Galilee. Clive Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ necessity. Blinking the tears out of his eyes he feinted to the right, and then swung a left that caught the woman’s jaw a solid crack. She let out a very satisfying yelp and stumbled backward, but to his surprise she was back at him before he recovered his own balance, throwing herself at him with such violence she brought them both to the ground.

      “Jesus!” he heard somebody say, and from the corner of his eyes saw Buckminster standing a few yards away, photographing the fight.

      Penaloza managed to pull one hand free and pointed toward his camera, which still lay on the grass a few yards from the senator’s daughter. “Grab it!” he yelled. “Buck! You shit! Pick up my camera!”

      But he was too late. The Bryson bitch was already there, snatching the camera up off the ground, and Buckminster—having decided he’d risked enough as it was—now turned on his heels and fled. Penaloza struggled to pull himself out of his attacker’s grip, but she’d pinned him down, her knees clamped to either side of his head, and he had no energy left to throw her off. All he could do was squirm like a child while she casually beckoned Meredith Bryson over.

      “Open the camera up, honey.” Meredith did so. “Now pull out the film.”

      Penaloza started to shout again; there were people coming to see what all the commotion was about. If one of them could prevent Meredith from opening the camera, he might still have his evidence. Too late! The back of the camera snapped open, and the Bryson girl pulled the film out.

      “Satisfied?” Penaloza growled.

      The woman perched on him considered the question for a moment. “Did anybody tell you how lovely you are?” she said, reaching behind her. She took hold of his balls, clutching them tightly. “What a fine, wholesome specimen of manhood you are?” She twisted his scrotum. He sobbed, more with anticipation than fear. “No?” she said.

      “…no…”

      “Good. Because you’re not. You’re a worthless piece of rat’s doo-doo.” She twisted again. “What are you?” If he’d had a gun at that moment he’d have happily put a bullet through the bitch’s brains. “What. Are. You?” she said again, giving his balls a yank with every syllable.

      “Rat’s doo-doo,” Penaloza said.

      ii

      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 СКАЧАТЬ