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  “You’re late, Shay,” I say as I swing open the passenger door.

  “Ohhhh, have you been waiting out here? I was waiting inside.”

  “Inside? What’d you think I was going to do? Drive up to the ticket counter?”

  “No.” She is crestfallen. Crushed. Destroyed that she’s done the wrong thing again. “I thought you’d park in that short-term lot.”

  “You mean the one that’s always full?”

  Nervously the man sets down Shay’s laptop computer case and two leather tote bags. Shay gives him one of her sequin-bright smiles and then completely forgets his existence. He walks away, looking dismissed and disappointed. Since my sister frequently volunteers my chauffeuring services, I am surprised she didn’t offer to drop him off at some hotel in congested Crystal City.

  Standing there surrounded by her baggage, Shay looks like a high-class, fast-track, sixties jet-setter. Ever since leaving her second husband eight months ago, she has been living out of suitcases, subletting apartments or staying with different friends and lovers in various cities, steaming out her clothes in other people’s showers and using small hotel gift containers of shampoo, bath gel and body lotion on a daily basis.

  Still, she’s looking good. She’s brown as a toasted muffin. Having always viewed tanning as a competitive sport, Shay takes a Caribbean cruise every Christmas to get a leg up on her competition before the official arrival of summer in North America. By July, she’s cocoa-brown. This summer’s ozone crisis has only enhanced the tone of her tan.

  As usual, she’s wearing a faded T-shirt tucked into her trademark white Calvin jeans and a pair of hot-pink thong sandals. Although her only makeup is lip gloss and black kohl eyeliner, Shay is a genuinely glamorous article, and the people making detours around her pile of baggage glance at her with small frowns as if she’s someone famous whose name they’ve forgotten. That’s okay for folks who don’t do crossword puzzles, but it’s a big risk for those who do.

  “Well, get in, Shay. The cops are watching.”

  “God, you’re such a doll to come get me,” she says, ignoring my irritation and starting to toss bags into the backseat while broadcasting her gratitude toward me with a neon-white smile. “You look gre-at. That’s a fabulous dress.”

  Uh-oh.

  The last time Shay borrowed something from me—my much-beloved metallic raincoat—she gave it to a pregnant woman in the Miami airport who was on her way home to Chile. When I got angry, Shay was totally shocked. For some reason I keep forgetting her favorite leisure activity is taking my shirt off her back and giving it away to someone else. The name of that game is: “Oh, sorry about that. I didn’t think you’d mind. I’ll buy you a new one.”

  Uh-huh.

  SNAPSHOT

  There we are. Two dark-haired little Jewish sisters, four and two years old, sitting atop a tencent-a-ride spotted pony at the Farmer-Labor party’s annual Fourth of July picnic celebration at North Commons. Surrounded by a crowd of little blond children, we are the only brunettes in this Scandinavian setting, where pale bland beauty is the standard and a shy quiet demeanor the norm. If you look carefully you can see that Shay is hanging on to (pulling?) one of my braids. By this time, our parents had long since abandoned their parents’ socialism to become socialites. Avid assimilationists, they threw catered affairs in newly constructed country clubs with open trenches still awaiting sewer and water lines. Although Shay and I were encouraged to assimilate and adapt to our surroundings, we somehow always seemed to stick out like sore thumbs. We certainly had more pony rides than the other children because Dad thought more was better in every situation.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” Shay continues fervently. She’s been gone maybe ten days. I wouldn’t know for sure because she never tells me when she’s leaving, where she’s going, who she’ll be traveling with or where she’ll be staying. Anyway, I’m always so relieved when she’s not around, it never seems to me she’s gone for very long.

  Shay checks the contents of a Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag before setting it in the backseat and then, climbing in beside me, starts searching for her seat belt. Having finally admitted her mortality when she turned forty in February, Shay now wrestles furiously with all the different restraint systems she encounters, animistically assuming they are trying to confound her. Now she is fighting to get the cross strap locked into place.

  “Do you put your seat belt over or under or between your tits?” she asks, scrunching down to find the lock mechanism.

  Uncertain, I look down. My seat belt appears to be doing all three things at the same time, so I don’t answer her question. Instead I ask:

  “Where’s Amelia?”

  “At Christopher’s house.”

  Amelia is Shay’s three-year-old granddaughter, of whom she has temporary custody. Christopher is Shay’s estranged second husband, whom she still uses as an administrative assistant and substitute baby-sitter whenever she has to go out of town. Christopher, once counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is now a Woodrow Wilson Fellow who spends all his time translating Baudelaire and taking care of Amelia as a way of reingratiating himself with Shay. Considering he is only related to the little girl through his now-defunct marriage to her grandmother, Christopher has turned out to be an excellent primary caretaker.

  What men will do for my sister still knocks me out.

  When Shay is finally strapped in, I start the car and crawl along with the other traffic until we are past the north terminal, where everyone speeds up. That’s when my sister lights one of her Merit cigarettes.

  “Oh, Shay,” I whine. “Do you really have to smoke when the air conditioner’s on?”

  “Smoking’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it,” she says, crossing her long legs and getting comfortable.

  I can tell she is totally focused on telling me her story. Crosscurrents of excitement turn her into an emotional Jacuzzi. Although she can hardly contain herself (she’s never been too big in the self-restraint department), Shay wants me to ask what’s happening. That’s why she’s twitching with impatience. Any minute now she’s going to raise her hand in good old kindergarten fashion and wave it in the air until I call on her.

  “Okay,” I finally relent in a slightly testy voice. “Let’s have it. What’s the story?”

  “It’s a real major story, Nat. I stole some government papers while I was out on Long Island.”

  “Oh, great. What kind of papers?”

  “It’s a copy of an interview the DEA—the Drug Enforcement Administration?—got from Fawn Hall.” Shay’s words come bubbling out like unchilled Perrier from a bottle. “It’s so damaging they’ve kept it under wraps for a whole year already. Just suppressed it. But now I’m going to blow the whole story sky high. It’s just what I needed to put me back on the map in a big way.”

  Shay’s talking celestial navigational charts here.

  “What’d she testify about?” I ask.

  “Are you ready for this? She said she was a weekend cocaine user from 1985 to 1987. I bet she was doing coke in tony Georgetown clubs while she was working for Oliver North on the National Security Council. Doing coke while she was working at the White House! Isn’t that wild?”

  “Didn’t she date some contra guy?” I ask, straining to remember a bit of gossip I’d read long ago. “A relative of a contra leader or something?”

  “Yup. Arturo Cruz, Junior.” Shay pronounces Latin names with an exaggerated Castilian accent she picked up back at North High School in Minneapolis. When she says “Nicaragua” it always sounds like she’s gargling. “He’s the son of Arturo Cruz, the contra general, or whatever he is. Fawn and Junior were a real hot item back there for a while.”

  “Jesus,” I whisper, genuinely impressed.

  Fawn Hall. The Republican Barbie doll. Captain of the White House cheerleading team. Oliver North’s sycophantic secretary, who made Nancy-Reagan goo-goo eyes at her boss during photo opportunities and hid secret documents insi
de her bra to get them past White House security for him. Fawn Hall, seen driving a red Fiero with FAWN 3 license plates around D.C., was aide-de-camp to an inside traitor. Another pollutant to add to this summer’s disgraces. Another hit on the list of scandals sprinkling down on us like acid rain.

  Washington has become the crime-and-corruption capital of the world.

  See Ronald Reagan pretend he can’t hear reporters’ questions.

  See Nancy Reagan telling the have-nots to just say no.

  See Fawn Hall, looking like a blond runaway from Charlie’s Angels, say yes to drugs and contras while she fawns all over Ollie.

  See Ollie twisting in the wind, still looking holier-than-thou.

  Watch the Boy Scout leader and his secretary shred National Security Council documents.

  See democracy go down the drain.

  But—wait—maybe it’s the bimbos who will finally bring down the government. Not the right, not the left. Not the skinheads, not the neo-cons. Not the Reagan royalists nor the distressed Democrats. Maybe it’s the retired bunnies who will do the dirty work for us. Maybe it’s the grown-up Barbie dolls who will finally destroy all the Kens who’ve diddled them for decades. Look how easily Donna Rice knocked off the Democratic front-runner.

  Although no political challenger could unseat Wilbur Mills from his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee, Fanne Foxe did it lying down. Foxe and Mills, Rice and Hart, Hahn and Bakker, Hall and North. Maybe Fawn and Ollie are making it. Maybe not. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because Americans believe it’s worse for a man to screw his secretary than to screw his country.

  So what’s new?

  But for Shay Karavan to break this latest Fawn Hall story is to let the fox do a feature on the chicken coop. Shay, too, is a member of the clubby coke generation. She understands all too well the health-club neurotic, macrobiotic, aerobic/phobic yuppiefied world of glitz, greed, drugs and personal defilement.

  Shay’s treatment of the Fawn Hall story won’t throw any new light on Oliver North’s Iran-contra caper. It won’t discuss the illegal provision of ill-gotten drug dollars to the contras in defiance of Congress. No. It will only be a stylish profile of a drop-dead gorgeous spandex-sexy secretary and how she partied it up in Georgetown. And why does this bug me so bad? Because I’m getting the short end of the stick. I work in an area where there are few federal, state or private dollars to sustain serious social-welfare programs. I care about the needy; Shay’s only interested in the greedy.

  “You know, it’s hard for people to remember what Contragate’s about, Shay. If you could simplify things, it would really be helpful. People can’t remember the sequence of events. Or the timing. Or even the players. Oliver North selling arms to Iran and then sending that money down to the contras to buy arms is just too complicated.”

  “Yeah,” Shay says vaguely.

  But now she is getting bored, fading out on me.

  Real politics turn her off. That’s why Shay should share this story with Eli. Let him do the political angle while she shines the glitz. Back in the early seventies, Eli did a lot of Watergate stories, sometimes even pre-empting the Post. But now no matter what stories break, what scandals surface, nothing can mar Reagan’s image, so Eli has ended up feeling professionally defeated and personally cynical about both the presidency and the press.

  It’s one of the reasons he’s so unhappy these days. Restive. Edgy:

  “Anyway, Mickey Teardash and I are going down to Atlanta Sunday night to meet with some Dukakis people. They’re deciding whether or not to corelease the story with us. You know who Mickey Teardash is, don’t you? From the Georgia tobacco family? Last year he bought U.S.A. Actually he bought two newspapers and three magazines last year, plus that humongous public-relations firm—Images—in New York that’s doing all the Dukakis television ads.”

  Shay cards her men. Each one must be famous for something.

  At this moment I think I know how Sophia Loren felt when her sister married Mussolini’s son. At this moment I think I know how Jessica Mitford felt when her sister Boud took up with Hitler, Himmler, Göring and Goebbels. Mickey Teardash is a walking symbol of Wall Street—the roaring eighties’ national poster boy for terminal avarice. He is a junk-bond junkie, an LBO luftmensch and a corporate take-over kamikaze kook.

  “I’ve read about him in the papers,” I say carefully.

  “Well, I told him we’d all meet him for a drink around eleven at Café au Lait. I know Eli knows him.”

  Of course Eli knows him. Eli knows everyone. That’s why Eli is so important to Shay. He’s a valuable brother-in-law because he knows everyone and because everyone knows him and because he’s an influential Washington journalist. Moreover, he is eternally and irresistibly interesting to Shay because he slept with her for several years before he married me.

  That’ll do it every time.

  Frequently when Shay gets drunk, she brags that she’s slept with Muammar Qaddafi, Fidel Castro, Michael Manley, one of People’s sexiest men alive (Sean Connery), one Nobel Prize winner, one MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship winner (that’s her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Christopher) and two Pulitzer Prize winners, whom she never names, out of respect for me, since one of them is my husband.

  “What this really means, Nat, is that the Democrats will have a better chance of winning the election in November. This could really help them. The Republicans will look awfully dirty after my story comes out.”

  This is a bit much for me to handle.

  Once again my kid sister has found a piece of stage business for herself that is front-page news. As usual she is going to gild herself while she goes for the gold.

  “Who’d you steal it from, Shay?”

  “Actually, it’s sort of a long story. See, I was out in the Hamptons working on an article for Lear’s magazine. You know? The one for women who weren’t born yesterday?”

  I nod like older sisters are programmed to do.

  “It’s about September sex,” she continues.

  Another nod. Although I’m not sure what September sex is, with my luck I’m probably missing out on a good thing again.

  “Anyway, before Mickey came out there to join me, I stayed with an old girlfriend of mine in Southampton. Remember Georgia Russo?”

  “No.”

  Translation: How the hell am I supposed to remember all the people in your life when you’ve got a goddam cast of thousands? You still can’t even remember the names of my two best friends—or tell them apart.

  “Well, one night, Jerry—that’s Georgia’s husband—got drunk and started bragging about how he knows some of the lawyers representing Fawn Hall and how sexy she is and all that kind of shit. Actually Jerry’s a real sleaze bag. He’s got a practice full of cocaine-dealing clients. Georgia’s worried because it’s illegal for a lawyer to be kept on retainer by a criminal currently engaging in criminal activity. That makes the lawyer an accomplice or something. Anyway, Jerry dropped this bit about how the DEA interviewed Fawn about doing drugs and that he managed to pinch a copy of the DEA report.”

  Shay cracks her window and flicks her cigarette out into the tinder-dry universe. Then she opens up her huge shoulder bag and starts to rummage through its jumbled contents.

  I have now reached the precarious point where 395 intersects 95 North. Like wild buffalo, cars are stampeding toward us, hurtling past the red nose of my little Ford Escort, which is poking into their path. Since there is no one behind me, I decide to give myself a break and wait for an easy opening. I’m in no big hurry. When Shay’s around I usually try to hang loose and take things slow and easy. Actually, when Shay’s around, I try to be a little nicer to myself than I usually am.

  “Anyway, the last night I was there, Georgia and Jerry went to this party I didn’t want to go to? And I was just sitting around when all of a sudden I got this idea. So I went into Jerry’s study and looked in his filing cabinet. And there it was. Right on top of some other papers in the top drawer. I almost f
reaked out when I read it. So I just shoved it in my suitcase and took it with me when I left there to move into Mickey’s place over in East Hampton.”

  “This is really serious, Shay,” I say, still watching the cars rushing in from Virginia. “It’s probably classified. You’ve probably broken some federal espionage act or something.”

  “Oh, I covered my tracks,” she answers confidently. “No one can prove I took the papers, and besides, Jerry probably won’t notice they’re gone until after the story breaks. In fact, depending on what happens in Atlanta, Mickey and I might just give it to the Dukakis people to release on their own so they’ll get all the credit for it.”

  Suddenly there’s a break in the traffic.

  I’m on.

  Flooring the accelerator, I swing out across 95 and then edge around the circle leading to Memorial Bridge.

  “So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a wrap,” Shay purrs like a cat.

  “Oh, absolutely,” I say, not even attempting to camouflage my sarcasm. “It’s in the bag, Shay.”

  “I can’t wait to tell Eli.”

  Shay stares off into the middle distance while she envisions playing out her big scene. As an entertainer, Shay doesn’t like to waste herself on audiences of one. Especially if it’s only me. She prefers performing for larger groups in SRO situations.

  Shay’s journalistic specialty is essay-style wrap-ups of sensational trials, which she considers a form of American folk art. She has written extensively about John Hinckley, Jr., Claus von Bülow, the Walker family of spies, Roxanne Pulitzer, John Zaccaro, Jr., Baby M, and most recently, Robert Chambers, the Preppie Murderer.

  “Eli is really going to freak out,” she predicts happily. “He’s just gonna love this story.”

  2

  And this I have to live with.

  I have tried to deal with it rationally.

  I have tried to deal with it in the offices of high-priced shrinks.