I miss your face. When can I c u? 
Walsh (D) |
Slaughter (R) |
Spread |
41 |
43 |
Slaughter +2 |
Every day of the campaign brought a new indignity.
Picketers with signs declaring CHARLOTTE WALSH KILLS BABIES besieged her as she walked out of the Today show. Shocked and curious, she approached one of the Latino men holding the cardboard placards. “Why are you doing this? Your sign doesn’t even make sense.” He fixed her with a dull stare.
Josh dragged her away. “They don’t speak English. Slaughter paid them to be here. They probably don’t even know what their signs say.”
Next came the photographs in the Daily Dispatch. The headline read: “Senate Candidate as a Young Hottie.”
“No one has ever referred to me as a hottie,” Charlotte snorted to Leila. There were other adjectives that, as far as she knew, had never been used to describe her—beautiful, adorable, and sexy all came to mind.
“Enjoy the vaguely complimentary misogyny,” Leila replied drolly.
There was a photo of Charlotte as a teenager in a relatively chaste two-piece bathing suit water-skiing on Lake Winola. In another she held a red Solo cup and leaned provocatively against a telephone pole smoking a cigarette, wearing a too-large army jacket, a black beret, and maroon drugstore lip liner on her way to a Smiths concert in Philly during her junior year of high school. The pièce de résistance was her in a gray negligee with the word ID written across the filmy white fabric in puffy paint. During her senior year of high school Charlotte and two other girls from the honor society had decided to be Freudian slips for Halloween. In the photo she curled her shoulders in and stood a step behind Jessica Kelly and Jenny DiGiorgio, who hadn’t wanted to include her at all except they didn’t think they’d win the costume contest with just an ego and superego.
Paul. The pictures must have come from Paul. He’d probably taken them when he was mucking around in the garage after her announcement speech. How much did they pay him?
He denied it when she finally got him on the phone, but Kara didn’t rule it out. “I’ll get to the bottom of it, honey. If he’s got money, I’ll figure it out sooner rather than later. He’ll do somethin’ stupid with it.”
I’ve been running a multibillion-dollar company for fifteen years and yet my fuckup older brother can still humiliate me. Losing her mind at Paul would be as fruitless as smacking Bob the dog for eating her shoes or Jack the Fat for peeing in them. All of them were too stupid to know they’d done something wrong. The difference was the animals showed remorse.
Josh was less concerned than she expected him to be. “You had a nice rack as a teenager.” He clicked through the photo gallery, lingering on the bikini picture.
“Find more pictures of you as a hot kid. We can make a joke out of it. Turn this into a humanizing moment for you. Get me more Halloween, college, you as a kid with a gun. We’ll make an album on your website. It’ll drive traffic through the roof.”
While she was in New York she met with a young actress, that one from that show with the teenage zombies. Roz had recommended her as a surrogate to attract young voters. She was from Conshohocken and still registered to vote in Pennsylvania. Jasmine Yates had been acting since she was five years old and had gone to rehab twice as a teenager. Then she’d gotten into Yale, reinvented herself as America’s brainy sweetheart, and had been nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe last year.
Charlotte arrived late in the afternoon to a television studio in Queens that used to be a sugar factory and waited an hour in the actress’s dressing room, cursing the waste of time. The walls were painted a soft yellow. One contained a corkboard vision board of pictures cut out of magazines and printed from Instagram that actually said “Jasmine’s Vision Board” across the top edge. Charlotte used the time alone to review a briefing memo Leila had crafted for her on the last four seasons of Jasmine’s show.
“Pretend you’re a huge fan,” Josh had instructed.
“Because I’m the demographic for teenage zombie romance?” Charlotte replied with a sarcastic smirk.
“Their audience is mostly thirty-five- to fifty-year-old mothers who no longer have sex with their husbands and fantasize about being held hostage by a nineteen-year-old zombie,” Josh said flatly. “I don’t know what’s in your Netflix queue.”
When she finally appeared, Jasmine’s face was washed of the heavy makeup used to render her a member of the living dead. Her hair was chopped into a pixie cut that wasn’t exactly becoming but could be called cute, and her wispy white dress was practically see-through in places that didn’t matter. Charlotte could see through the veneer of wholesomeness that Jasmine was going to great pains to project. The girl placed her hands on Charlotte’s shoulders and gazed into her eyes. “I feel like I know you.”
Charlotte remembered this young woman had once overdosed on heroin. There had been pictures of it where her head was cocked at an unnatural angle in the passenger seat of an expensive car, her tongue flopping out of her mouth. That had been five years ago, and look at her now.
“I love your show.” Charlotte gave her an easy smile. The girl looked down to insinuate that her “work,” the things she did on television, was insignificant compared to what she was engaging in right now, her political activism.
“How can I help your campaign?” Jasmine asked. “Can I come on the trail with you? I have 4.1 million Instagram followers.” It was the battle brag of the newly minted social justice warrior.
Charlotte knew Jasmine’s robust Instagram following proved the actress’s worth more than any awards. Lulu would love her. Charlotte imagined a future where the two young women would eventually become best friends, briefly lovers in an experimental way, and later bridesmaids in each other’s first weddings to handsome young men, both of them named Tom.
“I can introduce you to my Instagram manager, Lulu. We’ll get you to Pennsylvania in the next few weeks.”
Within the space of a breath the girl’s demeanor shifted. “I know how I look gets people’s attention. I don’t mind using it to get the right things done. I’m passionate about connecting with young voters. The first time I voted was like an out-of-body experience for me. I mean, it was, like, almost orgasmic. So many feels. Do you know what I mean?”
Charlotte made a herculean effort to smother a laugh.
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“I’m writing a song about it.”
Jasmine leaned in toward her like she was prepared to tell her a frightening secret.
“Let’s take a selfie before you leave.” The actress pulled Charlotte in close to her before Charlotte could protest.
Charlotte felt the need to cock her chin so it looked smaller and more angular.
No matter how many times she looked at herself in the mirror or in photographs, her appearance as a woman in her late forties could still surprise her, as it did now when she saw her tired eyes and sunken cheeks on the screen next to this glowing, shiny young woman.
Jasmine crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. “Smile.”
*
Her staff sat in a Burger King halfway between New York and Scranton following Charlotte’s weeklong media blitz.
“We should Instagram this.” Charlotte looked to Lulu, who pecked furiously away at her phone’s screen. “The glamour of the campaign trail.”
Lulu hardly even looked up from sipping her ice water through a straw. “You just promised to put healthy food in school lunches.”
“But I also promised hourly workers, like the ones who work here, I would fight to increase the minimum wage for them.”
“The lighting in here is really yucky.” Lulu’s eyes darted around the restaurant as she wiggled her nose.
Lulu was still sullen from a slap on the wrist from Josh after she’d played Billy Joel’s “Allentown” in a Snapchat earlier in the week.
“It’s about Allentown,” she had argued.
“Yes,” Josh replied. “About how they were closing all the factories down. It’s a song about despair and misery and how Pennsylvania is a terrible place to live. Listen to the damn lyrics next time.”
“Seventy-seven percent of Pennsylvania voters eat in a fast-food restaurant at least once a week,” Josh volunteered now. “But forty-three percent of those are ashamed of it. Maybe hold off. On another note, we need to dangle something or someone shiny in front of voters this month to get more cash.”
“Do you want me to see if Oprah is available?” Leila asked with a half smile.
“She’s not,” Josh said with a straight face. “I checked. I have a call into Nick Foles.”
“I met with that Jasmine girl. She’s going to be a surrogate and do voter registration events. I raised half a million this week, Josh. We’re doing okay.” Charlotte had no idea if that was okay.
“We’re still short.” Josh took a large bite out of his Whopper. Orange sauce slopped out of the bottom and dripped onto his wrinkled khakis. “We need something new to get people’s attention, and we need it fast.”
“I can make up the difference,” Charlotte whispered, almost to herself.
“How?” Josh asked. “Yourself. Your money?”
“If I have to.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that. How do you feel about Jimmy Buffett? Can you be a Parrot Head?”
She buried her head in her hands. “I’m exhausted trying to be everything to everyone.” I’m a pathetic people-pleaser.
“Then you shouldn’t have run for office,” Josh answered wryly. “It’s the reason you’re leading with both black women in urban areas and white men in rural areas. It’s the reason persuadable independents are coming over to our side for the first time in twenty years.”
She’d heard this before. Some days Josh actually ended their day by saying, “Did you talk to some brown folks today? Some old white guys? Anyone under twenty-five? Okay, then, you done good today.” Charlotte could see the chewed-up lettuce and meat in Josh’s mouth as he spoke.
“I feel like a liar.”
“I warned you about that from the beginning. But you aren’t lying. You’re just telling people what they want to hear. There’s a difference.”
She felt like one of those Russian dolls stacked inside one another, constantly unpacking a new version of herself painted over to look like someone else.
I am a liar. I am a rich woman pretending to be a middle-class woman. I am terrified of losing my husband and my family, but I pretend everything is perfect. I don’t trust the government but I’m asking people to trust me to be in the government. I don’t always trust myself.
“And we need you in more parades.” Josh kept going. “PA loves a parade and Slaughter doesn’t do them anymore since the Pussy Brigade pelted his float with tampons soaked in cherry Kool-Aid.”
Charlotte excused herself to go to the bathroom and was irritated to find it locked.
“You need a key.” The obese teenage boy who had served them their burgers now stood too close behind her, holding a silver key attached to a spatula. His breath smelled of warm French fry grease and rum and Coke.
“Thank you.”
He bowed his head slightly and she recoiled when he leaned in as if to sniff her.
The floor of the bathroom was strewn with damp, crumpled paper towels. Someone before her had attempted to bathe in the sink. One of the paper towels in the corner was covered in blood.
She lowered the toilet seat, sat on the lid, and dangled her head between her legs.
A tentative hand rapped on the door and jiggled the handle.
“Just a minute,” Charlotte said.
“It’s me. Can I come in?” Leila shook the handle again.
Charlotte reached over and flicked the lock to the right.
Leila’s red sandals stuck to the paper towels on the floor. She bent her knee and picked one off without even a grimace and handed Charlotte a black coffee.
“I’m so tired.”
“Drink this.”
“I don’t think coffee works anymore.”
“Want me to get you some speed?”
“I’d like it too much. I don’t think I can do this anymore, Lee.” In that moment, Charlotte was too exhausted to leave a fast-food restaurant bathroom, much less campaign for five more months.
Leila grabbed Charlotte by the elbow and pulled her to her feet.
“You’ve got this, mama. You’re almost home.”
*
Charlotte arrived at their house to find a sullen-faced teenage girl picking at fresh acne scars on her cheek and playing Candy Crush on her phone as she channel-surfed on their couch.
“Hey there.” Charlotte slipped off her shoes next to the twins’ glittery high-tops, dropped her bag on the floor, and surveyed the mess in the living room—an empty pizza box on the coffee table, damp children’s bathing suits hanging on the backs of chairs, an unfinished board game and colorful paper money in the middle of the floor. “Who are you?”
“Bailey,” the girl replied with a roll of her eyes, as if the answer were tattooed on her forehead. “The babysitter.” She was the fifth Bailey Charlotte had encountered in Elk Hollow. What happened fifteen years ago that inspired all these couples to name their babies either Bailey or Riley, names better suited for cocker spaniels than little girls?
Bailey stared at the television screen for a moment and then looked back at Charlotte. “That’s you.”
It took Charlotte a beat to recognize the unflattering photograph of herself used in the advertisement. Watching herself on television, a distorted version of herself, made her feel trapped, cornered. The quality of the photo was so degraded she appeared cadaverous and frightening. The words CHARLOTTE WALSH THINKS SHE’S SMARTER THAN YOU were writ large and angry and red on the screen. A voice read them in a low, ominous tone, giving them the cadence of a eulogy. Then came a montage of more photographs: Charlotte getting her diploma on Franklin Field (caption: IVY LEAGUE GRADUATE), Charlotte attending a gala for the New York City Opera (caption: ELITIST), Charlotte standing at an altar officiating a wedding ceremony for two male employees (caption: GAY PRIEST), footage of an interview with Charlotte for a TED Talk where she laughed and said, “I’m a total nerd at heart,” and audio of her saying the words “That’s just stupid” (where did they get that?). The spot ended with bright-red letters declaring CHARLOTTE WALSH THINKS YOU’RE STUPID. It was paid for by Patriots to Reelect Ted Slaughter.
It was still early in the year for an onslaught of attack ads, and Josh speculated it was because Slaughter thought he could humiliate her into quitting the race. The quality, or lack thereof, of local political ads astounded her, particularly when she considered that the cost of producing them ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A drunk monkey with an iPhone and the first version of Adobe Photoshop could have made better stuff.
“It must be totally weird to see yourself on TV.” Bailey’s eyes moved from Charlotte’s wrinkled pants to her face. “You’re less scary in person.” The teenager had the yearning look of a girl who believed, more than anything else, that she should already be starring in her own reality television show.
“Thanks. It is totally weird. Are my kids asleep?” She didn’t bother to ask where Max was. Her ignorance regarding her own husband’s whereabouts was none of this teenager’s business.
“Yeah. They’ve been out for an hour. I also saw you on Facebook this week.”
Overcome with the need for some sugar, Charlotte opened the fridge to find a jar of applesauce, a package of string cheese, six cartons of Girl Scout cookies, and some sparkling water. The trash bin overflowed with pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers.
“You did?” Charlotte ripped into the box of Thin Mints and wondered what the going rate was for babysitters here. In Atherton it was twenty-five dollars an hour. They had to pay for an Uber each way and order the sitter an expensive dinner. How long had this girl been at her house? She fumbled in her purse, hoping to find a few twenties. Bailey puffed out her bottom lip to blow flat bangs out of her eyes and flipped her hair behind her ear as she thumbed the screen of her zebra-print iPhone. “I’m gonna text my boyfriend to come pick me up. Cool?”
“Cool.”
*
The floorboards of the bedroom creaked. Charlotte flicked on the light. Their bed was unmade. Dirty clothes coated the floor, chair, and desk. Charlotte picked up the socks and underwear she encountered on her way to a much-needed shower. Her hair stank of fast food. Bob woke to the sound of running water and emerged from under their bed. She squeezed the scruff of his neck and tapped his butt to send him out of the small bathroom.
She heard Max come into their bedroom, remove his shoes, and drop his shirt in a pile on the floor like he was spending the night in a hotel.
Her husband walked into the bathroom and wordlessly lifted the toilet seat to pee.
“Hey.” She tried to keep her voice friendly.
“Hey.” He stopped and didn’t flush. The ancient plumbing made the shower lose hot water when you flushed. She wanted to believe he was protecting her from being frozen rather than being lazy.
“There was a strange girl on the couch when I got home.” They were out of shaving cream so she used conditioner to shave her legs, not bothering to go above the knee.
“I texted you I got a sitter.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Must have forgotten to hit send. Sorry. I thought I’d be home earlier. Were the girls good for Bailey?”
“Sounds like it.” Why don’t you ask me about my week? About New York. About anything. Yes, Hoda smells good—like mint and apple shampoo. I missed you. Talk to me, please!
“Is the water warm?”
“It’s fine. Hey, why do you think all the teenagers in this town are named Bailey?” Charlotte asked him.
“I dunno.” A surge of disappointment settled over her. When things were good between them Max would have liked this game. He would have manufactured an elaborate theory of the town’s many Baileys involving algorithms, weather patterns, global birth rates, and some pop-culture phenomenon. “I’m gonna run down to the basement to check on the hot-water heater. It was acting up again this morning. Oh . . . and we’re out of toilet paper.”
Then why don’t you replace it? It’s under the sink, in the same place I always put it after I buy it.
Charlotte wiped the soap from her eyes so she could lean out of the shower for a kiss, but Max was gone by the time she got her face around the plastic. She stood under the water longer than necessary, attempting to wash her frustration with her husband down the drain.
Her phone buzzed on the bedroom dresser. She ignored it as she turned off the tap and towel-dried her hair. The next time it buzzed she picked it up.
This wasn’t her phone. It was Max’s.
She saw a text from someone named Abby. Charlotte typed in his code and scrolled up to see the entire exchange.
I miss your face. When can I c u?
Before u know it. Booking a trip to Cali soon. Excited to see you too. Lots to talk about.
Not soon enough. Did you tell C. about me?
Not yet. No time. She’s ALWAYS busy.
Too busy for you?
Especially me.
That’s too bad.
Tell me about it. You’re sweet.
We’ll have some fun when you’re here.
A familiar humiliation overtook Charlotte. Goddammit. Not again. Not now. Buried memories assaulted her. Stop it, Charlotte. Don’t go there. Focus on what’s happening right now. She closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose as she read the messages a second time.
She flipped through her mental Rolodex to pinpoint an Abby in Max’s life. Andrea was a former assistant. Abigail? No, Abigail was his seventy-two-year-old masseuse who didn’t own a cell phone. Abby, Abby, who the hell was Abby? Then she had it. Of course. Abby was a wunderkind engineer Max hired two years ago from Apple to work on Humanity’s Artificial Intelligence team. Charlotte only met her in person once, but didn’t find her particularly memorable, couldn’t even recall her face. Why was Abby sending her husband kissy-faces and hearts and why was Max telling her she was sweet? Why were they planning to meet and what was the urgency? Don’t be simple, Charlotte. You know the answers to these questions. You knew this would happen again.
This can’t be happening again. Not now.
Charlotte scrolled to the contact information and committed Abby’s phone number to memory for no other reason than it gave her something to do. Charlotte was good at memorizing numbers. She’d won a contest in the fourth grade for memorizing pi to twenty-three places. Max poked sweet fun at her for it and asked her to recite the numbers at cocktail parties and weddings.
Still naked and wet, she replaced the phone on the dresser and sat on the edge of the bed, allowing conflicting emotions to swell inside her—rage, sadness, fear, guilt, doubt, and blame, all competing to see which would rise to the surface first. Charlotte stood, picked up the phone again, and threw it against the wall. Rage. It was going to be rage. The shiny black rectangle bounced on the carpeted floor.
Get it together.
She drew it all back inside and pulled on a ratty Penn State sweatshirt Max had left on the chair. His smell disgusted and comforted her in equal measure. She walked downstairs and directly out the front door.
They were far enough away from any city lights that the stars looked like the kind projected on the ceiling of a planetarium. Out of the corner of her eye she saw one light begin to move west, too small to be a plane—a satellite, most likely. Charlotte hadn’t known you could even see a satellite with the naked eye until that long-ago camping trip with Max in Yosemite, when he’d pointed them out to her one by one. He’d described in careful detail the names and paths of each of them. There was the International Space Station, China’s Tiangong-1 space laboratory, and Russia’s Mir.
“I used to track them with my telescope when I was a kid,” he’d explained. “There was a kit you could mail away for from NASA, before the Internet, you know, that showed you the orbits.”
Charlotte was touched by the idea of a small boy with a gray tooth and a crooked nose entranced by star maps and amazed such a faraway thing was visible with just his eyes.
“I had no idea,” Charlotte had whispered to him.
He smiled at her the way men smile at women before they’ve had sex with them. “I like telling you things you don’t know. It makes me feel good.”
Does Abby make my husband feel good? When is the last time I made him feel good?
She texted Max.
Left something at the office. Back soon. Don’t wait up.
He’d see her text at the same time he saw Abby’s. She got in the car and drove with nowhere to go, just down the street and through the neighborhood, trying to stay in motion.
When they were first married, Charlotte had believed she and Max had no secrets. Their lives had been open books to each other, sometimes to a fault. It was one of the things she loved about them, that frank and sometimes painful honesty that can only be born out of a true friendship. Sometime after they’d had kids, though, her husband had become a mystery.
How had he found the time and energy to have an affair the first time around? As far as she was concerned, sex with anyone, Max or someone new, seemed like too much work. It wasn’t that she’d never thought about what it would be like to be with another man. But the thoughts alone exhausted her. There was too much else to do. And now he might have found the time and energy to do it a second time.
An animal, probably a cat, dashed in front of Charlotte’s car, forcing her to pump the brakes and catch her breath. When something terrible happens to someone else our brains search for a reason, something that makes them different from us, something to reassure us that terrible thing could never happen to us. She’d thought about that when she first learned about Margaret, the excuses people would make for why Charlotte deserved to have her husband cheat on her.
Charlotte was never around.
She worked all the time.
She let herself go.
I heard they stopped having sex when the twins were born.
She was his boss, after all.
How would someone justify it now? If Max really was having another affair. If Abby was an actual threat to her marriage.
She put the campaign first.
Charlotte was too ambitious.
Didn’t you see that Vanity Fair article?
Charlotte shuddered inwardly. I am greedy. I wanted too much. Look at everything I was given, everything I took for granted. I meticulously created a life I thought I deserved and it was too much.
She needed to talk to someone. There was one person who would understand. Roz was the obvious person to call. She’d endured Richard’s infidelities when she was running for office the first time. Charlotte could trust her. Roz would never repeat anything Charlotte said to anyone else, would never say something to the wrong person, who could accidentally say something to the right person, who would turn it into the main story on Politico the next morning.
“Is it too late?” Charlotte asked. She knew it wasn’t. Roz didn’t sleep.
The formidable voice took over the car’s audio system. “Never. Just catching up on This Is Us. I cry like a goddamned alley cat in heat every time I watch this show. You had quite the week. I saw you on Today, Morning Joe, Maddow, Anderson, and a bunch of other shows that didn’t exist five minutes ago. I like that one with Mia Farrow’s kid. Thank God he got her bone structure. He definitely didn’t come from Woody Allen. And you shooting that gun? Very Calamity Jane.”
For a brief second Charlotte let herself enjoy her former mentor’s praise.
“Did you see me bake gluten- and sugar-free brownies with Rachael Ray?”
“I missed that. I’ll bet they tasted like crap, though.”
Charlotte lowered her voice, willing it not to crack. “Something happened.”
“Yeah?”
“With Max.”
Roz’s voice contained concern, but not surprise. “Tell me.”
“Max has been texting with another woman.” Out loud the words sounded juvenile and ridiculous. Texting—something kids did.
She heard Roz suck in a breath and pause the television show. “What kinds of texts and how do you know and what do you know about her?”
Charlotte explained how she’d picked up the wrong phone, about Abby, about everything she knew, and in recounting it she realized what she knew for certain was close to nothing.
“And you never suspected anything between him and this Abby before?”
“I hardly know who she is.”
“And that was all there was to it? Those were the only texts?”
She felt uncertain. “That was it.” Charlotte wavered in her anger and, for a moment, allowed the possibility that she could be jumping to conclusions, that Max’s first infidelity still haunted her and colored the way she interpreted everything he did.
The line got quiet save for Roz’s heavy breathing.
“What do you want to do about it?”
“Confront him? Scream at him? Punch him in the eye.”
“And what would that accomplish?”
Charlotte moved to the side of the road, no longer able to concentrate on driving. She placed her head against the soft leather of the steering wheel. “Probably nothing. Push Max even farther away. Disrupt our lives even more.”
“What do you want to focus on right now?”
Her brain shifted toward task management, damage control, the neutrality of fixing a situation. “This campaign.”
“Do you?”
“I want to win.”
“Then don’t say anything to your husband.”
Charlotte’s head throbbed, but her hands had finally stopped shaking. She couldn’t halt the loop inside her head, recounting all of the times Max could have been texting Abby, or any other woman. She wondered whether he’d really been sick the day of her announcement speech, where he’d been before the Vanity Fair interview. Was he really training for an Ironman? One small thing could make you question all of the other things, could begin to unravel the fabric of your memory, making everything fallible.
“Charlotte? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You need him to win. You know that too, right?”
Charlotte stayed quiet.
“I’m sorry, honey. Now is not the time to let your marriage fall apart. Confronting him right now will only hurt you worse than you hurt right now.”
Charlotte knew she was right. She hung up the phone and drove home to Max.
*
The last thing Charlotte wanted to do before collapsing into bed was check her email, but she was a slave to her inbox. She told herself it would be fast. She’d just glance at it and then go to bed.
Then she saw the name on an unread email in her inbox. Charlotte’s hand shook as she opened the message. The email contained links to stories reporting on her campaign followed by one line.