The Second Saladin

23

For the moment, the Kurd could wait, Chardy could wait, it could all wait. Other things occupied Joseph Danzig.

He was astonished. What little rabbits they were. He had lived most of his life in a kind of sexual sleep; then, at forty-seven, catapulted into an absurd celebrity, made preposterously powerful, imprinted upon the collective imagination, he was also granted, almost as a fringe benefit, an astonishing freedom with women. Not that they were attracted to his body — it was a wreck, a blimpish shamble of wrinkles, almost toneless muscles, a wilderness of wattles and fissures, a great, white dead thing — nor even his power (for they could not partake of that) nor his mind (they never talked about anything). They sought him not for cocktail party conversation or to get jobs with the State Department or for exclusive interviews to advance their careers in journalism or to punish their husbands or lovers.

Why then?

He asked one once, a lissome Georgetowner, thirty-four, ash-blonde, Radcliffe, old Washington/Virginia connections. They were at the time both naked and had just consummated the act with passion though not a great deal of skill — in this field, Danzig was well aware that he was merely an adequate technician. With prim efficiency Susan, for such was her name, was preparing to dress, arranging her Pappagallos, her Ralph Lauren double-pleated slacks, her cashmere turtleneck (from Bloomingdale’s, he guessed; it’s where they all dressed these days), her subtly checked tweed sport coat that re-created almost hue for hue the Scottish heather.

“Susan,” he said suddenly, “why? I mean, really: Why? Be honest.”

“Well, Joe,” she said, matter-of-factly — and paused. He knew she was the mother of two girls, three and five, and that her husband was a Harvard law grad in the midst of a flourishing career with the FCC. “Well, Joe” — naked she was small and fine, with tiny shapely breasts and delicate wrists. She was slender enough to show ribs and had creamy, mellow skin. She had tawny hair, expensively taken care of, and had been a champion golfer and an excellent doubles tennis player. “I guess you could say I was curious.”

Curious!

He had shaken his head then. He shook it now; he was with a twenty-six-year-old congressional aide, a bright Smith girl he had met casually at an embassy cocktail party. They had just accomplished an exchange of favors intense and satisfying and wholly meaningless. They were on the top floor of the Georgetown house in what had been a previous owner’s music room — a wide space that drew in light from the brightness outdoors and splashed it abundantly around. Meanwhile, birds sang and bees buzzed and the flowers and bushes in his garden grew under the skillful nurture of a Philippine gardener.

The girl — by coincidence her name was Susan too, which was perhaps why the first Susan had so recently been in his mind — was dressing quickly and without, it seemed to him, regret. The room stank of sex, a peculiar odor, of which he could never get enough when aroused but which disgusted him afterward. He was, in fact, a little nauseated with himself. He had come, of late, to enjoy certain deviations from the standard male-female menu, certain varieties of dish or sauce. It was always the same: what had seemed exotic, astonishingly inviting, fascinating, erotically creative almost, seemed now merely unwholesome, to say nothing of unhygienic. He wanted badly to brush his teeth and use mouthwash, but was unsure of the etiquette: would such a gesture seem impolite? She had not brushed her teeth and she had used her mouth quite as industriously as he had used his (and simultaneously). He felt gross, an ogre. Yet it was not his fault. These girls these days! A nod, a nudge, a gentle suggestion as oblique and encoded as a secret cipher, and off they went like Bangkok tarts after treasures their mothers could not have conceived of, would not have even had the vocabulary to describe. And they expected — demanded — he reciprocate.

Such odd creatures. Their minds, really, were different from men’s. For one, they were more grown-up, less romantic (as a rule, no matter that it defied the popular stereotype), more organized. Their brains were full of little compartments. This Susan, the other Susan, too, all the Susans, could fellate him like tigresses, smile, get dressed and return uncontaminated to their other lives. They’d go back to husband or lover, having entirely separated their adventure of the afternoon from their reality of the evening. Meanwhile, he or any man would brood and fret and remember, feel tainted and unworthy, clinched with guilt. Astonishing!

So now he stood wrapped in his robe at the broad window, peering down at the mazelike garden beneath him.

“It’s quite attractive, don’t you think? This new one works awfully hard, although I don’t think he understands me. I certainly don’t understand him.”

“Huh?” Susan said, getting her haunches (she was not quite as slim as the first Susan) into her pantyhose with a final pump of the pelvis.

“The garden. I was talking about my garden and the new gardener.”

“Yeah,” she said, self-absorbedly.

“It has such order. It is a very pleasing design.”

“Joe,” she said, “I’m going now.”

“Huh?”

She laughed. “I can see how much this all meant to you.”

“I’m sorry. Do I seem preoccupied? I do apologize. Forgive me, won’t you?”

“I just said I was going.”

“I’ll see you out, of course.”

“No. That’s fine.” She worked quickly on her makeup. Seeing her sitting before the mirror, one fine leg stockinged and crossed over the other (Danzig loved their legs), in her sensible plum wool suit, mundanely studying her own face and making improvements in it, he stirred.

With a moan of lust singing between his ears, he walked to her almost uncontrollably and reached to touch her breast, inserting his hand quickly between her buttons and the elastic of the bra, feeling the weight, the heaviness of it.

“Joe! God, you frightened me!”

“Don’t go.”

“Oh, Joe!”

He had his whole hand inside her cup now and the nipple was between his third and fourth fingers and he was squeezing it with what he took to be finesse.

“Please, I do have to go.”

“Don’t. Please.” He was startled at the urgency of his need.

“Joe, really—”

“It’s still early. Please. Please.”

He could feel the nipple tighten.

“Oh, God,” she muttered.

He bent and began to lick her earlobe, another trick he thought especially stylish; they all loved it. He reached and touched the inside of her leg and ran his finger up it and rubbed her, feeling the contours, the definitions, the fleshy rolling mounds of her cunt through her pantyhose. He kissed her on the mouth, their tongues groping.

For a second time they were finished and Susan rose to dress.

“Please,” she laughed. “I’ll get fired if I don’t get back. You’re a maniac.”

He smiled, seeing it as a compliment. He had not had sex twice the same day before in his life, much less in the same hour. He was astounded at his power. What was reaching him?

He looked and she was at the mirror working on her face again, dispassionately. He watched her sadly. Women were leaving him all the time; it had never bothered him before.

“I’m going,” she said, “this time.” She laughed; she was a friendly girl, good-hearted.

“I’ll call you.”

“Sure,” she said.

“No, I will.”

“It’s all right, Dr. Danzig.”

“Call me Joe.”

“It’s all right, Joe, I do have to go. ’Bye.”

“Goodbye, Susan.”

And she really did leave. He could hear her steps receding in the hall until she reached the stairwell and descended. A minute later he heard a quiet thud as the door closed. He wondered if the agents down below were polite to her. He hoped so. Damn, they’d better have been; if they weren’t, he’d have them reassigned faster than the coming of night. He told himself to check on it later.

Now he stood again at the window. He felt vulnerable, unprotected. Could this odd state of affairs be traced to the presence of this phantom Kurd assassin, who everybody is so confident will be shortly apprehended wandering desperately in the greater Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati triangle? Perhaps. But he felt, rather, another presence, a brooding thing that pressed at him from beyond the wall.

For beyond the wall was another room, almost the twin of this one. It was high-ceilinged and immensely bright. Potted plants stood green and smart against cream-white walls, and muslin curtains softened the blaze of the sun. It afforded a view almost the duplicate of the one he now enjoyed, the downward vantage to the mazelike perfection of the garden. That room, like this, was neat and orderly; that room, like this, had a red-hued Persian on the floor; that room, like this, had a desk, a mahogany worktable, a sofa bed. But unlike this room, that room had: one Xerox 2300 tabletop-size copier, four cans each of Xerox 6R189 toner and Xerox 8R79 fuser oil, three IBM Selectric typewriters, one DCX Level III Dictaphone, six Tensor steel-jointed lights, several dozen pounds of Xerox 4024 dual-purpose paper, to say nothing of carbons, erasers, Bic fine-line pens, Eagle No. 3 pencils, a Panasonic Point-O-Matic electric pencil sharpener, a blotter. And against one wall, tightly locked and as yet unopened, his files, his logs, his documents, his reports, his minutes, his clippings, his borrowings — his past.

That was the room of the book, and it terrified him.

In that room, in one thirteen-month period of intense effort, he, three research assistants, two exceedingly patient secretaries, and two editors down from an august publishing firm on Madison Avenue, had written a book. It was a book largely of triumph.

But soon another book was due from that room and there was, as Danzig saw it, no sadder thing in this world than a room in which a book must be written if you do not want to write the book.

Danzig did not want to write the book.

He preferred to ad-lib speeches and doodle in television and avoid his wife and pursue the limelight and make love to an endless procession of curiously pliant young or youngish women. But not the book: the book would take him back to the season of catastrophes, the year 1975, when Vietnam came tumbling down, take him back to sad, groping days with a new and short-lived President. It would be a book of defeat.

He secretly feared he’d lost his edge, his ambition. Poof! Here one day, gone the next. His reputation was that of a fiercely ambitious man, a ruthlessly ambitious man; and perhaps once it had been true. But another Danzig, a softer, a lonelier man, a man more anxious to explore the realms not of power but of the senses was beginning to emerge from under the shell of the old Danzig. He hoped it was a process of transformation or transfiguration. But he was terrified that he’d reached the age of entropy.

He thought he’d call another girl, because he did not think he could be alone in this room, next to that room, another second.