T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Colin or Carter or Rutherford turned to me and said, “What is it, George — are you all right?”

“The New Moon,” I said.

Lorna was regarding me quizzically. A few of the other aides turned their heads.

I was holding my plastic cup of 7-Up aloft as if it were crystal, as if it were filled with Taittinger or Dom Pérignon. “To the New Moon!” I said with a fire and enthusiasm I hadn’t felt in years. “To the New Moon Party!”

The American people were asleep. They were dead. The great, the giving, the earnest, energetic, and righteous American people had thrown in the towel. Rape, murder, cannibalism, political upheaval in the Third World, rock and roll, unemployment, puppies, mothers, Jackie, Michael, Liza: nothing moved them. Their worst fears, most implausible dreams, and foulest conceptions were all right there in the metro section, splashed across the ever-swelling megalopic eye of the TV screen in living color and clucked over by commentators who looked as alike as bowling pins. Scandal and horror were as mundane as a yawn before bed; honor, decency, heroism, and enterprise were looked on as quaint, largely inapplicable notions that expressed an inexcusable naïveté about the way of the world. In short, no one gave a good goddamn about anything. Myself included. So how blame them when they couldn’t tell the candidates apart, didn’t bother to turn out at the polls, neither knew nor cared whether the honorable Mr. P. stood for Nazi rebirth or federally funded electronic walkers for the aged and infirm?

I’d seen it all, and nothing stirred me, either. Ultraism, conservatism, progressivism, communism, liberalism, neofascism, parties of the right, left, center, left of center, and oblate poles: who cared? I didn’t even know why I was running. I’d served my two terms as a fresh-faced, ambitious young representative during the Eisenhower years, fought through three consecutive terms in the senatorial wars, wielded the sword of power and influence in the most armor-plated committees on the Hill, and been twice elected governor of Iowa on a platform that promised industrial growth, environmental protection, and the eradication of corn blight through laser technology. And yet, for all that, I wasn’t satisfied. I guess, even at sixty-one, I was still afflicted with those hungry pangs of ambition that every boy who can’t play center field for the Yankees will never wholly shake: I wanted to be top dog, kick off my shoes in the Oval Office, and stir up a fuss wherever I went; I wanted to climb high atop the mountain and look down on the creeping minuscule figures of queens, rock stars, matinee idols, and popes. It was a cold life in a comfortless universe; I didn’t believe in God, afterlife, or leprechauns. I wanted to make my mark on history — what else was there?

And so I — we — came up with the issue that would take the country — no, the world itself — by storm. From the moment of my epiphany on that rattling howling DC-10 I never said another word about taxes, inflation, Social Security, price supports, or the incumbent’s lamentable record on every key issue from the decentralization of the Boy Scouts to relations with the Soviet Union. No, I talked only of the New Moon. The moon we were going to build, to create, to hurl into the sky to take its place among the twinkling orbs of the night and recover the dignity and economic stability of America in the process. Jupiter had twelve moons, Saturn ten, Uranus five. What were we? Where was our global pride when we could boast but one craggy, acne-ridden bulb blighting the nighttime sky? A New Moon. A New Moon Soon: it was on my lips like a battle cry.

In Montpelier they thought I’d gone mad. An audience of thirty-seven had turned out at the local ag school to hear me talk about coydogs and maple-sugar pinwheels, but I gave them a dose of the New Moon instead. I strode out onto the stage like a man reborn (which I was), shredded my prepared speech, and flung it like confetti over their astonished heads, my arms spread wide, the spontaneous, thrilling message of the lunar gospel pouring from me in evangelical fervor, LUNACY, mocked the morning headlines, THORKELSSON MOONSTRUCK. But the people listened. They murmured in Montpelier, applauded lightly — hands chapped and dry as comhusks — in Rutland. In Pittsburgh, where I really began to hit my stride (I talked of nothing but the steel it would take to piece together the superstructure of the new satellite), they got up on tables and cheered. The American people were tired of party bickering, vague accusations, and even vaguer solutions; they were sick to death of whiz-kid economists, do-nothing legislatures, and the nightmare specter of nuclear war. They wanted joy, simplicity, a goal as grand as Manifest Destiny and yet as straightforward and unequivocal as a bank statement. The New Moon gave it to them.

By the time the convention rolled around, the New Moon was waxing full. I remember the way the phones rang off the hook: would we take a back seat to Fritz, throw our support to John, accept the VP nomination on a split-issue platform? Seven weeks earlier no one had even deigned to notice us — half the time we didn’t even get press coverage. But New Moon fever was sweeping the country — we’d picked up a bundle of delegates, won in Texas, Ohio, and California, and suddenly we were a force to reckon with.

“George,” Colin was saying (I’m sure it was Colin, because I’d canned Carter and Rutherford to avoid the confusion), “I still say we’ve got to broaden our base. The one issue has taken us leagues, I admit it, but—”

I cut him off. I was George L. Thorkelsson, former representative, former senator, and current governor of the Mesopotamia of the Midwest, the glorious, farinaceous, black-loamed hogbutt of the nation, and I wasn’t about to listen to any defeatist twaddle from some Ivy League pup. “Hey diddle, diddle,” I said, “the cat and the fiddle.” I was feeling pretty good.

It was then that Gina — Madame Scutari, that is — spoke up. Lorna and I had discovered her in the kitchen of Mama Gina’s, a Nashville pasta house, during the Tennessee primary. She’d made an abbacchio alla cacciatora that knocked my socks off, and when we’d gone back to congratulate her she’d given me a look of such starstruck devotion I felt like the new Messiah. It seemed that the Madame (who wasn’t Italian at all, but Hungarian) was a part-time astrologist and clairvoyant, and had had a minor seizure at the very moment of my epiphany in the DC-10—her left arm had gone numb and she’d pitched forward into a platter of antipasto with the word “lunar” on her lips. She told us all this in a rush of malaproprisms and tortured syntax, while cauldrons of marinara sauce bubbled around her and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rose and fell like a shuttlecock. Then she’d leaned forward to whisper in my ear like a priestess of the oracle. Leo , she’d said, hitting my sign on the nose, Scorpio in the ascendant. Then she drew up her rouged face and gave me a broad Magyar wink and I could feel her lips moving against my ear: A New Moon Soon , she rasped. From that moment on she’d become one of my closest advisers.

Now she cleared her throat with a massive dignity, her heavy arms folded over her bust, and said, in that delicate halting accent that made you feel she could read the future like a Neapolitan menu, “Not to worry, Georgie: I see you rising like the lion coming into the tenth house.”

“But George”—Colin was nearly whining—“gimmicks are okay, but they can only take you so far. Think of the political realities.”

Lorna and the Madame exchanged a look. I watched as a smile animated my wife’s features. It was a serene smile, visionary, the smile of a woman who already saw herself decked out in a gown like a shower of gold and presiding over tea in the Blue Room.