Small Town

“Well, all I have to do is open my mouth and people know I’m from New York.”

“I expect they do, but I already knew your name, too. Recognized you from your photographs. You’re the fellow who made New York a nice place to go to.”

“I had a lot of help.”

“Can I ask what brought you to Texas? And you could make me real happy by telling me you’re coming down to run the police department in Dallas.”

“Hardly that. I was giving a talk last night to a roomful of businessmen in Arlington.”

“Not the Pericles Club? Damn it all, I go to that more months than I miss, and I’d’ve been there last night if I paid attention to my mail and knew who the speaker was. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear you.”

“You didn’t miss much,” Buckram told him.

It had gone well enough. They’d flown him first class on American, met him at DFW in a limousine, put him up at the Four Seasons. The club premises were Texas opulent, with a lot of dark wood and red leather, and western art on the walls that included several paintings by Charles M. Russell. Dinner was good, and his talk went well enough. They paid attention, they asked questions at the end, and the applause was more than just polite.

Now he was on his way home, $3,500 to the good, less a third to the lecture bureau that made his bookings. That meant he’d net $2,366.67 (and he wished they’d raise his price a hundred dollars, just so they’d be dealing in round numbers) which was not bad compensation for being well treated and fussed over while he gave a talk he’d given so many times he could do it in his sleep.

It changed, of course, according to circumstances and what was on his mind, and, he supposed, the phases of the moon. But it didn’t vary much, and the fact that it got an increasingly favorable reception bothered him. He was getting good at it, but what he was becoming good at was performance.

He felt like an actor in a long run of a Broadway show. He thought of Carol Channing, touring forever with Hello, Dolly, playing the same part in the same show a couple of hundred times a year. How could she stand it? Why would she want to?

And the conversations over cocktails, the chatting with his dinner partners, the smiles and handshakes and photos taken, they were all part of the performance, ad-libbed for the occasion but nevertheless the same. The hardest part used to be during the Q&A, when he had to answer a question without letting on that he’d been asked it a few hundred times. But he’d learned how to do that, too. It had felt phony at first, but now it just felt like part of what he did, and what did that make him?

“One thing I heard,” Bob Wilburn said, “is you might be the next mayor.”

“You heard that all the way down in Plano, Texas?”

“Heard it in New York, matter of fact. I’m up there every couple of months. But I could as easily have heard it in Texas. There’s a whole lot more folks in Dallas can name the mayor of New York than there are New Yorkers who can tell you who’s mayor of Dallas. You fixing to run?”

“That’s a long ways off,” he said.

“And that’s a good way to answer the question, or to not answer it. Here’s another question — why in the hell would anybody want the job?”

He laughed. “Beats me, Bob.”

“What was it that fellow said? His name slips my mind, but you know who I mean. Talks like he swallowed the dictionary.”

“William F. Buckley.”

“That’s the fellow. Ran for mayor of New York, didn’t have a snowball’s chance, and some reporter asked him what he’d do if he won. Said he’d demand a recount.”

“It’s a good line.”

“It’s a damn good line. You want the job, Fran?”

“I don’t know.”

“That sounds honest.”

“It is.”

“It’s an important job. Somebody’s got to do it, and when you know you’d be good at it—”

“I’m not as sure of that as I used to be,” he said. “After 9/11, I looked at Rudy and watched him do everything right, and I don’t know if I could have done that well.”

“A time like that, a man finds out what he can and can’t do. I don’t know, Fran. Politics? I pay too much money to too many politicians to have a lot of illusions about the whole business. God knows I’ve never wanted to go into it myself.”

“Neither have I,” he said. “All I ever wanted to do was be a cop.”

That wasn’t entirely true. His father was a cop, and when he was a little kid of course what he wanted was to wear a blue uniform and carry a gun and do what his daddy did. But that changed, and he grew up knowing a cop was the one thing he definitely did not want to be. “It’s steady,” his father told him, “and a man can take some pride in it, but it’s no life for a kid with a head on his shoulders. You’re cut out for something better, Fran. You don’t want to wind up like your old man.”