Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

At eight minutes before five, just prior to adjournment, Jenkins’ assistant was moved to ask Adams whether it wasn’t true “that many of these remarks or abuses that you have detailed on the part of Mr. Cohn were actually made in a facetious or jovial vein?” Quite the contrary, Adams replied. “On the subject of Schine, nothing was funny. Nothing was facetious. Nothing was jovial.” Tim heard this last exchange on the radio in Potter’s Capitol office. He was happy to be overworked, fielding calls while rewriting a speech and folding one stack of papers into another. The more he had to do, the less time there was for being lovesick, which he’d been more often than not since Charlottesville. In the hotel room there, after a ferocious storm of sex that had followed the slap to his face, he had for the first time been allowed to lie all night in Hawkins’ arms. But when the two of them returned to Washington, things reverted to their regular pattern, making him miss the near-hysteria he’d felt during the unexpected travel idyll, and causing him to consider the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness. Maybe there was only intensity—and then everything else.