A Washington Tale - A Squawky Woman Is Seduced By A Conservative And Life Becomes A Bed Of Roses

Marfa Phipps had tried being a social activist. She couldn't quite pinpoint the moment she turned from her patrician past - Chippendale, Townsend, Revere in the living room, Turner and Copley on the staircase walls, the memoirs of her Aunt Abigail, direct descendant of John Davenport of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the New Haven Plantations and founder of Yale College.- but she did, decisively.  

It couldn't have been at Miss Porter's, the finishing school in Farmington; it couldn't have been at Vassar.  That school which had mistakenly decided to go co-ed once Yale did, immediately lost cachet and applications and dropped into the third tier of American institutions of higher learning; and with her desultory grades at Miss Porter's she was lucky to gain admission to Vassar.  

No, Vassar in Marfa's time was a far cry from what it was in the halcyon Seven Sisters era - the equal of the Ivies in ever respect - and it had become a loopy, artsy kind of place, lots of gay boys, and girls like herself who couldn't make the grade elsewhere.  So no campus activism, no student protests.

She struggled with her courses - even the ones in 'Communication', the modern catchall for just about everything.  Courses on 'culture' were her favorite, travelogues really, all about the customs, practices, and mores of different countries, but the required courses on statistical method stumped her completely, and only thanks to a generous donation by Aunt Abigail who was a Vassar graduate herself, did Marfa graduate. 

'Now what?' was the girl's dilemma.  Her classmates were headed off to this and that, internships, volunteering, marriage.  One even became a nun - Bridget Connor a sweet girl with a vocation which didn't keep her from 'Sapphic' love, as the Vassar administrators called it, happy that the institution was finally becoming diverse.  Bridget went off to the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Feasterville and was apparently quite happy in the company of so many girls in such a religious setting. 

Marfa, however, had no calling or no real aptitude for anything, so she drifted for a year until invited by a Vassar classmate who knew exactly what she wanted to hike the Shenandoah. Nature for Emily was like Jesus was for Bridget - a savior who only had to call once and was heard - and the hiking through God's country would wake Marfa to the bright potential of creation. 

It was a buggy slog through woodsy tangles, thickets, and brambles.  What had she been thinking? and how on earth did Emily ever get religion this way.  Yes, there were some nice views, but hardly worth the climb, and Marfa only ended up tired, fagged, and bored silly.  If that was nature, it was for the birds. 

'One more time, puleeze', begged her friend disconcerted that Marfa had not had the uplift promised.  'We'll go west', Emily said, 'big sky country'; but although the landscape differed, the result was the same.  The valleys were dull, endlessly wide, the mountains dark, gloomy places.  

So, like many girls of her background and education, Marfa drifted to Washington where Emily found her a job at a non-profit agency, a kind of pick-and-choose office where new employees were placed, based on interest and preference, in Civil Rights, The Environment, or Gender, but could do a round-robin and try a little of each to see which fit best. 

It took, this easy-going progressivism - nothing too demanding or arduous.  She could dabble to her heart's content and still feel satisfied at the end of the day. Gradually she became more interested in her work, invested more energy and will into lesbians for example, or the fate of the Apalachicola River.  She could not call herself an activist - her work was still too marginal and incidental to really count - but she felt she was on her way; and it wasn't long before she wore the mantle of The Movement proudly.  

Yet, it still didn't feel right.  It wasn't quite the buggy slog of Nature but close to it.  All those collegial dinners in Dupont Circle half-basements, endless colloquies on the plight of this or that, marches, protests, speeches.  She was about to give it all up and dive into uncharted waters when she met Lance Reventlow, Co-Chairman of the Washington Conservative Coalition, Californian, surfer-ready, tousled blonde hair, blue eyes, and a graceful swimmer's body.  Lance in fact had swum for Santa Barbara and was at the top of the list for the next summer Olympics. 

They met at the Old Ebbitt Grille across from the Treasury Department, and after a few rounds of oysters and martinis Marfa had forgotten his Trump credentials, his Republican ambitions, and his off-handed slurs about her constituents - the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten - and agreed to go off with him. 

It had been ages since she had had a proper roll in the hay - somehow the time was never right, work had become more obsessive, and men like Lance simply didn't come around all that often - but now, all had fallen into place. 

If there could be December-May affairs why not liberal-conservative ones?  Why did intimacy depend on political philosophy. 

'It's about the sex, isn't it?', Coleman Silk's friend Nathan Zuckerberg says to him after he learns of Coleman's potentially disastrous relationship with a young school janitor (The Human Stain) and so it was that Marfa's friends assumed the same thing about her and Lance.  She couldn't have given up her solidly progressive beliefs that easily unless it were some Lawrentian epiphanic sex, and more power to her although they hoped they would never be put in that compromising situation. 

And how Lance did go on!  The inner city was a sinkhole of entitlement, gross indifference, intellectual and moral corruption, and transplanted tribalism.  Transgenders were freaks of nature, lopping off perfectly good parts of their bodies and gluing on others just to make a point.  Equitable redistribution of wealth was taking from earners and giving to layabouts.  Immigrants must pay their own way, demonstrate their viability and utility or stay home in their mud-and-wattle thatched huts. 

Best of all, Donald Trump was the greatest thing since sliced bread, a popular hero, a doer, a Machiavellian genius, and a Borscht Belt comedian far funnier and more outrageous than Shecky Green or Jackie Mason - a mensch, the long-awaited Founding Father of the New America. 

Give it to me.  Give it to me, Your Royal Highness' is what Carolyn Burnham, failed realtor (American Beauty) says to The King of Real Estate as he works her over in bed; and this is exactly what Marfa said, in so many words, to Lance Reventlow.  Fuck the rest of it, fuck me! was her litany, her canon, her liturgy. 

Did Lance turn her into a conservative? Possibly, but those trysts in the Mayflower, those afternoon sexual idylls wiped the slate clean as far as she was concerned. Form follows function, or something like that said the Bauhaus architects of the Thirties, and this is what sex was all about for Marfa, or at least she saw some attributive meaning.  

In any case, politics either Left or Right, were of absolutely no interest whatsoever; but in most cases like this when the chador is removed, when women can see clearly once again, and when politics becomes just an irrelevant pastime, life begins.

'I heard she was living with some cowboy in Montana', a friend of Marfa's said. 

'Sounds just about right' said another.