Cape Disappointment (5 page)

TONIGHT IT'S A TUXEDO
— not rented, either— with black dress shoes and a starched shirt with a bow tie. The first time she saw me in the tie Kathy told me it would look best alone. So far, we hadn't gotten around to testing it. Neither of us had the time or energy for that sort of fooling around. Nor was she in the mood to say anything quite that flirtatious tonight, not after our squabble. I bought the tux for the plethora of black-tie functions I would be attending during the campaign, money-raising dinners having become the staple of political life these days. I purchased two new suits, too, though after the elections I would probably never wear either again. Now, standing in front of the mirror in our living room, I felt like a spiffed-up monkey. All I needed was a tin cup to collect nickels.

“You look pretty spectacular, big guy,” Kathy said as she emerged from the bedroom. “Too bad you're working for the dark side.”

“You look great, too.” She was wearing a sinfully slinky dress that I thought was lavender until she informed me it was cornflower blue, the same color as her eyes. Just a little tinge of color blindness going on there. Either way, I told her she looked terrific, and she truly did.

“Thanks,” she said as I helped her on with her coat. We got into her car without speaking. We'd had one of our rare disagreements and were both trying to cool off before confronting seven or eight hundred people who expected us to be relentlessly cheerful.

Kathy ran a one-woman law office and specialized in criminal law, not a specialty that brought in a lot of money. This autumn she'd put most of her cases on hold so she could work on Jane Sheffield's senatorial re election bid, and in one of those ironies that collide with real life, I found myself working for Sheffield's opponent, James Maddox. It was going to be a bone of contention between us until after the elections, perhaps even longer.

Kathy and I didn't bicker often, and when we did it was more in jest than for blood, but she was incensed that I was working for Maddox. Early in our relationship we forged a pact not to go to bed angry, established it as a firm rule, a rule that had prompted more than one make-up session stretching into the wee hours, the two of us dragging ourselves to work the next day, exhausted from conversation, satiated with make-up sex, and friends forevermore. Practically from the day we met and long before we were ever intimate, Kathy and I had been best friends, and we were bent on keeping it that way.

As luck would have it, when we walked into Bellevue's Meyden-bauer Center, under the colored banners and balloons, past the smiling greeters, past the coat-check room, the first person we ran into was a colleague of mine from the Maddox headquarters. Deborah Driscoll was almost as tall as my six-one, urbane, sophisticated, chatty when she needed to be, and apparently in a hurry, because she was bumping her way through the crowd. Already it was a huge crowd, and we'd just that moment wandered through the entrance, skimming the outskirts of the throng, when Deborah appeared out of nowhere.

Kathy spotted her first. “Hello, Deborah.”

“Oh, good to see you, Thomas. And … ?”

“Kathy. My name is Kathy.”

“Of course. I don't know why I always forget. My apology. I'll see you later, Thomas. I have … you know …” She shrugged at how busy she was and sank into a sea of suits as if by osmosis. She was wearing a poured-on emerald green sheath that revealed an astonishing amount of décolletage, displaying her wares as if she was out to prove something. I was struck by how tall she was next to Kathy.

When I turned around, Kathy said, “Finished ogling your friend?”

“What?”

“What what?”

“I was just daydreaming about something.”

“Yeah, her ass.”

“No, really—”

“Or her phony breasts. She had enough cleavage showing to use as a canvas for a mural of the winning of the West.”

“Really? I didn't notice.”

“And why is it that every time I run into her she pretends to forget my name?”

“She doesn't pretend to forget your—”

“If she's actually forgotten it, that's even worse. You realize she's a professional name rememberer. Have you ever known her to come up lame on anybody else's name?”

“Well, now that you …”

“I don't like it when people try to play mind games with me.”

“Come on now, she's not that bad.”

“Oh, but she is. Deb-oooo-raaah is every woman's worst nightmare.”

“How so?”

“Tall, skinny, with tits like medicine balls. And, oh yeah, interested in my husband.”

I was rescued by a loud commotion twenty feet in front of us, as a trio of women who apparently hadn't assembled in years greeted one another with squeals and hugging. When the hubbub died, Kathy turned back to me and said, “Also, it's a fact that something like ninety percent of redheads dye their hair.”

“So we're going to go with statistics, now?”

“In her case, yes, I'll go with statistics.”

“I don't think she dyes her hair.”

“Oh, come on.”

What I was really thinking was that her tits weren't like medicine balls, though they were close enough. Earlier when she walked away, every man she passed, including the gay guys, had done a double take. Kathy mistakenly assumed I was caught up in the testosterone rush, but I wasn't. Deborah Driscoll had worked for the James Maddox campaign since before it was a campaign, had been on Maddox's payroll in his private company for years now, billed as a public relations expert, though her duties extended far beyond any single title. She was a genius at public relations, having single-handedly reeled in some of the
largest contributions in Maddox's campaign chest. These days the engine of modern politics ran on filthy lucre. If you could raise enough money, you could win, and if you could win, you could raise more money. Of course, money didn't buy votes … not exactly. Money bought TV ads, which were horrendously expensive and all too influential with a voting populace that got most of its information from fifteen-second spot ads, headlines, and hunches. The most effective TV ads slandered your opponent so that people who didn't keep up on the issues— which was almost everyone— viewed the ads and got scared to vote for a candidate because of … whatever. Forget about the facts. And now, with four weeks to go before the election, and Kathy's candidate, Jane Sheffield, holding an almost insurmountable lead in the polls, Maddox's TV ads were getting uglier and uglier.

Kathy had been working for the Sheffield campaign longer than I'd been working for Maddox, and with all her heart Kathy believed in what Sheffield stood for. The latest Maddox ads had prompted a robust session of bickering between us. I didn't approve of the ads and said as much to Maddox, but I was only a cog in the machine and nobody was about to give me veto power over them.

“You're over there working with those nitwits,” Kathy said. “You're as responsible for what they're doing as anyone. Anybody with a whit of self-respect would have turned in his resignation a long time ago.”

“You know I'm paying back a debt.”

“And how about if he asked you to burn down a church? Would you do that, too, and claim you were paying off a debt?”

“He hasn't asked me to burn down a church.”

“You consort with people who are committing moral crimes. Those ads are nothing but vicious lies. You're all guilty over there.”

“I don't know why you're worried. Maddox doesn't stand a chance.”

“It's the principle of the thing.”

I don't need to go into the particulars of the ads. You've seen the type. They distorted Sheffield's voting record and attacked her on a personal level, mostly by implication, so that she couldn't directly counter the attacks without appearing to be the one who was lowering the level of discourse. It was a nasty season, and there wasn't an incumbent in the country who wasn't up against the same smear campaign. I didn't like it. In fact I didn't much like Maddox or his politics,
but I owed him, and knowing Sheffield was unbeatable anyway, I'd taken the position Maddox offered in order to fulfill my obligation and be done with it—and hopefully with him. At the time I made the decision I'd thought Kathy and I were mature adults and could put aside politics when we had to, but apparently I was wrong.

The evening was a celebration of the governor's engagement to one of the dot-com billionaires Washington State seemed to produce as easily as we produced timber, mushrooms, apples, and airplanes. The gala wasn't directly related to the elections, but we were sure to run into major players on both sides, since the governor was a Democrat and her fiancé, oddly enough, was a staunch and active Republican. I didn't like parties this large, or any parties for that matter. You had to be good at blathering about nothing for hours on end to survive them, and my bullshit tolerance was too low for that. Kathy, who loved people in any and all formats, would luxuriate in every moment of it … except perhaps those spent with Deb-oooo-raaah.

For a while we hovered at the periphery of the gathering like two kids waiting for the other to jump into the lake and give a report on how cold the water was. Deborah Driscoll popped into view one more time, chatting with Sheffield, Kathy's candidate, laughing and making Sheffield laugh, too. It was a tribute to Sheffield's equanimity that she was able to socialize so calmly with one of Maddox's staffers. “She's stately, isn't she?” Kathy said.

Tracing Kathy's gaze, I said, “Sheffield? I guess.” Sheffield was middle-aged and had never been stately by anybody's standards. She wore her hair choppy and had a plump figure political cartoonists made hay with. Tonight, clad in her usual gray business suit, she looked like a comptroller who'd wandered out onto the floor to get some information before going back to her booth to work a calculator.

“You know who I mean.”

“You mean Deborah?”

“Don't you think she's attractive?”

“I thought we were talking about stately.”

“Now I know why you like going to work so much.”

“She doesn't dress like that in the office.”

“No. But I bet you wish she did.”

A pair of women bustled past as if on a mission. After they were out
of earshot, I said, “You could sell the jewelry off some of these people and have more money than we'll see in our lifetimes.”

“You could always work full-time for Maddox after the election. Then we'd be in the chips.”

“I'm not going to work for Maddox after the election. Besides, I like being poor.”

“We're not poor.”

“We're not rich.” Together we made enough to get by, but not enough for either of us to retire early or to embarrass ourselves by purchasing gobs of status symbols. We didn't have vacation houses or stock options or second vehicles. We had what we needed, and so far we were happy with that.

“He keeps asking, though, doesn't he? For you to work full-time? Or is it Deborah who keeps asking?”

“Deborah's not interested in hiring me full-time. She's not interested in me at all.”

“She's not interested in you the way Exxon Mobil is not interested in black stuff under the sand.”

“Well, I'm not interested. You know that.”

“Women like her have a way of changing the minds of men like you. She wants you working for Maddox. I know that from past conversations. You know, those conversations in which she can't remember my name. I know this sounds petty, but I don't like you working with her.”

“Okay, I'll tell Maddox it's either her or me, that my wife doesn't like her.”

“Don't get too funny. You have a habit of getting too funny.”

“When have I ever been too funny?”

“How about that charity thing on Queen Anne Hill? The crab dip?”

“What crab dip?”

“I don't believe for a minute you don't remember it.”

It had been the earliest days of the campaign, when the political contestants were still friendly and eager to show their support for the same charitable cause. Library funding? Cancer research? I no longer remembered. Kathy and I were clowning around in the kitchen of the large mansion where the benefit was being held. Correction: I was clowning around, and Kathy was trying to get me to settle down. I spilled some clam dip on the black dress Kathy was wearing, and when
we tried to get it off, the stain only got worse. We did our best to clean her up but when we emerged from the kitchen, the first person we ran into was Maddox, who couldn't help staring at the chalky stain on Kathy's breast. Kathy saw him staring and told him I'd done it while fooling around with her in the back room. Maddox got a funny look on his face and scurried away before she realized what he was thinking and could explain further. “Oh, my God,” Kathy had said. “You don't suppose he thinks we had a Monica Lewinsky moment, do you?”

“Oh, I remember now,” I said, pretending it was all coming back to me. “The crab dip.”

“One of the single most embarrassing moments of my life.”

“He didn't think what you thought he thought. He was just—”

“He most certainly did think what I thought he thought. He thought exactly what I thought he thought. I just want to know what you said to him earlier that would make him think we might go into the kitchen and have sex.”