Clyde was given the job of handing out the little orange boxes to the children and acquitted himself well enough that he probably raised his standings in the crucial too-young-to-vote segment of the electorate. Then he prowled around the Stonefields’ one-acre yard with one of Jack Carlson’s fancy beers in his hand, trying to settle his mind, and happened across several foreign students working around a portable gas grill. One of them was built asymmetrically and moved with a characteristic limp.
“Is this the halal section?” he inquired from a distance. He was afraid that he might defile something by coming too close with alcohol in his hand.
Fazoul was delighted and insisted he come closer. It had been much too long, they both agreed. Fazoul had been busy with his research, and because the absent Desiree handled all of the Bankses’ social contacts, Clyde hadn’t seen many of his friends, new or old.
Fazoul heaped a plate with kabobs and thrust it upon Clyde. Seeing that Clyde could not talk with his mouth full, Fazoul shouldered the burden of conversation. He always seemed to wander back to the subject of the Middle East, and the extreme perfidy and demonism of Saddam Hussein and, by extension, most Iraqis, and, to a lesser extent, a great many Arabs. It was clear that this subject obsessed him; when he really got rolling, he would become spitting mad, waving his hands around and quoting verses from the Koran in Arabic and then translating them into English in order to bolster his points; as if he feared Clyde might be a secret admirer of Saddam. Clyde chewed and nodded, thinking that a show of agreement might calm Fazoul down; but it only seemed to egg him on.
One of Anita’s operatives soon drew Clyde away to shake hands and eat dinner. Much later Clyde realized he had lost track of his wife and daughter and learned thirdhand that they had gone home so that Maggie could get to bed. Anita Stonefield had arranged a ride home for Clyde so that he might stay late at the grown-up phase of the party.
John Stonefield had bought all of the land there, and built the country club and the neighborhoods surrounding it, during the fifties, handing over the choicest lots to his sons. Terry’s interest in houses was limited to the purely financial dimension, and he did not care about their architectural style or interior decoration any more than he cared about what kind of paper his blue-chip stock certificates had been printed on. He ceded all control to Anita, who had designed, and caused to be built, an immense structure directly across the fairway from the club house. She had been aiming for something out of Gone with the Wind but was forced to make some concessions to the Iowa weather: the spacious veranda was walled in behind thermal glass, and the widow’s walk had been enclosed in an odd hybrid of gun turret and cupola. Banks of powerful searchlights had been planted around the place, set in massive subterranean footings, all aimed upward at the house and bouncing off its white aluminum siding so brightly that, according to local legend, it was used as a traffic cone by jumbo jets stuck in holding patterns for O’Hare.
That was the setting in which Clyde and various other Republican candidates, Fazoul and various other foreign students, and a couple of dozen local country-club members and other movers and shakers were now trapped for the next few hours.
At some point in the evening Clyde found himself wandering through the place with Fazoul in tow, trying to get away from the sound of Anita’s stereo, which was piped into every room through speakers hidden in the ceilings. She had put on a two-CD set of recycled sock-hop favorites performed by an ersatz group called the Original Artists, and the place was jumping with drunken Republicans performing archaic dance steps.
They wandered, squinting, through an arctic brightness of snowy rugs and glass objets d’art pierced by powerful halogen spotlights, and into a simulation of a library. The walls were hung with paintings and photographs of scary Germans with giant mustaches, looking as if they were about to pop an aneurysm because of the music.
From this room a spiral staircase ascended to the second floor and from there continued up to the cupola, which, to judge from the drifts of cigar ashes in the giant ashtrays and the beer-bottle caps in the wastebaskets, Terry had installed as a refuge. It worked in that role for Clyde and Fazoul insofar as there were no speakers there, and no dancers either. A ring of windows provided a 360-degree view of Forks County: the golf course to the north, and, to the south, gently rolling farmland, with woods down in the folds of the earth, sloping imperceptibly toward the city of Wapsipinicon and the confluence of the rivers.
Close to the house they could clearly see Professor Arthur Larsen taking Anita behind the imported Irish gazebo and groping her ample breasts while she grabbed his head and pulled his lips down to hers. Clyde turned his back on this scene, worse than anything he had seen at Byproducts. Fazoul saw it but did not react visibly; for him it was apparently just part of the normal scenery of the modern United States. Clyde found this embarrassing, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“How may I help you, Clyde?” Fazoul said.
“Pardon?”