Literary Washington, D.C.

Patrick Allen

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781595341259
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The public face of Washington-the gridiron of L'Enfant's avenues, the buttoned-down demeanor Sloan Wilson's archetypal "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," the monumental buildings of the Triangle-rarely gives up the secrets of this city's rich life. But, beneath the surface there are countless stories to be told. From the early swamp days to the Civil War, the "gilded age" to the New Deal and McCarthy eras, as the center of world power to its underlying multicultural social fabric, Washington is a writer's town.While this is surprising to some, it is not news to the close observer. Alan Cheuse, in his foreword to Literary Washington, D.C. comments: "Part of this peculiar city's sense of place is that it serves as a capital for people who have no permanent sense of place.... War has brought us here, peace has brought us here, love has kept us here, and love or loss of love will give some of us reason to leave again. Which makes Washington, D.C. exactly like most other places in the rest of the country and the rest of the world-only more so."In fact, D.C. has been a magnet for great writers for centuries. Including novelists, poets, journalists, essayists, and politicians and patriots, finally, in Literary Washington D.C., the story of the capital of world power is finally told.

“The Tunnel”

ALAN CHEUSE (1940– )

New Jersey–born Alan Cheuse taught at Bennington College and at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, before his current position in the creative writing department of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, among them the novels The Grandmother’s Club (1986), The Light Possessed (1990), and To Catch the Lightning (2008), and the short story collections Candace (1980) and The Tennessee Waltz and Other Stories (1992). As a book commentator, Cheuse is a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. The selection below is from Cheuse’s story collection Lost and Old Rivers (1998).

One week after their candidate lost the election Jas and her roommate Sharon were getting ready for a party, Jas stepping into her flashiest skirt, the silver-sequined wraparound, and wondering about a blouse. She was a tall girl, so skirts like this looked good on her. She had narrow hips, long legs—good, firm breasts, that was true, and a long neck. My swan, her dad used to tease her lovingly. My swan. Who wanted to be a swan? Swans were oddly beautiful, but were they happy? That was the question that bothered Jas whenever she recalled her father’s pet name for her.

When she thought of her mother, it was another sort of memory, much more deeply tinged with emotion. Her mother had told her nearly every day of her life that her eyes were beautiful, and Jas felt her chest constrict—and seem to turn to ice at the same time—at the picture in her mind of her mother, just before she went into that last surgery, unable to speak but blinking hard at her, blinking, blinking, which meant, your eyes, your eyes. All she needed was to have a boy look her in the eyes and he’d be a goner. That was her mother’s constant refrain. But so far no one tall enough to look properly into her eyes—and there had only been a few of those anyway—was anyone she wanted to look back at. There had been one or two guys at school whom she had gone out with more than once, but nothing happened with them. All they wanted was sex, and she just couldn’t, not yet, not so soon, she told herself, after her mother’s death. There had been no one in the year after graduation when she had worked in downtown Detroit. No one these last six months when she had worked on the Committee to Re-Elect the President, first in Michigan and then—because of a little fling Sharon had had with a committee man passing through the state, a two-night stand, actually—here in Washington.

“Fletcher said it’s going to be a great party, even if we did lose,” her roommate said, stepping up next to her in front of the mirror.

Jas gave her a queer look.

“You didn’t ask him to bring a friend for me, did you?”

“No.” Sharon looked at her in the mirror looking at her.

“Look me in the eye and say that,” Jas said, turning to Sharon and touching a hand to her friend’s shoulder.

“I’ll call a taxi for us,” Sharon said, moving toward the telephone.

“I knew it!”

Jas stalked past her, went to the window, pretended to study the dark street below.

In the taxi, Jas enjoyed seeing the wide marble buildings lining the wide avenue, and as they approached Georgetown, the narrow but stately colonial brick houses with an occasional wood-frame mansion between. Up toward Dumbarton Oaks the vehicle carried them, the driver listening intently to the scratchy radio calls in a language neither girl could put a name to.

“Good address,” Sharon said when they pulled up in front of a three-story house with a wonderful white porch on R Street.

“Whose house again?” Jas had forgotten.

“Daughter of Senator Whoosis,” Sharon said slyly as they stepped from the cab into a gutter full of crackling leaves.

“Republican or Democrat?” Jas said.

“What do you think?” Sharon said. “Democrats have all the good parties.”

“To make a bad pun,” Jas put in.

“Ouch,” Sharon said. “But it’s true. Fletcher knows her husband, a photographer. They met on some trek or other in the Himalayas.”

“Tibet or not Tibet, that is the question.”

Sharon gave her a playful shove as they climbed the steps to the front porch.

“You have a great sense of humor. And such great eyes.”

“Thanks,” Jas said, noticing heads bobbing past the large picture window. Through the glass panes in the door they could see a thick curtain of coats hung on hooks along the wall.

Sharon rang the bell. Jas felt a little jolt, the old pain in her chest. Ever since the end of sophomore year at college it had visited her regularly. Will I ever be happy the way other people seem to be happy? And then, as usual—fortunately—her mind danced away from the thought.

There was a lot to distract her once they went inside. Their hostess, a petite woman wearing a long black dress and a Tibetan necklace of some sort—Sharon asked, so they learned that it was from Tibet—introduced them to the nearest group of people: a broad-chested national correspondent for a chain of midwestern newspapers, his mousey wife, a weak-chinned professor of philosophy from Georgetown—maybe he’d been a priest once, Jas figured from the way he spoke and looked at her—and a sour-faced fellow who wrote a political column for one of the local newspapers, the one with the lowest circulation. None of the men came up to Jas’s collarbone.

“I understand you’re going to be out of a job,” the philosophy professor said.

“That’s right,” Jas said. “We lost.”

“Poignant,” said the professor.

“Are you looking around?” said the wife of the national correspondent. “There’s always something else to do in this town.”

Before Jas could think of a response the circle of people shifted, and the national correspondent’s wife led him across the room but not before Jas caught a whiff of his foul-smelling breath. A thick-necked, shifty-eyed bull of a man the color of maple syrup drifted past; people said hello, hello, and then he was gone to another room. Then Sharon appeared, accompanied by the tallest guy Jas had seen in town in the past six months of her stay.

“Jas, this is Charles. Charles, Jas.”

“My name is actually Josephine,” Jas said, “but nobody calls me that.”

His eyes were level with hers and she stared a moment, watched him blink.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Oh!” Jas laughed and swept her right arm out to the side, knocking someone’s shoulder with her outstretched hand.

“Excuse me,” she said as the man turned to stare at her with cold blue eyes, glaring at first and then smiling, his cheeks crinkling up in a charming way.

“Of course,” he said and turned back to his conversation with the national correspondent and his wife.

“Easy on my boss,” the tall guy said.

“That’s your boss?”

“That’s my Senator,” he said. There was something about this young man’s eyes Jas noticed now—they were red-rimmed, as though he lacked moisture for his contacts or had been up all night talking, and whatever else. “Something to drink?”

And she said, yes, fine, and he brought her a glass of wine and asked her questions about the office and commiserated with her about its imminent closing. He managed to ask if he could call her.

“May I?” he said, like some lanky little boy in grade school asking for permission for a bathroom pass.

He called a few days later, catching Jas and Sharon in the middle of clearing out their closets.

“Oh, my God,” she heard herself say, trying to dig herself a little cave amidst the pile of sweaters and old running clothes. “I can’t, I just can’t.”

“You mean you won’t?” His voice sounded mournful at the other end of the line.

“I’m just so busy,” she said. “We’re closing our office, and I’ve got tons of work before I even start looking for another job.”

“So you’re going to stay in the city?”

“I don’t know,” Jas said, her voice turning a little childish. “I don’t know.”

“It’s something to do,” Sharon said after Jas had hung up.

“I am not going out with someone just because we are the same height.”

“I know people who’ve gotten together for worse reasons,” her roommate said.

“Who?”

“Our parents.”

“If he calls again, I’ll see,” Jas said, plucking at the collar of an old sweater from college with her sorority letters embroidered on the sleeve.

But she must have really put him off, she decided. Weeks went by, and they were nearly out of a job when Rosaliza, the secretary-receptionist in their soon-to-be-former office, suggested that Jas do a little research on government agencies where they all might look for something. That’s what you were reduced to in this town if you worked for the party out of power and you had little experience and fewer contacts. So she found herself in the Library of Congress spending hours going over lists of possibilities. The high-ceilinged room where she sat suggested such promise, the gilt of its decorations, the names of the greats, that she worked on and on in the midst of many others, from the elderly with noses pressed to their books to girls new to college whose purposes would in a few years turn out, she guessed, to be similar to her own. Find a job, hope for ...