The Race (16 page)

Rob smiled. Though this encouragement was typical, her reassurance buoyed him—he
had
come far, and she had been with him at every step. And now, as he had first imagined as a boy, he might be within sixteen months of becoming president.

"You know what I
really
look forward to today?" Mary Rose told him. "Being off my feet for a while." She took his hand. "Let's go look at the kids, Rob. We love them even more when they're asleep."

Rob caught something wistful in her expression, the shadow of a feeling she had expressed only once. "I know we're not enough for you," she'd told him after their second child was born. "I know what you need, Robbie, and that's okay. It's enough for you to love us."

Kissing her on the forehead, he went with her to Bridget's room.

COREY AND LEXIE SAT AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER, WATCHING Marotta's announcement on Rohr News. Now and then the camera would pan to Mary Rose and the children. "When the rest of us were trying to find prom dates," Corey observed, "Rob was auditioning first ladies."

"What's their marriage actually like?" Lexie asked.

Corey shrugged. "Who really knows about someone else's marriage? But as near as I can tell, Mary Rose Marotta has both feet firmly located on planet Earth. She's the clearest evidence I've uncovered that beneath the layers of calculation Marotta has a core of decency."

Seated with Mary Rose and the children were Marotta's mother, his parish priest, and the Jesuit high school debate coach who had told him that, with diligence and the help of God, he could become a senator. Recounting this story, Marotta said, "I've asked Father Frank if he wouldn't mind amending that prediction upward."

The audience chuckled approvingly. But, Corey thought, there was something strained about Marotta's humor or perhaps something too telling about his ambition for it to be tossed off as a joke. "This is the America I grew up in," Marotta said. "A community of faith and love in which the dream of a working-class family for its oldest son could become, with God's blessing, a reality."

"When you were a kid," Lexie asked, "did
you
imagine being president?"

"Never. That's part of what unsettles Rob, I think. But then my family life wasn't quite so idyllic."

Marotta's voice grew stronger. "And at the heart of that world," he stressed, "was faith. That's the world Mary Rose and I want for our children, and America's children. Not simply a place that is safe from terrorism, but a place where it is safe to worship God ..."

"Here we go," Corey said.

"A place," Marotta continued, "as blessed by God as the America that survived a depression, defeated Adolf Hitler, and vanquished the bleak vision of a Communist system that conceived of mankind without a precious spark of the divine.

"A place where men and women—and
only
men and women—marry for the reasons ordained by our Creator: to love and cherish each other, and to give their children the mother and father a loving God intended them to have ..."

"In other words," Corey told Lexie. "'You don't need Christy to protect you from gays.'"

"Schools where your children can pray, go to libraries free of obscenity, learn alternative explanations for the miracle of our existence, and be taught to appreciate that our flag stands for principles too sacred to permit its desecration. A country," Marotta concluded firmly, "where parents can still direct the moral and religious education of their children. Because our war against terror depends not only on the valor of our military, but the strength of our commitment to God ..."

Once again, Rohr News panned to Mary Rose Marotta, holding the hands of a son and a daughter to each side of her as she listened intently to her husband. "That's an object lesson in the power of a single image," Lexie observed. "Mary Rose as message."

"She's a help," Corey agreed. "But I think he's going too far."

"In what way?"

"Rob's becoming a shape-shifter. Price told him to evoke Christy, so that's what he's doing. It's a bad road to start down—the idea of a president unsure of his own identity makes voters feel uneasy."

When Corey's cell phone started ringing, he turned it off.

LATER, AS COREY and Lexie sat on the deck, gazing at the ocean on a gray and misty day, he took her hand in his. "I'm already sorry to leave," he said.

She turned to him. "Those phone calls you ignored—"

"Were from Rustin. His message was: 'What, you want an engraved invitation to run? Marotta's given you an opening.'"

"Has he?"

"He's certainly given Republicans nervous about Christy reason to be nervous about
him,
especially after we got killed in the midterm elections last year. But the money people like Alex Rohr know the score. Right now, Price is whispering into their collective ear that Rob just has to say this stuff to make sure Christy doesn't screw things up." Corey gazed at the distant gray-white spume of the surf. "The problem with that is Christy. Price's idea is to unite the godly and the greedy behind Marotta. Christy's idea, I think, is to pit the godly against the greedy in order to draw me in. If I erode Marotta's support from the other side, Christy believes, he could actually win the nomination. What Christy
doesn't
believe is that
I
could actually win."

Lexie's tone was carefully dispassionate. "What do you believe, Corey?"

"That I'm sick of politics as usual. The Democrats are so bent on holding one interest group or another that they stand for absolutely nothing. They caved in on Iraq, afraid of being called wimps. Now the war's gone south, and instead of a coherent policy all they can offer is the stirring slogan '_We're_ not
them
,' and deadlines for withdrawal.

"Then there's us. A couple of inaugurals ago I saw with utter clarity what my party had become. D.C. was awash in fundamentalists, of course—I saw one bus with pictures of Jesus and the president painted on its side. But most striking was a reception for our biggest donors. The place was jammed with fat, rich guys and their wives, the women wearing more fur than I'd seen this side of an old movie about the Visigoths invading Rome. There was so much smugness in the air I nearly choked.

"At the Inaugural Address, I occupied myself by watching them. When the president gave his riff about opportunity and diversity, they rarely applauded, though a lot of it was pretty good. But then he mentioned tax cuts." Corey turned to Lexie. "Suddenly they were on their feet, screaming like their team had won the Super Bowl. They'd come to Washington to celebrate their own greed."

Lexie smiled without humor. "And that surprised you?"

"The single-mindedness of it did. That's why they don't mind giving half the store to fundamentalists—if you're rich enough, they figure, whatever else happens in society won't affect you. At least until Al Qaeda eradicates the New York Stock Exchange.

"Hell, Price and Rohr even put Osama to work for them. In the last presidential election, our slogan came down to 'Vote for us or die.' But our foreign policy was run by the dumbest, most self-satisfied bunch of white guys who ever fucked up a savings and loan—except they fucked up an entire war. So now our slogan's 'Only
we
can save you from the consequences of our own disaster.'" Restless, Corey stood. "We've got to be about something other than fundamentalism, fear, greed, and nailing Mexicans at the border. And we need to offer young people a cause bigger than themselves, maybe even compulsory national service. The air force taught me that much."

Turning, Lexie gazed at their interlaced fingers, and then into his eyes. "You're running, aren't you?"

Corey jammed his hands in his pockets. "If the party nominates me," he answered, "I'll become president. There's no Democrat who can beat me, and the people who support Marotta know it. The question is whether they'd rather risk losing than risk what would happen if I won, and what they might do to stop me."

Lexie fell silent.

THEY ATE DINNER by candlelight, talking quietly. The evening had a faintly elegiac quality; before she went upstairs, Lexie kissed him gently on the lips.

Corey tingled with surprise. "What was that for?" he asked.

"For coming. And for staying when you could have left."

Once again, Corey could not sleep.

Deep in the night, he heard a quiet knock on the door. Then it opened, and moonlight framed her silhouette.

"Don't ask," she said softly. "Just accept that I want to be here."

She stood beside his bed, still for a moment. In the darkness he heard, but could not see, her robe dropping to the floor. Then she slipped beneath cool sheets.

Silent, they lay facing each other, inches apart. Reaching for her hand, Corey felt the pulse beneath Lexie's slender wrist. He leaned forward to kiss her, gently, and then she rested her forehead against his shoulder.

They stayed like that for a time, their bodies not quite touching. Corey traced her spine with his fingertips, aroused by her closeness but knowing there must be no rush. When he kissed the nape of her neck, he felt her quiver. The scent of her hair was sweet.

As she stretched, offering more of her, the tips of her breasts grazed his chest. Corey felt a current of desire. Touch was his means of sight.

His fingers slid to the base of her spine and, palm opening, brought her closer to him. She froze for an instant, then kissed him softly on the mouth. As the length of their bodies met, the tip of her tongue touched his.

Their kiss went deeper. Then Corey's lips slid down her throat, her breasts, the taut flatness of her stomach and, finally, lower still. This new intimacy drew a soft cry from her lips. The cry, repeated, and the rise of her hips signaled her insistence that this not stop. When at last she quivered with release, her fingers entwined his hair.

As Corey entered her, he felt her gazing into his face.

They began moving together, slowly at first, then with greater urgency. At the edges of his consciousness, Corey sensed her detaching from him, as though, even as her body merged with his, some part of her had slipped away. Her cry of fulfillment sounded solitary.

Swept up in his own release, Corey no longer thought at all.

LYING BESIDE HER, he tried to sort out the reason she had come to him; despite the deep mutuality of their desire, the intense closeness had dissipated into a tangible sense of her apartness. "Talk to me," he said.

She slid away, lying on her back beside him, only their fingers touching. In her silence Corey felt the intensity of thought.

"It matters to me, Lexie. I don't want you to hide."

He heard her draw a breath. Still gazing at the ceiling, Lexie began speaking in a monotone.

SHE WAS TWENTY-FOUR THEN, A PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEER AT THE END of her tour in rural Colombia. She arrived at a regional airport, the first leg of a trip that would bring her home to Greenville for two weeks with her mother, and then on to the fresh and daunting challenge of Yale Drama School.

As she checked through security, preoccupied with imaginings of her future, two uniformed guards with handguns pulled her aside.

Lexie assumed they were looking for cocaine. She had none: intent on her studies, she had not even smoked dope in college. Only when they led her to a windowless room did she sense her vulnerability.

She looked at the men more closely. One was mustached and cadaverous; the other squat, with the face of an Aztec mask. The first guard motioned Lexie to a chair, questioning her in soft, insistent Spanish—why was she here, why did she seem afraid. At the edge of her vision, the other man, his heavily muscled back turned toward her, rifled her backpack.

She had nothing to hide, Lexie insisted. Her tongue felt thick.

Turning, the squat man held aloft a small plastic bag of white powder, eyebrows arching in his cruelly impassive face.

"Cocaine," he said. "Unless you cooperate, you will spend many years in jail."

Panicking, Lexie began to protest.

The thin man shook his head. When he unzipped his pants, his penis was already hard.

The squat man pushed her head down.

Afterward, as she sobbed, the man she had sated held a revolver to her head.

They permitted her to undress herself. Then they shoved her to a mattress in the corner of the room. She fell to her knees, begging first in English, then in Spanish.

They pushed her onto her back. As the squat man entered her, she tried to detach herself, to force her mind to separate from her body. The tears running down her face felt like someone else's.

The second man, aroused again, thrust into her. When he was done, they rolled her on her stomach for the first man's use. There were several ways, he told her in Spanish, to take pleasure from an American woman. Close to unconscious, Lexie realized through her shock and anguish that they knew at least one word of English.

Nigger, the squat man repeated harshly, and laughed.

WHEN LEXIE LEFT the room at last, each step was that of an automaton. She went to the bathroom and vomited; afterward, still weak-kneed, she tried to wash herself, as though to erase what they had done. Boarding the plane, she felt the dull ache of her body, the residue of violation.

She changed planes twice, speaking only when addressed. Feigning sleep, she curled in her seat, her back to whomever they seated next to her. She barely acknowledged offers of a meal.

Her mother greeted her at the airport, eyes welling with the joy of Lexie's return. Embracing her, she complained, "You look like a zombie, girl."

Lexie kissed her forehead. "It was a long flight, Mama. I'll feel better soon."

LISTENING TO LEXIE'S story, Corey wrapped his fingers around hers. "I didn't tell anyone," she said. "I was female, and black, too often invisible growing up. And Daddy's heart condition had taught me the habit of silence."

"Even about
this
?"

"When it mattered," she answered wearily, "I couldn't make those two men hear me, or see me as a girl anyone loved. They didn't just violate my body—they took part of my humanity. I'd become invisible again.