed it again. He had no idea why he had waited at all. He had nothing to say to Kate that couldn’t be heard by everybody in the office, and most people out.
“I always wondered how you were surviving in the new Republican Party,” Kate said. “It didn’t seem like your kind of thing, really.”
“I don’t know what being a conservative means if it doesn’t mean preserving standards, standing up for classical music against the onslaught of cheap popular noise, standing up for Henry James and Jane Austen against ungrammatical techno-thrillers and children’s books about boy wizards who ride broomsticks. It’s almost impossible to find a classical music station on the radio anymore, and do you know why? Because of the things we did, because of deregulation. So we spend a lot of energy fending off the people in our own party who want to do away with public broadcasting, because here we are, with conservatives in charge, and without public broadcasting we can’t get conservative art and conservative values on the airwaves.”
“For goodness sake, Neil. You people have spent two decades telling the whole country that classical music is liberal art and liberal values and everybody who listens to it is a stuck-up snob who wants to destroy the American way of life. What did you expect to happen?”
“I didn’t expect to spend two decades telling the country that people who listen to classical music are snobs. Not to put too fine a point on it, I thought that was what liberals did. Think that classical music was for snobs, I mean.”
“Well, it’s like you said. It’s a different world.”
“I know it is. I hold out in the hope that there will come a day when we’ll have so much power, we’ll be so thoroughly entrenched, that we won’t have to pander to those people anymore. We’ll be able to come right out and be what we are. In the meantime, I’m comforted by the fact that it’s still our money. The party strategy people can’t go too far in that direction, or we yank the money.”
“The question is, are you going to yank the accusation that Sherman Markey supplied Drew Harrigan with those pills?”
“I don’t know,” Neil said. “I don’t know what the canary wants to do, and I don’t know how much of what’s about to happen we’re in control of. The police aren’t going to stop looking at Markey just because we’re no longer interested in him.”
“No, but it’s likely they’d stop looking at him if you people stopped contending he’d done the deed. Drew Harrigan’s dead, Neil. And you know as well as I do that Sherman Markey is in no shape to do all the things Harrigan says he did. Or any of them.”