Tracy Breaux was pouting. Joe T. Evangeline knew this, even though her back was turned to him.
Pouts were interesting on the faces of those models in Victoria's Secret catalogs that Joe. T. sometimes perused. Alas, this wasn't some scene from a catalog. He and Tracy had just made love on the couch in the governor's office.
Well, they'd had sex and, the governor had to admit, not very good sex. And mostly, he had to admit, this was his fault. Well, mostly entirely.
Tracy was young, pretty, bubbly, long-legged, modestly intelligent, and extremely accommodating in bed. She would do pretty much everything the governor asked—not that the governor asked for anything much out of the ordinary.
Anyway, the governor couldn't figure out what was wrong with this picture, but something was most definitely wrong. Tracy just didn't stir him up the way she was supposed to. This fling had turned into a mess, and here was the worst thing: Joe T. wasn't even certain why it was a mess. A couple of years ago he wouldn't have felt this way.
Tracy Breaux was twenty-two years his junior, which made her twenty five years old. The governor had put on a full-court press to get Tracy, his executive administrative assistant, to sleep with him. She had, and at the instant she had, Joe T. had regretted it.
This hadn't stopped him from sleeping with her several more times, with diminishing ardor, over the past several weeks, regretting it every time. On one level, the governor recognized that he was playing a game of chicken with himself. Perhaps if he could just bound through one of these episodes of sexual gymnastics with his eyes closed, he'd vault out the end with no regret at all.
It hadn't worked.
Each time, he had more regret. And of course, as his ardor diminished, Tracy's had increased. It was possible now that she was in love with him.
In his day, Joe T. had slept with a fair number of executive administrative assistants or their equivalents, and most of them had gone along with the game. He was, after all, the good-looking, charming, powerful, witty, articulate, extremely masculine governor of Louisiana. They (or at least Joe T. told himself) were upwardly nubile young women looking for thrills, adventure, promotions, and recommendations (the latter of which he was always happy to provide. Always!).
Here was the twisted thing: while his wife was alive, Joe T. had loved this game. Loved it! But Gloria had died two years ago of breast cancer, and though he absolutely knew what a rotten, largely inattentive husband he had been, a husband who had chronically toyed with the idea of divorcing his wife, he hadn't divorced her.
No, no. She'd left him permanently, without much warning, with no confrontation, with no—what was that facile cliché?—closure. And though a man who had chronically been thinking about divorcing his wife might have taken some secret relief in his wife's death, her death actually had slammed him like an out-of-control eighteen-wheeler on a foggy highway.
He'd loved her; he had just forgotten why, and how much.
He hadn't admitted to himself how much Gloria knew about his philandering. He now realized, from a long, long chat with Gloria's best friend a few months after she'd died, that Gloria knew it all. Yet, even knowing it all, she had still loved him.
Everything was wrong now, turned upside down.
Joe T. now hated Gloria for dying. Just hated her. He hated her generosity; he hated her indulgent and forgiving heart.
Of course, these were ludicrous feelings. He would look at himself in a mirror most mornings and laugh uproariously at this parody of a midlife crisis he was having.
Shake it off, Joe T.! What the hell's wrong with you? You're perhaps the most eligible widower in America, and at least seventy-three percent of all the women in Louisiana want to sleep with you! Go buy a friggin’ Harley or a Corvette and get on with it!
But back to the mess. Well, one of the messes. (The Guv had another mess, even bigger than this one, but he could only contemplate one mess at a time.)
Now, Joe T., a shrewd political operative if there ever was one, recognized that there was at least a small prospect of scandal associated with his fling with Tracy Breaux. She could rat him out in public as a cruel seducer of young women, and there was the small matter that Tracy was the niece of one of Joe T.'s oldest friends and political allies, Henry “Push Broom” Breaux from Ville Dularge.
But Joe T. knew Tracy wasn't going to rat him out. No way. See, again, she probably loved him.
No, what actually bothered Joe T. about all this was how …how … how … guilty he felt. Guilty!
Oh, Tracy was young and beautiful and resilient. She'd get over this. But Joseph Theophile Evangeline was for the very first time in his mostly charmed life contemplating the reality of someone else's heartbreak because he was—for the first time in his mostly charmed life—contemplating unresolved grief of his own. And, boy, was it awful.
Of course, he'd played the grieving widower when Gloria died. He'd milked it; he'd reveled in the enormous outpouring of sympathy—most of it real, a lot of it political baloney—after her death. He'd bought into all that dime-store-novel, Hollywood-movie business about grief-stricken people passing through their grief into redeeming and happy endings.
But about the time Joe figured he was supposed to move on he felt worse than ever. Not that he let on, of course. Joe T. had an image to live up to. He was a bon vivant; he was the king of the bon mot; he was a world-class quipster with the razor-sharp answers that raked his opponents (and sometimes the press) like shrapnel.
But a year beyond Gloria's death, Joe didn't like his character anymore. He didn't like playing the grieving widower because he had become the grieving widower. There was unfinished business with Gloria, but Gloria wasn't around to finish it with him.
Of late, he had been reminded why he fell in love with Gloria in the first place: not because she was the most beautiful or sexiest woman he'd ever known, because Joe T., well, had known some stunning women. No, it was because she got him, understood him, understood what moved him and what motivated him and what he was afraid of. He and Gloria used to look out on the horizon and see the same things. Oh, and by the way, at one point—well, at more than one point—they'd had a very, very nice sex life.
So why, over some dozen lost years that their marriage had wandered south, a fog-shrouded period Joe was now having a hard time reconstructing, had he forgotten all that?
Joe T. was jolted back into the real world when Tracy, having finished dressing, turned to him. She wasn't just pouting. She was crying. “What's happening with us, Joe? What are we doing?”
The Guv, for about a delirious second, was on the verge of telling her. Confessing! Confessing it all!
Tracy, I'm sorry. This is a big mistake. I'm a fucked-up middle-aged man having a crisis. I'm medicating myself with you! Go, Tracy! Go very far away from me!
But instead, the governor walked forward, put his arms around Tracy, gave her a hug. “Darlin,” he said, “it's okay. I'm just distracted. Listen, why don't you take the rest of the day off—go to the mall, go to the movies, go see your friends. I'll call you tonight and we'll talk things over. We could even go to dinner at Mulatte's. I know you love that place.” He would normally have ended such a routine by kissing Tracy passionately. But he just couldn't manage it. The best he could do was to take her hand and guide her to the door.
But she pulled away and said, “Joe, don't. It's okay. I get it. I'm not stupid. Whatever it is we—well, you—felt when we first met, it's just not there anymore. I haven't changed, Joe. You have.”
Joe T. looked down, shook his head, rubbed his eyes. This would be another good moment to lay it all out, but he tried one more dodge. “Tracy,” he said, “you're overreacting. Nothing's wrong. It's just some funk I'm in. I've got appointments waiting out there in the hall. I've—”
Tracy put up a hand. “Don't try to explain. It's best that I go. If you want to call tonight, fine. But I can't promise I'll be answering the phone.” The tone of her voice wavered somewhere between defiance and resignation.
Well, at least she didn't throw a tantrum. And it had presented Joe with a opening—if he still wanted an opening. He could actually call her tonight.
Tracy turned to walk toward the door.
That's when Joe remembered she'd brought lunch—two shrimp po'boys from the Shrimp Shack, his favorite place, just six blocks from the capitol, and two cold cans of Dixie beer.
“Tracy, don't you want to take your sandwich?” the governor said, mustering his kindest voice.
Tracy didn't even turn around but answered, “No, Joe. I'm not hungry anymore.”
The heavy oaken door to Joe T.'s office opened, and he heard the diminishing clicks of Tracy's high heels on the hard marble floor.
The governor felt suddenly exhausted.
He walked to his desk, swiping up Tracy's lunch bag as he sat down. He opened the bag and the seductive smell of a shrimp po'boy, slathered with mayonnaise and hot sauce and topped with lettuce, tomatoes, and dill pickles, filled his nose. This cheered the governor slightly. He closed his eyes, realizing that savoring the po'boy and beer might be his one pleasurable moment of the day.
He'd already gotten a partial schedule from Minna Cancienne, the tall, prim woman who sat, regal and watchful as a marsh hawk, in his waiting room. In between hectoring the governor over his fling with Tracy Breaux and commiserating with him at the same time, Minna kept his schedule and shielded him from people he didn't want to see or talk to. (Which, if things went way south, could also include Tracy Breaux.) He knew he would be stuck in at least three boring, stressful, or contentious meetings most of the afternoon, the most notable with the vexatious Julie Galjour, the vexatious general counsel for the vexatious Department of Environmental Conservation.
The DEC was busting the Guv's chops, trying to get him to throw the state's weight against this oversized drainage ditch the Corps of Engineers was proposing to dig down in Chacahoula Parish. The governor prided himself on being a quick study, and he'd actually read all the position papers on the matter. He had an opinion, of course, and it wasn't actually all that different from Julie Galjour's, except that, well, the matter was complicated in ways that Julie Galjour would never be able to understand. But the political bottom line was that it just wouldn't be helpful at the moment for the state to officially oppose the project.
Joe T.'s reticence was actually tied up with the bigger mess that his life had become, a mess of considerable proportions that was spreading, unchecked it seemed to the governor, like ravenous fleas on a chained-up dog.
And then, there was Julie Galjour herself. Julie Galjour, the Guv knew, was thirty-two years old, single, a Louisiana native from a speck on the map in deep bayou country. Her parents had a small sugarcane farm, and she had six siblings. She'd parlayed her hard work and extreme intelligence into a full scholarship to Harvard, where she'd studied the great books and history. She'd come back to Louisiana to enroll at the LSU law school because she wanted to practice here, and LSU taught the Napoleonic Code, under which the state's bar operated.
The real problem with Julie Galjour was that she was so distressingly articulate, so distressingly determined, so distressingly passionate, so distressingly prepared, and yet—yet!—so clearly in love with her home state and so clearly the unaffected Cajun girl she had always been that she totally disarmed everybody she met.
No fair!
Joe T. could deal with backstabbers, sycophants, and assorted assiduous tongue-thrusters, with ingrates, moralizers, hacks, hucksters, crooks, and obsequiously loathsome and ambitious assholes—like that oil blowhard Tom Huff down in Chacahoula Parish, for example. He dealt with these people every day. But he couldn't deal with Julie Galjour because she made him feel … cynical.
She reminded him of what he wasn't.
Christ, she was still an idealist! At thirty-two years old!
Actually, there was another issue, which was that while Julie Galjour was not what a man like the Guv would call drop-dead beautiful, she was singularly interesting to look at: tall and just a bit gangly, with piercing blue-gray eyes, a mass of black, wavy hair down to her shoulders, a face that was, like her body, maybe(?) too long and thin. But if this was an actual flaw (the Guv was undecided), it was a flaw that disappeared the moment Julie Galjour flashed her smile.
Beyond that, you only had to look once at Julie Galjour to understand that there wasn't a mean bone in her body, nor a foolish one. Hers wasn't a cocky self-confidence; it was guileless, the opposite of the Guv's self-confidence. Which caused Joe T., when he was around Julie Galjour, to feel, uh, somewhat less confident than usual, as though her self-confidence was somehow superior to his.
The other issue with Julie Galjour was that she absolutely, positively declined to flirt with the governor or even flirt back when he tried to flirt with her. Of course, he had to admit how clumsy his flirtations had seemed, even to him—odd because the Guv, everybody knew, was a world-class flirter. He was grappling with some sense that Julie Galjour was, in some way that he just couldn't put his finger on, above flirting!
Okay, here was the other thing: Julie Galjour reminded the Guv vaguely of Gloria, his late wife. Well, maybe a little more than vaguely.
This was a place Joe dared not even visit.
Anyway, Joe T. this very afternoon faced an hour in a small room with Julie Galjour and her brimming idealism and her implacable determination. The killer was that, but for the mess, Joe T. could see himself (with clever calculation, of course) slowly sliding over to her side of the issue, thereby winning at least her admiration and respect and—what the hell?—perhaps something more.
But what was it that Joe wanted to win?
Another romp in the hay?
Well, yes, sure, probably. But was that what he needed?
It was beginning to dawn on the governor that he needed another romp in the hay like the saltwater marsh needed another mosquito. But if not that—and Joe was still on the verge of pronouncing his own inner thoughts totally and utterly preposterous—then what?
And anyway, what the hell! On this shipping-channel business, he had history on his side. Historically, going back to the end of the Great Depression, the state, no matter who was guv, pretty much ran itself as an adjunct of the oil companies, happy to grease the skids for permits to do all manner of things—the dredging, consequences be damned, of literally thousands of miles of canals through the state's estuary to float in all manner of drilling equipment was one example. The trade-off, or so state officials told themselves, was the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and the tens of thousands of jobs the industry had provided over the years.
The oil industry had almost single-handedly pulled Cajun Louisiana out of its scenic poverty and into the modern century. The downside to this had been debated with increasing frequency and sometimes rancor over the past decade or two—the fight over the Chacahoula Parish shipping channel was the latest example. But it would hardly be shocking if the governor, in a dustup over a federally sponsored canal where both sides seemed to present credible science, would ultimately decide that such a project was beneficial for the state's economy.
Joe T. stilled these thoughts long enough to take a bite of po'boy and a sip of Dixie. His bliss was interrupted by the obnoxious buzz of his intercom and the insistent voice of Minna Cancienne.
“Your lunch date seems to have left the building, Governor. You may want to use that as an opportunity to bone up for your meeting with Ms. Galjour this afternoon. We understand she's a tiger.”
The Guv sometimes didn't know what to make of Minna's admonitions. “Thanks for all that, Minna, but I think I'm quite ready for Ms. Galjour. And I'm a tiger tamer, remember?”
“I guess we'll find out,” Minna replied.