Timmy said, "I suppose it would have been okay to be doing Republican campaign bios for, say, Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. But having worked for Betty Krumfutz certainly isn't what you'd want in your hometown obituary. I mean, if you were actually dead. Which you say Jim Suter isn't."
"Are the Krumfutzes behind bars yet?" I asked. Betty Krumfutz had been a Pennsylvania Republican congresswoman who had run on a "pro-family, pro-gun" platform in 1992, and even as Bill Clinton carried the state, she had easily replaced the retiring incumbent in her conservative upstate district. It came out, though, a year after her reelection in 1994 that both Mrs. Krum-futz's first- and second-term campaigns had been financed by illegal contributions from a Central Pennsylvania construction magnate, among others, and ineffectually laundered by the candidate's husband and campaign manager, Nelson—who had in any case, secreted half the five hundred and sixty thousand dollars in donations in an account he kept under his mistress's name, Tammy Pam Jameson, in a bank in Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, the Krumfutzes' hometown.
"Both Krumfutzes are out walking the streets right now," Maynard said. "Nelson was convicted in May but is free on bond while his conviction is appealed, and Betty was never charged with anything. She surprised everybody and resigned her congressional seat after she swore at a three-hour news conference last year that she'd been grievously wronged along with her constituents and she would never give up her seat. Then, when Betty quit abruptly, the speculation around town was that somebody had gotten the goods on her, too, and an indictment was imminent. None ever came, but people I know on the Hill are still waiting for the other Krumfutz shoe to drop. Nelson's a crook and Betty could well be. It's really an indication of how unprincipled Jim Suter could be—not just reactionary, but unprincipled—that he ever got mixed up with the god-awful Krumfutzes."
"But maybe he didn't know," Timmy said, "that they were crooks—or Nelson was—when he signed on with them. Didn't that all come out later?"
"Timothy, you're as charitable as ever," Maynard said. Then he went on gravely, "Jim didn't know the Krumfutzes were crooks, but he knew they had won an election partly by smearing the moderate-Republican fish-and-game official who ran against Betty in the 1992 spring primary. I ran into Jim in a bar right after he signed up with Betty and Nelson, and he said one of the tactics they'd used against this hapless fellow was, the guy had accepted a campaign donation from a Penn State gay group, and Betty and Nelson ran television ads showing two male officers of the group chastely kissing at the end of a gay-pride parade in Pittsburgh. The ad asked if this was what parents wanted taught to their children in local schools—as if Betty's opponent had come out for same-sex kissing instruction to be added to Pennsylvania's public school curricula. Jim knew the Krumfutzes had done this, and he still went to work for them."
Timmy said, "That does reflect poorly."
The crowds viewing the quilt continued to move by and around us. Some people stopped at quilt panels nearby and spoke quietly. Some pointed, some gazed with fierce concentration, some people hugged one another and wept. The two young lesbians beside us moved on, as did the man from Tennessee. The recitation of the thousands of names went on and on.
I asked Maynard, "If Jim Suter was such a creep, what attracted you to him fifteen years ago? Or was he less of a reprehensible character back then?"
Maynard blushed faintly. "The attraction was mainly physical. I mean, it wasn't just that. Jim is smart and knowledgeable and, despite a cynicism I eventually got pretty tired of, Jim can be fascinating on American political history and Washington his-
tory. He actually grew up here in the District. But I realize now that the attraction was mostly sexual. He had a great athlete's body—he'd been a wrestling star at Maryland—and he has a wonderful face, bright and handsome and with radiant skin, and with piles of blond ringlets all over his head, like a kind of sensual Harpo Marx. It's what's inside Jim's big, gorgeous head that sooner or later turns a lot of people off. It did me, anyway. And I've run into a couple of other people—or maybe it's a couple of hundred—whose experience with Jim was similar, or worse."
"When you saw Jim in Mexico recently," I asked, "what was he doing down there?"
"I only wish I knew," Maynard said, and pondered the question. "Here's what happened. I'd gone down to the Yucatan for a quick go-round for a piece I did for the L.A. Times on touring some of the lesser-known Mayan ruins. None of it was terribly exotic, but I hadn't been to the Yucatan for several years, so I went down mainly to update the hotel, restaurant, and other nuts-and-bolts stuff. I was in Merida walking across the zocalo one day when all of a sudden here comes Jim Suter, of all people, walking towards me. I said, 'Hey, Jim!' and I stopped. And what does he do? He pretends not to see me, and he walks right by me, eyes straight ahead. I stood there flabbergasted and watched him walk away, and he never looked back.
"I thought about running after him," Maynard said, "but it was obvious he recognized me—or that he'd been aware that somebody had called his name—and he had been careful not to look my way and to hurry away from there as fast as he could without breaking into a full trot. I had an appointment to keep with a hotel marketing director a few minutes later, so there was no time for me to go chasing after somebody who—it soon occurred to me—probably didn't want me to know he was in Mexico.
"Anyway, I couldn't think of any other explanation for Jim's behavior. When we broke up after our three-week fling back in '81 or '82, we'd parted on basically friendly terms, and we always talked and caught up with each other whenever our paths crossed—which in gay Washington happens fairly often, especially if you're both writers. Washington, this supposed great world capital, is more like Moline in that regard—very small-towny. Or so it seems, anyway, to gay New Yorkers who live here and tend to talk as if they've been exiled to Ouagadougou. As for me, the only other city I'd ever spent much time in was Vijayawada, so Washington has always seemed to me to be a pretty exciting place."
A sturdy-looking woman in a trench coat, shades, and a golf-cart-motif silk scarf tied tightly around her head had stopped in front of the quilt panel with Jim Suter's name and was looking down at it.
Timmy said, "Maynard, how can you be sure the guy you saw in Merida was actually Jim Suter? Couldn't it have been some other gorgeous, beringleted, blond North American?"
"Timmy," Maynard said, sounding faintly irritated in the casual and familiar way old friends can sound with each other without suffering any huffy consequences, "this is a very beautiful man whose very beautiful face I slurped on and chewed at rapturously nearly every night for three weeks. This was not an experience I repeated frequently in my life, it pains me to have to remind you. Do you think I might fail to recognize such a face if I saw it again?"
Timmy said, "You put it so vividly, Maynard, I can't fail to see what you mean."
"Anyway," Maynard said, "it was plain that the man I called out to in the zocalo was determined not to acknowledge my presence. All he wanted was to get out of there as fast as he could. And if it wasn't Jim Suter, then why would he? And, of course, if it was Jim—which I'm positive it was—why would he want to run away from me?"