The Senator's Wife (15 page)

“He's had several over the years, yes.” She drank some wine.

“And you've known about them.”

“Never at the time. No. I haven't.”

“But you knew later.”

“I heard. I heard probably some of what you heard. And he and I talked about it.”

“And you agreed to live with it, somehow?”

“No.” Suddenly she was angry. “Look, Evan. I don't even think we should be having this conversation. In some sense or another this is simply none of your business. But I will tell you that when I found out about one or another of these things, it was always after the fact. When I learned about the first one, he told me there had been several others. But my sense was not ever . . . that it threatened me. Or us. It wasn't
like
this last thing, with Carolee. It was . . . My sense was of a weakness. One that he succumbed to, from time to time.”

“So if you didn't have to know about it, it was okay.”

“It
wasn't
‘okay’! Nothing was okay.” Now her voice had gotten louder, and she stopped and looked around, but no one seemed to have noticed. She leaned forward, her hands clasped under her chin. “It broke my heart. It broke my heart over and over. We struggled. We fought. But we wanted to stay married. We
both
wanted to stay married.”

Evan's face was unreadable. Cold.

“Look, Evvie,” she said. She'd made her voice gentle. “I hope that when you marry, I wish for you, that there's only . . . that you both, whoever, are able to be nothing but in love with each other all the time. That neither of you ever wounds or hurts the other. I wish Dad and I, I wish for us, for you, that we had had that.”

He met her eyes for a moment, and then looked down at his own hands, encircling his glass.

“We didn't. But we had . . . we had a great deal else. Which kept us together. Which served us well.”

“Until now.”

“Yes.”

They sat quietly. There was a jukebox in the pub, and someone had chosen a series of songs by Frank Sinatra. Now it was “Laura.”

He said, “But you're still doing the campaign.”

“Yes. I am.”

He sighed. “Okay.”

“I still love him, Ev.”

He shrugged. They finished eating. They talked of other things. When school would start. What courses he was taking. What she'd heard from Brad.

After she paid the bill and they were getting up, he smiled at her—almost sadly, she would have said. “Well, I'll see you in November then.”

The next morning, he'd packed his car up and left, early, for school in New Hampshire.

I
N THE TRAIN
coming down to the city, Delia couldn't imagine how it would be to see Tom, to be with him. She was actually frightened, aware as she watched the dry September landscape and the tired, dusty cities flash by, that her heart was pumping faster from time to time, her breath coming short. She'd brought a book with her, but she didn't even pretend to read. She watched the scenes change out the window—the marshes, then the steely water, then the backside of one little New England town after another—and she felt swarmed by memories.

She remembered Tom promising her he wouldn't see Carolee ever again, his face turned away from her, his shoulders dropped in what seemed like defeat. She remembered his sitting opposite her in the kitchen in Williston after she'd learned that he had been lying, after she'd called him and told him that was it, she was leaving, going away. He'd flown up to see her, to talk, to ask her not to divorce him now, not until the election was over. She sat for what seemed like hours, tears coursing down her face, as he told her he had tried but hadn't been able to give Carolee up. As they talked about when he'd been lying, when he'd been telling the truth. As she announced her disbelief that he could have chosen a woman young enough to be his child; that he didn't see, or wouldn't acknowledge, the lopsidedness of it, its unfairness to Carolee. “Of course the girl adores you. It's in the nature of that difference, that advantage, that she should.” Her voice was hoarse, cracked, she'd been crying so long.

“She's not a girl, Delia.” He was calm, reasonable. “You and I had been married for more than five years when you were her age, and you were not a
girl,
then.”

“But you were not a man thirty years my senior,” she shrilled. “You didn't have that advantage to . . . dazzle me with. We were ourselves.”

“I am myself with her,” he said, and Delia laughed, though she was still also crying.

Delia's tears were for her life, her stupidity, her age, her vanity. She had no control over herself. While they were talking, she had shrieked, she had wailed. How could there be so many tears? She could feel that her eyes, even her lips, were swollen. Once she choked on herself, her pain, and Tom came around the table and patted her back. Her horrid back! Her old, bony shoulders! She shrank from him. She didn't want him touching her, feeling sorry for her.

When she was calmer, when they were sitting opposite each other again, he said to her gently, lovingly, that what he wished for her more than anything was the same happiness he'd found. Delia had thought of this often, with more bitterness than she felt about almost anything else.

And with all this, when she saw him in the lobby of the hotel in New York, what she felt was simply joy. He was Tom. He was so himself, so unchanged. So beautiful to her.

His face was grave when she first spotted him, standing close to the glass lobby doors, looking out at the pedestrians hurrying past under their black umbrellas. He was dressed, as usual, in an expensive suit, a pale shirt. His sandy hair was more silvery than she remembered it. When he turned and saw her, his face lighted with a smile. Or perhaps she was smiling first, and his was a response to that, she couldn't have said. Perhaps they both felt it simultaneously, the sense of all that was familiar and inalterably beloved, no matter what happened between them. She wept then. She wept when he first held her, she wept when they made love.

Afterward they came downstairs and walked for blocks through a fine, misty rain, holding hands, barely speaking. They were both stunned at the ease of their lovemaking, at the power of it. Perhaps, like her, Tom hadn't imagined that they
would
make love, perhaps he too was wondering what it meant.

They saw a bar, which appealed to them with its zinc counter and its twinkling lights. It reminded Delia of Paris, actually. It was quiet at this hour—just after four. They sat at the counter and watched the beautiful young woman in front of them shuck their oysters. Delia felt that something had shifted, had changed. She had control of her own life, she thought. Even, perhaps, of what happened between them.

She said, “It's going to be really almost essential for me to escape all this, to just be far, far away from it all from time to time.”

He misunderstood her. “From Washington?” he said.

She laughed. “Once this campaign is over, I doubt I'll ever set foot in Washington again.”

He looked hard at her, and then away. She was feeling a kind of joyous recklessness. She had acquired such freedom! He had wounded her so deeply that she could do what she liked, say what she liked.

“No, I mean truly far away,” she said. “Where reporters won't call me and invitations won't reach me and I can disappear—from the face of the
American
earth anyway.” She put her hand on her bosom and made her voice more dramatic.
“From the margins of your life.”

“Delia.” He was turned to her at the bar, and he bent toward her now and gripped her elbow. “You'll always be in my life, Delia. You'll always be at the center of my life.”

“Oh Tom,
please,
” she said, her voice suddenly impatient. And then she remembered that an hour earlier, making love, she'd been silently weeping. That he had wept too. Her throat tightened. They sat for a moment. Finally she said gently, “Here's what it is: I'd like to go back to Paris. To stay in Paris, at least some of the time. I can speak the language now, more or less, and I can disappear there.”

“And that's what you want? To disappear?” His voice was surprised, his face in profile in the mirror behind the bar sad.

She was surprised too, that this could make him sad. That she could. She wanted to cheer him. “Well, as an alternative to
offing
myself, for example, it seems actually appealing. Another kind of
off.
” She waved her hand. “Off to Paris.”

“That's not funny, Delia.”

She turned and looked directly at him. His face was grim, his mouth a tight line. She lifted her shoulders. “Ah,” she said, her voice lowered. “So you can make me want to die, but I'm not allowed to talk about it with you.”

“You
don't
want to die,” he said fiercely. He gripped her hands, raised them to his mouth, kissed them.

Delia leaned against him, her forehead touching his chin. Then she sat up straight, abruptly. “No. Not anymore. But I do want to disappear.”

“What if I don't want you to disappear?” he asked.

She thought for a moment, wanting to be sure she didn't speak from bravado. Then she said, “Well, but you're no longer in charge of that.”

The young woman placed the oysters on their bed of ice in front of them. Tom drizzled them with lemon and they ate them slowly, relishing the briny, sweaty, animal flavor. He ordered them another martini. Delia described the apartment in Paris, and Tom said yes, he thought he could find a way to manage that.

F
OR THE NEXT
three mornings, Delia woke next to Tom in different hotels. They had coffee in their room, they talked, idly and affectionately, as they moved past each other, washing, dressing, packing. Delia was happy in those moments.
Happy in a subjunctive way,
she thought, but in a way she was coming to feel she would not ever be able to give up entirely. On one of those days they made love before they were truly even awake, and Delia lay there afterward in a wash of sensation, the sensation she had when she woke with him already inside her—that they were part of each other, that they were one.

When they were ready, Delia dressed in what she thought of as her costume, they went out and were instantly surrounded by Tom's staff, and then by Tom's public. They became simply the candidate and his wife.

Delia's job was to look as good as she could, to listen with rapt attention to Tom speak, to answer good-naturedly the questions put to her. She had one event on the first day out that she did solo, a lunch with women from across the state who were politically active. Tom's speechwriters had provided her with a text for this, which she changed a little bit here and there before she gave it.

It was only slowly over these days that Delia realized that everyone in the press asking her questions knew that she and Tom had been apart, and that at least some of them probably knew about Carolee. It occurred to her that Tom must have known this would be the case, he'd been so careless in his passion. That he'd understood, that he
must
have understood—as she hadn't—that enduring this was part of what he was asking of her.

She thought of the friends who had spoken to her through the winter of how indiscreet he was being—of how he'd been seen so frequently with Carolee in New York, in Washington. One of them, Madeleine Dexter, had run into them leaving a restaurant in Washington. She said that in spite of every signal she'd sent that she didn't imagine being asked to greet him, he'd brought Carolee over to be introduced, and stood there, clearly expecting cordial conversation from her and her husband. “Is he mad?” she'd asked Delia.

The questions now weren't brutal or aggressive—the time when that would have been the case was yet to come—but they kept being asked. And they were asked with a kind of slightly amused intensity of focus that said to Delia,
We both know what this is really about, don't we
?: “Isn't it hard getting back into the political swing, after being away for so long?” “What do Frenchwomen have to teach American women about glamour?” “How much do you plan to be in Washington if the senator is reelected?”

“
When
he's reelected,” she corrected, and they laughed. This was the second day. She was standing in a hotel lobby talking to three or four reporters after a breakfast for local businessmen Tom had spoken at. Tom was standing behind her and just to the side. She could feel his eyes steady on her. “And the answer is that I've always spent more of my time in Williston. I live in this state, as the senator does, as our children do, and I hope never to forget that.”

Finally, later that same day, in an interview for the Living section of a local paper, the reporter, a young woman with a skirt so short that when she sat down Delia could see her underpants—could see, in fact, that her underpants were striped—asked the question nearly directly. “We missed seeing you earlier in the campaign, and I know questions have arisen about your absence. Is that something you'd care to respond to?”

They were in the living room of the hotel suite she and Tom were sharing. A photographer had been there before, snapping shots of Delia as she spoke, but he was gone now, off to some other newsworthy event or crisis. Delia looked out the window at the rain for a moment before she spoke. Then she turned and smiled evenly at the young woman.

“Well, of course my instinct is to say that that's a private matter, that it has absolutely nothing to do with my husband's remarkable record, his great . . . the great strengths he'd bring to a second term. You know—that what we should be talking about is the economic health of the state, is the war, is the cost of the war to social programs.” She shrugged. She smiled, kindly she hoped, at the reporter. “But I understand that this is something people are interested in knowing about the senator and me. Part of the package they'd be getting, as it were.”

The young woman nodded and kept writing in her notebook. She had a peculiar hairdo, with bangs that reminded Delia of Mamie Eisenhower's. Was this somehow back in fashion among the young?

Delia took a deep breath and went on. “So let me say that I think marriage is a wonderful but a
complicated
institution. I think every long marriage has its difficulties, its ups and downs. I'd ask people to respect that. But I'm campaigning with the senator because I'm committed to him. Because I believe in him. Because I believe that he deserves another term and will be terrific in another term, and because I love him. Because I'm proud to be married to him.”