How many times did you stand last night? I didn’t count, but a man named Robert at Eliza’s table did, and he stopped at forty-one. He said he gave up because the gesture had stopped meaning anything around the fifteenth one, which struck me as the most honest review the evening was going to get.
We had the address on mute in Eliza’s library, the way you keep a fire going in summer — out of habit, and because it’s rude to admit you find the heat oppressive. Eliza poured a Sancerre that her wine man has started describing as ‘unaligned,’ a word I’m told now means ‘we are not telling you whether it is French.’ The bipartisan lobbyist — you know the one — was running his thumb along the stem of his glass and watching the screen with the soft focus of a man who has worked every administration since Reagan and stopped pretending any of them were different.
They stood for the tariffs. They stood for the border. They stood for a man in the gallery whose name nobody had been told and whose presence had been arranged at three in the afternoon by a staffer who is, presumably, asleep now. They stood for a sentence about manufacturing that contained no verb. Robert flagged that one — he’d been a speechwriter at State in the nineties — and said the absence of a verb used to disqualify a line, but the chamber had standards now that were more flexible.
There is a particular face that a senator makes during a joint session, and I had forgotten how exact it is. The chin lifts. The mouth holds an expression that is not quite a smile and not quite a grimace — the facial equivalent of a man being audited but trying not to look guilty. The cameras pan and the face adjusts. The chamber knows its blocking. Whatever else you say about the institution, it has, after two and a half centuries, learned where to put its hands.
The lobbyist refilled his glass without standing and said, almost to himself, ‘They’ll do the same thing in January if it’s a Democrat.’ Eliza said, ‘Margaret, please,’ which is what Eliza says when she suspects I am about to say what I am, in fact, about to say. I said it anyway. A chamber that stands forty-one times on a Tuesday does not stop standing because the speaker has changed parties. It stops standing when the seats are empty, which is a different thing, and one we are closer to than people care to admit.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent her career at the National Archives and has the unfortunate professional gift of remembering everything, called this morning to remind me that there is a recording of every one of these addresses going back to 1923. She said the early ones are short and the chamber is mostly seated. She said the standing started in the eighties and has been compounding since, the way credit card interest does. Judy is not a satirist by temperament. She does not invent the country she describes. She simply notes that we used to be able to hear the sentences.
What, exactly, is the point of a chamber that performs its enthusiasm on cue? I am asking. The Founders, who were nobody’s idea of restrained men, sat through nearly all of Washington’s addresses — sat, the way you sit through a sermon you are obligated to attend but not obligated to grade. The standing is a recent invention, and like most recent inventions in our politics, it has replaced a slower thing with a faster thing and called the speed an improvement. Robert’s count was, in that sense, a kind of forensics.
At eleven we turned the television off and Eliza brought out the cheese. There was a hard sheep’s milk something I’d never had, and a quince paste the lobbyist pronounced ‘the best thing said tonight,’ a remark he delivered without looking up. Robert had abandoned his count. Judy had gone to bed. The cheese was good. We agreed it was good. We were, briefly, a deliberative body, and we voted unanimously, and we sat down.