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to go for a beer."
    "Right." She was giddy. "He coulda really rocked Donny's world--asked for a Diet Coke, a 7UP . . . a club sandwich." It was late, but I hadn't expected the irreverence, the humor, the love of the game. She was breathtaking. "So what, then? How did Donny let him down?" "He'd go up with the palms. 'Lark, this is what we've got. This is what we can do. I owe you one, buddy. What can I say?' " I stopped. I hadn't quite caught the fullness of Donny's Irish grease--he cast a spell, as all the good ones do. "In the end, it didn't mean anything anyway. We'd take it back to our side, renegotiate the lulus, pass the damn thing. And then, as we knew from the start, the White House would veto. And we'd celebrate our great moral victory: we forced a veto."
    "That was something," she said.
    "Not enough. It was even worse on the stuff that had to pass--the budget."
    "So you dropped out," she said. "You gonna drop out on us?" Very smooth. She was closing the deal.
    Okay: "Have I dropped in yet?"
    "Say you have."
    "Well, I was always curious about how it'd be," I began. "How the whole process--yeah, I guess the country, too--would work with someone who actually cared about . . . Well, y'know, I wonder: It couldn't always have been the way it is now, the feeling of--of blab. Swamp gas. Stagnation. There had to be times when it was better. The other guys had it with Reagan, I guess. But, to me, he was just floating with the flow. He didn't try for anything hard. . . ."
    "And a good thing, too," she said.
    "Yeah, I guess . . . The thing is, I'd kind of like to know how it feels when you're fighting over . . . y'know--historic stuff. I'm not like you. I didn't have Kennedy. I got him from books, from TV. But I can't get enough of him, y'know? Can't stop looking at pictures of him, listening to him speak. I've never heard a president use words like 'destiny' or 'sacrifice' and it wasn't bullshit. So: I want to be part of something, a moment, like that. When it's real, when it's history. I . . ." I had let things slip a little bit. That wasn't good. I was interviewing for a job where my primary responsibility would be to not let things slip. "Goddamn," I said. "My, my, my," I said--just like my father, and just like his father, the Reverend Harvey Burton, the man Susan Stanton had praised. Embarrassing, to make this into Black History Month; unprofessional. But I saw: she was with me. It was okay. Still, I had to button it up. "I feel like--a real jerk--even saying that sort of thing," I said. "Maybe we're not living in a time when those kinds of dreams are possible, or even appropriate. But it's late and you asked, and there it is."
    "No, you're right," she said. "It's good. History's what we're about, too. What else is there?" Then, "Sleepy?"
    She led me into the living room. There was a pillow and a blanket folded on the couch: "Your quarters," she said, patting me on the back, squeezing my arm, drifting off toward the bedroom. I tossed the blanket, lay back on the pillow. It was light now; there were birds, and a piney breeze through the screens. Summer camp. Uncle Charlie came padding through, wiry taut in a sleeveless T-shirt and boxers. And tattoos: "Momma" with a heart on one arm, on the other a sly devil with a pencil-thin mustache--like his--and the words "Made Me Do It."
    "Hey," he said. "Coffee?"

    Chapter II
    Henri, you think its possible for a black girl to look like Winona?" Richard Jemmons asked.
    "Get lost."
    "Oh yeah, I forgot. You don't like black girls much."
    "Fuck you."
    "But then again, there's that Mexican girl in scheduling, Maria Whatsis--she's got the hair and the mouth. So if a Mexican can look like Winona, then maybe . . ."
    "Richard, you are diseased." And he was. He was manic, obsessive, very strange-looking, thin as a whippet--his body and all his features were narrow, thin lips, thin nose, dark thinning hair, which made his thick, black-frame eyeglasses seem enormous; everything about him was