What are we talking about in 2009? Bernie Madoff; US Airways Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson River; Springsteen Super Bowl; Somalian pirates; the Nook; Michael Jackson; Sonia Sotomayor; Twitter; barre class; Ted Kennedy; Dunder Mifflin; Tiger Woods; al-Qaeda; The Hangover; “Boom Boom Pow.”
The older Jake gets, the more he realizes that very few situations are purely good or purely bad. Ursula wins her Senate seat, which initially seems purely good. She has launched herself onto an even larger platform, and she secures a coveted spot on the Judiciary Committee. She’s only forty-three years old; her future is bright.
There’s a victory party in Washington held at the Willard Hotel, and all of the donors who gave above a certain level have been invited. Bess has been spared—she’s back at the condo with Prue—but Jake has to stand by his wife and thank every single person who comes through the line. Only about half of these people are from Indiana. The other half are Washington establishment and political operatives, people who use their money to buy influence.
A big man in a double-breasted blazer comes through the line and Ursula murmurs, “Bayer Burkhart, the guy from Newport, and his wife, Dee Dee, in the pink. They’re friends with Vince and Caroline Stengel, remember?”
Jake remembers Newport, the invitation that he declined because it was on Labor Day weekend, yes, but the who-knows-who-from-where has been lost. Obviously Jake knows Vince Stengel, the Rhode Island senator, but has he ever met the wife? He can’t remember. His brain has short-circuited when it comes to meeting people. He knows everybody he needs to know, and even that number can be whittled down to double digits. Low double digits.
Still, Jake plays along. “Hello there, Mr. Burkhart.” He shakes the guy’s huge, powerful hand. “I’m Jake McCloud.”
Bayer tilts his head like he has a crick in his neck. “Jake McCloud. I told your wife this already, but I feel like I’ve met you somewhere. Years ago. Your name is familiar. I’ll figure it out at some point.”
Jake has never seen this guy before in his life. He laughs. “All right, Mr. Burkhart. Thank you for your support.”
Bayer Burkhart holds on to Jake’s hand an instant longer than is socially acceptable—Jake has at least developed an instinct for this much—and he’s still looking at Jake strangely. He thinks he knows him from somewhere. Everyone wants a personal connection, Jake gets it, but come on. He extracts his hand.
A little while later, there’s a familiar face in the line that Jake hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s Cody Mattis, the guy who tried to get Jake a lobbying job with the NRA. Cody has risen in the ranks there. Now he’s the number-two or number-three guy.
But what is he doing here? “What is Cody Mattis doing here?” Jake asks Ursula. His voice is low but she can probably sense his concern. “You didn’t…Ursula, you didn’t take money from the NRA, did you?” If Cody Mattis is here, then the answer is yes. Even if Ursula didn’t accept money directly from the NRA, she took it from a dark-money source in bed with the NRA. For all Jake knows, Bayer Burkhart is the dark money.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Ursula says.
“Later” is midnight in the condo. Bess is asleep; Prue has gone home after a long day. Jake goes into the dark bedroom, where Ursula is pretending to be asleep.
“Your campaign accepted money from the NRA?” he says.
“Don’t sound so self-righteous,” she says. “You were the one who lined up an interview to work for them.”
“That was ten years ago, Ursula. And I canceled it.”
“Because I told you to,” Ursula says.
“No, because you told me about the shooting in Mulligan, and, using my own moral compass, I decided I didn’t want anything to do with the gun lobby.”
“You’re sounding pretty sanctimonious,” Ursula says.
“How much did you take from them?”
“Seven hundred,” she says, then she clears her throat. “Seven fifty.”
Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. “What did you have to promise them in exchange for that money, Ursula?”
She sighs. “You and I both know that Indiana is a pioneer state. Hoosiers like their rifles. All I promised was that I wouldn’t vote to take them away or make them any harder to get.”
“Rifles meaning AR-15s.”
“Rifles meaning for hunting, Jake,” Ursula says. “Turkey, quail, rabbit, deer…”
“Return it. Return the money.”
“I can’t,” Ursula says. “They gave it to me, I spent it, I won. I can’t just return it like a sweater I’ve decided I don’t like.”
Jake swallows. He has been with Ursula for nearly thirty years and he would have said he knew everything about her. But it turns out he doesn’t know her at all.
“That Mulligan shooting,” Jake says. “The kid, a seventeen-year-old, Ursula, bought the gun at Walmart and no one asked him for ID. Gun laws need to be tightened, not kept the same, and certainly not loosened.”
“Can we just go to bed?” she says.
“Return the money,” he says. “Or I’m leaving.”
Ursula laughs indulgently, like he’s a little kid holding his breath. “Okay.”
Jake sleeps in his study. He thinks about the media circus that will take place if he leaves Senator Ursula de Gournsey over a policy decision. They made a pact back when Ursula first ran for Congress that they would not bring politics into their home. They weren’t going to agree on everything; that was a given. Politics covers such a vast spectrum of issues that it’s unlikely any two Americans hold the exact same views; each person’s political DNA is unique, like biological DNA. Jake thinks gun control is a big deal that will keep getting bigger until some laws are passed. It’s feasible that, ten years from now, there will be mass shootings like the one in Mulligan happening every week.
Ursula disagrees—maybe. Maybe she is siding with her constituents who hunt. Or maybe she is so blindly ambitious that she takes any cash she can get.
Will Jake leave her?
No.
But he wants to.