For the first time that day, the rigid knot in Leonard’s stomach loosens and unties. He is a happy man. Their plans can be abandoned. He will play jazz in New York. The Four T’s will not be his only gig in America. Bravo. Bravo. But his relief is still uncertain. Nadia will see, of course, that the president has not arrived and that AmBush should be called off. But almost certainly she cannot yet know that Maxie isn’t there. There is no predicting what she might do if she still thinks he’s with her in the chamber.
Laura Bush is talking at the podium. She looks, he thinks, a lot like Nadia might look in twenty years’ time, if she dyes her hair and smiles. Both women are dressed similarly, in fact, with churchgoing small-town white-bread values in every stitch of their clothes, although Laura’s pantsuit is more pearl than granola, and she has a textile bloom on the sprigging of her lapel rather than a metal butterfly. But the lipstick is almost a match. So, oddly, is the hair. They could be mother and daughter, Leonard thinks — Laura, Jenna, Nadia — and the mother comes across as personable rather than viciously Republican, even though she’s reading from the page a little stiffly. It’s something dull about the administration’s billion-dollar-a-year “national reading initiative” that is targeting “low-income children.” Children! Leonard almost jumps. But no, that’s not it. The word he fears is singular. He looks across at Nadia. She seems unstirred. All is safe and well, perhaps.
It is four minutes, actually, before, at last, Laura Bush says the word. But Leonard’s missed it. He is in a reverie. This time it’s Maxie sharing cells with T-shirt Man — and T-shirt Man has two big friends with him. Maxie is apologizing. Maxie’s pissing down his leg. Maxie’s head is making porous thuds against the wall. Leonard’s never hated anyone this much, hate and envy, all in one. For a moment it’s almost as if the commotion from the front of the chamber belongs to Leonard’s reverie and Maxie in his prison cell. But all too soon Leonard is half out of his seat, like everybody there, and trying to find a clear view of the dais. Nadia is on her feet, shouting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and has already pushed her way into the aisle before anyone has a chance to seize her arm.
Leonard sits and lowers his head into his hands. He squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t want to hear or watch. Nadia sounds so screechy and so British — and so inefficient. Uncool, in fact. Unhip. Unblue. “Shame!”—constantly repeated as she dashes toward the podium in her high shoes — is an aimless slogan. Shame on what? Shame on the war? Shame on the planned withdrawal of troops? Shame on libraries? Does this woman have no sense of what’s appropriate? He’s overestimated her. America has poisoned her. Maxie’s knocked her out of shape. Does she not understand or care that the president’s not here and that this is only the president’s unelected wife, supporting libraries? All Laura Bush is calling for is that kids should read a book in bed at night. Everyone heard her saying as much a minute ago. Now where’s the shame in that? She’s just the meek, accommodating spouse. She could be married to a Democrat or to a pacifist and she would still want dads and moms to read their children nursery tales. This is silly, Nadia Emmerson. This is impolite. Sit down.
In fact, Leonard almost stands and shouts “Sit down,” as others are doing, rather than the “Troops … Out … Now” that he has planned. But he stays where he is, his face pressed into his hands, while pregnant Nadia succeeds in getting to the podium before any of the Secret Service men stir in their suits to block her access to the president’s wife. Indeed, Nadia has jumped up on the great oak Speaker’s table and has kicked off her spiky shoes before the first protector, a beefy, uniformed state trooper, has succeeded in grabbing her ankle and succeeded too in toppling Nadia off the table and onto Laura Bush. There is an audible clash of heads. Inexplicably, Nadia has not attempted to roll off her victim but is both gripping her by the lapel of her pearl pantsuit and pushing her back over her chair. Laura Bush takes hold of Nadia’s hair but does not tug at it. They’re wrestling. It’s an erotic fantasy made flesh, the blogs will say.
Now guns are drawn. Almost everybody in the audience is on their feet, shouting for this embarrassment to end. The Secret Service men have come alive at last, as have some men from the audience. Texan Volunteers. Heroes of the Book Festival. Nadia is pulled back across the table by twenty hands and forced onto the floor. Again there is a crash of heads. She screams and tries to shout, “Troops—” but is silenced with a hand across her mouth before she’s lifted up by ankles and by wrists and bundled away, through the governor’s door. Another friend is out of sight, though not immediately out of hearing, and very nearly out of Leonard’s life. Another eighteen years.
Leonard does not need to stand, or to speak. He no longer has to make a fuss. Any fuss he makes would be too late anyway and buried by the mayhem all around. Everybody else in the chamber is already making an excited fuss. What a historic tale they’ll have to tell their grandchildren. The nation’s first lady is being ushered from the room. She presses a tissue against her face. She holds her head with the other hand. Her nose is bleeding and blood is dripping on her suit.
Leonard lets his neighbors pass and waits for the chamber to clear round him before he even gets out of his chair. He’s calm but he is shaking. He’ll go back to the loft, remove his makeup, collect his bags and Mr. Sinister, and leave at once, before the police arrive. What other choice is there? He’s being sensible. His only hope is that the child has not been hurt, the child who will be Lucy Emmerson.
12
THE EMMERSONS LIVE IN THE SORT of digital Smarthouse designed to satisfy both fashion and environment — slot-in, prefabricated components but cottage-styled and then overbrightened and individualized with pastel StucoLux. They have the corner unit in a block of eight, with gazebo doors, dormered upper floors, an integrated glazed atrium at the back shared with neighbors, a wall-mounted carbon scrubber, and light-seeking energy scanners whirring on the roofs. Their StucoLux is beryl green. The building could be in any new development in almost any temperate city in Europe or New England, apart from the show of tended British evergreens breaking up the architectural lines of the suburban mews in which it stands.
Leonard is surprised: he has envisaged an ill-kept, narrow terrace house with peeling timber and cats, something batty or subversive, behind the times. Francine is disappointed; these increasingly ubiquitous Compact Intelligent Households are not cheap to buy or rent or run, so why choose one? Both expected the house to be more spirited than this bland and voguish eco-pod, and more in keeping with the hot-headed Sniper and the willful, sparky daughter described during the drive south in Leonard’s scrupulously selective account of his few days in Austin. “I like the sound of Nadia,” was all Francine offered, when he was finished and inviting her lenient response. She kept any thoughts on Comrades Gorky and Trotsky to herself, only nodding at her husband’s familiar frailties. She laughed out loud three times: when someone threw the dime at Mr. Sinister, when Laura Bush was floored, and when Leonard pissed on his own shoe.
They have left the Buzz in the local shopping precinct, recharging at a fuel unit in the rooftop car park, and walked the last five hundred meters not quite arm in arm but shoulder to shoulder. When they reach the Emmersons’ block, they do take hold of each other, though, posing as a blandly contented couple, unhurried and companionable, simply walking down the street and going about their errands. At first there is no evidence of any police or security services outside the house, but the residential parking spaces are all occupied, and in a side road opposite two photographers are sitting on the bonnets of their cars, waiting for some “show.”