Cape Disappointment (6 page)

“I didn't say anything.”

“He must think I'm an idiot.”

“Stop worrying about what he thinks. And stop worrying about Deborah. I'm not the least bit interested in her. Or working for Maddox full-time. I'm interested in you only. Besides, I could never meet Deborah's qualifications. She goes after guys who own banks, not guys who can't get loans from them.”

“You might not have money, but judging by the way I've seen her sizing you up, you have everything else.”

I must have given Kathy an “I do?” look, because she added, “Put your tongue back in your mouth.”

“Why? Was I attracting flies?”

“No more than your normal number.”

IT HAD BEEN
a tough autumn for Kathy and me, each of us putting in twelve-and fourteen-hour days. Lately we could count the waking hours we spent together on the fingers of one hand. I'd been put on the Maddox payroll and thus was able to drop most of my other work until after the election, whereas Kathy was volunteering and trying to keep up with her law practice as well. The Sheffield folks had offered to put her on salary until the election, but out of some misplaced sense of vol-unteerism, she refused, which only increased her resentment over the fact that I'd accepted wampum. “Resentment is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies,” I said.

“Yeah, well, consider it swallowed.”

“Kathy …”

“You're working against your own best interests. Everything he stands for means less for the little guy. And in case you haven't noticed, you're one of the little guys.”

I couldn't have been less of a political thinker, and on a list of priorities, I generally relegated politics right below cleaning the lint out of my underwear drawer. I left the group think projects to people who didn't wither from boredom in meetings the way I did. “I'm just working off a personal debt.”

“Wrong way to do it.”

Jane Sheffield was a two-term incumbent senator with a solid record
of championing progressive causes, a woman who'd gotten big business angry with her so many times that last spring the CEO of one of the country's largest oil companies publicly denounced her as the biggest traitor to this country since Ethel Rosenberg. As fatuous as it was, the accusation continued to garner news coverage, mostly in the national media, while the local media, as well as the local populace, supported Sheffield in the way they supported the local ball teams. She was one of us. She spoke for us. We loved her.

Sheffield began her working life as a grade school teacher. From there she moved on to become a high school Spanish teacher, librarian, principal, councilperson for the city of Tacoma, representative in the Washington State legislature, and currently U.S. senator. For weeks she had been running fifteen and twenty points ahead of Mad-dox in the polls in her reelection campaign.

James Maddox started out as a police officer on the streets of Seattle before working his way up to a deputy chief, and later the appointed head of the Washington State Patrol. After several years of running that agency, he entered politics and ran for congressman, serving two terms in D.C.

There were multiple differences between the candidates, but if I had to put it in a nutshell, I would say Maddox stood for economic growth and corporate freedom while Sheffield worked indefatigably for ordinary citizens. Maddox had big money backing him, as opposed to the thousands of small contributors who supported Sheffield. If prompted, Kathy would lay out a more elaborate catalog of differences, emphasizing Sheffield's championing of veterans' rights and the working and nonworking poor, as well as health care for all. She would contrast that with Maddox's emphasis on smaller government and lower taxes at the expense of social services.

It was interesting to watch the two candidates work the room: Maddox, silver-haired, immaculately coifed and dressed, shaking hands, making small talk, and patting people on the back. On the other side of the room, the much shorter Sheffield kept vanishing into the crowd like a swimmer disappearing in the whitecaps. She was her normal serious self, her gray mop of hair flopping as she spoke. Even in social settings she refused to relax for a minute and talked constantly about the issues the country was facing. Maddox avoided shoptalk when he
worked crowds, but that was all Sheffield did. She'd been known to pull out her cellphone and call a federal department to rectify an injustice moments after somebody brought it to her attention. Some said about Maddox that you didn't have to worry about getting stabbed in the back, because he would gladly stab you in the chest. Others called him forthright.

Ten minutes later I was alone when a man in a white tuxedo approached: Kalpesh Gupta, a second-generation American of East Indian extraction who worked with Kathy on the Sheffield campaign. He was a remarkably handsome man, his dark skin set off by his flashing teeth, white tux, and regal blue bow tie. I shook his hand, remembering he liked to squeeze hard on the off chance that I might have a broken bone. I'd been caught off guard at previous meetings, but tonight I gave back more than I got and was pleased to see him wince.

“Hey, Thomas,” Kalpesh said. “Kathy around?”

“She's here somewhere.”

“I was just with Jane. She's not over there.”

“I'm supposed to meet her at the south exit in two hours. I'm headed there now. You're welcome to wait with me.”

Kalpesh knew I was joking and gave me an impish look. Kalpesh liked a good joke, or better yet, a bad one, and almost always recognized when I was joshing. There were already too many people who failed to discern what Kathy called my “dry wit.” I'd learned a long time ago that when somebody said you had a dry wit, it meant they didn't think you were funny, and anyway I'm pretty sure Kathy actually meant “juvenile humor” and was trying to be kind. “Is that what you're doing? Waiting until it's time to go?”

“Yeah.”

“You two just get here?” he asked.

“Basically. You?”

“I came early with Jane and some others. She wanted to have a chat with the governor before everything got rolling.” It was hard to know if he'd thrown the tidbit about the governor out as some sort of bait that I would take back to the wolf den to poison the rest of the pups with. Since Jane Sheffield and the governor were both Democrats, the alliance was natural. But it would not please Maddox to think that the governor was
conspiring with his opponent. Surely, Kalpesh knew I would spread the news. “Lotta beautiful women here tonight,” he added.

“I've just seen the one.”

“Kathy?”

“Right.”

“You are a good husband. I'll have to take notes for when I get married.”

“Like you need any help with women.”

“I wonder what the governor is going to do with all the money she'll have after the wedding.”

“They probably have a pre-nup.”

“I heard they don't. Makes you wonder what it would be like to all of a sudden be worth a couple of billion dollars, doesn't it? You think he'd be interested in her if she wasn't the governor?”

“I don't know. You think she'd be interested in him if he wasn't worth a couple of billion?”

Kalpesh was too handsome, especially considering he worked so closely with my wife, but I couldn't help liking him. He did all the man-boy things that I did: watched old cowboy movies, told fart jokes, participated in endurance sports with varying degrees of success— triathlons in his case, having been a distance runner in college and a cyclist more recently. We kept talking about doing a bicycle ride together, but I noticed we both talked about it as if it was never going to happen. The only things I didn't like about him were the foul-smelling cigars he sometimes smoked and the fact that his name came up a little too frequently at home.

Kalpesh was single and had courted dozens of beautiful women over the years, breaking hearts wherever he went. He'd graduated from Harvard and, for the past five years, worked in Washington, D.C. Before that he'd traveled to South America and later toured Africa. He'd lived in Europe and spent a year in Asia. He spoke four languages and could get by in three others. Me? I spoke bad high school Spanish and didn't own a passport, but on the plus side, I could spit a cherry pit over twenty feet.

Before we could work ourselves into more manly discourse, we were joined by Deborah Driscoll. I noticed a blue-green jewel on a pendant
that I hadn't seen before, bobbing in and out of her plunging neckline, as if to entice me to look in there. I resisted the best I could.

Deborah and Kalpesh had a routine and they fell into it immediately, she greeting him in French and he returning the greeting, both aware the exchange was completely incomprehensible to me. They laughed and flirted, and for a few moments it was as if I wasn't there. I made a move to slip away, but without taking her eyes off Kalpesh, Deborah took hold of my sleeve, saying, “Now, don't you be going anywhere, smarty pants. I want to talk to you.” Then she addressed Kalpesh: “Why don't you come over and work for us? I don't know why you want to work for that BHL.” Kalpesh laughed.

BHL meant “bleeding heart liberal,” and was a phrase Maddox and his staff used every day. It irked me for many reasons, not the least of which was that the label applied to me and it certainly applied to Kathy. Deborah Driscoll asking Kalpesh Gupta to switch sides was funny to all three of us. In the latest ABC poll Maddox trailed Sheffield by nineteen and a half points, so switching to the losing side at this juncture would have been just short of political suicide. Unless something very odd took place in the interim, in five weeks Sheffield was going to annihilate Maddox in voting booths across this state, which was precisely what everybody had been predicting since before he filed. It was one of the reasons I'd felt safe in taking the job. Had joining the Maddox campaign been the tipping point, I would have thought long and hard about it, but I wasn't going to tip anything. Maddox was running a doomed campaign. Asking Kalpesh to switch sides was like asking General Grant to join the Confederacy during the final days of the Civil War.

“You people never give up, do you?” Kalpesh said, smiling at Deborah before turning to me for the first time since she popped out of the crowd. When she looked at me as well, I caught him taking advantage of her inattention to take a gander at her chest.

“I'm serious,” Deborah said, pressing her point with Kalpesh. “If you come over now and we win, it'll look like a stroke of genius. Wait until after we've won and you'll just be another jobless politico looking for work.”

“This all presupposes you people are going to win. You are
not
going to win.”

“Nobody has counted a ballot yet, have they, Thomas?”

“The counting doesn't start until later,” I conceded.

“In the unlikely event we lose, you can go back to Sheffield with some sob story and get your old job back.”

“Jane asks for many things, but most of all she asks for loyalty. I assure you I would not get my old job back.”

“Listen to you,” said Deborah, “talking about getting your job back. You've already crossed out of the I-would-never-do-it category into the how-will-we-work-it category. Now you're talking tactics. You want to do it or you wouldn't be talking tactics.”

“I am sorry,” Kalpesh said. “But Maddox represents everything my convictions say is wrong with modern politics. Jane Sheffield represents everything right about them.”

“Oh, come on now,” Deborah said. “Nobody in this business could possibly be that idealistic.”

“I am,” Kalpesh said.

“I'm serious about the offer,” Deborah said as he walked away. Turning to me, she smoothed one of my lapels with her palm and said, “He'd be great in our office.”

“Sure, but he's not going to jump ship.”

“Care to bet on it?”

I stood back and looked into Deborah's eyes. “You think you can accomplish anything, don't you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You really think Maddox is going to win?”

“You know I think he's going to win.”

“But we're losing.”

“Only if we think like losers.”

“I'm glad you and Maddox are so confident. I'm not, but then I don't count much in the grand scheme of things.”

“
Au contraire,
Thomas. You bring a refreshing voice to our discussions. We enjoy your take on things. But elections can turn on a dime. And one never knows when that dime is going to drop.”

For weeks I'd had the feeling Deborah and Maddox and maybe one or two others knew something I didn't: that Jane Sheffield had had a torrid affair and it would be exposed, or they had film of her shoplifting skin-care products from Nordstrom. Whenever I asked Maddox, he
denied it. “Sure, we're confident,” he said. “But it's about winning. Winners never let their guard down. You can learn from this, Thomas.”

“What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked Deborah.

“I meant to catch you during the week, but we've all been busy. You worked with Maddox years ago in the Seattle Police Department. The thing is, we've been trying to get an endorsement from anybody in the department but so far haven't had any luck. He
was
popular as a policeman, wasn't he?”