These Dreams of You

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He waits a moment, turns back to her and throws up his arms as if to say, Well? “Whether to run for president,” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

“Yes,” she repeats.

“Is that, uh, ‘yes,’ as in, Yes you know the question that I’m asking everyone, or as in, Yes I should run?”

“Yes you should run.”

He takes off the black-rimmed glasses. “That was straightforward,” he allows, at once relieved and vexed.

“Do you fancy running for president?”

“Fancy it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s the question”—and now the kid in him swivels all the way around in the chair—“everyone asks me.” He stops before the window and the trees along the Mall in the distance. “Know much about presidential politics?”

“No.”

“Still studying. . it was journalism, right?”

“Not in a while.”

“Still think politics is, uh, whatever it was you said that night? A waste of time.”

“I don’t think I put it that way, sir.”

“Pretty much.” He glances at her over his shoulder. “What changed?” and she doesn’t answer but, as if she did, he returns to the window. “Do you have family?”

“Dad more or less disappeared when I was young. Mum died three years ago.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

“A brother. Don’t see him much either. He’s older.”

“How much?”

“Eight years.”

He murmurs, “My brother was eight years older. I keep wondering what he would say but perhaps that doesn’t matter — he thought everyone else should be careful except him. He wasn’t careful.” The bowl of ice cream finished, he swivels back to put it on the desk. “No modern president’s ever been denied the nomination of his political party. You have to go back to, who? Cleveland?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Truman was the most unpopular man in the damned country by the time he ran. The children of Franklin Roosevelt, the man who appointed him, tried to take away the party’s nomination and give it to Eisenhower, who didn’t even belong to the party. Eisenhower only saved the world — and they still couldn’t do it. Theodore Roosevelt, most revered president since Lincoln, tried to take the nomination of his party from President Taft, who nobody liked and came in third in a three-man election,” he leans over the bowl on the desk, “and Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t do it,” and stares into the bowl as though it’s bottomless. “I need more ice cream.”

She says, “Times change?”

“Yes times change,” he agrees, “but the system changes last, after everything else. If I run, it will be Bad Bobby again. Ruthless Bobby. Everything that those who hate me have ever said about me, it shall all be true. Selfish Little Son-of-a-Bitch Bobby who can’t wait to get back in the White House. Every damned office-holder of my party, which is to say those who control the party, will hate me because it will just complicate the hell out of their lives and their own political fortunes. And when people are for me, they won’t be for me. They’ll be for him.”

“You’re wrong,” she shakes her head.

“On the other hand, there’s Dante.”

“Dante?”

“Uh, ‘the hottest place in hell. . ’ etcetera.”

“Etcetera?”

“Is reserved for those who do nothing when faced with a moral choice.” He blurts, “Whatever I do, I need your help.”

“Right. Of course. I would be honored.” It sounds funny but she means it.

“Not too honored. I don’t deserve that.”

She rises from the chair and at the door stops, the thought tripping her up. “Is it because I’m black? I mean, I don’t know what you have in mind, do I, but whatever it is—?”

“How can you wonder that,” he says, “if neither of us knows what I have in mind?”

“I’ve never been all that conscious of that part of me. With these white woman’s gray eyes, I suppose.”

“Ethiopia.”

She’s impressed. “Did I tell you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Folks moved my brother and me when I was two — Dad was a med student. As I always heard it, the idea was eventually to come on over here. They got as far as London before they split up.”

“If we do this, remember to bring the angry woman with you. I’ll need her.”

“I’m not an angry woman.”

“Bring the one with the sense of humor then.”

“I’ll bring them all,” and with a start she’s unsettled by how much he already looks like a phantom. “There’s more than one.”

“Yeah? Try being me.”