Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Harrison
My suite was filled with men in expensive suits, and I wasn’t listening to a single one of them.
They were arranged around my sitting room the way power always arranges itself—the heavy hitters in the armchairs, the hopefuls on the sofa edges, the aides standing against the walls pretending not to exist. Coffee going cold in hotel china.
The prairie blazing white through the window.
And at the center of it, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his big hands clasped like a man about to arm-wrestle the Holy Spirit, sat Byron Judd Pembroke, who wanted my endorsement the way a drowning man wants a rope.
“The way I see it, Pastor,” Pembroke was saying, in the cornpone baritone he'd no doubt focus-grouped, “this country took a wrong turn when we let them push God out of the schoolhouse and the statehouse both.
My district's done waiting. They don't want another politician.
They want a warrior. Somebody who'll go up to Washington and tear the whole rotten thing down to the studs and build it back the way the Lord intended—a Christian government, for a Christian nation.”
Murmurs of approval around the room. Pembroke was a big handsome slab of a man, ex–college ball, a jaw you could land a plane on and not quite enough behind the eyes.
He was anti-trans, anti-woke, anti-anything that polled.
A candidate the machine adored precisely because he'd never had an original thought to get in the way of the script.
He'd burn the government down on a dare.
And South Carolina would send him to do it, if I laid my hand on his shoulder and told three thousand churches he was anointed.
“He tests through the roof on the base,” someone said.
“He's got the rural counties without even trying,” said someone else.
“All he needs,” said a third, and they all looked at me, “is you.”
I made the listening face. I had a listening face the way other men have a good handshake; it cost me nothing and it told them everything they wanted to believe.
I nodded gravely at the right intervals.
And the whole time, behind the face, I was still in a wrecked bed at dawn, with a man's terrible morning breath and a kiss I'd have traded this entire roomful of kingmakers to have again.
Tonight. I'll be here.
The words had carried me through the donor breakfast and the prayer luncheon and now this, a private litany I kept saying to myself under the public one.
Then every phone in the room went off at once.
Not one. All of them, a dozen devices buzzing and chiming in the same two-second window, the unmistakable shudder of a news alert hitting a room full of people whose business was news.
Hands went to pockets. Faces dropped to screens.
And the temperature of the room changed all at once, the way it does when something awful has happened.
“Good Lord,” Pembroke said, staring at his phone. “Mullins.”
“What about him?”
“Frank Mullins. Secretary of State.” Pembroke turned his screen around like he needed a witness.
“Resigned. Just now. There's— there's pictures. Somebody got him coming out of a bar in D.C. A gay bar. With a—” he lowered his voice as though the word might stain the carpet, “a male prostitute.
Kissing him. Out front, on the sidewalk, like he didn't care who saw.”
I had my own phone in my hand by then, and there it was.
Frank Mullins, sixty-one, married thirty-one years, a fixture of every prayer breakfast in Washington, photographed under a streetlight with his hand on a young man's jaw and his mouth on his mouth.
The headline read: SECRETARY OF STATE RESIGNS AMID SCANDAL.
The photo was grainy, long-lensed, stolen.
The young man was beautiful. Mullins looked—and this was the thing that went into me like a blade—Mullins looked happy.
In the half-second before the flash, before his political life ended, the most powerful diplomat in America looked like a man who had finally found joy.
“Decades of public service,” one of the leaders said, shaking his head with the deep satisfied sorrow of a man enjoying himself. “Threw the whole thing away. For a hustler.”
“Couldn't keep it in his pants for one more election cycle,” said another, and a few of them actually chuckled. Pembroke shook his big handsome head at the tragedy of it.
“That's what happens,” Pembroke pronounced, “when a man lets the flesh run the show. No discipline. You play with that fire, you burn the house down. Every time.”
They went on and on, but I didn't hear them.
Because I was looking at the grainy photograph of a ruined man under a streetlight, and the streetlight might as well have been the one outside the Lincoln Grand.
The beautiful young man might as well have had dark-blond hair and a press lanyard, and the happy doomed face might as well have been my own.
One photograph. That was all it took. One long lens, one careless streetlit moment, one person who decided to point a camera—and a successful political career, a marriage, cabinet post, a name, was gone between one breath and the next.
Alec had a camera. Alec also had the longest lens I'd ever seen.
I set my phone down very carefully on the arm of the chair, because my hand had started to shake. I made the listening face, and underneath it I was as afraid as I have ever been in my life.
* * *
They filed out eventually, full of coffee, resolve, and the gleeful horror of someone else's downfall. Pembroke pumped my hand at the door and promised to pray on it, all of them promising to pray on it. Then the door closed and the suite was quiet and it was just my mother and me.
She’d sat through the whole meeting in the corner chair, silent, watching—she always watched—and now she rose, crossed to the window, and looked out at the prairie for a long moment before she spoke.
“Thirty years,” Floris Mae said. “Frank Mullins built that career one careful brick at a time. I sat next to his wife at three inaugural prayer services. Lovely woman. Dull as a fence post, but lovely.” She turned.
“And he set it all on fire because he could not govern himself for the length of one evening. Because he wanted something badly enough to be stupid about it.” Her mouth thinned.
“There is no sin in this world, Harrison, that cannot be survived except the sin of being seen.
Frank Mullins didn't fall because of what he is. Half that city is what he is. He fell because he got caught being himself on a sidewalk.”
“Mother, it's been a long—”
“Don't.” She cut me off, and crossed the room toward me.
Something in her face had changed—the velvet was gone, peeled clean off, and underneath it was the thing I had spent my whole life pretending I couldn't see.
“Don't you use that tired voice on me. I made that voice. I trained it into you when you were nine years old and sniveling, and I will not have it turned on me. Ever.”
I went still.
“You think I don't know,” she murmured.
The floor of the world tilted.
“You think I have ever not known?” Her voice was low and even and terrible.
“I’ve known what you are since you were sixteen years old, Harrison.
I knew before you did. I watched you look at the Hadley boy at the lake house the summer you were seventeen and I knew, and I went home and I didn’t sleep.
Then I got up the next morning and I built you a life so airtight that what you are would never, ever cost us a thing. ”
“Mother, I…”
“Don’t interrupt. The marriage. Kimberly, God rest her soul, it was the perfect arrangement.
The widowhood. Every brick of it, I laid, so that you could be what you are in the dark and a king in the light and never, ever pay for it.
” She was close now, close enough that I could smell the Joy perfume and the coffee.
“I’ve protected you from yourself for thirty-five years.
And I will not—I will not—stand in a hotel ballroom tomorrow night and watch you become Frank Mullins.
Watch some grasping little nobody with a camera turn my life's work into a punchline on the evening news.”
“There's no one,” I said. “There's nothing. Mother—”
“I smelled it on you yesterday.” Her eyes raked my face.
“The same thing I smelled on your father all those years ago.
You're rested, distracted, and you've got a stupid look on your face I haven’t seen on you since you were a teenager.
Joel tells me you've been riding the elevator at all hours, down to the twelfth floor. So you will hear me, and I will only say it once.”
Floris Mae reached up and straightened my collar, the old gesture, and this time it felt like a hand squeezing my throat.
“It ends tonight. You will straighten up, make your speech tomorrow, and you will endorse that magnificent idiot Pembroke. After that you will get on the plane Sunday afternoon the same man you have always been. Or I will fix it the way I fix everything—and I promise you, darling, you will not like how thoroughly I fix it, and neither will your man with the camera.” She patted my cheek. “Am I understood?”
“Yes Mother,” I heard myself say. “I understand.”
* * *
I don't remember deciding to go down. I remember the elevator, the long beige hall, and my knuckles against the door of 1218, and the whole way my chest was a riot I had no words for.
Because the truth was simple and the truth was impossible, both at once.
I wanted Alec. Not the way I'd wanted the others, the anonymous men who fixed my fevers.
I wanted to wake up beside him again. I wanted to know his middle name, how he took his coffee, and what he'd been like as a boy. I’d only known him for two days, and it was the realest thing that had ever happened to me, and it was going to get one or both of us destroyed.
Alec opened the door, and his whole face lit up—that unguarded gladness—and it nearly killed me.
“Hey,” he said. “You're early. I wasn't even—” He stopped, reading my face. “Harrison. What happened.”
I stepped inside. And I, who had stood dry-eyed at my own wife's funeral, who had not wept in front of another human being since I was a child except in this very room, felt my throat close.
“We can't,” I muttered. “Do this. Anymore. We just… can't.”
“What?” The gladness went out of him. “Where is this coming from? What the hell happened?”
“The Secretary of State happened.” The words came out wrecked.
“Frank Mullins, it's— it doesn't matter. What matters is they will find us, Alec. They find everyone. I sat in a room this afternoon and watched powerful men laugh at the wreckage of a man’s life and I realized—” my voice broke clean in half “—that could be me, and you. Damn it, I have my mother to think about, and the whole machine. And if we’re discovered they won’t just come for me, do you understand?
They will come for you. Mother as good as said it.
If they find out what you are to me, they will take you apart, your name, your work, everything, and I would rather—”
“Hey.” He reached for me. “Harrison—”
“Don't.” I stepped back, because if he touched me I wouldn’t be able to do it, and it had to be done. “Please don't. I can't be brave about this if you touch me, and if I have to be brave about exactly one thing in my whole cowardly life it has to be this.”
Alec stood there with his hand still half-raised, his eyes doing something terrible, and I forced myself to say the rest.
“Forget about me.” It was the hardest sentence I had ever assembled.
“Forget this happened. Forget my face, my name, write whatever story you came here to write, I don't even care anymore.
Just be far away from me when it runs. That's the only thing I want now. For you to be somewhere safe and far away when my entire life finally catches up with me.”
“That's not—” his voice cracked, and the cynic, the armored man, the one who'd told me wanting people was a sucker's game, looked like I'd hit him. “Harrison, that's not your call to make alone, you don't get to—”
But I was already moving to the door, because if I heard the rest I'd stay.
I got the door open. Stepped into the hall.
And the last thing I saw before it swung shut was his face, the realest face in a building full of liars, looking at me like I was walking out of the only honest room either of us had ever stood in.
I made it to the elevator before the tears came in earnest, weeping like the boy my mother trained me not to be.
How would I ever get over him?