I confessed most of the details of my disgrace. Though disillusioned ever since the hiring of Furst, he was back at work on the Senate staff. Sometimes at night I heard the daughters of ambassadors and cabinet officers howling and moaning in his bedroom. For the first time in my life, I succeeded in picking up a girl at a bar, and later, back home, she had to plead with me to be gentle, although in all my scant amorous history, no one has ever accused me of excessive enthusiasm.
Three months later, Trey came home in a rage. After paying Furst and his people more than $200,000, the campaign committee declared bankruptcy. Like most of the staff, including Trey, I was owed four months in back wages. “Can you believe that bastard?” he said.
That night we went to an Ethiopian restaurant, and Trey told me the senator had flown up to New York twice in the last month to visit Amanda Greer. By this time I was working for a public relations firm. It was nothing I would've envisioned myself doing five months before, and I was hardly proud of the work. We represented, among others, a South American dictator who for years the senator had attacked for his appalling human rights record. I was, however, having more success with women. After my moment of glory with Amanda Greer, I felt slightly disdainful of mortal females, which seemed to make me more attractive. For six months I dated a legislative assistant from Texas, Deirdre Clark, who would've married me, and whom I probably would've been thrilled to marry a year before. She was coltish and sweet and smarter than I was. I cheated on her and let her find out about it, and she moved back to Houston a few months later.
Trey had increasing difficulties with Castleton and eventually went to work for Senator Moynihan. Three years after our campaign ended, Castleton officially announced he was making another run, and now he was the front-runner. According to Trey, fat-faced Carl Furst had agreed to take charge only after Castleton promised to stop fucking around. A week after he won New Hampshire, one of the supermarket tabloids published a story about his relationship with Amanda Greer. Lacking hard evidence, they published a picture of the two tête-à-tête at a fund-raiser. Unnamed sources said that the senator made frequent, unscheduled visits to New York and that his wife had given him an ultimatum. The issue of womanizing, the secret buzz of the press corps for years, was now out in the open. At a press conference in Florida, he was pelted with questions about marriage and infidelity. He indignantly denied the story, while acknowledging “an old friendship” with the actress. With Doreen standing at his side, he said, “I have always been a faithful husband and a devoted father,” and refused to say more. He accused the press of conducting a witch-hunt and suggested this was the work of his rivals and the Republicans. The issue bubbled for a week, then faded with the lack of new disclosures.
A few days after the senator's Super Tuesday victories, Trey organized a reunion poker game for some of us who'd been involved in the previous campaign. We met at a saloon in Georgetown, where he'd reserved a private room in the back. He'd asked each of us to bring at least two hundred dollars. Gene Samuels, Dave Crushak, Tom Whittle, Trey and I drank beer and reminisced about the bad old days on the trail. All of us had been burned when the previous committee had declared bankruptcy, and not one of us was involved with the new one. If the American public had been listening in, they would've formed a highly unfavorable impression of Castleton's character. Old slights and grievances were revived, along with tawdry stories of broom-closet dalliances. We reviewed the specifications of “the type”—blond, big tits, no ass. Finally, Dave Crushak said, “I'm feeling lucky. Who's got the cards?”
“I've got a card,” said Trey. From his blazer he extracted a five-by-seven picture of an attractive blonde, on which was printed the name Tamara, along with a set of measurements and the name and number of a Los Angeles modeling agency. We passed it around, making appreciative noises. We were all a little drunk by now. “Look familiar?” Trey asked. When no one could place her, he said, “The fucking archetype, boys.”
It was true. She looked like a composite of all the stewardesses