“What could have given him that idea?” asked Bastiaan, taking his life in his hands with his sarcasm.
“It’s not funny,” said Courteney, looking across at him angrily. “He couldn’t even give me a good reason why I didn’t get it. Well, he could, but he chose not to. But the truth is I know exactly what happened. The White House put pressure on him not to appoint me. They don’t like me over there. Reagan’s people think I’m trouble. I just can’t believe that he caved, that’s all. Whatever happened to journalistic integrity?”
“Sometimes, if you can’t believe something,” said Alex, “it’s because it’s not true.”
“But it is true,” insisted Courteney. “I know it’s true. I said as much to him and he didn’t deny it. He couldn’t even look me in the eye, the little prick. He muttered something about the paper having to maintain important relationships with powerful people, but when I challenged him on this he just clammed up.”
“What’s he like anyway?” asked Bastiaan, who was far more interested in these matters than I was. He even read a newspaper every day, which was something I almost never did. “Is he as stupid as people say he is?”
“He’s not stupid at all,” said Courteney, shaking her head. “No one gets to be President of the United States if they’re stupid. He might be marginally less intelligent than anyone who has ever held the office before him, but stupid? No. Actually, I think he’s quite smart in some ways. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He uses his charm to get himself out of difficult situations. And people love him for it. They’ll forgive him anything.”
“I can’t even imagine having a run-in with Reagan,” I said. “The closest I ever got to something like that was being punched in the face by a Press Officer in the Irish parliament. The woman who ran the tearoom had to pull him off me.”
“So what did you do to Reagan that was so wrong?” asked Bastiaan, who had heard that story before.
“Maybe we shouldn’t get into all of this right now,” she said, lowering her voice. “You and Alex don’t want to talk work tonight. I’m just venting.”
“Work?” he said. “Why, what has it got to do with our work?”
“She challenged him about his response to the AIDS crisis during a press conference,” said Alex. “And reporters are under strict instructions never to bring that word up with the President.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing. He pretended that he hadn’t heard me.”
“Maybe he hadn’t,” I suggested. “You know, he’s a very old man. I think he’s like eighty or something.”
“He heard me just fine.”
“Did he have his hearing aid in?”
“He heard me just fine!”
“Did it have its batteries in?”
“Cyril!”
“So he just ignored you?” asked Bastiaan.
“He stared down at me and gave me that little smile of his that he uses whenever his mind is drifting away and you just know he’d rather be riding his horse over the prairie in Wyoming than standing in front of a bunch of reporters, and then he just pointed at someone from the Washington Post, who asked some boring question about the Iran-Contra affair. No, what I was asking about was something far more controversial. Something that hasn’t been written about enough yet.”
“Look, Reagan’s never going to do anything to help us in this fight,” said Alex. “Eighteen months from now we’ll have another election and Dukakis or Jesse Jackson or Gary Hart or one of those guys will be in the White House, guaranteed. After that, there’s a lot more chance of our voices being heard. Reagan can’t stand gays; everyone knows that. He doesn’t even like to acknowledge that they exist.”
“Society can’t condone that lifestyle and neither can I,” I said, quoting the President in what I thought was a pretty good impression, and for the first time I noticed a table of four sitting at the table next to ours staring over at us with utter disdain on their faces.
“Fuck society,” said Courteney. “What has society done for any of us lately?”
“Margaret Thatcher says there’s no such thing as society,” I said. “That there are only individual men and women, and there are families.”
“Fuck her too,” said Courteney.
“The strange thing is,” said Bastiaan, “Reagan worked in movies and television for years before he went into politics. He must have been surrounded by homosexuals.”
“Yeah, but he probably never even realized that any of them were gay,” said Alex. “You ever hear the story of how Charlton Heston didn’t know that Gore Vidal was writing a love story for Ben-Hur and Messala? He thought they were just old pals from the Jerusalem kindergarten. Reagan was probably just as clueless. It’s not as if anyone would have ever made a pass at him, is it?”
I had the misfortune of taking a drink from my wine glass as he said this and it was all that I could do not to spit it all over the table. Once again, I noticed the table next to us and a woman seated there, shaking her head in contempt.
“A truly great American,” I heard her husband say in a loud, aggressive voice.
“Well, what about Rock Hudson?” asked Bastiaan, who was oblivious to our neighbors. “They were friends, weren’t they?”
“When Rock Hudson died, Reagan said absolutely nothing despite decades of friendship,” said Alex. “Look, as far as the President is concerned this is a gay disease wiping out gay people and that, by its very nature, is not the worst thing that he can think of. It’s been six years since the first case was identified in America and in all that time the man has said absolutely nothing. He hasn’t even uttered the words HIV or AIDS once in public.”
“Anyway, I went to see the Chief of Staff afterward,” continued Courteney, “and he made it clear that the subject wasn’t even on the President’s agenda. Off the record he told me that the government would never put any substantial funding into research for a disease which was seen by the majority of the population as something that primarily killed homosexuals. Normal people don’t like fags, he said, grinning at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was getting so worked up about. So what does that mean? I asked him. That they should all die because they’re not popular? The majority of members of the House of Representatives aren’t popular either, but no one’s suggesting that they should all be killed off.”