Gore Vidal - Empire

“Or delight me. Sit down, Blaise.”

Sulkily, he turned the gilded chair backwards and straddled it as if he were riding a horse. Demurely, she sat at her desk, strewn with unpaid bills. She wished now that she had paid more attention to Mlle. Souvestre’s excellent but dull teacher of mathematics.

“How much,” asked Blaise, “did it cost you?”

“Two or three Poussins.”

“ My pictures!”

“ Our pictures. I shall pay you your share, of course, when you give me my share of-”

“That’s for the lawyers.” Blaise was looking about the dismal office. Caroline was pleased at the amount of squalor she could endure. She regretted that she had not followed her first impulse to hang on the wall a lurid four-color portrait of Admiral Dewey, with the legend “Our Hero.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Blaise.

“I’ve never understood why whenever someone is truly serious, someone always says that. Of course I’m serious. I am,” Caroline lowered her lashes shyly, the way Helen Hay did when the waiter brought around dessert, “working here, as publisher and editor, just like Mr. Hearst.”

Blaise laughed, without joy. He had seen the framed front page; and guessed that it was her work. “There’s more to this than murders,” he said.

“Yes. There’s Mrs. Hearst’s money to pay his debts. Or was. She goes back to California. She will not help him any longer.”

“Who’ll pay your debts? The old Trib loses money like a sieve.”

“I suppose that I will. From the estate.”

Blaise swept the gold chair to one side; and walked over to the window and stared through the fly-specked glass at the print shop beneath. “ That makes money. The paper loses it.” He turned around. “How much do you want?”

“I’m not selling.”

“Everything has its price.”

Caroline laughed. “You’ve been in New York too long! That’s the sort of thing very fat men say at Rector’s. But not everything is for sale. The Tribune’s mine.”

“Mr. Hearst will pay you double what you paid, which must have been around fifty thousand dollars.”

“He hasn’t got the money, I know. I have met his mother.”

“One hundred fifty thousand dollars.” Blaise sat on the window-sill. He wore a light gray coat which was now, visibly, beginning to darken from the room’s dust. “For everything. That’s three times what this wreck of a paper’s worth.”

Caroline thought Blaise uncommonly attractive at this moment. Anger was his invigorating emotion. What was her own? Time would answer that, she decided; and then she made Blaise gloriously beautiful, by turning mere anger to plain fury with the words: “You don’t want to buy this for Mr. Hearst. You want to buy it for yourself. You are double, as the fat men say at Rector’s, crossing him.”

“Damn you!” Blaise sprang from the window-sill. The back of his gray frock coat veined with spider-webs and the mummies of a dozen flies who had found in the Tribune ‚s window frame their final Egypt.

“I might-if you stop damning me-let you have half the paper if you let me have my half of the…”

“Blackmail! You come here behind my back, knowing that I… knowing that the Chief must have a Washington paper, and tricked that nigger into selling-”

“I didn’t trick him. And is he really a nigger? The subject is very delicate here. It is like the Knights of Malta. You know, how many family quarterings can you produce? Anyway, if you’re interested, there is a very engaging Negro newspaper here called the Washington Bee . Since niggers and-by association?-blackmail so much concern you, you should talk to the proprietor, a Mr. Chase. I can introduce you. He is, perhaps, too moral for Mr. Hearst, but he might sell, and then you-or Hearst-will have a true Washington paper, entirely black, like the town.”

Blaise looked less attractive as fury was replaced by anger, and a revival of his native cunning. “How can you pay all those bills on your desk…?”

“I didn’t know you could read upside down.”

“Red ink, yes.”

“I have my income, such as it is. I have,” she improvised, “helpful friends.”

“Cousin John? Well, he can’t help you, and John Hay doesn’t dare unless he wants the Journal down on him.”

“I don’t think he’s afraid of Mr. Hearst, or much of anyone. You see, he has,” she explained demurely, “a bad back.” Caroline rose. They faced one another at the room’s center. As they were the same height, blue eyes glared straight into hazel ones.

“I won’t give up any part of the estate,” said Blaise.

“I won’t give up the Tribune .”

“Unless you go broke.”

“Or sell it to Mr. Hearst, and not to you.”

Blaise was pale now; he looked exhausted. Caroline recalled a precocious girl at Allenswood who had actually been seduced. The girl’s highly secret report to Caroline, her best friend, was the only firsthand account that Caroline had ever received from that Strange country where men and women committed the ultimate act. Although Caroline had pressed for specific details (the statuary in the Louvre had created a number of confusions, those leaves ), the girl had been, maddeningly, spiritual in her report. She spoke of Love , a subject that always mystified, when it did not annoy, Caroline; and could not be persuaded to tear the leaf from the mystery. But the girl had described the transformation in the young man’s face from the archangel that she saw him to satyr or, a kindly second thought, wild animal, and how the face, all scarlet one moment, went gray-white, with exhaustion, or whatever, the next. So Blaise now resembled a lover at transport’s end. But what, Caroline wondered, was the transport itself like? Mlle. Souvestre had suggested that if her students were really curious about what she always referred to with not-so-delicate irony as “married life,” they study Bernini’s Saint Teresa at Rome. “Allegedly, the saint is in the throes of religious ecstasy, the eyes are closed, the mouth is disagreeably ajar. The expression is cretinous. It is said that Bernini was inspired not by God but by the grandest of human passions.” When asked if “married life” at its peak was similar to a confrontation with the Holy Ghost, Mademoiselle had said firmly, “I am a freethinker and a virgin. You must apply elsewhere for instruction in ecstasy, and after you have left Wimbledon.”

“Come,” said Caroline graciously, “let me show you the paper.”

Together they entered the long compositors’ rooms. Trimble, in shirt-sleeves, was correcting a galley at the long table. The cat was still asleep in the window. The city reporter was writing on a new typewriter-machine, bought by Caroline during the second day of her proprietorship. “I find the noise of typing soothing,” she said to the silent Blaise. “I am responsible for the Remington. It’s what Henry James uses.” Caroline looked at her pale brother expectantly; but his silence, if possible, deepened. “I’ve asked the reporters not to achieve the same results. Fortunately, they only admire Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis. This is the managing editor, Mr. Trimble.”

The two men shook hands, and Caroline said, as an afterthought, “My half-brother Blaise Sanford. He works with Mr. Hearst, at the Journal .”

“Now there is a paper.” Trimble was flattering. “You know, last winter we heard a rumor that you people were going to buy us.”

“Since then Mr. Hearst has drawn in his horns,” said Caroline. “He’s not acquiring for the moment.”

“What’s your paid circulation?” asked Blaise.