Title:  Questions and Answers

Author: CGB (c.giles@curtin.edu.au)

Web: http://Appelsini.tripod.com/Christine/

Rating: PG - 13 (some strong language)

Spoilers: SGTE SGTJ, ITSOTG

Archive: Sure

Disclaimer: stuff, stuff, stuff.

Summary: Drunk and cradling a pint glass, Sam wonders whether he should have

asked his father if there was something he knew about relationships that no

one else did.

Acknowledgements: Big thanks to AJ, Neil Young for reasons I'm not going

into, and Died Pretty. 

*

"You want to hate me? Go ahead. I can't change it now. I can't change what

happened. You say what you have to say, you do what you have to do.

Whatever helps you.  Maybe one day..."

"I'll understand?" Light in the hallway disappears as someone further down

the hall locks up for the night. 

"No... No Sam, I don't think you'll ever understand. Why should you? You've

never been like me. I wouldn't want you to be. You've always been so..." his

father's voice chokes. "You were always such a good son."

Sam's father was always such a good father. 

Sam swallows. He could have been married now. Lisa wanted children. She

wasn't sure when she wanted them but there was the knowledge that had all

things gone according to plan, he could have been a father by now.

And had that happened, he knew he would be more confused than ever.  

*

"I'm going home."  

Sam looks up. Lisa's jacket is standing in front of him, jacket slung over

her arm and car keys are at the ready.  

"OK..." He places his drink on the coffee table in front of him and stands

up. 

"Hey!" Max says as Sam leaves the spot next to him on the couch. "It's only

eleven thirty."

"You can stay if you like," Lisa says. 

"No, I'm coming with you."

"I mean it, Sam. Stay."

"C'mon Sam," Max pleads. 

"I really have to go Max. I've got a case file this big to get through

tomorrow." He makes an exaggerated gesture with his hands.

"Are you sure?" Lisa says.

"Of course." And the only thing he's sure of is that he gotten much better

at lying to her when he needs to keep the peace.

"Max hates me." Lisa slams the belt buckle together several times before

finally achieving a lock. She throws herself back into her seat and sighs

loudly.

"He does not." 

"He doesn't like me." 

"Lisa..."

"He was disappointed when he saw me."

"Lisa, can you hear yourself?"

She shakes her head and looks out the window. 

Sam flicks the windscreen wipers on, then off again. He peers through the

glare of streetlights reflecting off the water, and worries about getting to

his meetings tomorrow in the rain.  New York sinks into him like the dye in

his socks that stains his trainers every time he goes running in the rain,

but when it comes to the weather he is irrevocably a California boy.

In the passenger seat Lisa sighs again, indicating she wants to talk but not

willing to initiate a conversation. There was a time when he ignored the

sighs and the yawns, pretending he didn't understand her moods. Then was a

time when he really didn't. 

But there's nothing older than this relationship with it's pent up

frustration and unspoken resentment. There's nothing older than him with his

downtown apartment and his six-figure salary and the way he worries about

the rain interfering with his schedule. 

He drives on in silence and remembers that when everything else is fitting

the mold, Lisa doesn't.

* 

He is in his third year at Duke when he meets Lisa. 

Lisa has a reputation for avoiding class and keeping odd hours at the

residence.  Anti-social and unconventional - she is something of an enigma,

the kind of person about whom rumours circulate. Some accuse her of having

sex with her lecturers. Others say that she has rich parents abroad that pay

for her passing grades.

But Sam finds less insidious rumours more intriguing. 

"She has an eidetic memory," Jasmine tells him one day. "I've seen her in

action."

"How?"

"It's a party trick. She finds an unsuspecting victim, pretends to be drunk

and then bets fifty dollars she can memorise a page from a book at a

glance."

"You've seen her do it?"

"Yeah. It's a neat trick. Get her to do it for you some time."

Sam has a good memory. He is an exceptional student, all round smart guy and

competitive enough to want to go head to head with the eidetic memory of

Lisa Stoller.

He develops more than a passing interest in the girl who habitually arrives

late for classes and keeps the residences alive with speculation surrounding

her frequent disappearances and 3 am turn in.

And then one night, at a party off campus, he catches her act. Three boys

pull a magazine from under a couch and bet $10 each against her recall. She

scans the page briefly and then throws it into lap of one of them. She

recites. Sam guesses two paragraphs. One hundred words maybe. The small

audience applauds when she's finished. She bows. 

Later, Sam finds her outside smoking and introduces himself.

"I'm Sam," he says and he holds out his hand.

"Sam I am?" She takes his hand and gives it a loose grasp.

"I get that a lot."

"Lisa Stoller." 

"I know." 

Her black eyeliner is smudged a little under one eye. She wears a man's body

shirt. The genuine article if he's not mistaken. A relic from the seventies.

"So, how did you do it?"

"The party trick?" She indicates inside with a slight inclination of her

head.

"Yeah."

"Not heard of a photographic memory Sam?"

"I've heard the term used to describe feats of memory but biologically there

is no real difference in the mechanics of memory from one person to the

other. Eidetic memory exists in few children and even fewer adults, and even

then it's not as simple as instant photo recall." 

She laughs. "You got me Sam Seaborne.  It's a trick. I'd teach it to you but

it's something that usually works best with your own system."

"A Russian psychologist used a mnemonic system to memorise lines of foreign

languages. He got to four lines of Dante in its original Italian."

She nods thoughtfully. "Not bad. If you gave me a foreign language I'd be

useless. I use language groupings and assign them a code."

"It doesn't help you study?"

She grins wryly. "I study like everyone else here. I read and take notes."

She takes a drag from her cigarette. "A lot of notes."

He thrust his hands into his pockets feeling the cold. He wonders how to

frame the next question.

"You miss a lot of classes." He says eventually.

"I skip Barassa's class on a regular basis and for that I do not apologise.

That man is a fascist."

"Some would say his methods were rigorous."

"Are you one of them? Fuck - you went to one of those boys' schools where

they caned you into submission right? Now you've got some kind of weird,

masochistic need to act out childhood." 

Sam laughs "My school was co-ed and surprisingly liberal in matters of

corporal punishment. For what it's worth, Barassa takes some getting used to

but it's a good class. You should show up on occasion."

She frowns and throws her cigarette onto the ground, crushing it with her

toe. Inside the music gets a little louder and a woman's voice shrieks with

laughter.

"I really don't like lawyers," she says. 

"Then what are you doing here?"

She looks away. "Getting a law degree."

*

Duke is years in the past before they meet again. He finds himself in New

York, not where he wants to be and not sure what he's doing. He's been in LA

and he's been in Washington, and now he's in New York, almost thirty. 

He spends his weekends, when he's not working, watching his friends get

married. It's become the social disease of his late twenties. He's on first

name basis with the girls at the Bridal Registry in Bloomingdales.

He thought he was going to marry Angela. And then there was Bridget. He got

over Bridget by sleeping with Cassandra, but Cassandra was a colleague who

refused to be seen in public with him. It ended badly. 

And it ended with his move to Gage, Whitney and Pace. He never really

decided whether this was good or bad fortune.

But he's single and on the fast track at Gage Whitney when he crosses paths

once more with Lisa Stoller. He finds her in a bar the receptionist at Gage

Whitney once termed 'the drycleaners' because of its reputation as a place

to 'pick up a suit'. 

He sees her across a Friday night crowd, slumped against the bar and

obviously drunk. A first he can't decide whether it is really her or a very

good doppelganger. Her hair is pulled into a bun and she has a smart, navy

suit on. 

He imagines that even Lisa would eventually wind up working as a lawyer but

the image seems so out of place with his memory of the willing misfit who

refused to make friends at Duke.

He approaches her until he notices her noticing him. Her eyes are half

closed and she's almost swaying, but she recognises him.

"Sham Sheaborne."

"Lisa Stoller. How've you been?"

"Shhhwell... an... and you?"

She is teetering. He instinctively holds out his hand to catch her arm in

case she falls. 

"Who are you here with?"  He looks over her head and wonders how anyone

could leave their friend in this state. 

She frowns and looks at the floor. "I was in court today."

"You were? Who do you work for?"

"I lost." 

"It happens."

She shakes her head still looking at the floor.

"Kids shouldn't have to go to jail, Sam."

He takes a breath and lets it out slowly. His clients are large business,

shipping and mining industry. He's never defended a minor. 

"Do you live around here?" he says. 

"Sam, are you propishish... propishishitioning me?"

"No, but someone should take you home."

He took her home and found out where she worked. A community legal centre.

He called her two days later. 

*

The relationship is in its second year when they move in together. 

When he made the decision to move in with her, his justification was that

they already spent all day and all night in each other's company and the

move halving the rent for both of them. 

He is unprepared for things like Lisa's possessions, which include a

scratched antique desk (a twenty first birthday present) and a second hand

bureau painted a deep purple. Both offend his Princeton bred sensibilities

but she's oddly attached to them and won't be separated.

He is unprepared for the everyday-ness of this relationship.  The constancy,

the little things that signal intimacy, Lisa complaining about her job - her

pay, her colleagues, her clients, Lisa singing along loudly to Neil Young

when she thinks he isn't home, and Lisa brooding on Sunday, because it's

Sunday.  

But he's never been bad at anything and refuses to be so now. He becomes the

kind of boyfriend that makes Lisa's colleagues say "where did you find him?"

and "where can I get one?" 

And Lisa becomes the kind of girlfriend that never gets along with his

friends.

*

"Democracy?!" Josh is yelling. "Democracy?"  He says it like it's a name

he's been called. Like he's insulted.  

"The ego on that guy," someone says in his ear and Sam thinks it's not the

first time he's heard that about Josh Lyman.

When Josh announced his intention to visit, Sam couldn't contain his

excitement. He met Josh in DC. They met over a shared conviction and faith

in their ability to change the system. 

But he tried Lisa's already small degree of patience to its limit with

stories about Josh and him and their time in Washington. And then he invited

friends over to meet Josh and finds that he's almost as unpopular as Lisa.  

"You say it like it's a Utopian State. Like it's the be all and end all of

social and structural change. We've sold the world on the idea that a

democracy is the ultimate political system."

"You got a better one?" 

"That's not the point," Josh says. "We don't stop looking because of our

lack of options. Is a system that allows all parties to have a say - even on

matters they are unfamiliar with - so perfect?"

"So who gets to have a say?" Lisa says. "You?"

"If I have the knowledge, yes."

"So it's a certain level of education that will be required then?" Lisa

doesn't attempt to hide the acid tone in her voice. Sam wonders why he ever

let them meet.

"Unlike our current system where a certain level of affluence is the

determining factor."

"At least it's a choice. We can choose our representatives even if there are

those who don't exercise that right."

"And why don't they exercise that right? Why are voter turnout figures the

lowest since universal suffrage?  What kind of choice do you have if you're

choosing the lesser of two evils? We need to reform the system and we should

start with campaign finance and the elimination of soft money

contributions."

"So it won't be a case of only the rich choosing to run, they'll be the only

ones able to run."

"Then we regulate the campaign process," Sam says. "We legislate on how much

staff a candidate can hire, how much advertisement time he, or she, can take

out on television."

Lisa gives him a hard look. He has just taken sides. 

"You have all the answers don't you," she says. "You think that if you're

just given the opportunity you can change everything where better men and

women before you could not. Well I tell you that politics is not about

changing the world and making a difference, it's about winning and losing

and being able to say on your CV somewhere that you worked in Congress,

while the real work is being done on the streets by Samaritans and

volunteers. None of which will be given consideration at the next election."

Josh looks bemused but says nothing. Sam cringes. He wonders whether Lisa

truly believes what she says or whether she just likes being the incendiary

one in the group.

Either way, he knows she'll never be the fan of Josh Lyman that he is.

*

"So you earn, like, a lot of money at..." 

"Gage, Whitney and Pace."

"Gage Whitney and Pace...you earn a lot of money at Gage, Whitney and Pace?"

"Yeah." Josh is going back to DC. They are waiting for a taxi outside Sam's

apartment. 

"Six figures?"

"Yeah."

"A brutal amount of money?"

"Obscene."

"Well you know what they say about a fool and his money..."

"Yeah, but they never tell you how the fool got the money in the first

place."

"Luck."

"Right..."

"The point is, you don't need that much money and this," he waves his hand

in the direction of Sam's apartment. "This isn't you."

"I'm working for Gage Whitney and Pace. "  There's an involuntary apologetic

note in his voice. "It's the second largest law firm in New York."

"It's not for you Sam."

"Who knows what's for me."

"Do you miss it?"

"Washington? Or politics in general?"

"Both."

"Yes."

"Then come back with me."

"Right now?"

"Sure."

"You're not serious."

"Right now, tomorrow, next week. Just don't go putting it off until... until

you do something crazy like marry Lisa or something."

Sam looks at the ground.

"You don't like her."

"Oh... uh... hey, I don't really know her."

"And what you do know, you don't like."

"No! No, that's not... that's not it," Josh looks away. "It's just... not

what I think of when I think of us."

"You and me?"

"Yeah. This isn't us, Sam." 

Sam is silent for a while. Then he shakes his head.  "I'm not you, Josh." 

"Yes you are. You're more me than you think."

"How do you know?"

"Because when we're together, Lisa gets nervous."

Josh' s taxi pulls up. Josh reaches for Sam's hand and grasps it while

giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze. 

"Call me when you get to Washington," Sam says. 

"I will."

The Taxi pulls away from the kerb. Sam watches it until it's a yellow blur

disappearing around a corner several blocks up the street.

Josh is going back to Washington to change the world while Sam goes back to

his office with a view and his Cerruti tie.

He wonders why he's not following him, why he'll go back upstairs to his

apartment and to Lisa who will be making coffee and eyeing the day's papers.

He thinks about Lisa with her dour look and cynical tone, representing

battered women and evicted drug addicts, and the way she comes home at night

and showers, willing it all down the drain with her shampoo. 

When they told Leah she made partner she whooped with joy and took them all

out to dinner. When they tell Sam he goes straight into the bathroom to

splash cold water on his cheeks. 

It's days before he can bring himself to tell Lisa, and when he does he

drops it casually into conversation. "No big deal," he says.

Lisa regards him suspiciously. "I would have thought you'd be more excited,"

she says.

"It's an invitation to invest in the company. It will cost."

She shrugs her shoulders and smiles. "It sounds impressive."

He smiles too, pleased that Lisa can be counted on to attach a degree of

levity to the event. 

The next day, his nine o'clock runs into his ten o'clock and his ten o'clock

nearly runs into his twelve. He spills coffee on his tie and contemplates

canceling the afternoon altogether. 

Between two and three o'clock he goes shopping. He tells himself he is going

out for a late lunch but he arrives out the front of Tiffany's staring at

the window displays and contemplating his inner Holly Golightly. He goes in

and emerges less than half an hour later with a small package in hand.

Out on the street again he takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes

a film of sweat from his brow. It is unseasonably warm. 

*

When he gets home he hears children's voices coming from the apartment. Lisa

is taking care of the neighbour's children. 

Inside they are singing "Everything I am is me" to a Sesame Street video.

Sam pecks Lisa on the cheek while she continues to sing.

"Me in the mirror, me in my bed, me in the picture I make in my head.."

"I know this one."

"So do I. They haven't changed the songs in twenty five years."

Lisa returns the neighbour's children while he pans the cupboards for food. 

"We have nothing to eat," he says when she gets back.

She ignores the question and put her hands behind her head to perform next

stretches. "What do you suppose they're trying to say?"

"Who? Where?"

"Sesame Street. The Children's Television Workshop. I mean, most of what

they say is pretty straightforward. "Everybody sleeps, exercise is fun,

having a pretend friend is OK..."

"Mr Snuffleupaguss is real."

"I noticed. When did that happen?"