Wry Martinis (43 page)

It sounded perfectly plausible to me, but then I was eighteen and stoned. Successive assaults by the multitudinous cockroaches in my college dorm only heightened my sense of impending doom. Still, in time I ceased gibbering about the coming Armageddon and got a life.

But now, each summer, after a few days in our decomposing mossy rental on the Maine coast whose plumbing was last repaired during Roosevelt’s second term, I find myself, like that chimp contemplating the human skull, considering my position in the chain of being. I find myself, too, on about the fifth trip into town to the hardware store, cozying up to the proprietor. “Rufus,” I say, “they’ve been guzzling that stuff you sold me like it was strawberry milkshake. I’m a regular customer. Surely you have something
special
under that counter? DDT? Napalm? Sarin? Just between us. No need for the EPA to know anything. Heh heh.”

I know it’s tricky, revealing one’s insecticide wet dreams in the magazine that published
Silent Spring
—and, what’s more, on a typewriter just up the road from E. B. White’s old barn, home to the most famous spider in history. But there it is.

Each summer in our cabin, where—true fact—some years ago a woman died of complications from a spider bite, my wife, my children, my dog (in his capacity as larval troop carrier), and I are intimately reacquainted with the insect kingdom: flies, mosquitoes, midges, gnats, moths, earwigs, beetles, weevils, wasps, plant hoppers, assassin bugs (that is an actual type), back swimmers, thrips, lice, stone flies, crickets, termites, damselflies, dragonflies, horseflies, ticks, mites, millipedes, and centipedes.

This summer brought us friendship with yet another glory of creation: carpenter ants. My first clue that the spring had not been a silent one came when I walked into the room that serves as our living, eating, and sleeping quarters to find a significant pile of extremely unpleasant matter heaped on the floor. Naturally, this drew my eye to the ceiling beam above. Where, exactly, I mused, did this revolting, excreting winged horde fit in the ultimate scheme of things? Did He who made the Lamb make them? The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, asked what a lifetime of study had taught him about the nature of God, replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” You could call this point of view bugnosticism.

Yet now I see—writing this, enfolded in citronella, my face sticky with Repel—that they also serve who only creep and crawl. These unlovely arthropods show us our true selves. There is the Zen monk who removes his sandals lest he step on an ant. And there is me, shaken by my wife out of a rum-deep sleep at 2:00
A.M
., handed a flyswatter, and told to kill—kill!—the mosquito that is freaking out the kids. In summer, I see my place in the ultimate scheme of things: groggy in a bathrobe, snarling and swearing, ridiculous, fencing with the vanguard of Apocalypse.

—
The New Yorker
, 1995

Writing brought me to Washington. I was sitting at my desk at
Esquire
magazine in New York, eating my New York bagel, musing New York thoughts—rent control, the newest twenty hot restaurants that had opened that day, and whether I could get a reservation—when the phone rang. It was a desperate vice presidential press secretary calling from—cool!—Air Force Two. He needed a speechwriter, needed one fast, needed one cheap.

What the hey, I said to myself philosophically. Could be an interesting gig. I’ve always thought of writing as a journeyman’s trade; perhaps the way a studio musician might think of his own craft. Here was a chance to work on a new album with George Bush. (
Voodoo Economics Lounge
?) Do it for a year, go back to the Apple with neat Secret Service stories.

That was fifteen years ago. Here I still am, with every intention of staying, despite having spent the last forty-eight hours in inane Sisyphean battle with minor functionaries of the D.C. government over—oh never mind. I like it here.

I wrote my first novel. It had the words “White House” in the title, and that somehow fixed me, if not pigeonholed me, as a “Washington novelist.” At first I was quite delighted with this appelation. Me, a “Washington novelist.” I don’t think we’re in New York anymore, Toto.

I wrote a second novel that didn’t have “White House” or “Washington” or “Potomac” or “Power and Principle” or any other denotative code words in the title. There was a disappointed sound from the gallery when it came out (despite good reviews).
It’s very nice and all, but frankly we were rather expecting another Washington book
.…

I wrote a third novel. It didn’t have D.C. buzzwords in the title, but it was certainly a “Washington novel.” (Main character: a K Street tobacco spokesman. Washington enough for you?) The gallery expressed satisfaction:
Now that’s more like it
. Once again I was, in the reviews, a “Washington novelist,” or just “Washington writer.” “Washington satirist” followed. I guess whatever my feelings about the Department of Public Works, this effectively rules out fleeing to the burbs. “Bethesda novelist,” “Chevy Chase satirist” just doesn’t have the same oomph. There’s this, too: if you live somewhere where renewing your car registration is automatic and painless, you won’t be inspired to write satire. Efficient government—local and federal—would only wreck my career.

Washington was my writer’s capital, as Melville put it in a more aqueous context, my Harvard, my Yale. I was quite innocent when I arrived here with my houseplants, Hermes typewriter and
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
. I’d seen a bit of the world; rather a lot of it, actually. But oh what a brave new world was Washington, that had such people in’t! A few weeks after I arrived that suffocating July, 1981, I soon found myself in the White House mess, that is, the Navy-run dining room in the basement, listening to two (grown) speechwriters arguing furiously over who had had more “face time”—face time! oh brave neologisms!—in the “Oval” with “POTUS.” (The first term is synecdoche, of course; the second an acronym for President of the United States.) All this I watched in fascination and in wonder. Here was a ritual that had been acted and reenacted since the first royal court was established thousands of years ago in the palmly deserts of the Fertile Crescent, when the first Rosencrantz and Guildenstern squabbled over who had spent more time sucking up to Assurbanipal.

I don’t think my two messmates were familiar with Alexander Pope’s “Epitaph for one who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey”:

The little episode was my first inkling that I had found my proper place in the universe. There’s a Spanish word my father taught me early on:
querencia
. Literally “favored spot.” It’s used in bullfighting. When the bull enters the ring, the matador watches very intently as the bull seeks out the spot where it feels safe. Once he finds it, he will continue as the anger and pain increase, to return to it. The matador must therefore take care not to put himself between the bull and his
querencia
, for once he has set his charge for this—to put in a Washington way—safe house, he will keep going, no matter what stands in his path. He will not be tempted by a proffered cape. Woe to the matador who has misjudged the invisible spot in the sand. At any rate, I had found my
querencia
. Or, as these things happen, it had found me.

I was surprised to find myself so contentedly situated. I was a New Yorker, and New Yorkers—for the most part—are programmed to disdain Washington as a third-rate burg with not enough first-rate restaurants. Of course, Reagan changed that, for a time. The Eastern Shuttle was crammed with
boldfaced
names from “Suzy Says.” There was a touch of mink about the place for a while until the new tenants, a Greenwich Episcopalian and his what-you-see-is-what-you-get wife moved in and the ethos changed from Rodeo Drive to—go figure—Country Western. But all that was merely ebb and tide. It was permanent Washington, with its solemn absurdities, its motorcades of vanity, its noisy earnestness, its pomp and mitigating circumstance, its serene solipcism—to say nothing of its perfectly good, even terrific restaurants—that held me here.

Otherwise I suppose, I would have given the houseplants to the lady next door, dropped off
Bartlett’s
at the Vassar book sale, and caught the last shuttle back to New York.

I’m still perplexed about this elusive thing, the “Washington writer.” Is Charles McCarry a “Washington novelist” because he has written about spooks? Larry McMurtry spent a quarter century here—though he did keep a place in West Archer, Texas—but managed never to become a “Washington writer.”
Lonesome Dove
isn’t about Strobe Talbott at the disarmament table. Is Anonymous a “Washington writer”? Apparently not, as one hears he’s just bought a new house in Pelham, New York. It would be a stretcher to call my British chum Christopher Hitchens a “Washington writer,” though he has certainly created the most interesting, or as we used to say in foreign policy speeches, “vibrant” Washington literary salons going, with a Vermouth splash of Hollywood
glam, owing to his
Vanity Fair
gig. Very casual. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Kevin Costner’s coming. Barbra Streisand may drop by. Come early and have a drink, shall we say
vers sept heures?
Doesn’t
sound
like a “Washington writer,” does he? What about Edmund and Sylvia Morris, the Nick and Nora of biography (Reagan—Clare Boothe Luce). Are they “Washington writers”? Nah. Too exotic. But they’re here, thank heavens.

Was Gore Vidal typed as a “Washington writer” after
The City and the Pillar?
He seems more of a Washington writer now, in his umpteenth decade as a resident of Ravello, Italy, than he did after that first shockeroo of a novel appeared. He writes oftener and oftener these days about Washington.
Nostalgie de la boue?
An aspect of his narcissism? It was here, after all, that he grew up and first fell in love, with, now he tells us, a Saint Alban’s schoolmate. Perhaps in the end, you don’t have to live here at all to be a “Washington writer.” Perhaps—how does it go?—Washington is a moveable beast.

—
The Washington Post
, 1996

I was on a jury recently, and got to say something I thought I’d never get to say. It was during the preliminary process known as
voir dire
, French for “Interminable process that makes you regret ever having registered to vote.”

The judge was asking us a series of questions to determine our suitability to serve. He asked if any of us knew anyone in the intelligence agencies. Not wanting to share the particulars of my answer with a packed courtroom, I meekly stuck my hand in the air and asked, “Your honor, may I approach the bench?”

“Approach,” he said. I approached, feeling very puffed up and important.

The next day I recounted my thrill to my friend Geoff Norman, who happened to serve with Special Forces in Vietnam. He shared my excitement: “It’s like the first time I got to say, ‘Cover me.’ ” This rather put my big rhetorical moment in perspective.

For most of us, life is less dramatic than the movies. Few of us will get to deliver the really cool lines, like “Charge!” or “Sponge, clamp, sutures,” or “I’d like to thank the Academy.”

I suppose that most men, at some point in their lives, have imagined themselves saying, “Take her down to periscope depth.” Or even, “Fire torpedo tubes number one and two.” Who among us hasn’t found some excuse to say out loud, “Set your phasers on stun”—even if we were only holding a water pistol?

Space is the final verbal frontier. A lot of really studly things get said in space, starting with, “… three, two, one, ignition, liftoff.” But with
my math SATs, there was never a chance I’d be the one pronouncing those words. Or, “Fire secondary stage booster.” Or, “The Eagle has landed.” Sometimes, when I land at the airport, I call my wife and say that, but from that to the taxi stand is downhill.