The Last Thing He Wanted (3 page)

That had been her old life and this was her new life and it was imperative that she keep focus.

She had kept focus.

She had maintained momentum.

It would seem to her later that nothing about the day had gone remarkably wrong but it would also seem that nothing about the day had gone remarkably right: for example, her name had been left off the manifest at Newark. There was a new Secret Service rotation and she had packed her press tags and the agent in charge had not wanted to let her on the plane. Where’s the dog, the agent had said repeatedly to no
one in particular. The Port Authority was supposed to have a dog here, where’s the dog.

It had been seven in the morning and already hot and they had been standing on the tarmac with the piles of luggage and camera equipment. I talked to Chicago last night, she had said, trying to get the agent to look at her as she groped through her bag trying to find the tags. This was true. She had talked to Chicago the night before and she had also talked to Catherine the night before. Who she had not talked to the night before was her father. Her father had left two messages on her machine in Georgetown but she had not returned the calls. Hey, her father had said the first time he called. Then the breathing, then the click. She located something smooth and hard in her bag and thought she had the tags but it was a tin of aspirin.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t,
Catherine had said to her.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line,
her father had said to her machine the second time he called.

Chicago said I was on the plane, she had said to the agent.

We don’t have a dog, it’ll take all day to sweep this shit, the agent had said. He seemed to be directing this to a sound tech who squatted on the tarmac rummaging through his equipment.

She had touched the agent’s sleeve in an effort to get him to look at her. If somebody would just check with Chicago, she had said.

The agent had retracted his arm abruptly but still had not looked at her.

Who is she, he had said. She hasn’t been cleared by the campaign, what’s she doing here.

The sound tech had not looked up.

Tell him you know me, she had said to the sound tech. She could not think whose tech he was but she knew that she had seen him on the plane. What she had come during the campaign to describe as her advanced age (since no one ever demurred this had become by June an embarrassing reflex, a tic that made her face flush even as she said it) made asking for help obscurely humiliating but that was not important. What was important was getting on the plane. If she was not on the plane she would not be on the campaign. The campaign had momentum, the campaign had a schedule. The schedule would automatically take her to July, August, the frigid domes with the confetti falling and the balloons floating free.

She would work out the business about Catherine later.

She could handle Catherine.

She would call her father later.

Tell him you know me, she repeated to the sound tech’s back.

The sound tech extracted a mult cable from his equipment bag, straightened up and gazed at her, squinting. Then he shrugged and walked away.

I’m always on the plane, I’ve been on the plane since New Hampshire, she said to the agent, and then amended it: I mean on and off the plane. She could hear the note of pleading in her voice. She remembered: the tech was ABC. During Illinois she had been
standing on the edge of a satellite feed and he had knocked her down pushing to get in close.

Tough titty, cunt, I’m working, he had said when she objected.

She watched him bound up the steps, two at a time, and disappear into the DC-9. The bruise where he had pushed her was still discolored two months later. She could feel sweat running down beneath her gabardine jacket and it occurred to her that if he had passed her on the way to the steps she would have tripped him. She had worn the gabardine jacket because California was always cold. If she did not find the tags she would not even get to California. The ABC tech would get to California but she would not. Tough titty, cunt, I’m working. She began to unpack her bag on the tarmac, laying out first tapes and notebooks and then an unopened package of panty hose, evidence of her sincerity, hostages to her insistence that the tags existed.

I just didn’t happen to be on the plane this week, she said to the agent. And you just came on. Which is why you don’t know me.

The agent adjusted his jacket so that she could see his shoulder holster.

She tried again: I had something personal, so I wasn’t on the plane this week, otherwise you would know me.

This too was humiliating.

Why she had not been on the plane this week was none of the agent’s business.

I had a family emergency, she heard herself add.

The agent turned away.

Wait, she said. She had located the tags in a pocket of her cosmetics bag and scrambled to catch up with
the agent, leaving her tapes and notebooks and panty hose exposed on the tarmac as she offered up the metal chain, the bright oblongs of laminated plastic. The agent examined the tags and tossed them back to her, his eyes opaque. By the time she was finally allowed on the plane the camera crews had divided up the day’s box lunches (there was only the roast beef left from yesterday and the vegetarian, the Knight-Ridder reporter sitting next to her said, but she hadn’t missed shit because the vegetarian was just yesterday’s roast beef without the roast beef) and the aisle was already slippery from the food fight and somebody had rigged the PA system to play rap tapes and in the process disconnected the galley refrigerator. Which was why, when she walked off the campaign at one-forty the next morning in the lobby of the Hyatt Wilshire in Los Angeles, she had not eaten, except for the Coke during refueling at Kansas City and the garnish of wilted alfalfa sprouts the Knight-Ridder reporter had declined to eat, in twenty-eight hours.

Later she would stress that part.

Later when she called the desk from LAX she would stress the part about not having eaten in twenty-eight hours.

She would leave out the part about her father.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

She would leave out the part about Catherine.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.

She would leave out her father and she would leave out Catherine and she would also leave out the smell
of jasmine and the pool of blue jacaranda petals on the sidewalk outside the celebrity fund-raiser.

Small public company going nowhere, bought it as a tax shelter, knew nothing about the oil business,
she had written in her notebook on the day in 1968 when she interviewed Wynn Janklow’s father.
I remember I said I wanted to take a look at our oil wells, I remember I stopped at a drugstore to buy film for my camera, little Brownie I had, I’d never seen an oil well before and I wanted to take a picture. And so we drove down to Dominguez Hills there and took a few pictures. At that point in time we were taking out oil sands from twelve to fourteen thousand feet, not enough to reveal viscosity. And today the city of Los Angeles is one of the great oil-producing areas in the world, seventeen producing fields within the city limits. Fox, Hillcrest, Pico near Doheny, Cedars, United Artists, UCLA, five hundred miles of pipeline under the city, the opposition to drilling isn’t rational, it’s psychiatric, whole time my son was playing ball at Beverly Hills High School there I was taking out oil from a site just off third base, he used to take girls out there, show them my rockers.

The old man had looked up when the son entered the office.

Just ask him if he didn’t, the old man said.

Beverly Hills crude, the son said, and she married him.

Pick yourself up.

Brush yourself off.

I hadn’t eaten in twenty-eight hours, she would say to the desk.

Not that it mattered to the desk.

6

O
n the plane to Miami that morning she had experienced a brief panic, a sense of being stalled, becalmed, like the first few steps off a moving sidewalk. Off the campaign she would get no overnight numbers. Off the campaign she would get no spin, no counterspin, no rumors, no denials. The campaign would be en route to San Jose and her seat on the DC-9 would be empty and she was sitting by herself in this seat she had paid for herself on this Delta flight to Miami. The campaign would move on to Sacramento at noon and San Diego at one and back to Los Angeles at two and she would still be sitting in this seat she had paid for herself on this Delta flight to Miami.

This was just downtime, she told herself. This was just an overdue break. She had been pushing herself too hard, juggling too many balls, so immersed in the story she was blind to the story.

This could even be an alternate way into the story.

In the flush of this soothing interpretation she ordered a vodka and orange juice and fell asleep before it came. When she woke over what must have been Texas she could not at first remember why she was on
this sedative but unfamiliar plane.
RON Press Overnites at Hyatt Wilshire,
the Los Angeles schedule had said, and the bus had finally arrived at the Hyatt Wilshire and the press arrangements had been made out of Chicago but her name was not on the list and there was no room.

Chicago fucked up, what else is new, the traveling press secretary had shrugged. So find somebody, double up, wheels up at six sharp.

She recalled a fatigue near vertigo. She recalled standing at the desk for what seemed a long time watching the apparently tireless children with whom she had crossed the country drift toward the bar and the elevator. She recalled picking up her bag and her computer case and walking out into the cold California night in her gabardine jacket and asking the doorman if he could get her a taxi to LAX. She had not called the desk until she had the boarding pass for Miami.

7

W
hen she arrived at the house in Sweetwater at five-thirty that afternoon the screen door was unlatched and the television was on and her father was asleep in a chair, the remote clutched in his hand, a half-finished drink and a can of jalapeño bean dip at his elbow. She had never before seen this house but it was indistinguishable from the house in Hialeah and before that the unit in Opa-Locka and for that matter the place between Houston and NASA. They were just places he rented and they all looked alike. The house in Vegas had looked different. Her mother had still been living with him when they had the house in Vegas.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

She would deal with that later.

She had dealt with the plane and she would deal with that.

She sat on a stool at the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen and began reading the Miami
Herald
she had picked up at the airport, very methodically, every page in order, column one to column eight, never turning ahead to the break, only occasionally glancing at the television screen. The Knight-Ridder reporter who had been sitting next to her on the plane the day before appeared to have based his file entirely on the most-likely-voters story the wires had moved.
California political insiders are predicting a dramatic last-minute shift in primary voting patterns here,
his story began, misleadingly. An American hostage who had walked out of Lebanon via Damascus said at his press conference in Wiesbaden that during captivity he had lost faith not only in the teachings of his church but in God.
Hostage Describes Test of Faith,
the headline read, again misleadingly. She considered ways in which the headline could have been made accurate (
Hostage Describes Loss of Faith? Hostage Fails Test of Faith?),
then put down the
Herald
and studied her father. He had gotten old. She had called him at Christmas and she had talked to him from Laguna last week but she had not seen him and at some point in between he had gotten old.

She was going to have to tell him again about her mother.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

She had told him on the telephone from Laguna but it had not gotten through, she was going to have to tell him again, he would want to talk about it.

It occurred to her suddenly that this was why she was here.

She had arrived at LAX with every intention of returning to Washington and had heard herself asking instead for a flight to Miami.

She had asked for a flight to Miami because she was going to have to tell him again about her mother.

That her mother had died was not going to change the course of his days but it would be a subject, it was something they would need to get through.

They would not need to talk about Catherine. Or rather: he would ask how Catherine was and she would say fine and then he would ask if Catherine liked school and she would say yes.

She should call Catherine. She should let Catherine know where she was.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.

She would call Catherine later. She would call Catherine the next day.

Her father snored, a ragged apnea snore, and the remote dropped from his hand. On the television screen the graphic
Broward Closeup
appeared, over film of what seemed to be a mosque in Pompano Beach. It developed that discussion of politics had been forbidden at this mosque because many of what the reporter called Pompano Muslims came from countries at war with one another. “In Broward County at least,” the reporter concluded, “Muslims who have known only war can now find peace.”