PROLOGUE

[ i ]

The event at the Elks Club ended at dusk and they headed west, into the countryside. She was surprised by the drama of the terrain—the rolling hills were steeper than she’d expected, and perfectly proportionate; the chocolate soil fresh and fecund. The sun was setting between pilasters of clouds, which were less delicate than the casual coastal puffs she was used to; they were bigger, heavier, like the heroic thuds of mashed potato that had been deposited on their plates at the Elks. And yet, the sunset colors were as subtle as the clouds were dramatic; no pollution-induced fuchsias out here. There were streaks of canary and tangerine rising to a robin’s-egg blue, then fading into a navy night.

“Great sky,” she said.

“Why?” he asked.

Why? She turned to him, wrinkling her brow.

“I just want to see what you see,” he explained. She brushed a hand along his cheek, which was sandpapery with early evening stubble.

“All you have to do,” she said, “is look more slowly.”

Just past dark they stopped at a picket fence, at the end of a long dirt road, after endless, rolling miles of corn and soy. Straight ahead was a simple white farmhouse, overilluminated by halogen crime lights; there was a red barn to the right, and corn all around. The senator slid open the minivan door and jumped out.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, taking her by the wrist and, gently but firmly, leading her along the driveway path. She resisted, in part a visceral response to being tugged, but also a consequence of her khaki skirt, which was long and cumbersome. She was also wearing a white silk blouse and navy espadrilles—he didn’t much like the espadrilles, but that was part of her allure: she challenged his predispositions.

He yelled a greeting—“Hey, Tom!”—in the general direction of an elderly, heavyset man in coveralls, who was ratcheting himself, with some difficulty, out of the rocking chair on the porch. “Take it easy, Tom,” he quickly added, “we’ll be right with ya,” and he pulled her abruptly to the left, into the corn—several rows in, so no one could see them, although the lights from the house and the campaign minivan threw competing, smoky shadows through the leaves and tassels. He stopped, turned, put his hands on her shoulders; she sensed their unevenness in the dark—the right hand strong; the left a shadow of a presence.

“Okay,” Charlie Martin exhaled. “Okay. . . . Will you marry me?”

“Marry you?” Nell Palmerston was suddenly breathless—and laughing. “Uhhh . . . no?” She was, she realized, imitating her daughter, for whom every statement was a question.

“ ‘Uhhh . . . no?’ ” He imitated her imitation, expecting a response. But she was too stunned to say anything. “No? As in, for real—no?” Actually, he wasn’t surprised. A simple yes would have been astonishing, perhaps even slightly disappointing. Nothing was ever simple with Nell. He knew he’d have to work at this. “Why the hell not?”

“Because,” she said, catching her breath, “you’re in campaign mode.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, trying to see her through the tasseled shadows, “I don’t know what that means.”

“Yes you do,” she said. “At least, I hope you do. I mean, if you didn’t—that would really be pathetic.”

“I’m in the middle of a campaign,” he acknowledged. “So what?” He was having trouble reading her in the dark. It was hard enough reading her when he could see her.

“You’re completely caught up in this thing.”

“Well, what did you think—”

“I didn’t think,” she said. “Sometimes I have a problem with that.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “You knew. You think I invited you out here to help with the haying?”

“Well.” She played a bit, regaining her balance. “Rhymes with haying . . .” He didn’t laugh, and now she was disappointed: he didn’t want to play? He wanted a serious response?

“I guess I wasn’t expecting the onstage-all-the-time part of it,” she tried. “I mean, it’s Saturday and we were out there all day—and tomorrow’s Sunday, and we have to do it all day then, too. . . . And my role: comatose devotion, perpetually amazed by your brilliance. Two days of it, and my face hurts from smiling. When do we go to the beach? I’d settle for a lake. I saw a lake today. People were swimming.” She smiled and dropped an arm over his shoulder. “Can’t we go campaigning in a lake? It looked so nice. We drove right past it, on our way to where? The Fort Ditty-Bop Burrito Festival? Or was it the Firehouse Bazaar in Grove Corners?”

“It was the Fort Dantrobet Burrito Festival,” he said, “and if you were having such an awful time, why did I have to wipe the salsa off your chin and drag you away from those women you were yakking with?”

“Well, they were quilt makers,” she explained.

“Ohhhh, I see: quilt makers.” He debated whether to tell her that it just wasn’t politic to get so deeply embedded in a conversation on the hustings: the rest of the crowd might feel slighted. It was a detail of implementation, and he didn’t want to force her political education; she’d learn the ropes at her own speed. Or so he hoped. He returned to Topic A. “So, is this a permanent no or just a provisional one?”

“Is it going to be a standing offer, or a one-shot deal?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I’m guessing it’s somewhere in between,” she said. “A provisional standing offer. You’re too proud to make it permanent and—I’d guess—too reasonable to make it a one-shot deal.”

“Can we negotiate? Should I try again? You want a knee?” he offered.

“Seriously?” she asked, chuckling—she had a wonderful, unexpected chuckle; her laughing voice was deeper than her speaking voice. “A knee? As in, down on one knee?”

“Absolutely . . . not really. I’ve given you all the corn I could muster,” he said. “I put a lot of thought into this, proposing to you here.”

It was sort of fabulous. Looking straight up, she could see a brilliant night sky, with the same sliver of moon the cow jumped over in nursery rhyme books. The rich, damp smell of the soil was intoxicating.

Charlie could see her eyes now, calm and gray-green, and her coarse tangle of blond hair; Nell could see his mouth, but not his eyes, and that was a disadvantage. She had fallen in love with his eyes. He was holding her hand; he kissed the inside of her wrist. She touched his hair, which was thick and black, tending toward gray, rather aesthetically, at the temples. “I’ll bet this is where you used to take all the girls,” she said, “haying.”

He did like a good cornfield. He’d thought about corn all the time in Vietnam, especially when he’d pass through a stand of bamboo—bamboo creaked in the wind; corn swished. Corn was so much more delicate, and benign. The thought of a midsummer cornfield, undulating over the hills, had always made him homesick. In Vietnam, he’d sometimes found himself drifting here, to Uncle Tom and Aunt Leah’s place, just outside of Fort Jeffords—the corn backed up to the edge of their yard on all sides. And so he’d brought Nell to Tom and Leah’s, to propose to her in the middle of their cornfield, after the last event of the day: a broasted chicken dinner with the Fort Jeffords Future Farmers of America at the Elks Hall.

Nell thought the dinner was indescribably exotic. They had been served white bread and margarine, along with the chicken, mashed potatoes, and way overcooked canned vegetables—and apple pie with slices of processed cheese melted on top. She had also been tickled by the idea that there was such a thing as Future Farmers: she had always imagined farmers to be part of the past, like coopers or blacksmiths. But there they were, these incredibly earnest and soon-to-be-overweight kids, talking about hybrids and genetics, and none of them wearing overalls. Nell hadn’t thought about plant genetics since high school biology. She tried to remember the name of the monk who’d done the experiment with fruit flies—was it Gregor Mendel, or was he the Kafka character? She was going to ask Charlie, but he seemed so busy, asking intricate questions about the vagaries of modern agronomy, listening intently to the Future Farmers, joking—flirtatiously. Politics, as far as she could tell, involved an awful lot of flirting.

Charlie’s plan was they would spend the night at Tom and Leah’s—something he hadn’t done since childhood—after he proposed and she’d accepted. He had imagined himself and Nell coming down the stairs Sunday morning, his arm around her waist, newly engaged. There would be Leah’s famous cinnamon buns. They would go to church, of course; you have to go to church in the middle of a campaign (usually, you have to go to several churches). But he knew a rowdy apostolic congregation outside of town—great music. It would be more midwestern exotica. He wanted to show her all of it, see how she reacted. He loved watching her see things.

A cellular phone in the distance. “Hey, Senator,” shouted Mustafa, his driver. “Headquarters. They got the numbers from tomorrow’s R-W.”

Nell sighed. “See?” she said. “Campaign mode.”

“Fuck campaign mode,” he said softly—but intensely, just above a whisper. “You think I’m asking you to marry me for the sake of appearances? I’m asking you to marry me because you are . . .” He struggled for something clever, and failed. “The most . . . interesting person I know.”

“ ‘Interesting’?” She laughed.

“This isn’t funny,” he said, but, of course, he knew it had to be. “All right: I’m asking you to marry me because . . . Well, what are you going to wear to church tomorrow?” During the day, when the sun had been hot, she’d worn a spectacular wide-brimmed straw hat with a white nylon mesh band that flowed down her back, and Jackie O sunglasses—with the khaki suit, she looked as if she were on a safari photo shoot for some fashion magazine. Plainly, she hadn’t been born to do politics. But he loved having her there, and he was still pretty much amazed that she finally had agreed to come out from New York—although she did affect his ability to concentrate on the business at hand. Then again, she’d only been traveling with him for two days. This—Nell working his turf, living his life—was still new, for both of them. He had hoped she’d find his world as . . . charming as he’d found hers; well, maybe not as charming. He was hoping she’d find it tolerable.

“What does my Sunday best have to do with anything?” she asked.

“You’re the first woman I’ve ever been with where I’m even thinking about it,” he said. “You make everything—”

“Groovy?”

“Wild thing,” he said, making the connection. “You make my heart sing.” Truly a great rock lyric; he’d never focused on it before. Simple, elegant, perfect. She made his heart sing. “Hey, you want to go dancing?” he asked. “Then we won’t be in campaign mode.”

“Dancing?” He’d used this tactic before, shifting gears on her, proposing an outlaw getaway—dancing, usually. They had danced, on occasion; but they’d never actually gone dancing.

“We’re about forty-five minutes from the Crescent Lake Casino, where Mom met Dad. Saturday night, they’ll have some old-fart band, or maybe square dancing, or polkas,” he said. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“You just want to hear the numbers,” she said mischievously. “You want to get me out of the cornfield, so you can take the phone call and hear the numbers. You’re not even interested in getting me to marry you anymore.”

“Bull shit,” he said, making them two words. “That’s a done deal. You’re going to marry me, sooner or later.” He snaked an arm around her waist, nuzzled her neck, went woozy at her smell. “But right now,” he said, “we’re going dancing.”

“I do hope it’s square dancing,” she replied, reaching down, squeezing the back of his thigh. “I’ll be able to ask the caller something I’ve always wondered about: is do-si-do short for something? And what about allemande left—is that a reference to El Alamein? And—”

“Senator!” Mustafa shouted. “You comin’ or what?”

“Coming!” Charlie Martin said. Nell rolled her eyes.

Mustafa was leaning against the van. He was, Nell thought, a strange specimen: a tall, middle-aged black man who chain-smoked Virginia Slims, thin and angular except for an incongruous potbelly. He handed Charlie the phone.

“Who?” Charlie asked.

“Aunt Mary.”

It made sense. Mary Proctor ran his home-state office. She knew all the pooh-bahs at the Register-World. She’d have their poll numbers first.

“So okay, Mary,” he said. “Cut to the chase. What’s the story?”

“You’re behind. Only a couple of points, margin of error,” she said. “But behind.”

“To that little turd?” he said. “No fucking way.”

“As my granddaughter would say,” Mary said, “way.”

[ ii ]

One of the first things Nell Palmerston had noticed in the den of the Martin family home in Des Pointe—everyone just called the place “Oak Street”—was a laminated copy of a Life magazine article from June 1968: “A Hero Comes Home.” And there he was: young, skinny, black hair closely cropped, left hand heavily bandaged, but smiling . . . and those eyes. Even in black and white, they were deadly, she thought: almost feminine. In real life, they were a very dark but vivid ceramic blue—like Delft china—each with a perfectly etched aurora of crow’s-feet, which made it seem as if he were perpetually on the brink of a smile, even when he was angry. They were calm, kindly, long-lashed eyes, unexpectedly benign; Charlie Martin’s best feature. Without them, his face would have seemed irreparably harsh and masculine, slightly pockmarked: a good face for a soldier or a ballplayer, much too severe for a politician. The eyes made politics possible.

Nell found herself drawn repeatedly to the Life story, which hung on plywood paneling surrounded by family photos. The photos dominated the room—not just photos of the hero-politician son, but of the heropolitician mother, and the charming accordion-playing dad. The den was the most lived-in room of the house, containing what appeared to be the family’s three most significant pieces of furniture: the console television, Charlie’s father’s La-Z-Boy recliner and a spinet piano; there was also a couch, side tables and lamps—undistinguished, department store early-American style—and bookcases filled with Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The Martins didn’t seem to be very conscious of physical appearances; there was no visual coherence to the place. In a way, the absence of attention to design was as jarring to Nell as the all-consuming presence of politics.

There was a lot to assimilate in the Life magazine spread, even though it was only two pages long. Indeed, the story seemed as exotic to Nell, and as deeply American, as the Future Farmers had. She remembered studying issues of Life in the orthodontist’s office back in the sixties, the same way other people flipped through National Geographic—it was a form of anthropology: the photo-fantasy of an utterly foreign people, strong and happy and unencumbered by irony. And yet, in this case, the blandness of the words and photos seemed off-key—a harbinger of the end of innocence, the end of Life: this story was about a return from Vietnam. Charlie was beautiful but painfully thin, reluctant and haunted. One photo was of a parade, with the hero standing in an open car, tentatively waving with his good right hand. Another was of Charlie being given the key to the city by a big-boned prairie woman with a sweet, small face—the caption said: “Captain Martin receives the key to the city from his mother, Mayor Clarice Campbell Martin.” His smile was a wince.

Another photo, captioned: “First Family of Des Pointe.” There was Charlie, arm in arm with “his wife, Johanna”—a very serious-looking young woman with rimless eyeglasses and an acute, back-to-the-barricades sort of beauty. Nell remembered that look—great skin, high cheekbones, blazing eyes: those girls had been truly intimidating in college (but not since). Charlie and Johanna were flanked by the hero’s “colorful” parents, Clarice and Buzz Martin. They were Mutt and Jeff: Buzz was as thin and casual as Clarice was sturdy. He was wearing shades, and a thin dark tie, and he was smiling—with his left eyebrow raised mischievously. The caption described him as “a local musician.”

According to the text, written in a style Nell found clumsy and yet comforting, Charlie was a “much-decorated Marine,” just released from the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where he’d been treated for wounds suffered in a land mine explosion southwest of Danang. Asked about the “recent large-scale protests against the war in Washington,” Captain Martin said, “I’m not going to criticize that. Everyone has a decision to make about this war, and it’s possible to come to different conclusions. My heart is with the grunts, the guys I served with—we need to give them all the support we can.”

The mayor, however, was more forthcoming: “My son lost most of a hand. For what? I thought we could use this year’s Memorial Day parade to honor Charlie’s sacrifice, and to honor all the other boys who are doing their patriotic duty. But I think Lyndon Johnson should spend a day—maybe this day, Memorial Day—emptying bedpans in the ward where they had Charlie in Philly, and then I’d like to see what he’d be saying about this war.”

The “feisty” mayor, “a former social worker and community activist,” had run a “grassroots” campaign against the “infamous Petunia Social Club” political machine in 1966 and “won a narrow victory, much to everyone’s surprise.”

But most of the article was about Charlie Martin, who had been awarded two silver stars in Vietnam. “Local Democrats are already talking up the possibility of a political career for young Martin. ‘He’s a natural,’ said Patrick Dunn, chairman of the state Democratic party. ‘He’s the kind of kid who, soon as you meet him, you think: this guy’s going to be president some day.’ ”

“Bobby Kennedy died the week that came out,” Charlie said, coming up behind Nell, the evening after she had rejected his marriage proposal.

“I remember,” she said.

“Where were you?”

“In Paris . . .”

“Negotiating with the Vietnamese? The Paris Peace Talks?”

“Negotiating with Chanel,” she said. “For a summer job.”

“As a model?”

“Too weird-looking, too irregular,” she said. “I was a kid. I was willing to work for free . . . and, it turned out, the price was right. The family thing didn’t hurt, either.”

The family thing: Charlie always had to be reminded that she was distantly related, on her father’s side, to the British royals. Nell found this endearing, and a bit exasperating: most of the other men in her life had been a bit too impressed by her lineage. It was an advantage she’d been able to use on them, one that Charlie wouldn’t allow, stone Democrat that he was. It was nice to be loved for one’s own attributes, Nell thought, but it was also nice to have advantages.

“The ‘family thing’ didn’t hurt you, either,” she said. “You went into the family business . . . ‘the kind of kid who could be president some day’ . . .”

He snorted. “That was just politics,” he said. “Patsy was making a peace offering to Mom. He was a creature of the Petunias, the machine’s state chairman. He was making nice, hoping she wouldn’t come after him, too. Funny thing is, it worked. Pat was a labor guy, and the meat packers were big in Des Pointe in those days. He and Mom found they had more in common than not. . . .”

“Yeah, but everyone—including you—believed it, the president stuff. In fact, you still do,” she said.

“I’m still licking my wounds from last time,” he said. “It’s probably why this guy is giving me a tussle now . . . . Anyway, I’ve got to check in with Patsy Dunn. And, sweetie”—he paused theatrically—“tonight’s the night. You want to come along, have a meal with him?”

“Do I have a choice?” she asked, with a smile. “Aren’t there any more Future Farmers, or Former Farmers, we can chat up?”

“You’ll like Pat,” he said. “I promise.”

“Where do we find him?” she asked. “Will there be more Wonder Bread?”

“At the Petunia Social Club, of course,” he said. “And don’t be so proud of your cultural disadvantages: Wonder Bread builds strong bodies twelve ways.”

“From what I’ve seen,” she said, moving toward him, nuzzling his ear and whispering, “that could only be true if you define strength as fat.”

“You are cruel to my people,” he said, snaking an arm around her waist.

*    *    *

The Petunia Social Club Restaurant wasn’t the real Petunia Social Club: that had been a speakeasy and whorehouse down on the Flats, near the east bank of the Brown River, which flowed through Des Pointe on its way to the Mississippi. Charlie had always loved the Flats—several blocks of redbrick factory and warehouse buildings, just like St. Louis or any other real city. The meatpacking plants had been there, and the whorehouses that serviced the meat packers: Des Pointe had been a wild town in the Petunia days, an era that had lingered until the advent of the Clarice Martin Democrats in the mid-1960s. Now the Flats had been “restored,” just as similar neighborhoods throughout urban America had been: lots of exposed brick, and T-shirt shops, and restaurants where the waiters told you their names and carried the menu on a blackboard. The new Petunia Social Club was just such a place, with some nice sepia photos of old Des Pointe on the walls—meat packers in bloodstained aprons, stone-faced farmers coming to town in the wagons, members of the Petunia machine in bowlers, painted ladies. And Patrick Dunn could usually be found there, too.

He sat in a rear booth—his unofficial office—nursing a tap beer, far from the crowd of young professional this-and-thats at the bar busy picking one another up.

“Dr. Demento,” Charlie said, giving Dunn a brisk hug, “this is Nell Palmerston. She’s the granddaughter of a duke. Nell, this is Patsy Dunn. He’s the son of a duchess.”

“Thought you were going to say, he’s the son of a bitch, Chas,” Pat said. “That’d be true, too. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

Nell noted that Charlie had used her lineage. It had been a joke, but he’d used it, which was slightly disappointing—and slightly not: advantage Nell. She also noted that Patsy Dunn was perhaps the most handsome bald man she’d ever met. He had strong, straight features and clear, Windex-blue eyes—did startling eyes come with the territory out here? she wondered—and he held his age well, nothing stooped or cloudy about him, though he was well into his seventies. He was wearing a navy Polo golf shirt; he didn’t have the slightest hint of a potbelly.

Patsy’s booth came equipped with a red-checked tablecloth and oversized everything: napkins, plates, utensils; the waiter brought an oversized loaf of bread (white, though furiously grainy) on a board, with an oversized bread knife to cut it. Nell ordered a vodka on the rocks, and was presented with enough alcohol to level a Cossack; Charlie was brought at least sixteen ounces of diet Coke.

“Dunnsie actually grew up here,” Charlie explained, “in the Flats.”

“Mother was in the entertainment business—middle management,” Patsy said. “This wasn’t so cute and fancy then. Smelliest place in the world—blood and cow dung. That’s why they put it on the east side, so the proper folks, like Clarice Martin and all, wouldn’t get the whiff.”

“No one ever accused Buzz of being proper,” Charlie reminded him.

“We’d see Charlie’s dad from time to time in the old days,” Patsy explained. “He’d come play the piano for a poke at Sarah Miller’s, which was where my mother worked. I always said, Clarice—Charlie’s mom—couldn’t reform Buzz, so she reformed the rest of us instead. Ruined the local economy. We used to get farm boys and cowboys from all over the Upper Plains, patronizing our local institutions.”

“Didn’t do much for the tax base,” Charlie said.

“But it promoted social stability,” Pat replied, thankful that Charlie had turned out to be something more than Clarice’s son—she’d been a hard woman, cold as Utah in a blizzard, a revisitation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Charlie had a filial weakness for reform, but it was leavened by a healthy respect for human frailty—Buzz’s legacy, no doubt. Truly, a felicitous combination in a senator, Patsy thought. “The Flats saved a lot of marriages,” he explained to Nell. “Safety valve. After all Clarice did to wreck that, I’d say it was simple justice that the boy’s getting bit in the ass by the Righteous Lad now.”

“Oh, right,” she said to Dunn. “Mr. Muffler.” Charlie had told her about his rich young challenger, but the descriptions hadn’t done Leland Butler justice. For one thing, Charlie hadn’t mentioned that Butler was extremely good-looking. Not her type, to be sure: blond, bland, overscrubbed, a distant cousin of Troy Donahue—Nell found that she was still thinking in Life magazine-era terms—or the King family. But handsome, in an American way. “It was the King family, wasn’t it?” she asked.

“What was?” Charlie said, laughing at the out-of-left-field non sequitur, a very Nell-ish thing—and nodding at Dunn, as if to say: isn’t she a stitch?

“Those milk-fed dray horse girls who sang with Lawrence Welk,” Nell said. “Back when.”

“The Lennon Sisters, I think,” Pat offered.

“And . . . so?” Charlie asked, happily bemused.

Patrick Dunn sat back, watched, evaluated: an oddball, this Nell—a throwback, like the rich girls in the movie comedies when he was a kid, during the Depression: she had a touch of Carole Lombard, but wilder hair.

“Lee Butler reminds me of them,” she said. “He’s good-looking for a goody-goody.”

“A goody-goody, but not a prude,” Dunn said. “That’s the part that gives me the itch. He’s six ways righteous, and yet he’s got this Saturday Night Live sense of humor—and the leather jacket, and riding his motorcycle around the state. It doesn’t fit.”

“Patsy, you’re too damn old for Saturday Night Live,” Charlie said.

“You’re the one who’s lookin’ old right now, Senator,” Patsy shot back.

“I haven’t seen his ads yet,” Nell said. She’d only seen Butler once, in fact, silent footage of him campaigning, picnics and town square festivals, on the evening news. “It’s been nonstop stumping since I got here.”

“He’s not running ads right now,” Charlie said.

“You said he had clever ads.” She looked at him, perplexed.

“That was before,” Charlie began to explain. It had been two years since the first Muffler Man spots, starring Leland Butler, had appeared on local television—reappeared, actually—and become something of a phenomenon. Lee Butler was the grandson of the original Muffler Man, Jackson Butler, who had been a constant presence on the air when Charlie was growing up.

“Nell, this guy’s grandfather was like—he was a Des Pointe institution,” Charlie said. “He did birdcalls. He’d do contests: guess the birdcall and win a free lube job . . . He wore a straw boater and a bow tie. He’d say, ‘Wanta hear a funny noise?’ and he’d put his hands up to his mouth like this.” Charlie started, then stopped—he didn’t like doing obvious things with his hands. “Well, you know what bird callers do . . . And then he’d say, sort of singsong, ‘Dat’s a fun-ny noise.’ ”

Nell cracked up. She’d never heard of Jackson Butler, of course; but it was clear that this was one of Charlie’s ancient talents—a perfect Muffler Man impersonation. The senator was pleased with himself. Nell saw him, fleetingly, as a child—the sort of kid who didn’t need to do impersonations to be popular, but did them anyway. “I mean, you can imagine what it was like when we were kids,” he said. “Everyone did a Muffler Man, ‘Dat’s a fun-ny noise.’ Right, Patsy?” Dunn was laughing now. “And then he’d say, ‘But you don’t want your car making fun-ny noises. So come on down to Butler Muffler.’ That was the grandfather. . . . So what’s your guess, Patsy?” Charlie said, returning to business. “What do you think he’ll throw at us? Did you hear what they’re doing to McGreevey in Ohio? They’re running spots that morph him into Jack Stanton. You think they can do that to me?”

“Dunno. It’s a worry,” Dunn said, but he didn’t sound too worried. He had more immediate concerns. He was worried about his candidate. He needed Charlie to be more focused, less in love. Patsy watched the senator across the table, without being too obvious about it—which wasn’t hard, because Charlie couldn’t keep his eyes off Nell. This was astonishing: Charlie Martin had always been the guy who’d been ogled—men and women, didn’t make a difference, they couldn’t take their eyes off him. The change in Charlie was potentially more perplexing than the Lee Butler challenge: Pat Dunn searched his memory and tried to remember if he’d ever been involved in a campaign with an infatuated candidate before—drunks, yes; thieves, far too often; cads, of course. But smitten? Never. Politicians weren’t built like that. They were loved, not vice versa. He wondered if the craziness of the past few years had softened Charlie, made this head-over-heels tumble inevitable. Or was it just this particular woman?

She wasn’t beautiful, certainly not in a straightforward midwestern way. But she was undeniably attractive—she had one of those arch, eastern, long-nosed, sophisticated looks: the sort of look a lot of midwestern folks didn’t understand, or like much if they did. And she was clever, which was not good at all—a liability at best in politics, and quite possibly a disaster.

Charlie excused himself, and Nell immediately asked, “So, how much trouble are we in here, Mr. Dunn?”

“Hard to say,” Patsy said. “Won’t know until the campaign really gets rolling, although Butler’s off to a good start. We’re bringing in a consultant, New York fella named Morey Richardson.” He looked at Nell as if she might know the man. She didn’t. “First time we’ve ever done that. But he’s had experience with these goofball sort of candidates—you know, rich guys running for the first time, TV and radio celebs. Anyway, Richardson says there’s no handbook. Can’t tell what you’re up against until you’re up against it. Some of them, you hit them and they fall down. Some of them, you hit them and they fall down and then they get back up and knock your block off.”

“And what happens to Charlie when this guy swings at him?” she asked. “Does he fall down, too?”

“Been thinking a lot about that,” Dunn said. “Thing about Charlie, he’s never had a tough race, never really had to slug it out. First time he ever got clocked was the presidential campaign. And that sent him spinning. I don’t know if he’s recovered yet. You’ve seen more of him the past year than I have, what do you think?”

“I don’t know very much about politics,” she said. “All I know is, he looks at me and he sees me—exactly who I am. . . . Patsy, we’ve been so damn happy these past few months. It’s, like, shocking. I think our senator is in a state of shock. Me too. I mean: Here I am . . . like, duuuhhhh.” She circled her index finger next to her forehead, meaning—what?—Pat wasn’t quite sure. Either that she was crazy to have come out there, or crazy about Charlie. Maybe both. “Anyway, I don’t want to lose what we have. I don’t know if I can watch him become someone else, the tough guy you want for this campaign. Or worse, get pummeled by—”

Charlie was back, a waiter in tow. Instead of going through the specials, the waiter looked over at Dunn, who said, “I’d say two and a half. Salad and potatoes. Madame,” he asked Nell, trying to be continental, “you like your steak rouge or rose?”

“Steak?” she said with a shudder. “Oh, well.” And then she gleamed wickedly across the table at Patrick Dunn: “Saignant . . . bloody.”

“She’s a difficult woman, Charles,” Patsy said. “About time you found one. This is good steak, Ms. Palmerston. Medium red, son,” he said to the waiter.

“Oh, by the way: it’s not Ms. Palmerston,” Nell said. “It’s Mrs. Belligio.”

“You’re still married?”

“Not really, but I have kids and they have his name, so I keep it, too, to cut down the confusion at school.”

“And what are your intentions toward our good senator?”

This was a direct, formal and rather startling question. Charlie glared at Dunn. Nell didn’t want to take it seriously, and Pat saw that. “We—”

“Are living in sin, in the middle of a campaign,” the old man said lightly, but not really. So that’s the agenda, she thought.

“Hey, Dunnsie, cool it,” Charlie said. “We are not living in sin. She’s just visiting. Anyway, we’re grown-ups.”

“Would that the voters were,” Dunn said.

Nell looked at Patsy. There was no anger, or outrage, or exasperation. He seemed perfectly calm.

“This is none of their business,” Charlie said firmly. “When have they ever cared before?”

It was true: Charlie’s rather gaudy social life had always been a public titillation, but never an issue. He was a hero, a veteran—and veterans received special dispensation: they were assumed to have warrior libidos. But the Washington press was treating politicians differently now; Pat wondered if the Des Pointe press might be induced, in a tough campaign, to follow suit.

“Mr. Dunn, are you saying you think that our private life will be”—Nell paused—“public business?”

“I don’t know,” Patsy said. Overwrought salads arrived in huge wooden bowls. “The lad here is the most popular politician in the history of this state . . . at least, that’s how they always introduce him at rallies, and I worry that he has come to believe it.”

“I’m out here every weekend, I’m working my tail off—”

“Finally,” Dunn said coldly. “You weren’t around much the past six months.”

“Every other week,” Charlie said.

“Seemed like less.”

“Well,” Charlie conceded. He had been spending a fair amount of time in New York, with Nell, the past six months.

“Nell, Lee Butler has been a celebrity in this state for the past two years, and he’s got some powerful friends,” Dunn said. “Chas, you saw what gunnies did with the crime bill?”

“Fuck the gunnies,” Charlie said.

“Easy for you to say,” Patsy said, then looked over at Nell, who was trying to follow, but having trouble: they were speaking Greek.

“I’m opposed to crime,” Nell offered. “Is that okay?”

“Well, if you were really opposed to crime, you’d also be opposed to the Crime Bill,” Patsy said. “At least, that’s the argument.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said. “How does supporting the Crime Bill make you against crime? And who, by the way, are the gunnies?”

“The National Rifle Association,” Charlie said, and realized that Nell had only a vague idea who the NRA was. “The gun lobby. They attacked my Crime Bill position in a series of newspaper ads—Muffler Boy didn’t have to raise a finger. They hate the bill because of a few gun-control provisions we snuck in.”

“And that’s worrisome?” Nell asked. “You’d think the gunnies were doing you a favor.”

“You’d think,” Charlie said. “Back in New York, they might be. And maybe here, too, when we get on the air in the fall—unfortunately, we don’t have any ‘independent’ groups like the NRA to run ads for our side. At least, not on that issue.”

“Maybe I could be an independent group, like the NRA,” she offered. “We could call it the American Swimwear Institute and Foundation—AS-IF, for short.”

“Nell designs bathing suits,” Charlie explained proudly.

“And are you planning to address the other issues in this campaign?” Patrick Dunn asked her, attempting her ironic style.

“Are you kidding?” She rolled her eyes. “I’m going to zip my lip.” She zipped it with her hand and threw away the key. Patsy decided that he liked her, which made it all so much worse. She had grit, unlike some of the sheer lookers Charlie had trotted out over the years; she had edges. He was happy for Charlie, but worried—and then angry at himself for being worried: What was so wrong about the kid, finally, having a life?

“And what will you do if some of our enterprising reporters ask your opinion about this or that?” Patsy asked.

“I will hand them a petunia and send them to you,” she said. “Charlie, they’re not going to ask me—” She stopped, thought a moment. “But of course they are. Aren’t they, Mr. Dunn?”

[ iii ]

On Monday mornings when he was home, Charlie Martin would hold a press conference in Des Pointe for local reporters. If the Senate was in session, he’d fly back to Washington in the afternoon. The week of Nell’s visit, however, he’d made an election year decision to stay home—it was a noncompulsory week for senators who had races: no major votes were scheduled. “You sure ISTEA isn’t coming up this week?” Charlie asked Hilton Devereaux, his communications director, as they headed to the state capitol in the campaign minivan.

Nell stared out the window: Des Pointe wasn’t nearly as exotic as the surrounding countryside. It had some nice Victorian and prairie-style homes on the west side, where Charlie’s family lived, but downtown was generic—nondescript glass curtain-wall buildings (although, in a concession to the stark winters, some of the buildings were connected by enclosed, mezzanine-level walkways). After a few blocks of semihigh density, downtown dribbled off into vacant parking lots. The state capitol stood about a half mile in the distance like a mirage, on a hill next to the Brown River. It was surrounded by a cluster of state office buildings, which seemed to have been built in thirty-year intervals—in the 1930s and 1960s, with the excavation for the inevitable 1990s edition just begun nearby. The capitol itself was a late Victorian masterpiece with a curious Eastern Orthodox onion dome. Charlie would meet the press, picturesquely, on the granite steps outside, with the golden dome—recently regilded, a consequence of the booming nineties—in the background.

“What is Iced Tea?” Nell asked. Dinner with Pat Dunn had convinced her that she should try to learn the lingo.

“It’s the transportation bill,” Charlie said, with a bit of an edge.

“Why is it called Iced Tea?” she asked, catching the testiness.

“Because . . . because it’s an acronym,” Charlie said. He could never remember what it stood for. “What are we gonna have from the peanut gallery this morning?” he asked Hilton abruptly.

“Hog lots, topsoil and pesticides,” the press secretary replied, turning to Nell: “Remember Oklahoma!? Remember ‘the farmer and the cowboy should be friends’? Now it’s the farmer and the environmentalist. . . .”

“Which side are we on?” Nell asked. There were all these issues.

“We take a nuanced position,” Hilton said, with raised eyebrow. He was mortally droll, languorously stringy, a homosexual from Mississippi. “It’s super-responsible. It just isn’t very explicable. Senator, that’s sort of our modus operandi, isn’t it? Impenetrably worthy?”

Hilton’s presence was one of the things Nell loved about Charlie: he sought out irregularity; he appreciated irony. He was impatient with people who were too respectful, too willing to do his bidding, too timid to get up into his face—she’d seen it time and again at social occasions in New York and Washington. He liked to be provoked. He would create conversational skirmish lines, challenge and probe and fence with all comers—it was how he learned. This was a wonderful quality in a handsome man, but an odd one in a politician (those she’d met with Charlie, at least, seemed tepid, cautious, determinedly banal). The testiness in his voice that morning was the first time she’d ever heard him the slightest bit taut. She took his hand, stroked it, sending a message: she wouldn’t always be difficult. She would try to read his moods, learn his business.

“What else, you think?” he asked Hilton, reciprocating her message with a slight squeeze.

“Horse race, of course. The R-W poll. They’ll want your version of ‘the only poll that counts is on election day . . . .’ ”

“What if I say,” Charlie said, “if this poll is accurate, and it probably is, I can’t believe how thick the people of this state are?”

“That’ll work,” Hilton said.

A clot of reporters, four television cameras, several radio sorts, campaign spies, malingering office workers and a smattering of the bizarre, special-pleading human driftwood who hang around every statehouse greeted Senator Martin on the glary, late-morning capitol steps. Nell and Hilton blended into an octet of Martin supporters—a couple of state senators and assembly members, county chairpeople, all of whom seemed to be sweating. She reached into her bag for the sunglasses, but Hilton stayed her arm as she moved to put them on: okay, okay—shades bad, squinting good. But why? “You’re wearing sunglasses,” she whispered to Devereaux, who was otherwise safely in uniform: blue blazer, button-down shirt and striped tie, chinos and Top-Siders.

“I am not you,” he said. “Every last one of those reporters is going to be checking you out.”

“Why?” But she knew why.

“Because you’re bonking the senator.”

Charlie was easy at the microphone. First question to Mike Ryan of AP: reaction to the poll?

“Well, we’ve got a long way to go, haven’t we?” Charlie said. Then he gave them all a smile. “You want me to give you ‘The only poll that counts is on election day’? That’s true, of course. But I do think this poll is an indication of some real questions that folks have: they don’t like the way things are going in Washington. Well, okay. Let’s talk it over. But in the end, I’m confident they’ll decide I’ve been working hard on the things they care about.”

“Senator, have you ever been behind in a poll before?”

“Didn’t you cover that presidential campaign we had two years ago?”

“I mean, a statewide poll.”

The answer was no, but Charlie didn’t want to admit that. He didn’t want to avoid it, either. “I hope it’ll prove a fleeting phenomenon.”

On to topsoil and hog lots and pesticides. Charlie fenced and danced, and explained his position in excruciating detail. Nell watched the reporters taking notes and not taking notes. She found herself quite impressed by them: they were asking serious technical questions about topsoil loss, and tree-planting programs, and PCBs in the runoff, and fecal matter from the feedlots—and Charlie was firing right back at them: how did he find the time to keep all that stuff in his brain and still be a human being?

Finally, a television guy who looked like a young male model read a question from a slip of paper he pulled from his notebook. “Blake Dornquist from KFYR—News Nine,” he introduced himself. “Your opponent said yesterday, in an exclusive interview with News Nine that will air tonight, that you had an ‘alternative lifestyle’ and that voters should be concerned, not only with how you vote, but how you live.”

“No kidding!” Charlie said lightly, as if he were answering another question about topsoil. “Well, first of all, I didn’t hear Mr. Butler say it and I’ll grant him the right to have been misquoted. But . . . if he did say it, what on earth do you suppose he meant by it? He thinks I shouldn’t be dating?” Charlie asked with a smile. He actually seemed to be enjoying this; he certainly didn’t seem to take the accusation very seriously.

“Well, I guess—” the male model said.

“He means,” said Bob Hamblin of the Register-World, “that your social life, and that of your staff, should be fair game.”

Nell felt Hilton flinch: they were both in the same boat.

“Do you think that, Bob?”

“Doesn’t matter what I think, Senator,” Hamblin said. “I just report what you guys do to each other.”

“But it does matter,” Charlie said, getting serious. Nell had never seen him publicly serious before; he seemed to slow down, become more thoughtful. He spoke softly—the opposite of his conversational skirmish style. “Let’s think about it a minute,” he continued. “What if I turned it around on you? Now, I know you and Gracie have a great marriage, and three terrific kids—but what if you were a guy who wasn’t married, or who had an ‘alternative’ lifestyle, whatever that is: you think it would be any business of mine? Or of your readers? I’m sure you have a few nontraditional sorts over there at the R-W. Should we have footnotes after your bylines for ‘lifestyle’ choice, list them down at the bottom of the story: reporter X once had an abortion, reporter Y once paid for an abortion, reporter Z did some cocaine back in the seventies, reporter W is born-again and a teetotaler?”

“We’re not on the public payroll,” Bob Hamblin said.

“But you’re doing the public’s work,” Charlie said, coming right back at him—amiably, though. “I could argue—since abortion, sadly, is likely to be a part of this campaign—that there should be full disclosure: the public has a right to know whether a person who reports on such an important issue ever had to make a personal decision on that issue . . . but I’m not gonna do that. Because I believe there are lines we shouldn’t cross. I don’t care if my opponent watches kung fu movies in his spare time, or cheats on the golf course—or on his wife, for that matter. None of my business. I think we get into pretty dangerous territory when we start fishing those waters. I expect Mr. Butler and I will have enough differences on the public’s business, without having to get into how we butter our toast. Next question.”

Hilton whispered to Nell, “That probably wasn’t very good for us, but I loved it.”

“How could it be bad?”

“Stick around,” he said. “Personal stuff always turns bad. And I’m not so sure that the working press likes to be confronted that way.”

When the press conference ended, a few innocuous questions later, Charlie chatted informally with reporters. “You should come out on the road with us,” he said to Bob Hamblin.

“You’ll be sick of me before this is done,” Hamblin said.

“I’m sick of you already,” Charlie replied. “Your middle kid okay?”

“Thank God for special ed, Senator,” he said. “He’s catching up.”

Nell was transfixed by this, the intimacy, the ease of the transaction—much more so than she’d been during the technical parts of the press conference, when her mind had wandered: the topsoil talk had gotten her thinking again about how this was the farthest she’d ever been from an ocean in midsummer. She missed the smell of salt and suntan oil; she missed thinking about bathing suits and cover-ups, and seeing who was wearing what at Bridgehampton. A woman approached her. “Hello,” she said. “Caroline Adams from the R-W.”

“Hello,” said Nell, not introducing herself.

“You’re traveling with the senator?” the reporter asked, working at informality.

“Yes.” Even. Pleasant.

“Well, I was wondering if you’d be willing to let me interview you,” Caroline Adams said. She was a plain girl, badly dressed—a yellow blouse with a Peter Pan collar, battleship-blue-gray slacks. “Are you having fun?”

“Oh, yes,” Nell said. “But why would anything I’d have to say be noteworthy?”

“People in this state have been fascinated with Charlie Martin for a long time,” Adams said. “They’ve watched him grow up, they’ve been through a lot with him. They’re interested in who he’s dating.”

Hilton approached, nick of time. “Now, Caroline, you’re looking spiffy this fine Monday morning,” he said. “Where you been the last couple of weeks?”

“Oh, foolin’ around—Dutch festival up at Speights. Amazing, the artwork you can do with soybeans and corn kernels,” she said, with a grimace. “I was just asking Miss Palmerston if she’d be willing to have a cup of coffee or lunch with me. . . .”

“Well, you heard how the senator feels about his private life,” Hilton said, very friendly.

“But I don’t know how you feel,” she said to Nell.

Nell smiled benignly—a reaction she had inferred from Hilton.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Caroline said to her. “My editors think you’re a story.”

“I’m a person,” Nell said. “Not a story.”

“I mean,” Adams said, “you may want to get your side of the story out.”

“My side of the story?” Nell asked, trying to control her irritation: how could there be another side to the story?

“There’s no evil intent,” Adams said. “The society page runs profiles of wives and . . . friends of our elected officials all the time. By the way, I have one of your swimsuits.”

“Really?” Nell tried to imagine what sort of body this plain girl had; she seemed long-waisted. She was about to ask which suit, and where Adams had bought it—Nell didn’t think she had any outlets in Des Pointe—but she saw Hilton giving the “Don’t ask!” signal with his eyes.

“I got it in St. Louis.”

“Really?” She wondered which store.

“You’re very talented,” Adams said. “Do you design them yourself?”

“Thank you.” Nell was jogged back to reality by the compliment, and withdrew into blandness. “Yes I do, design them myself.”

Charlie was with them now. “Hi, Adams. Working the girlfriend angle?”

Caroline shrugged. “Your opponent is,” she said.

“Dating is an alternative lifestyle?” Charlie asked. Nell sensed Hilton’s concern: Charlie had made his statement, he shouldn’t push his luck. “Does that mean you have an alternative lifestyle, Adams?”

“Senator, we’d better—” Hilton tried.

“A reluctant alternative to marriage,” Adams said, with a smile. “Look, I’m sure most of the reporters here—and most of our editors—agree with you about this, but you have to help us out a little.”

“No, I don’t,” he said, glancing over at Nell.

“There are a lot of cluckers out there,” she said.

“I haven’t heard any. And I have to go now, Adams, and listen to the noncluckers’ problems, and see if we can do something about them,” he said. “We’ve got a Garden Club lunch in Otweegum, and then I’m gonna visit Sam Leason over at the Pike County Dispatch, and hit a few fire houses, and then wander east and do shift change at the Ford plant in Port Sallesby. Busy day, huh? You want to come along with us? Don’t have room in the van, but you can travel along behind.”

“Can I speak with Ms. Palmerston?”

“What does she say about that?” Charlie asked.

“She hasn’t said.”

“I’m sure you would be entirely fair,” Nell said. “But I don’t want a story written about me.”

“It’s going to be written,” Caroline Adams said. “The only question is whether you cooperate or not.”

“We have to go,” Hilton said.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Caroline Adams said.

“You had to invite her along?” Nell said, back in the van.

“She was coming anyway,” Charlie said. “What do you think, HD? Talk or balk?”

“Talk, I guess,” Hilton shrugged.

“Do I get a say in this?” Nell asked.

“You get ultimate say, my love,” Charlie said. “I just wanted you to hear Hilton on the subject, before you decide.”

“Why talk, Hilton?” she asked, disappointed: the Des Pointe Hilton was different from the Washington Hilton. He was distant, distracted: a working Hilton. She turned to Charlie: “I came out here to be with you. Not to be a public spectacle.”

“I am a public spectacle,” he said coolly. “It’s what I do. I’m sorry.” Nell wondered about the coolness. She wondered if he was still smarting from the rejection of his marriage proposal. On the other hand, living a life in which reporters were as common a presence as deliverymen was just the sort of thing she’d always tried to avoid; her parents had been far too public with their various and sundry debauches—and then there were her British cousins, who lived on the media equivalent of Devil’s Island.

“Nell,” Hilton said, “you say no, it becomes a Big Story. You say yes, you shmooze her a little, charm her, and you can draw the line on anything really personal. Most reporters aren’t killers. They’re embarrassed to ask the personal questions. They ask because they have to, and they’re relieved when you put up the stop sign. The biddies will read it in the lifestyle section, and they’ll say, Oh, she may be from New York, but she’s not so bad. End of story. Think of it as publicity for your company.”

“And you want me to do this?” she asked Charlie.

“I’ll go with whatever you decide,” he said. Clever. Charlie, good cop; Hilton, bad cop.

“I don’t know,” she said. “All right. But you be there with me,” she said to both of them.

“One other thing,” Hilton said. “We probably should stop by Oak Street and get you changed.”

“What’s wrong with this?” she flared. She was wearing a navy-blue sundress with a halter top and a very full skirt; it was modestly cut, but her shoulders were bare. “I was thinking Kim Novak in Picnic,” she said, plaintively but playfully, taking the edge off.

“Think Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz,” Hilton said. “Where there’s a women’s page reporter, a photographer is likely to follow. Do you have like a plain blue suit?”

“You want me to dress like him?” She nodded at Charlie. “And won’t Lois Lane notice that we stopped at Oak Street for me to change?”

“She may,” Hilton said. “She may even note it in the story. But you don’t want to be photographed sexy or fashion-forward. If you don’t want to be a story in this campaign, we’re gonna have to work at it.”

On Wednesday morning, after reading the Register-World—where the story had appeared on the front page, before jumping, improbably, to the lifestyle section—Nell had absolutely nothing to say.

“You want to talk about it?” Charlie asked.

“No,” she said. “Later.”

“It’s not so bad,” Hilton said.

It was excruciating.

THE SENATOR’S ROYAL CRUSH

By Caroline Adams, staff reporter

Senator Charles C. Martin has a new camp follower.

The 51-year-old bachelor, who has “squired” some of the world’s most glamorous women through the corridors of power, unveiled his latest conquest on the campaign trail this week: Arabella “Nell” Palmerston Belligio, a New York fashion designer-who is blond, 42 years old, a distant cousin of the British Royal Family and the divorced mother of two.

But the designer, a jet-setter who crafts expensive and revealing swimsuits, also seems to be specializing in a new line of cover-ups. When asked the nature of her relationship with the senator over coffee at Mae’s Café in Port Sallesby, she said: “I don’t like to talk about my private life.”

Her private life has been quite public since she arrived in Des Pointe last week, and took up residence in the senator’s Oak Street home. She has been out on the campaign trail with Senator Martin each day, a very striking fixture in the Martin entourage. “It’s been fun,” she said. “But I have to be careful. The food at all these barbecues and pancake breakfasts and broasted chicken dinners is so good that I’ll have to start dieting.”

Local political pros questioned Senator Martin’s decision to flaunt his very active social life during a difficult political campaign. “After what happened to him back in ’92,” said one distraught Democrat, “you’ve got to wonder if he has a death wish.”

Martin was accused of fondling a campaign worker in the waning days of his failed presidential campaign that year, an accusation he denied at the time. In the past, the once-divorced politico has squired country music diva Natalie Dilley, flame-haired movie star Susan Whitworth and local photojournalist Anne Hellstrom, among others.

Senator Martin refused to discuss his relationship with Mrs. Belligio. “I think she’s fabulous,” he said. “I’d hope the public would be more interested in how I’m going to represent them than in who I’m dating. I’ve built a record of service. The people of this state know I work overtime for them.”

But the senator’s social life may well become an issue in the coming campaign against colorful, conservative muffler magnate Leland Butler. “It’s arrogance on Martin’s part,” said a gleeful Republican. “He’s been in office for so long, he thinks he can get away with anything—but the public is getting a little tired of his parade of tootsies. . . .”

Mrs. Belligio, a shy and dignified woman, is the daughter of Nigel Palmerston—of the famed, eccentric Darbyshire family—and Susannah Coxley of South Carolina, heiress to the Coxley Power fortune.

And on, and on, and on. A jet-setter who “crafts” swimsuits? A country music diva? Flame-haired? God. The interview at Mae’s Café had gone well, she thought. The questions had been 97 percent pleasant. But none of the questions, or her answers, had made their way into the story, except the “I don’t like to talk about my private life” line, and that awful business about the food.

She stewed all day, angry at herself—and at Charlie, and at Hilton, for pushing her into the interview. And at herself, again: it would have been quite a different story if she had agreed to marry him, which was obviously what he’d been expecting. Then it would be “Bachelor Senator to Settle Down.” But she couldn’t do that. Not yet. She was frightened, suddenly, by how little she knew about him, about his life. She knew Charlie had gotten around—she remembered seeing a picture of him with the actress, Susan Whitworth, in Vogue or W (his eyes, she’d thought, even then, were far more interesting than Whitworth’s dress)—but she hadn’t known that he was famous for getting around, and the notion that she’d be seen as just the latest installment in a long line of “tootsies” was way beyond unimaginable.

“Why didn’t you help more?” she pleaded that night, back in his Oak Street bedroom, which was the Des Pointe version of a loft: a big room over the garage, separated from the rest of the house. It had campaign posters on the walls—for Kennedy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter . . . and in an unobtrusive corner, a red and black “Charlie Martin for Congress,” with a remarkable picture of him: long-haired in the seventies, smiling, sleeves rolled, shaking hands. “You’re a politician,” she said, trying to keep her eyes off the poster. “You must have seen it coming.”

“Some things are unavoidable,” he said, plopping down in his black leather reading chair, loosening his tie. His white shirt seemed excessively white. “You take the hit and move on. And I gotta tell you, this isn’t so bad.”

“It’s awful,” Nell said, thinking, he really doesn’t understand.

“She tried to be nice,” he said. “She called you ‘shy and dignified.’ ”

“She got that wrong, too,” Nell said. “I mean, what right does she have?—She doesn’t know anything about me.”

“Only the First Amendment,” Charlie said, leaning back. “Look, here’s how it works. She got those juicy blind quotes and had to go with them: the hot news in the story was the political gossip about me. That’s what put it on the front page. The Republican shot was to be expected, but I’d love to know who the ‘distraught Democrat’ was. I’ve got it narrowed down to about three—I’ll know next time I look them in the eye.”

“I don’t know,” she said, standing over him. He seemed more interested in figuring out who the “distraught Democrat” was than in talking to her.

“It’s newspaper stuff.” He looked up at her, furrowed his brow. “It’s bullshit. I know the folks out here. They like to know who I’m going out with. It’s a vicarious kick. But they don’t cast their votes on it. Muffler Boy doesn’t understand the difference between curiosity and prudery. They’re curious. They’re not prudes. They voted for Stanton, and he was messing around while married.”

“But you must have known this would happen,” she said, exasperated. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought,” he started, “you—”

“I would marry you?” she said. “A campaign ploy to end the Charlie Martin Tootsie Show?”

“Nell, for chrissakes,” he said, his eyes softening, saddening, looking up at her. “You know better than that.” And then his eyes hardened. “Anyway, why the fuck won’t you marry me? We both had to jump off a cliff to get here—”

“You make me do crazy things,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. It was a guy’s bed. It didn’t have a headboard. “This was a bad move, Chas. Bad timing. Premature.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he said. He sat beside her on the bed. He took her chin in his hand, kissed her gently. “It was time. Nell, you’ve gotta admit, we make a pretty okay team,” he said softly.

“But not as candidate and candidatrix,” she said, pulling away, standing up, clearing her head—the kiss had been spectacularly soft, not a guy kiss: it had been about essential things, not sex. How did he know to do that? Did it come from the same place as his politics? “I don’t like this public stuff.”

“What about the Future Farmers—”

“Oh, come on, Charlie: I’m not cut out for it,” she said, hands on hips. “That should be painfully obvious by now. I’ll embarrass you.”

“Never. You may drive me nuts, but you’ll never embarrass me,” he said, folding his hands between his knees, stretching and thinking, Well, maybe. It would be too easy for people to read her lack of interest in politics as disdain for it.

“Charlie,” she said slowly, tentatively, “is being a senator worth all this bother? I mean, what does it matter now anyway? What’s at stake? I’ve been here a week, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what this election is about. The farmers are so rich that half of them migrate to Florida for the winter. The air is clean, compared to New York. The topsoil may be eroding, but surely they can find someone else to deal with that. . . .”

“Look,” he said, raising his voice, standing up, taking her by the arms. “Stop. This is what I do. I’m a United States senator. End of topic.”

“Charlie,” she said, with a wistful smile. “I love you, but the unexamined life is not worth living with.”

“Whew,” he said, dropping back down into the armchair. “You don’t really think I haven’t thought about . . . You wouldn’t have come this far . . . and, by the way, I also do this because life won’t always be so good for the folks and I don’t trust a callow dilettante asshole jerk like Lee Butler to make the right decisions when things go bad.”

“I came this far because the guy I knew back East knew me,” she said sadly. She saw that she’d hurt him. “But you’re a different guy out here—not completely, but sort of . . . What on earth am I trying to say? I don’t even want to think about all those people who are going to be staring at me tomorrow, the way they did today. And I’m certainly not going to bring the kids into a situation like this—where their mother is a ‘story.’ Are they going to be ‘stories,’ too? No way. I’m out of here. . . .”

“No, you’re not,” he said, reaching out for her, but she pulled away. “You may think you are, but we’re in this—You ever see the movie with Walter Brennan, took place in the Everglades, and at one point he says to—I don’t even remember who the leading man was. But he says, ‘You’re stuck in Okefenokee for good, bub.’ ”

“Sorry, Charlie,” she said, moving to the closet, fishing for her suitcase. “I’m out of here.”

He followed her, took her by the waist, kissed the top of her shoulder and whispered, “No, you’re not. Even if you do walk out that door, you’ll be back. And if you don’t come back, I’ll go find you. I swear I will.”

“Oh, Charlie. Honestly.” She put down the suitcase, and turned to him. He was giving her the crinkly eye; she sighed. “Oh, for God’s sake—say something, so I can dispute it. . . .” But he didn’t say anything. He just looked at her—and she saw the same thing that Pat Dunn had seen: a once-in-a-lifetime look. “Oh, all right, I’ll . . .”

He kissed her then, before she had a chance to decide whether to say “marry you” or “stay.”

“What?” he asked. “You’ll what?”

“Stay, for a while.”