13

The calendar of the United States Senate proceeds unevenly, in fits and starts, but not without purpose. The winter and spring are spongy, with long recesses and vacant time. Not much happens until the midsummer, or early fall, when the members—a third of whom face reelection in each even-numbered year—erupt into furious activity and vote on thick, specific, often incomprehensible blogs of legislation. When approved, these bills enable the rest of the government to continue its business. Without the electoral spur—and, certainly, without the existence of the House of Representatives, whose 435 members must face the voters every two years—it is possible the debates and haggling would go on in the Senate forever; as it is, the schedule enables the politicians to approach their constituents immediately postpartum, flushed with the righteousness of belated productivity.

As a result, legislators tend to be ursine. In winter, they hibernate. In the spring, they stir. At least, some do. The more motivated members chug through spring expending great amounts of energy in committee hearings that produce the legislative monuments voted upon in the fall; the less motivated devote themselves to greeting constituents, raising money and appearing dignified. Spring is a curious time, when discipline is needed—if not necessarily rewarded.

For most of his career, Charlie Martin had been a diligent springtime politician. This began to change slowly, as the end of the cold war made Armed Services Committee business less compelling—and Charlie’s presidential ambitions stirred, flowered and then sputtered. The first winter of the Stanton administration, the winter of the Parkinson debacle, had been a violent exception to the general trajectory of Senator Martin’s waning political diligence. The second winter provided few such distractions. He would be facing reelection that fall, but his elections had never been troublesome—and this time it was assumed his opponent would be an antique Republican congressman, Porter Weingarten, who had volunteered to oppose Senator Martin as a valedictory kamikaze mission: a farewell tour in which the state’s Republican party could celebrate the esteemed but profoundly unexciting congressman’s retirement. Charlie Martin looked forward to a comfortable campaign. He’d begin to work at it when the snow cleared. In the meantime, he gravitated to New York. To Nell.

He had never been moved, one way or the other, by the immensity of New York. He was not particularly stirred by the worlds of publishing or finance, or particularly offended by the brusqueness of the locals, which seemed, to him, a logical consequence of the density of the place—if there were a million people on the street, it became impractical to say “Good morning” to each one you passed and the chances for civility devolved from there. But that winter, the city changed for him—became charming; at least Nell’s part of it did. It was as if he were living in the Flats, back home, and the brick warehouses continued on for more than a handful of blocks; indeed, in New York, the Flats-like neighborhoods were endless. On weekends, he would jog down the West Side to the Financial District, which seemed ancient and empty, wrinkled with alleys. The wind rushed through the crevices, and Charlie enjoyed the acute discomfort of launching himself directly into the winter gusts: a fond legacy of his training as a snake-eater, where he’d learned to embrace privation—pain assaulted was pain obliterated.

It seemed remarkable to him that in Nell’s immediate neighborhood, amidst the dense tangle of streets and buildings, there were the very same elements of community that marked Port Sallesby or Fort Dantrobet or any of the towns back home. There were shopkeepers, whom Nell knew by name. There were schools and churches, bake sales and Scout troops. There were block associations and ethnic festivals. Nell thrived in the midst of all this, her sensibility quite perfectly at home amidst the clutter. In Charlie’s mind, she did not merely reside there: she was an institution—a business, a family, a retinue. There were the children, and Lucius, and the MerMaid employees, most of whom were Asian and Hispanic women (although there was also a great-grandfatherly Italian cutter named Nunzi, whose sense of the delicate Lycra calculus was impeccable and crucial). There were odd interminglings of functions. Lucius superintended the shop and the children. Nunzi sometimes came upstairs and cooked, as did a stooped Chinese seamstress from Guangzhou named Fou Zhi. MerMaid worked some Saturday mornings, and several of the women would bring their children—who played with the boss’s kids (Pamela earned her allowance by supervising the mayhem). Nell managed all this with a calm intelligence; and more, with the graceful authority of a gifted field officer.

Soon, in ways that he scarcely imagined possible, the senator was absorbed into the neighborhood and the family. He learned to love the local customs, the syncopated ceremonies of Nell-enic domesticity, the rhythms of the loft; he established a comfortable place for himself in the household, assumed a useful role—he was an early riser (as opposed to both Nell and Lucius), and so he took control of the morning duties, which meant he was often the first adult the children confronted.

Robin was easy—dreamy, artistic, an unhurried and accepting soul very much like his father, with whom he was quite close. Robin and Charlie could sit quietly together in the morning, on the high bar stools surrounding the stainless steel kitchen island, munching cereal—Charlie reading the Times; Robin, a cereal box or Lego catalog.

On one of Charlie’s first visits, Robin looked up from his Lucky Charms, all dark eyes and curls, his mouth a pinched little bow, and asked, “Is Daddy right? Did someone shoot your hand in the war?”

“Yup,” Charlie said.

“Does it still hurt?”

“Sometimes, a little.”

“Can I touch it?” Charlie nodded and Robin came around to his side of the table, and slowly pointed his right index finger toward the shiny pink stump, finally touching it lightly, then quickly pulling his hand back in horror. He looked up at Charlie, at once terrified and apologetic, as if his finger had been stung by the wound, yanking his hands behind his back and keeping them there, entwined.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Charlie replied, shaken. No one had ever approached him so—innocently, about his hand before.

“You won’t tell Mommy?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry,” Robin said again, tears forming. “Y’know, I hate the . . .” He hesitated, unsure about the enemy in question. “The bad guys.”

And he ran off to watch cartoons.

Pamela was more difficult, of course. She was prickly, defensive, fierce, skeptical. “I knew you were going to be Mom’s next one,” she said to Charlie one Saturday morning.

“I know you knew,” he said. “You’re a knower.”

“I’m ADHD,” she said, an acronym Charlie had never encountered before. He assumed that it had to do with some sort of precocity: most of his knowledge about Manhattan children had come from novels.

“Oh, yeah?”

“You don’t even know what that is, do you?” She put her hands on her hips, screwed up her face, a mini Nell.

“Americans of Dangerously High Distinctiveness?”

“Attention Deficit Disorder, jerko. Hyperactivity. I’m hyper.”

“Coulda fooled me,” he joked. “You always seem so calm.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “Mom says every kid in Manhattan either is gifted or has learning disabilities. Except Robin, he’s average.”

Charlie laughed.

“So Mom said,” Pamela continued, “you could maybe walk me over to ballet? She’s still in bed, of course.”

“You woke her up? Where’s ballet?”

“Someone had to. At the Y, Seventh and Twenty-third.”

“Why did someone have to? She deserves a good long morning every once in a while.”

Pamela shrugged. “So, you taking me or do I go wake up Lucius?”

They went out into the dull, chilly Saturday morning city, which still seemed to be recovering from its Friday-night revels, the streets smelling of stale beer and fast food. Pamela was wearing a multicolored sock cap with a long tassel on it—and suddenly, on the street, she was transformed from child harridan to little girl. She reached up to hold his hand, his left hand. She didn’t think anything of holding it; her hand was tiny, precious in his. His eyes filled with tears.

“You’re crying?”

“The wind,” he said.

On several occasions, he was accompanied to New York by Hilton, who had a beau, an English professor at Columbia, on the Upper West Side. Hilton never introduced his friend to the boss, but he did spend a fair amount of time in Nell’s loft—which he christened Mondo Nello. The official excuse was work on speeches and assorted nonsense with the boss, but he was also attracted to the intense domesticity of the place: it felt like a real home. He formed a natural, fraternal alliance with Lucius; they were Sancho Panzas to the two principals, Nell and Charlie. And Charlie noticed that Hilton seemed a somewhat different fellow in New York than the very professional Senate press secretary. He seemed looser, chattier . . . gayer. And he caused Charlie to wonder if the New York version of Charlie Martin was a different person, too.

Nell and Hilton got on from the first. She was quite taken by his almost mystical deftness as a shopper—for anything: food, appliances, airplane fares—but he was especially good in consignment shops, where she would buy secondhand designer labels for herself and the children. “Hilton, you are a human divining rod,” she told him the first Saturday they went out together, as the three of them—Charlie, third wheel—had sandwiches in a Greek coffee shop on the Upper East Side after a particularly inspired gleaning of the Spence-Chapin thrift shop. “I can’t believe that Bill Blass ball gown you found for me. You know, you could make a serious living as a shopper.”

“Could I really?”

“No,” Charlie interrupted. “Not a serious living.”

“A good living, then,” Nell said. “People would certainly pay cash money for your eye.”

“No, the boss is right,” Hilton said. “I’d run the risk of becoming so fey that I’d float off into the ionosphere. I do manly work now: tote that amendment, lift that press call. Get a little drunk and you land in sub-committee.”

“You don’t get weary and sick of trying?”

“Don’t be such a showboat!” he said, pointing a long finger across the table at Nell, who laughed as Charlie groaned, leaving a tuna smear on her lower lip. Hilton handed her a paper napkin and said, “Remember, you’ve got to redo the zipper before you wear the Blass.”

“Huge money, Hilton,” she said. “You could come work for me.”

“If you don’t hush up,” Hilton said, “he’ll send me to the Des Pointe office.”

“What’s the shopping like in Des Pointe?” she asked Charlie.

“As if he’d know,” Hilton sniffed.

“Why don’t you come and find out?” Charlie asked.

“Here we go again,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m as dreary as Des Pointe in December. . . .”

“Silly as Port Sallesby on a September noon,” Hilton added, then stood, spread his arms and crooned, defiantly off-key: “I can explain why you’ve corn on the brain: you’re in love with a wonderful guy!”

“Jesus H. Christmas,” Charlie said, hiding his face behind a sleeve. “Both of you are such complete faggots.”

In late January—and very much to Charlie’s surprise—Calvin turned up in New York and stayed for several weeks. He was welcomed without much ado into Nell’s snugly expandable universe, the loft always capable of including more. (Nell’s life, Charlie realized, resembled her fabrics.) Like most musicians, Calvin was daunted and fascinated by the Big Apple; he haunted the Village jazz clubs. One afternoon, on a long father and son walk along Canal Street toward Chinatown, he asked Charlie, “Why didn’t Buzz ever go for it, here or in Chicago—or maybe L.A.?”

It was a good question, the sort that Charlie would never have thought to ask his father. He wondered if Calvin was getting antsy in D.P. and thinking about taking a stab at the main chance himself. He wondered if he should offer a permanent spot in Nell’s battalion; he was sure she could find room in the loft, sure that Calvin would be a welcome addition—and then the kid could explore the scene from a base of certainty. “Maybe Buzz didn’t need to,” Charlie finally replied. “Most people do. They want to test their chops against the best, see if they cut it. It’s scary, but inevitable. Sort of like running for president in my business. But you know Buzz, he’s easy.”

“You were scared when you tried it?” Calvin asked. “Running for president?”

“Not scared enough,” Charlie said. “Too dumb to be scared. It’s something I learned belatedly: if you’re not at least a little scared, you don’t respect the process sufficiently. . . . And you? You thinking about the main chance?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get there. Kinda hard to leave Buzz and Edsy at this point, especially with—”

“Me spending so much time here?” Charlie asked.

“Sorta. Naw. It’s not about you. But you know, Buzz and me—since I offered to back him a little on the traps, even Vern’s rallying. It’s interesting, the old guys are all technique now that the reflexes are gone. Gotta love it, the way they keep at it. Sad, maybe. But I’m learning from them.”

“Buzz’d understand if you decided to try your luck,” Charlie said. “He wouldn’t want to hold you back.”

“It’s just . . . Dad.” Charlie couldn’t remember Calvin ever calling him “dad” before, certainly not with that degree of intimacy. But then, Charlie couldn’t remember having so easy a conversation with his son before. “I couldn’t do it to the old guy right now. Couldn’t look him in the eye and say the words.”

“I don’t want to ruin our relationship,” Charlie said, “but you’re a hell of a guy.”

“Yeah, well. Can I . . . like? . . .” Charlie waited for his son to continue. Calvin stopped, looked over at him, looked him in the eye and said, “I just want to say, you shouldn’t worry. It’s okay that you’re here. I can handle the D.P. part of the program—and this seems to be a happening thing for you. I talked to Buzz and Edsy on the phone last night, told them about Mondo Nello. Everyone thinks it’s about time. Buzz’d never say it flat out, but he’s happy for you. And . . . and I am, too. It’s even good seeing you get silly with her kids—I kind of imagine that’s what you might have been with me, if you’d had the shot. And don’t think it’s not a temptation for me to stay. There is something addictive about this place. The other day, when you were in D.C., Fou Zhi showed me how to make dumplings. She was actually up in the kitchen, making them. . . . Anyway, don’t worry. This is good.”

Charlie still went home to Des Pointe for folk-poking many weekends, but when he went it was almost painful to be there, away from Nell and the kids. He spent the entire week of the February recess in New York—and remained, playing hooky there for several days after the Senate reconvened. He began to keep clothes in Nell’s closet. He joined the New York congressional delegation on the air shuttles from LaGuardia to National Airport; by March, he was spending as many midweek nights in New York as in Washington. He called Lynn Thurston and told her that he’d fallen in love; she reacted with the tiniest of shudders. She had not harbored great expectations for Charlie, but she was surprised to have their stasis shaken by anything so violent as love. She said she was happy for him; she asked him who it was. When he told her, she said, “And Linc?” He told her about Marisa Carter. They chatted on a bit, then said good-bye. And that was that.

Actually, it was something more than that: Lynn had been his tether to the social life of the city, and now he slipped out, away, no longer constrained to the cocktail and dinner party circuit—and less of a presence in town as a result. There were things, bits of information, he didn’t know now that he’d always known in the past. He’d always thought them trivial things—gossip about who was moving against whom in the White House and in the media; speculation about who had leaked what to the Post or the Times—but they were valuable in the way that information always is; they were the subtext of the business of the capital. The absence of Lynn combined with the absence of Linc had estranged him from both the society of power and the knowledge possessed by the innermost political circles. His status changed in Washington: from being a hot political property, a sought-after dinner guest, to a more occasional and enigmatic figure. The sense in Washington was that Charlie Martin’s moment had passed. He found that he didn’t much care: he had always imagined that he ran counter to the “sense” in Washington, and assumed he could turn the conventional wisdom around quickly enough, if he chose to do so.

But he chose not to do so. The central place in his life once held by the daily conversations with Linc—in which the topography of the capital was inspected and the tiniest calibrations of strategy adjusted—was supplanted by near-hourly conversations with Nell, and by the various concerns of Mondo Nello.

Mondo Nello was oddly hermetic. They didn’t go out much socially. They brought movies in. They played charades, especially when Hilton or Calvin was around—there would be six of them then; three matched pairs of three—the pairs split into teams, which meant Charlie could come up with clues for Nell, things he could torture her with—like “The International Law of the Sea Treaty.” He loved watching her act things out.

One Sunday afternoon, Nell came in from shopping and found Charlie and the two kids wrapped around each other in the television room, watching the end of Close Encounters—where the aliens come and turn out to be good guys—all of them rapt, unconscious, safe. Charlie looked up at her, woozy with domesticity. She wanted to pull him out of there, rip his clothes off, have at him: patriarchy was such a turn-on.

That night, in bed, she said, “I’ve got something for you.” She opened the night table drawer and pulled out a small black box from Barney’s with a golden ribbon.

He sat up and opened it. It was a keycase, of fine dark green snakeskin. “Open it,” she said, her forearm resting atop his shoulder. Inside, there was a key—to the loft—and a charm: a mermaid. “The key to my heart,” she said.

“I’ve never—” he started. She put a finger to his lips.

“Me neither,” she said, reaching down for him. “I think, perhaps, you have something to give me, too.”

*    *    *

One late March noon, Charlie found himself sitting in an Armed Services Committee hearing about the continued, torturous efforts to figure out a policy regarding homosexuals in the military when he remembered that Nell, who was off in Atlanta selling her line, had asked him to remind Lucius that Robin needed to be picked up at school and taken to the dentist. He rushed back to the committee office and called Lucius at MerMaid.

“Will you be home for dinner?” Lucius asked.

“I wasn’t planning—”

“It’s just that Nell’s not around and the kids were hoping you’d be a fourth for Chinese checkers.”

“The kids? Pamela, too?”

“She said she’d go pepperoni, onions, double cheese in your honor.”

“We’re doing pizza?”

“Cat’s away.” Nell hated pizza.

“Count me in,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his schedule card, then dialing Donna. “D—that Hollowell Feeds guy coming in at five, you think we could move him to tomorrow afternoon? Tell him I was called over to the Pentagon. And tell Tam that we’ll move the chemical weapons briefing to—I don’t know. Soon.”

“Ohhh-kayyy,” Donna said. “We’re going to have to move some stuff around tomorrow to fit Hollowell in and—this is an important meeting at the Pentagon?”

“Crucial,” he said.

“I thought she was in Atlanta.”

“I’ve been summoned by the kids,” he said. “Pizza and Chinese checkers.”

“Senator—” she began, then lost heart. “Do you want to assume the usual lecture?”

“Consider me suitably chastened,” he said. “Look, I’ll take the six-thirty shuttle back in the morning. See if the Hollowell guy would like to have breakfast. Tell Tammy to meet me in the office for the briefing after that. Have Rosemary order in some bagels and stuff. . . . Is Mustafa around? Can he give me a lift over to National about four-ten?”

“Yes, if you’ll agree to put him on staff,” Donna said.

“What?”

“He’s never asked you for a thing—for himself. For the church, yeah. We’ve got a slot, with Alice McElvaine leaving. Don’t you think it’s about time we made it official with Moose?”

“I thought we’d done that,” he said.

“We’ve temped him. We still share him, officially, with Goodwill. And you remember that kid, Jerry—the one he was training? Jerry’s clean now, he can take the Goodwill slot and . . . Look, forget it. I’ll handle it.”

“No,” he said. “You’re right. Good idea. Let’s do it.”

Of course, the rearrangement of the boss’s schedule didn’t go as smoothly as Charlie assumed it would. It never did. Jack Carter, the president of Hollowell Feeds, was leaving town first thing the next morning and wasn’t available for breakfast. Brendan Lofton, Hollowell’s lobbyist, was furious: “I don’t care if Charlie wants to blow me off all the time, but Jack Carter doesn’t understand senatorial prerogative—Donna, he thinks he’s more important than anything allegedly going on at the Pentagon. And he may be right. You know, word’s getting around the ag community about Charlie not being quite so dependable as he used to be. Do I need to be more specific about that?”

“Brendan. First of all, fuck you.” Donna understood that any sign of weakness would be taken as tacit agreement. “You know damn well we’ve always been right on ag. To a fault, probably. Second, how many times has he blown off Jack Carter? You couldn’t count ’em on your thumb. And finally, we’ll figure out a way to make this up. The senator’s working home turf next weekend, maybe we can set him up with Carter out there—he can fly to Des Pointe via Minneapolis. Meet Jack, meet any folks out there Jack wants to impress. Okay?”

“Well,” Lofton said. “Donna, everyone knows what’s going on with Charlie.”

“And what’s that?”

“Never mind. You’ll guarantee Minneapolis?”

“I’ll give it my best shot.”

Donna stood, stared out the window for a moment, then buzzed Hilton. “Summit meeting. Boss’s office. Right now.”

The office seemed chilly, embalmed. The television wasn’t even on. Donna was astonished by its emptiness—which was, she realized, a direct consequence of the senator’s distraction: a certain level of intensity had to be maintained or everything fell apart. That was true even for second-rate senators from low-maintenance states. But it was particularly true for someone like Charlie Martin, who’d been a real presence in the institution, a star—any change in his modus operandi was noticed immediately, sensed by colleagues and rivals, gossiped about by assholes like Brendan Lofton and eventually reported in the press.

“Okay, Hilton, we’ve reached a new level here,” Donna said, when Devereaux ambled in. “He’s going to New York even though she’s in Atlanta.”

“Lucky him,” Hilton said, depositing himself onto the leather couch.

“Goddammit, Hilton,” Donna said, still standing, pacing. “You’re falling down. Your job is to watch out for him and instead you’re a goddamn coconspirator. He should fire your butt, but he won’t. If you had half a brain, you’d quit. You’re not up to this.”

“Whoa!” Donna had a temper, but she’d never loosed it on Hilton before. “Did something happen?”

“If something did, you wouldn’t know about it.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Truer words were never spoken,” she said. “You don’t understand. He’s in love. That’s good. About time. It’s great to see him so happy. But he’s drifting—that’s risky business, even if it weren’t an election year.”

“Just barely an election year,” Hilton said, fending her off. “Some old fart doing a phantom victory lap.”

“Goddammit, Hilton. That is one hundred percent the wrong attitude. Your job is to assume the worst, to keep on top of things, to protect him.”

“From what?” he asked, knowing the answer.

Donna sat down. “From himself, in this case. I know that sounds harsh. But he can’t go around blowing off the Jack Carters of this world because he wants to play Chinese checkers with Nell’s kids.”

“That’s why he’s going?” Hilton doubled over, laughing. “Cool. You ever stop to think, he might be a better senator—might get along with the folks better—if he goofed off every so often, just like normal people do? I gotta confess, I love working for a guy whose idea of fucking off is Chinese checkers with his girlfriend’s kids. And you do, too, and you know it.”

“It’s just . . . it’s just not natural,” Donna said, and began to laugh. “You stop this, Hilton.”

“Stop what?”

“Being insidious.” She stopped, grew serious. “Hilton, I don’t want to pry—but what on earth are you doing up there?”

“What ever do you mean?” he replied, very Blanche DuBois.

“I mean you. We know what the attraction is for him, what’s going on with you?”

“And this is your business?” Hilton asked, miffed. “If I were hetero, would it—”

“Absolutely!” Donna said. “You’re socializing with the boss. That isn’t healthy.”

“I’m not socializing with the boss,” he insisted, startled, backpedaling. Donna was right, of course. “You should see the senator up there, D. He is so damn happy. We’re playing charades last weekend and Robin—the little boy—has to act out the song Happy Birthday, and what does he do for ‘Happy’? He points to the senator. None of us got it, of course. But you see what I mean?”

Donna got up, sat down next to Hilton on the couch, put her hand on his arm. “Look, I know your intentions are the best—and happiness, Lord knows I don’t want to stand in the way of that. Not even your happiness, sweetie. But, Hilton, what you are doing is very, very wrong.”

“Why?”

“Because your job, our job, is to keep him on the stick,” she said. “He might not have been hurt by this yet, but he could be and that’s what he has us around for—to cover his back.”

“Even half-speed, even mailing it in,” Hilton said, “he works twice as hard as three-quarters of the jerkballs in this place.”

“First of all, that’s not true. Second, even if it were, half-speed doesn’t work for Charlie Martin. I can’t explain why, I just sense it.”

“D, he’s not supposed to have a life?” Hilton was astonished by what he was thinking: maybe he was in the wrong job, and the wrong city. And then he had another astonishing thought: maybe the boss was feeling the same way.

“He’s supposed to play it straight up,” Donna said, standing now, ending the conversation, having figured out what she wanted to say. “Sure, he can have a life. Why not? But if he doesn’t feel he’s giving this job his all, there’ll be consequences. He’ll overcompensate, screw up somehow. He’s got a conscience, Hilton. It’s why we love him.”

*    *    *

In politics, one should always look a gift horse in the mouth. Good fortune is earned; unearned fortune is suspect, bound to create unexpected consequences, gaps in the zeitgeist, opportunities to be seized. And so, when Patrick Dunn began to hear the gossip that Porter Weingarten might not run for the Senate against Charlie Martin, he began to worry. He called around, and gathered string; and then he called Charlie, who was in New York.

“Good news and bad news, Senator,” he said.

“Bad news first,” Charlie replied. “Always.”

“Potsie Weingarten has angina, a sick wife, an iffy prostate and a daughter in San Diego who’s married to a real estate mogul who’s promising nirvana by the sea if Potsie doesn’t squander the family fortune on a losing race against you. And I think Weinie’s seen the light.”

“Too bad.” A race against Weingarten would have been paradise. Potsie would have pulled a safe 36 to 38 percent, mostly from the Scando-Teutonic farming communities like Hansen County and the religious wing nuts who never voted for Charlie Martin, in any case. More important, Potsie was old-school. Civil. He would flog safe issues like ag, taxes and defense spending. It was true that, in anticipation of the campaign and at the age of seventy-three, Congressman Weingarten had seen fit to become one of the only Lutherans in history to be “born again,” but Charlie had assumed the conversion to be an election ploy, a device that gave Porter some breathing space with the wing nuts.

“So what’s the good news?” Charlie asked.

“Chaos among the GOPs.”

“That’s not such good news. Didn’t you teach me that certainty was always better than chaos?”

“Well, hold on a second,” Dunnsie said. “You know that Jimmy Hapworth started off slow against Saunders.” The governor’s race. Hapworth was an attractive and impatient young Democratic congressman from the industrial towns along the river in the eastern part of the state; Arch Saunders was the popular Republican incumbent governor.

“Yeah, you’ve got me doing a round of fund-raisers for Jimmy,” Charlie said. “So?”

“So Jimmy’s doing better and Archie’s doing worse,” Pat said, with a laugh. “You want to know how much worse? A DWI worse.”

“How on earth does a governor get bagged on a DWI?” Charlie asked.

“Well, if he commandeers a Pontiac Trans Am owned by one of the better-looking girls in the steno pool and drives it into one of those metal newspaper boxes at the corner of Fox and Second in downtown D.P., that probably wouldn’t be enough, would it?” Dunnsie began, enjoying himself immensely. “Because the D.P. police might reasonably conclude that the young lady was behind the wheel, and not even mention in the report that the governor was in the car. Unfortunately, the accident was the third moving violation for the young lady in the past twelve months, and the state police, as a matter of course, moved to lift her license. It seems the governor felt a moral obligation to intervene . . . of course, not the governor himself. But Tommy Duncan of the gov’s office and Ingrasso at the DMV.”

Charlie whistled. “That’s rich. How come the world doesn’t know it?”

“The world does, sort of,” Pat said. “If you’d been reading your R-W carefully, you might have seen at the bottom of the front page a few days ago an item titled ‘DMV Commish Probed in Ticket Fix.’ Ingrasso is as far as it’s gotten publicly, but the word is that it’s going all the way to Saunders—and the Republicans are way too caught up in that to be worrying much about a sacrificial lamb to put up against you.”

“Well, that is good news, I suppose,” Charlie said. “Unless some high school civics teacher wants to take me on as a class project. Then it could be trouble. You’d have to be civic. Debate him. Pain in the ass.”

“Right,” Dunnsie said, having maneuvered Charlie to the business part of the program. “Anything that isn’t Weingarten could be trouble of some sort. And so you should make a couple of moves now, solidify your position. Neutralize the civics teachers and assorted winkie-dinks.”

“How?” But Charlie knew how.

“Do a fifty-three in seven Easter week.”

Fifty-three counties in seven days. Every county in the state. It had been one of Charlie’s innovations when he’d first run for Senate. He’d done two of them that year—to start and to end the campaign. He’d done another when he’d run for reelection in 1988. It was silly, exhausting, twenty-four-hour stuff. He did it in a camper, and slept aboard.

“Oh, God. Aren’t we getting a little old for that, Dunnsie?” Charlie said. “Anyway, I’ve got plans for Easter week.” He and Nell had talked about taking the kids skiing.

“Plans?” Pat asked. “What about your Easter schedule?”

Charlie winced at the thought of so many bunnies and jelly beans, so much honey-glazed ham, the flat kiddie colors of the season: yellow and violet. Worse, he had done a stupid thing, leading Nell on—she’d already made the reservation at Killington—when he’d known that he would never be able to get away for Easter week. He remembered warning her in New Orleans: politicians can’t avoid holidays; they are human greeting cards, famously festive. They must commemorate Arbor Day, Flag Day, National Secretaries’ Week. There was no way to get around a big one like Easter; a senator must preside over at least a half-dozen egg rolls and treasure hunts, and attend the Passover seder at the West Des Pointe Jewish Center, and be very, very well-dressed and public on Easter Sunday. He wondered why he had chosen to delude himself, and Nell: wishful thinking came to mind. But the strength of the delusion was perplexing.

“Okay, okay,” he said to Dunnsie. “We’ll beef up the schedule. I’m not going to do a fifty-three in seven, but we’ll spend a nice, solid, high-profile week. Let’s have Mary start working on it. A lot of civics classes—although school’s out that week, right? Rec programs then, and media. We can do it in the Winnebago, give the appearance of a fifty-three in seven. You happy now, Patrick?”

“Delighted,” Dunn said.

“You promised,” Nell said.

“I lied,” he replied. It was midevening. The kids had gone off to watch television. They sat at the dining room table, a raw March wind rattling the row of French doors.

“The kids’ll be disappointed,” she said.

“I’ll be disappointed,” he said. “Hey, you want to bag the skiing and everyone come out with me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because they desperately want to go skiing.” And because going out to the Midwest, and spending a week in Charlie’s world—introducing the kids to that—seemed far too big a jump, too official, a formal announcement of something or other. Nell hadn’t thought her way that far into the relationship yet, in part because he hadn’t asked it of her. He seemed perfectly happy, drifting along in Mondo Nello; as happy as she was, as everyone was—all of them shocked by their sudden good fortune, as if a whole section of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle had suddenly fallen into place. The absence of tension in the household was astonishing.

“We could sneak in a couple days of Colorado skiing for the kids,” he said. “Have you ever done that?”

“No,” she said, refusing to give ground, annoyed that he was pushing this. Why did he want to change things so soon?

“Well, it’s—”

“No.”

“No?” He was surprised by her firmness. “Why?”

“Because I don’t want to have to ‘do pretty’ on a vacation, and I certainly don’t want the kids to have to. I want to vacate.”

He could understand that. He didn’t want to “do pretty” either. He was stunned by the emotional resonance of her point of view. It had all sorts of dire implication—for him. And Nell didn’t seem to care about his career at all. “Look, I’d love to vacate, too. But I can’t—”

“Why not? You said your opponent is dropping out. So why can’t you celebrate?”

“You never celebrate,” he said, “until after the election. When the tide’s moving your way, you press your advantage.”

“And when the tide’s moving against you?”

“You press harder. Nell, look: I’ve got to do this. I’ve been goofing off enough—”

“ ‘Goofing off’? Is that what you call this?”

“No, and you know that,” he said. “This is the closest I’ve come to—” But he was too angry with her to concede how happy he’d been. She was being unfair, picking at his words. She knew how he felt and was pretending she didn’t.

And he realized something else, the same thing—he now knew—that Linc had seen: Nell was entirely unimpressed by public service. It meant nothing to her that he was a United States senator. That was, of course, part of the allure: she loved him, not what he did, not his power or his potential; by doing so, she had freed him from both. This was both refreshing—and galling. He was used to being admired, not loved.

He looked at her; she conceded nothing. She was wearing a forest-green pocket T-shirt and blue jeans; he was amazed how long it had taken him to realize what a wonderful body she had—as if her unpredictable looks and clothes, and her even more unpredictable mind, had steered him away from his usual, banal male perceptions. He was desperate to make her happy now, and angered by his desperation. Why couldn’t she indulge him, just a little? He understood why she wouldn’t come out and campaign with him—he would have to nudge her toward that gradually. But couldn’t she be awed, just a little, by what he did?

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs and goof off with the kids.”

She stared at him, briefly, before moving—understanding that the honeymoon had just ended and that now the serious decisions and adjustments and concessions of making a life together would begin. It had been a fabulous honeymoon, the best she’d ever had, and she needed to tell him that, somehow. She stood before he did, leaned over him, slid her hands down his chest and nuzzled his ear with her nose. She felt him loosen, and he turned to kiss her: perhaps the honeymoon wasn’t quite over yet.

“Oh, guck,” said Pamela, from the top of the stairs. “Guhross.”

“Oh, Shamela,” Nell said, extricating herself. “That is such a wonderful observation! You are so gifted. That is so excellent.” It was a game they played: Nell’s Manhattan Mommy impersonation. “Isn’t she just so . . . special, Charlie?”

“Moth-errr,” Pamela said. “Can’t we all do something . . . challenging together? It’s been hours since I was challenged.”

“Some mathematics, perhaps?” Nell asked. “Is there something advanced I could help you with?”

“Perhaps an advanced play date?” Pamela said. “You can bring him, if you want.”

“Do you think he’s gifted or talented enough?” Nell asked, tousling Charlie’s hair. “He works for the government, you know.”

“He’s gifted enough—for you.” And Nell chased Pamela up the stairs as Charlie watched, bright-eyed and tremulous, bedazzled and besotted with them both.

*    *    *

He went back to Washington the next morning, stopped in the office and then went directly to the Armed Services subcommittee meeting on force readiness adjustments—one of his specialties, a meeting he would chair. It was a sparsely attended affair: no other Democrats, Mike Rotello of Florida representing the Republicans, an under- and an assistant secretary representing the Pentagon, but Charlie was happy in the details of the work.

At about twelve-fifteen, Mustafa came in—through the committee office door, behind the senators. He put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, “Donna says you better come down to the office immediately.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Something back home, I think.”

Charlie called a ten-minute recess. His office was two floors below the Armed Services Committee suite—a matter of real convenience: he could pop out of committee, go back to his office, greet local firemen and return without missing very much. Now he rushed downstairs with Mustafa, whose construction boots squeaked along the marble corridors, and into his office—where the two Ds had gathered. They both looked up as he came in: glum squared. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Proctor just called from D.P.,” Donna said. “Muffler Man opened his show this morning by announcing a week-long radio poll—a People’s Poll, he called it—asking listeners to vote on whether he should run for the Senate . . . against you.”

Charlie smiled. “Have you voted yet?”

“I’ve been on the phone with Pat Dunn,” Hilton said. “He’s going to start calling around, make sure that none of our people—the teachers, the choicers, the greens—do anything resembling an organized phone response to this. We can’t appear to take it seriously. If we seem to be working this thing, it gives him more credibility right out of the box.”

“He’s got credibility, whether we work it or not.” Charlie was torn between disappointment that he’d actually have to work the campaign and an intense desire to have at Lee Butler, to get back at him.

“Dunnsie wants you to call him as soon as possible,” Hilton said, staring at Donna, who gave him an I-told-you-so look.

Charlie sat down on the couch, stretched his legs, dialed Patsy Dunn himself. “Okay, if I put you on speaker, Pat?” he asked. “I’ve got Donna and Hilton here.”

“Fine,” Dunn said, his voice a constricted, electronic echo in the high-ceilinged room.

“I guess,” Charlie began, “we can assume the results of the People’s Poll in advance. Did anyone see this coming?”

“No,” Dunn said. “Phone calls I’ve gotten in the past fifteen minutes, everyone thinks it’s nuts. Hamblin from the R-W says they’ve got a poll coming—mostly on the governor’s race, but they threw in a couple of questions about you—that says your favorables are down slightly, but still pretty damn good, high fifties.”

“You get any calls from Hamblin?” Charlie asked Hilton.

“I’ve gotten eighteen press calls from D.P. in the past ten minutes, including Hamblin,” Devereaux replied. “What do we say to them?”

“We sing the praises of democracy, of course,” Charlie said. “We welcome the boy into the race, if he sees fit to make it.”

“Mr. Dunn, it’s Hilton,” Devereaux said. “Has Butler been lighting us up in any way these past few months? I figured Mary would give us coverage if there’d been anything.”

“I haven’t listened to every minute, but no—he had some fun with the Arch Saunders Safe Driving School yesterday. He’ll mention Charlie from time to time, when he goes on one of his isolationist or antiimmigrant tears, but there hasn’t been anything sustained since the ‘Carlito Loco’ bits after Charlie announced he was voting for NAFTA.”

“Is there anything new with the Arch Saunders Safe Driving School?” Charlie asked.

“Mary says the current thinking at the R-W is they may have overrun the story. No one’s stepping forward to place the governor in the car—”

“Figures,” Charlie said: with Saunders safe, the Republicans could concentrate on unseating him. “How do you think the GOPs respond to Muffler Boy?”

“Well, they won’t be thrilled—he’s torched them often enough,” Pat said. “But if he’s really coming after you, and putting money behind it, they probably won’t be disappointed either. . . . Senator, we’re gonna need some help, working through all this. Media, polling, office staff.”

“We’ve got Roy Branson,” Charlie said. Hilton rolled his eyes: Roy Branson ran an advertising agency in Des Pointe and devoted most of his energy to inflating the egos of the local automobile dealers and their families—he’d turned them all into television stars.

“We’re gonna need more than Roy Branson,” Pat said. “Even if Muffler Man hires himself to do his advertising, he’s five times slicker than Roy. Charlie, listen: if Butler runs, we’re in the twilight zone. He’s gonna run clever, and unpredictable. We need to take this very seriously. I don’t have to tell you that, right? Hilton, I think you should call the D-triple-C and find out if there’s anyone out there who’s had experience doing oddball rich guy candidates. . . . Charlie, we want to start thinking bigleague handlers, Washington guys.”

“I don’t know about that, Dunnsie.” Charlie said, with a pro forma stubbornness. He knew Pat was right, but the prospect of big-league handlers raised awful memories: it reminded him of the presidential campaign. “I don’t want to start bringing in high-priced talent from outside the state. We’ve never done that. I don’t want people to think we’re taking this pissant seriously.”

“Fair enough,” Dunn said, conceding the nuance, but not the argument. “Hilton will be very discreet as he begins to check around. Right, Hilton?”

“Muffle’s the word,” Hilton said. He looked over at Charlie, who sat on the couch scratching his sideburn with his index finger. His eyes were calm, as always; but his chin was down, tucked into his chest. A race against Lee Butler might prove easier than running against Porter Weingarten—amateurs usually found a way to screw up—but the campaign would require effort and preparation, and a level of interest that might be a greater commitment of energy than the boss was prepared to make. One thing was certain, Hilton thought: Muffler Boy would cause the suspension of Mondo Nello. The boss knew that, and hated the thought of it.

“Patsy,” Charlie said, “fuck you for being right—we’ll do a real fifty-three in seven Easter week, okay? I’ll bring Mustafa out to drive the Winnebago—I don’t want that kid, Barry, doing it. Hell, I don’t want Mustafa doing it either, but he knows how to handle a truck. You think we can pry him away from the church for a week, D?”

“I don’t know if we can put him on the campaign if he’s on the Senate payroll.” Donna warned, all business, as always.

“We’ve got to worry about that happy horseshit again now, don’t we?” Charlie said wearily.

“Actually, he can take a vacation week,” Donna said. “He can moonlight the campaign, get double pay.”

“Boss, I’ll take a vacation week that week, too,” Hilton said. “And I don’t need the extra pay. And neither does Moose.”

Charlie looked up at Hilton, and nodded. “Feeling guilty?” he asked.

“Always,” Devereaux replied.