American Wife (26 page)

“Are you angry?” I asked.

“You lecture me on how to behave, but you might want to save some of your etiquette lessons for your grandmother.”

“Charlie, she’s eighty-two years old. And she was joking around.”

“You must find her a hell of a lot funnier than I do. You’ll give me crap for saying this, but there are quite a few nice Republican girls out there who’d be plenty happy to date me.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“If we’re going to stay together, I need your support. Running for office puts pressure on a man. I’ve watched my father go through it, and now my brother, and it ain’t easy. It’s exhausting. I have to go out there and convince voters that I deserve to be elected, but if I can’t even convince the girl I’m dating, how ass-backward is that?”

I was quiet, and then I said, “I would vote for you.”

“Lucky for you, I’m not running in your district.”

“Do you not believe me that I would?”

He looked over. “Sure, I believe you. Why shouldn’t I?“

“Charlie—”

“It’s not like you have to put your money where your mouth is.” He leered a little. “So to speak.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“Alice, loyalty is everything to my family. There’s nothing more important. Someone insults a Blackwell, and that’s it. Starting in grade school, kids would think they’d lure me into an argument, or they were just busting my chops—I don’t care. I don’t try to convince people. I cut them off. So for me to hear your grandmother—”

“I wish she hadn’t said that.”

“As a public servant, you rally your supporters, and you try to win over the people on the fence, but your detractors, forget it. You’ll never get ’em. If you’re smart, that’s not how you use your time.”

We both were quiet, and I said, “What about this: What if we don’t talk about the political stuff? Spending time with you this summer has been the most fun I’ve ever had. It really has. But I don’t want to pretend that I believe things I don’t. I don’t want to stand at a rally chanting slogans.” (The number of times I have stood at a rally chanting slogans, chanting onstage, with cameras rolling—years and years ago, I lost count.) “What if I support you not as a politician but as a person?” I continued. “What if we put our differences to one side, you don’t try to convince me and I don’t try to convince you, and we just appreciate being together? Am I crazy, or is that possible? I can assure you I’ll never
tell
anyone if I disagree with you—that’s no one’s business but ours.”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “I’m running for Congress on the Republican ticket, you’re a hippie who promises not to admit it in public or around my family, and together we make beautiful music?”

I hesitated. “Something like that.”

“And I can’t even try to convince you that Jimmy Carter is a pathetic chump?” But his tone had lightened; I didn’t need to hear him say we were on the same side again to know we were. “To answer your question,” he added, “no, you’re not remotely crazy. I’ve dated crazy girls, and you don’t qualify.”

“Thank you.”

He was looking over at me again. “You’re an unusual woman, Alice.”

I smiled wryly. “Some might say that you’re an unusual man.”

“You have a strong sense of yourself. You don’t need to prove things to other people.”

Did I agree? It had never felt to me like I had a strong sense of myself; it simply felt like I
was
myself.

“I have this image in my head,” he was saying. “We’re old, older than my parents are now. We’re eighty or hell, we’re ninety. And we’re sitting in rocking chairs on a porch. Maybe we’re up in Door County. And we’re just really happy to be in each other’s company. Can you picture that?”

My heart flared. Was he about to
propose
?

“I don’t think I’d ever get sick of you,” he said. “I think I’d always find you interesting.”

This was when my eyes filled with tears. But I didn’t actually cry, and he didn’t propose (of course he didn’t, we’d been dating for a month) and for another long stretch, neither of us spoke.

We had just pulled onto Sproule Street when I said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“That’s an auspicious start to a conversation.” He parked in front of my apartment and turned to me, his eyes crinkly, his lips ready to pull into a smile. I knew I had to forge ahead quickly or I’d lose my nerve.

“When I was a senior in high school, I was in an accident,” I said. “I was driving, and I hit another car, and the person in the other car died.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said, and I wondered if telling him was a mistake. Then he reached out to tug me toward him. “Come here.”

I put up one arm, holding him off. “There’s more. It was a boy I knew. I had a crush on him, and I think he had a crush on me, too. There were never repercussions in the legal sense, but the accident was my fault.”

Again, Charlie reached out for me, and I shook my head. “You have to hear all of this. I felt very guilty afterward. I still feel guilty, although I’m not as hard on myself as I was then. But I ended up”—I took a deep breath—“I ended up sleeping with Andrew’s brother. That was the boy’s name, Andrew Imhof, and his brother was Pete. It was just a few times, and no one knew about it. But I got pregnant, and I had an abortion. My grandmother arranged for a doctor she knew, a friend of hers, to do it. I never told Pete, or my parents, or anyone.”

“Alice—” He pulled me in so we were hugging, and this time I let him, and his skin was warm and he smelled exactly the way I’d come to expect him to. Against my neck, he murmured, “I’m so sorry, Lindy.”

“I don’t know that I’m the one who deserves sympathy.”

He drew back so we were making eye contact. “You think I haven’t made mistakes?”

“Of that magnitude?”

“As a matter of fact, I thought I got a girl pregnant in college. She missed her period two months in a row, and we were both beside ourselves. She was down at Sweet Briar when I was at Princeton, and I wondered if I could get away with pretending it wasn’t mine even though I knew I was the only fellow she’d slept with. When she did finally get her period, I never talked to her again, so how’s that for not deserving sympathy?”

“You were young.”

“So were you. And people fuck up. We just do. It started with Adam and Eve, and as far as I can tell, there’s been a steady flow of human error since. Can I make a suggestion? Let’s go inside so I can hold you properly.”

“Okay, although as long as I’m telling you everything else—Well, my mother just lost a bunch of money in a pyramid scheme, and the reason I didn’t go through with buying the house wasn’t because of the inspection, it was because of that. Oh, and I’m pretty sure my grandmother is a lesbian.”

To my surprise, Charlie burst out laughing. “Your grand—” He tried to compose himself. “Sorry—it’s just—that old girl back there is a muff diver?”

“Watch it, Charlie.”

“You have proof?”

“She has a . . . a lady friend. The woman who’s the doctor, they’ve been a couple for years. I think my grandmother has gotten too frail to travel to Chicago to see her, but they’re very devoted to each other.”

“Bully for her.” Charlie seemed genuinely admiring. “Anyone who finds women more attractive than men won’t get an argument from me. What else? This is getting juicy.”

“I think we’ve covered it,” I said. “No, I guess there’s also the fact that Dena isn’t speaking to me because I’m dating you. I was right that she’s furious.” The more I thought about it, the more it seemed Dena’s behavior had to reflect her frustration with her own life more than with me—her disappointment at not being married or having children. Perhaps she really had pinned her hopes on Charlie before she’d met him, but this seemed unrealistic on her part, and her anger at me felt excessive.

Charlie waved an arm through the air. “She’ll come around.” He pulled the key from the ignition. “I’m not cutting off the conversation, but let’s continue it inside.”

Though I don’t know if what he had in mind was sex—it probably was—that’s what happened: We stepped through the door of my apartment and he hugged me tightly, and soon we were grabbing and groping, impatient to shake off all the tension and verbiage. There had been too many words, they’d begun to overlap and run together, and now it was just his body on top of mine, his erection inside me, the jolting rhythm of our hips. You feel like a cavewoman saying it, but if there’s a better way than sex for restoring equanimity between a couple, I don’t know what it is.

After, he spooned me from behind. He said, “I want to take care of you and protect you and always keep you safe,” and this time I did start to cry, real tears that streamed down my face.

“I wish you could,” I said. “I wish anyone could do that for anyone else.”

“Turn around,” he said. I complied, and he said, “I love you, Alice.” With his thumb, he wiped a tear from beneath the outer corner of my eye.

“I love you, too,” I said, and it seemed such an inadequate expression of my affection and gratitude and relief, of my guilt-inflected excitement at all we had to look forward to. How had this happened? And thank goodness it had.

“What you told me in the car, I know that’s big stuff,” he said. We were facing each other, and he rubbed my hip beneath the sheet. “But from now on, it’s smooth sailing. It’s all going to be okay.”

MY GRANDMOTHER CALLED
late the next morning while I was rinsing a paintbrush I’d used on Yertle the Turtle’s shell. “Charlie’s terrific,” she said.

I was stunned. “Are you teasing me?”

“Well, his politics are appalling, but he’s been suckling too long at the teat of the conservatives. I’m sure you can coax him over to our way of seeing things.”

“Granny, he’s running for Congress as a Republican.”

“He doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, my dear. That old coot Wincek has had a lock on the Sixth District since before you were born. Anyway, I suspect it’s more a rite of passage in the Blackwell family than a bona fide attempt to win on Charlie’s part. Why not let him get it out of his system? But he’s mad for you, there’s no doubt about that.”

“And you liked him apart from the political stuff?”

“He’s adorable. Very lively, very well mannered. Oh, he’s a real catch, and your mother agrees. At this very moment, she’s tidying up your trousseau. Speaking of which—should I say I told you so about your mother and Lars, or would you prefer to say it for me?”

“I think you just did.”

“That bit about his bloating and gas, and at the dining room table—it’s clearly not Lars’s debonair manner that’s attracted her, but we shouldn’t judge her for wanting to enjoy herself.”

“Granny, you baited him.”

She laughed. “Well, maybe a little.”

“I’m glad you approve of Charlie,” I said.
Even,
I thought,
if it’s not reciprocated.

“Alice, you hold on to that young man.” My grandmother sounded positively ecstatic. “You’ve found a keeper.”

THE FOLLOWING WEEK
, which was the one before school started, I drove my papier-mâché characters to the library. It took two trips to fit them all in my Capri, delicately stacked atop one another. Though no one had seen them besides Charlie, I felt nearly certain that they had turned out the way I’d wanted. Even Babar’s head stayed upright once I’d secured it to a hook behind him.

While I was situating Eloise on a shelf, I heard a deep voice say, “Those are real nice, Alice.”

“Big Glenn!” This was what we all, teachers and students alike, called Liess’s janitor, who was an extremely tall black man in his early seventies; he’d worked at the school for over fifty years. I hurried over and hugged him. “Did you and Henrietta have a good summer?” I had never actually met Big Glenn’s wife, though there was a famous pineapple upside-down cake she made that Big Glenn dropped off in the faculty lounge every May, some morning before the end of the school year. It was usually decimated by eight-twenty
A.M.
as if its consumption were a competitive activity.

“It’s sure been peaceful not having the hellions around.” Big Glenn smiled.

“You mean the teachers or the students?” He laughed, and I said, “I bet you missed us all.”

He stepped forward, his voice lowered. “Don’t go repeating this, but I hear Sandy’s husband is real sick.”

I winced. “Again?” Sandy Borgos taught second grade and was a friendly woman twice my age who knitted during faculty meetings and wore, whenever possible, a beige shawl that she’d made herself. Her husband had been diagnosed with throat cancer two years earlier, though the last I’d heard, he’d been in remission.

“It’s in God’s hands now,” Big Glenn said. “You know about Carolyn, anyone tell you that?” Big Glenn was, among other things, an extremely well-informed source of school gossip.

I shook my head. Carolyn Krawiec worked in the kindergarten and was seven or eight years younger than I was; she’d been at Liess just a short time, and I hardly knew her.

“Not coming back this year,” Big Glenn said. “Took up with a new beau and followed him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” He arched his eyebrows meaningfully. This was always part of the transaction—the eschewal of explicit disapproval in favor of coded glances.

“Wow,” I said.

“Must be the real thing.” Big Glenn’s tone was highly dubious, and I felt a wave of defensiveness. Maybe it
was
the real thing.

“How long ago did she tell Lydia?” Lydia Bianchi was our fifty-five-year-old principal and a woman of whom I was quite fond. She was married but had no children, which led to speculation among her employees—that is to say, us—over whether her childlessness had been a choice or a private disappointment.

“Not more than a week or two,” Big Glenn said. “The gentleman is in the pharmaceuticals field, comes up to Madison on a regular basis, so you might think they could have seen each other like that.” He shrugged. “I must have forgot the passions of young love.”

“Have they hired her replacement?”

“You interested?”

“No way—I’m staying right here in the library.” This was when, somewhere inside, I knew that the opposite was true. I would leave. I would go away. If Charlie and I stayed together, if things progressed between us in ways I had not specified to anyone, including myself, since that conversation with Dena at the sandwich place, then my days as a teacher were probably numbered.