The American Ambassador Read Online Free Page A

after six months in-country, this is worse than Chicago. It was not graft on a colossal scale, because the country was so poor; but everything there to be stolen was stolen. However, the country was free of Communists and that was a problem. Every year a problem with the foreign aid appropriation because there was no Moscow-inspired internal threat. In fact, as the ambassador observed, there were more Communists in Chicago. There were more Communists in one department at the university than there were in B——. But it was a bell curve. Each year, he predicted, there would be more Communists in B——, while in Chicago, of course, there would be fewer. What had Melville said about his whaling ship? My Yale College and my Harvard. That was what North felt about Africa, and wherever he went thereafter, Africa went, too. The continent had not had the same effect on Murillo and Deshler. Poor Joe Deshler—Africa had become an obsession and after 1970, as he freely admitted, he wasn’t worth a damn as a Foreign Service officer. He no longer knew where his deepest loyalties lay. When he died in Rock Creek Park, he was on loan to the Agency for International Development.
    When Elinor came to bed, he feigned sleep, his left hand tucked awkwardly under his chin. He thought of rolling over, then didn’t. He couldn’t get his mind on sex and keep it there. His dead hand distracted him. He continued to flex his fingers, feeling her beside him, her heat and the rhythm of her breathing, not quite asleep; she moved and touched his foot with her own. Your move, Jules. Her foot was warm and he backed into her, the underside of his thighs against her knees. Her touch was comfortable and familiar, without reserve. And we haven’t needed anyone else, he thought; a two-edged thought. She mumbled something, turning, and he was alone again. He shut his eyes and saw the cigarette, white against the dark shag of the rug and the accusing wisp of smoke.
    Then he was dozing, moving back and forth among his dead and troubled friends, his wife, and his absent son. He was trying to ignore his numb hand. By concentrating on his friends he thought he could make a separate peace. But Bill Jr. forced his way inside, an occupying army: Bill Jr. at seven, ten, thirteen, sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-four. He watched the boy grow, taller and broader; listened to the voice deepen; watched the smile disappear.
    Sleep would not come so he carefully got out of bed and crept into the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. A low counter separated the kitchen from the living room. On a table at the far end of the living room, dimly seen by moonlight, were family photographs in silver frames, their national archive. Elinor in a bikini on a beach near Mombasa, almost twenty years ago. He and Elinor with Jomo Kenyatta at the race course in Nairobi, the Mzee’s fly whisk only inches from her nose, the old bull rank with bed, whiskey, and cigars; Elinor maintained his only equal in pure animal grace was Richard Burton. Elinor with an animated Robert Lowell in a pub in Hampstead, both of them jolly and tight, their moods matching the rosy glow of the pub. He and Elinor in black tie, talking to Lyndon Johnson at a reception in Washington; no,
listening
to Lyndon Johnson at a reception in Bonn, the former President’s hands deep in his trouser pockets, jiggling coins and his private parts, telling them about his library, greatest of all the presidential libraries, the most complete, the handsomest, and in
Texas
, magnet for scholars worldwide, he himself overseeing each detail (though North remembered, too, Dunphy, the old man’s aide, late atnight, with the former President in bed and out of the way, conducting a monologue, he and Elinor listening with the attention you’d give a great cellist playing tragic Mozart in your own living room, the concert for your ears only. They were downstairs in the ambassador’s residence,