Galilee. Clive Barker

      The woman who’d laid Penaloza low was of course none other than my darling Marietta. And you’re probably sufficiently familiar with her by now to know that she was very proud of herself. When she got back here to L’Enfant she gave Zabrina and myself chapter and verse of the whole escapade.

      “Why the hell did you go there in the first place?” I remember Zabrina asking her.

      “I wanted to cause some trouble,” she said. “But once I got there, and I’d had a few glasses of champagne, all I wanted to do was fuck. So I found this girl. I didn’t know who she was.” She smiled slyly. “And neither did she, poor sweetheart. But, I like to think I helped her find out.”

      

      There’s one footnote to all of this, and it concerns the subsequent romantic career of the senator’s daughter.

      Maybe a year after the Geary wedding, who should appear on the cover of People magazine, there to announce her membership of the Sapphic tribe, but the radiant Meredith Bryson?

      Inside, there was a five page interview, accompanied by a number of photographs of the newly uncloseted senator’s daughter. One in the window seat of her house in Charleston; another in the back yard, with two cats; and a third of her and her family at the President’s inauguration, with an inset blowup of Meredith herself, caught looking thoroughly bored.

      “I’ve always been interested in politics,” she averred in the body of the piece.

      The interviewer hurried her on to something a little juicier. When had she first realized she was a lesbian?

      “I know a lot of women say they’ve always known, somewhere deep down,” she replied. “But honestly I didn’t have a clue until I met the right person.”

      Could she tell the readers who this lucky lady was?

      “No, I’d prefer not to do that right now,” Meredith replied.

      “Have you taken her to the White House?”

      “Not yet. But I intend to, one of these days. The First Lady and I had a great conversation about it, and she said we’d be very welcome.”

      The article twittered on in the same substance-free manner for several pages; I don’t think anything of any moment was said from beginning to end. But after the talk of White House visits I couldn’t help but imagine Marietta and Meredith in Lincoln’s bedroom, doing the deed beneath Abe’s portrait. Now there was a picture the sleaze-hounds would have paid a nice price to own.

      As to Marietta, she would not be drawn out any further on the subject of the senator’s daughter. I can’t help wondering, however, if at some point down the line the fate of L’Enfant and the secret lives of Capitol Hill won’t again intersect. This is, after all, a house built by a president. I won’t argue that it’s his masterpiece—that’s surely the Declaration of Independence—but L’Enfant’s roots lie too close to the roots of democracy’s tree for the two not to be intertwined. And if, as Zelim the Prophet once claimed, the process of all things is like the Wheel of the Stars, and what has seemed to pass away will come back again sooner or later, is it unreasonable to suppose that L’Enfant’s demise may be caused or quickened by the order of power that brought it into being?

       IX

      So now you know how Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary became husband and wife—from their first meeting to the vows at the altar. You know how powerful a family she had entered, and how possessive it was; you know she was in love with Mitchell, passionately so, and that her feelings were reciprocated.

      How then, you ask, does such a romance fall from grace? How is it that, a little over two years later, at the end of a rainy October, Rachel was driving around the benighted streets of Dansky, Ohio, cursing the day she’d heard the name of Mitchell Geary?

      If this were a work of fiction I could invent some dramatic scenario to explain all this. She’d step into the house one day and find her husband in bed with another woman, or they’d have an argument that would escalate into violence, or he’d reveal to her in the heat of an angry exchange that he’d married her for a bet with his brother. But there was nothing like that in their lives: no adulteries, no violence, and certainly no raised voices. It just wasn’t the way Mitch dealt with things. He liked to be liked, even when being liked meant avoiding a confrontation that would be to everybody’s good. That meant turning a blind eye to Rachel’s discomfort if there was the least risk of stirring up something unpleasant. His former empathy, which had been so much a part of what had enchanted her about him, disappeared. If she was unhappy, he simply looked the other way. There was always plenty of Geary family business to justify his inattention; and of course the inevitable seductions of luxury to soften Rachel’s loneliness when he was gone.

      It would be wrong to claim that she was not in some fashion complicit in all of this. It became apparent to her very quickly that her life as Mrs. Mitchell Geary was not going to be as emotionally fulfilling as she’d hoped. Mitchell was wholly devoted to the family business, and as she had no role in that business, nor wanted one, she found herself alone more often than she liked. Instead of sitting Mitch down and talking the problem through—telling him, in essence, that she wanted to be more than a public wife—she let his way of doing things carry the day, and that soon proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less she said the harder it became to say anything at all.

      Anyway, how could she claim the marriage wasn’t working when to the outside world she’d been given paradise on a platter? Was there anywhere she couldn’t go if she wanted to? Any store she couldn’t shop in until she was tired of saying I’ll take it? They went to Aspen skiing, Vermont for a weekend in the autumn, to enjoy the turning of the leaves. She was in Los Angeles for the Oscar parties, in Paris to see the spring collections, in London for the theater, and Rio and Bali for spur-of-the-moment vacations. What did she have to complain about?

      The only person in whom she could confide her growing unhappiness was Margie, who wasn’t so much sympathetic as fatalistic.

      “It’s a trade-off,” she said. “And it’s been going on since the beginning of time. Or at least since the first rich man ever took himself a poor wife.”

      Rachel flinched at this. “I am not—”

      “Oh honey.”

      “That’s not why I married Mitch.”

      “No, of course it isn’t. You’d be with him if he was ugly and poor and I’d be with Garrison if he was tap-dancing on a street corner in Soho.”

      “I love Mitch.”

      “Right now?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I mean, sitting here right now, having said all the things you’ve just said about how he’s neglectful, and doesn’t want to talk about feelings, and so on, sitting right here right now, you love him?”

      “Oh Lord…”

      “Is that a maybe?”

      There was a pause while they thought about what she was feeling at that moment. “I don’t know what I feel,” she admitted. “It’s just that he’s not…”

      “The man you married?” Rachel nodded. Margie refilled her whiskey glass and leaned forward as though to whisper something, though they were the only people in the room. “Sweetheart, he never was the man you married. He was just giving you the Mitch you wanted to see.” She leaned back, waving her free hand in the air as though to swat a swarm of phantom Gearys out of her sight. “They’re all the same. Christ knows.” She sipped her whiskey. “Believe it or not, Garrison can be charm personified when it suits him. They must get it from their grandfather.”

      Rachel pictured Cadmus the way he’d been at