“Don’t torment yourself,” he said quietly. “I don’t think there’s anything anyone could have done. I mean, if you couldn’t figure out what was going on in her head . . . You’re the writer after all!”
“Clearly I missed the story,” I muttered.
“Well, it happens. Anyway, not your fault.” He glanced surreptitiously at Hanan—her eyes were fixed on the screen—and turned back to me. “She’d always been wobbly. Did I tell you she did a spell in the bin when she was at Oxford? Ten days in the Radcliffe under round-the-clock surveillance. We found that out even before we found out about the Hanna Reitsch stuff. So . . .”
I said nothing. I didn’t trust myself to speak without betraying an emotion I couldn’t explain or justify.
“This is what matters now,” Marco said, gesturing at the TV. “Right?”
I managed an accommodating grunt. I seem to have a large capacity for accommodation.
“We’re going to win. Trust me. We’re going to win big.”
“I know,” I said.
That at least was something we still had in common. I was as confident as he was in the Democratic candidate’s imminent victory. She’d just reminded the audience of de Tocqueville’s old maxim, “America is great because she is good,” and it seemed to me still just about valid. Her opponent had faltered visibly in the interim. He was no longer swaggering so much as blustering—flailing even. Swaying on his thick legs, he gave the impression of some elephantine statue lassoed in ropes and about to come crashing down. The nightmarish possibility of his presidency was slipping, mercifully, into the realm of bullets dodged, disasters averted. Some day no doubt novelists would write dystopian alternate histories in which he won, but it was becoming clear, if one had any doubts, that in the real world rationality and basic decency were going to prevail, as they usually did, and that the arc of actual history was going to continue bending, in its imperfect way, toward justice.
It was some consolation, I supposed.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK JILL BIALOSKY and Robin Robertson for their editorial advice, which has been enormously helpful, as always.
The phrase “epistemological assault” on page 3 comes from a talk given by Katha Pollitt.
Also by James Lasdun
Also by James Lasdun
FICTION
Delirium Eclipse
Three Evenings and Other Stories
Besieged (SELECTED STORIES)
The Horned Man
Seven Lies
It’s Beginning to Hurt
The Fall Guy
POETRY
A Jump Start
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
(COEDITED WITH MICHAEL HOFMANN)
Woman Police Officer in Elevator
Landscape with Chainsaw
Bluestone: New and Selected Poems
MEMOIR
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked