Asterisk by Campbell Armstrong Page A

promises … trust … already broken.… When he had finished it was already 9:30 and Farrago was on the telephone again.
    â€œQuit fucking around, Thorne. Bannerman’s been chewing my ear off.”
    â€œShe’s typing right now,” Thorne said.
    â€œIs it true she can turn out eight words a minute if she’s really hammering?” Farrago hung up.
    Thorne walked into the adjoining office and watched the girl type. On a wooden stand beside her desk there was a bottle of nail polish, a nail file, two apples in a plastic bag.
    â€œYou better hurry it,” he said.
    She looked at him lazily: “It’s not my fault if it’s late, is it?”
    He shrugged and went back to his own office. He stood at the window and watched a Secret Service agent playing with his walkie-talkie, moving along the edges of the lawn and muttering into his device. Overhead, a helicopter with the Air Force seal came into view. Thorne saw it hover a moment and then go out of sight.
    He sat down behind his desk, put his feet up. Later, the provincials would start to come in. The Old Man always liked to know what was happening in the sticks and would read the summaries before going to bed. But the pressure’s off, Thorne thought: it’s off for a while. He closed his eyes, tried to relax. He could hear telephones ringing, the persistent clatter of IBMs, voices from the corridor. At times he found himself struggling with a sense of some weird incongruity, moments of uneasiness when he wondered what he was doing in this place at this particular time and where, in the long run, it might all be leading. If somebody had told him a year ago that he would be working in the White House he would have consigned this prediction to a category of things that included belief in a flat earth, the notion that the moon was made of Gorgonzola, and the idea of coming one fine day to love the poetry of S. T. Coleridge.
    There had been two blurry years at Harvard doing law: what could you say about that? Humdrum: anathematic to him—the stifling weight of legal judgments, the dust of dilapidated precedents. It was followed by the obligatory year of doing Europe in a VW bus; a drifting time, a fragile existence at best, one day shading pretty much into the next. There was a lack of adhesive, of a glue that would hold the experiential things together. And what he had come to realize, almost as something of a shock, was that he needed an epoxy of some sort to keep the passages of time together in a purpose.
    A purpose.
    He went to the window. The Secret Service agent, as though he anticipated an outbreak of demons, a plague of protesters, appeared to be crouching in the shrubbery, his face turned in the direction of Penn Avenue. Thorne watched a moment; the raincoated figure stood suddenly upright and moved off in long exaggerated strides.
    Journalism, he wondered: what had attracted him to that?
    He had done the upstate New York newspaper bit—funerals, flower shows, Eagle scout awards, graduations, weddings: the minuscule events that were finally sandwiched between the ads that paid for the paper. He remembered long hours, bleak snowy winters, a dreary sense of a system enduring in a vacuum. Where was the outside world? the real world?
    His telephone was ringing.
    It was Duncannon, one of the legal aides, suggesting a lunch. Thorne declined. He knew the nature of these lunches, the floating conspiracies, the tiny struggles for position, for power, for the opening that would suggest a foothold on the Way Up. He put the receiver down and thought: What am I doing here? What part do I have in the whispers in the men’s rooms, the quiet words in nearby restaurants, the confidences—both false and true—that are exchanged in the mess?
    What indeed?
    You had to be ambitious to make it around here; you had to want it badly, you had to hurt for it. Where the hell do I fit in this scheme of things? he wondered. Where