Politics

Tonight Hazard’s father and stepmother are having jazz for McGovern. In the old game-room the old liberals listen as the quintet builds crazy houses out of skin and brass, crumbling the house of decorum, everybody likes that. For decades they have paid for the refurbishing of America and they have not got their money’s worth. Now they listen, hopeful, to the hard rock for McGovern. The ceiling in this palace needs fixing, the chalky blue paint is like an old heaven but there are holes and flaking. They had movies here when grandpa was solvent. Hazard desires his wife, the way people on the trains to the death camps were seized by irrational lust. She is the youngest woman in the room, he would like to be in bed with her now, he would like to be president. He has not been to his studio in four days, he asks the bartender, a college boy with a ponytail, for more gin. He stands in the doorway. Forsythia and lilac have overgrown the porch, there is the rich smell of wood-rot. What twenty years will do to untended shrubbery and America and Hazard.