Lust, Loathing, Lunacy

A photograph depicting a naked female on a motorcycle lay on a kitchen table. A middle-aged man clad in a stained and ragged turquoise bathrobe stood looking down at the photo which was illuminated by a bar of morning sunlight as he swallowed a third cup of black coffee to combat his daily hangover. The man was Philip Francis Parkman, Democrat Congressman from the 14th District of New Jersey. The nude in the photograph was Catherine Taylor Quinter, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the congressman’s closest friend in Washington, D.C. Beauteous Catherine and the Honorable Philip Francis Parkman had been lovers for the past four months. In the five-by-seven digital print out which had just arrived that morning by FedEx at the congressman’s apartment glorious Catherine, thirty years younger than her lover whom she always addressed as “Phil” instead of the “Philip” he preferred, perched in naked glory on a maroon Harley that was surely too powerful for her to control. Thus the congressman wondered who might be the owner of bike. He who had taken the picture? Turning the photo over on the table Philip discovered that on the back of the print Catherine had inscribed in red ink a note to him that answered both his questions: Hi Phil! My cousin Ron took this at the Cape last year. You like? Did he like? Yes, he liked. He more than liked. He lusted and the world would soon shun him because he did; that much he knew with metaphysical certainty.

Philip poured himself a fourth cup of coffee. He was alone this morning. Elaine, his wife, had gone to her office. It was so quiet in the apartment that Philip could hear the clock in the living room counting off toward noon. Cup replenished, Philip returned to the table where the photo lay. It seemed to pulsate like a living heart in the morning brightness. Unable to resist its allure Philip picked up the photo again. He examined it from a variety of perspectives: upside-down, sideways, east and west, near and far. From any angle Catherine radiated splendor and he wondered what he had gotten himself into this time.

In the photo Catherine was facing into the camera her mouth open in a smile of invitation. Honey-colored hair framed her face and fell to her breasts. Without willing it Philip found himself recalling the silkiness of her breasts. The memory sent a tremor of desire through him. A heart palpitation followed, a sensation he attributed not to the coffee burning in his gut, but to the self-loathing he carried within him—the price of his passion for the girl in the photograph. Even in this amateurish depiction the girl flaunted her beauty with all the poise she had acquired as an adolescent fashion model. Here was the mouth offered for tasting. Here was the deliciously-muscled thigh extended for a visual caress. Here was the sumptuous torso displayed for the beholder to stroke in fantasy. The girl knew how to do it all. The photo proclaimed what Philip had already discovered first-hand: this budded rose, mounted on her throbbing Harley also knew well how to enthrall the slavering lechers of the world among whom he counted himself. Yes, Catherine shone with the luster of young beauty. Yet in the photo was there not also a hint of fragility? Didn’t this depiction of her also insinuate that beauty must fade, love must wither, and rapture must crash in flames of regret?

To suppress further reflections along that melancholy line Philip finished his coffee and went into the study where his computer regarded him with the blank bewilderment of a disabled beast. Like so much else in Philip’s life the beast had crashed weeks earlier and he had left the wreckage where it lay. Philip would have to respond to Catherine’s note and photo in his own shaky hand. Accordingly, he rummaged through his desk in search of writing paper.

The desk was overflowing with the detritus of his congressional career: file-folders ringed with coffee stains, post-it notes from his secretary that he would never acknowledge, piles of newspaper clippings forwarded urgently, phone messages that he would never return, downloads from bloggers that some enraged someone thought he should read, abstracts of legislation that he would never examine, and correspondence from constituents that he would continue to ignore. Philip knew that his office in the Rayburn Building which he had not visited for weeks also teemed with evidence of a life speeding toward disaster. As for his district office, Philip hadn’t visited it since, he couldn’t remember when. Thus, his political life lay in shambles.

Amid the jumble on his desk Philip found a new file folder that Ilona, his faithful and long-suffering secretary had sent over together with her own handwritten entreaty that he please, please, please call her. Things are happening, she had written, that I need to talk about with you. See inside this folder: PLEASE. Momentarily curious, Philip peeked as instructed. The folder was overflowing with various pleas all from Shelley Brune, the Democrat Party’s State Chairman in New Jersey. Shelley was the man whose backing eighteen years earlier had secured for Philip Francis Parkman the Party’s nomination for congress in a newly-gerrymandered and thus safely Democrat district. As revealed in the folder’s contents Shelley was in a monumental rage about Philip’s “neglect of office.” Quickly, Philip scanned the latest of Shelley’s missives in which the Party Chairman expressed his “outrage” at Philip’s “contempt for the Party” by which Shelley meant himself. The furious note also contained a warning that Philip had better straighten out at once or he would face a primary election in which the Party would back another candidate. The Chairman finished with a demand that Philip return his phone calls “without delay”. Philip tossed the bulging file folder into an already-full wastebasket. It was Catherine who was on in his mind now not Shelley Brune.

At last Philip found a sheet of stationery that bore the seal of his office. Was he still entitled to use it? Well, why not? The voters hadn’t thrown him out yet. He began to write in ballpoint:

Dear Catherine,

I adore the picture you sent me. Thank you. You are so lovely you make my heart hurt. May I photograph you too? Just tell me when and I’ll come and take a thousand pictures of you, unless, of course, I’m in the loony bin, which is a distinct possibility because I’m most certainly crazy, dear C. Only a nut would adore you as I do. Not that adoring you is crazy in itself. No, no. You are divine. But when a forty-eight-year-old servant of the people (which is what a congressman is supposed to be after all) makes love to the still-young daughter of that congressman’s dearest friend that’s crazy. But what can I do? You have enslaved me. You are my drug. I have become addicted to you. When I hold you in my arms, Sweet C., I am connected to a universe where madness equals ecstasy.

Philip paused. Madness equals ecstasy. True, but was it not more than a little pretentious? He left it in anyway; Catherine wouldn’t notice.