Light drained from the sky and settled along the land, bringing a harsh chill. Cece buttoned up her marigold yellow sweater and threw on a down vest.
Most of the other reporters had gone home for the night, packing up the vans and rumbling back toward town. But Caroline stayed. You never knew what could happen at night.
It was a captivating story: the governor of Oklahoma had disappeared. He’d been gone for three days and his wife and aides hoped he was hiking in the Rockies–something he’d apparently done a lot of before. But it was clear they didn’t actually know where he was.
Such an important man. Vanished. Oddly, though she was staked outside the governor’s mansion waiting for a worried family member to emerge and give a statement, she felt pity for Fred Montgomery, the governor himself. What could be so bad, when you were a healthy man like that? Or what…what could be so good?
*
Belinda saw the tulips as hands, each petal a finger, that could hold a small glass sphere, an ice cube, a Robin’s egg. She’d watched, over the last few days, as the petals dropped one by one, falling to the striped damask tablecloth. And, in her mind, the sphere shattered, the ice cube melted, the egg cracked.
Fred had given her those purple tulips last Thursday, on the anniversary of their first date, an occasion she’d always demanded he recognize. She wasn’t sure why. Wasn’t a wedding anniversary enough for one man to remember? One man who wasn’t romantically inclined as it was. Or so she thought.
The emails she’d discovered had proven differently, had portrayed a man she’d only barely glimpsed 13 years before. He’d taken her for rides in his beat up Chevy Nova, had occasionally presented her with a handful of roadside flowers and had even, the summer they’d spent apart while she interned at Smith Barney and he was a page on the Senate floor, written her a few letters. His missives had been stilted (back then, he hadn’t grasped the concept of contracting two words), but sweet and earnest.
Still, he’d never sent her anything like those emails to Dezi.
Dezi.
The name pulled over her tongue like rancid orange juice and squeezed through her teeth. Such an abrasive name. Dezi.
And the words her husband had attached to that name. Soulmate (as if there were any such thing). Connection. From the first moment. Her stomach roiled just thinking of those phrases he’d given her. All saved in a Word document called “D”.
Belinda didn’t gather the petals as they dropped, but let them lie in rubbery curls. She didn’t take dinner at the table anyway. Not lately. She’d eat a quick hard-boiled egg over the sink or a granola bar in the back of the Towncar.
It was one of Fred’s staffers, Bernie Zusak, a man Belinda had always liked, who delivered the news on Sunday, while Belinda rode to a women’s luncheon to be held in the town library’s atrium. “Fred’s not hiking Flattop,” Bernie said. “Or Mount Richtofen either. As we’d hoped.”
Belinda’s first thought was that they’d found him dead somewhere–-his Saab lying upside down over the edge of an embankment, or a fatal gunshot wound through his flat abdomen, his body rotting in a weedy lot behind a gas station. He did, certainly, have his detractors.
She gripped her cell phone hard. “What?” she’d said that one word, severing the sunny afternoon into a distinct before and after. She’d been reading a book in the back of the car when he called. A good book she’d been sorry to put down. Not that she wasn’t wondering, every second, where Fred was. But this novel, about a cranky old woman and the small town that revolved around her, had been an escape.
“He’s in Brazil,” Bernie said.
Her stomach fell. Her brain turned to thick sludge and she couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. Brazil? But he’d just been there last month on state business. Why had he gone back? And why hadn’t he told anyone? He’d been scheduled, that week, to be here, in the mansion with Belinda and the girls.
Shortly after the luncheon was over and she was home, she’d logged into Fred’s email accounts, his ok.gov, and both his personal addresses. She knew the passwords of course: Achieve. Achieve1. Achieve2. He believed in quotes, and his favorite was “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Robert F. Kennedy.
When they'd just started dating and Belinda had first seen the room he rented in a downtown Arlington house, she’d been surprised. Not by the lack of remotely tasteful décor-–he was a man in his twenties, after all-–but by the excessively tacky computer printouts pinned to his white walls. Ugly, thin paper with dot matrix quotes etched across them saying things like “Self-trust is the first secret of success” and “Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can”.
A little grandiose, she’d thought. But ambitious. Maybe for Christmas she’d have a few of his quotes printed in letterpress and framed. Something masculine, dark wood or black metal.
Back to the tulips. She'd let Doris, the housekeeper deal with them. Dump them into the compost.
On second thought, Belinda wanted the satisfaction herself. She yanked them from their crystal vase and carried all twenty-four flowers, stems dripping, petals falling, to the stainless steel bucket on the counter. She pushed them into the banana peels and coffee grounds so vehemently that eggshells scraped her knuckles and the heel of her hand squished into decaying food. She didn’t care. She crammed them down harder until the steel bin was bashing the granite countertop. She heard herself grunt. She didn’t care about that either. She pushed and slammed until compost littered the kitchen and the bin spun on its side in the middle of the floor.
“Well, then,” she said. She washed her hands and went to her bedroom to change her clothes.
*
He called at two o’clock in the morning which, even if they were in the same time zone, wasn’t that unusual. Fred only needed three or four hours of sleep a night and had always kept crazy hours. He was too focused or too inconsiderate to not pick up the phone the moment the thought to do so. This time, though, he didn’t sound revved up or bursting with ideas. He sounded tired. “Belly,” he said.
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “Not now.” She pulled herself half upright and clicked on her bedside lamp. Her heart tripped all over itself, like a thirteen-year-old boy trying to two-step.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what? Carrying on with this Dezi woman? Betraying me and the girls and the whole state of Oklahoma who, by the way, assumed the worst for the past three days? For letting me think you were dead?”
“I just…needed some time.”
She was furious now and she couldn’t restrain her anger. “So you gave yourself permission to fly down to Brazil, lie to your family and your cabinet and your constituents, and have sex with some puta so you could clear your mind?”
“She’s a respectable woman, Belinda. You don’t even know her,” Fred said, his voice cracking ever so slightly.
“And neither should you.”
A silence descended between them, crashing down like a dropped piano. It sat there, hulking, impassable. Until finally… “I’m powerless,” Fred said. “I can’t explain it. Least of all to you, but, I couldn’t not come.”
Belinda considered pressing the hang up button. She laid her head back onto the pillow. She could smell peanut butter from the still open jar sitting on the nightstand. A thoroughly licked spoon laid there too and it repulsed her. When had she gone from preparing Pork Bolognese and Chicken Marsala to eating like a college student? “Well, you’re a weaker man than I thought you were,” she said. Her nose stung and tears gathered behind her eyes. She couldn’t cry. Not while on the phone with him.
“I take full responsibility for that. It’s true.” She could almost see his chin ticking upward as he spoke, convincing himself that still possessed some whit of dignity. She was sure he didn’t understand yet what he’d thrown away.
Fred had been one of the GOP’s top candidates for a 2012 run at the white house. But now. Now he was going down in a spitting fireball like John Edwards. “They’re going to eat you up, you know?” Belinda said, referring to the press.
“That remains to be seen. Can I count on your discretion?”
Belinda laughed. Cackled, really. And hung up. Can I count on your discretion? Please. She grabbed the jar of peanut butter, swirled her index finger through it and sucked, wishing she had chocolate chips to sprinkle in. She wondered, briefly, if Fred would be asked to step down. Not so much because of his extra-marital affair, but because he’d left Oklahoma without notifying anyone or assigning power to Lisa Knowles, the lieutenant governor. He wouldn’t give up his job willingly. She knew that.
Impeachment, perhaps? Then they’d have to move from the mansion, find a house in Nichols Hills.
Assuming, of course, that he wasn’t going to move in with Dezi.
*
The coffee tasted good that morning. Hotter, more bitter, more rich than usual. Still in her bathrobe, she took it to the window as she often did, planning to check the Scissor-tailed flycatcher’s nest in the redbud tree. As she pulled open the drapes though, and peeked through the sheers, she saw what she, at first, thought was a block party. Before she had time to wonder why a block party was happening at seven in the morning, she realized that what she was seeing was no block party. But a swarming blanket of reporters and cameras in the street, some encroaching onto the lawn. Vans with satellites parked along the curb. She ducked away from the window and stepped back into the shadows of the ficus. She set her coffee on top of the piano and paced into the kitchen, then back. What the hell? What the hell?
She’d expected maybe a few calls from the Oklahoman and the local network affiliates. Maybe, maybe a brief mention by Brian Williams. But not this…herd of story-hungry mongrels in her front yard.
Bernie would know what to do. She called him, sure he’d be up, feeding his dog Chester, reading his three favorite newspapers and drinking tomato juice with freshly-ground black pepper.
“Shit. Damn Jackasses,” was how he responded when she told him about the press outside. Despite the situation, she laughed. Bernie was the only one she knew who could compose an entire sentence made exclusively of curse words. His were inspired.
Fred sometimes laughed politely when he let loose a slew of expletives, but later muttered how low class it made Bernie sound. “He’s better than that,” Fred had said more than once.
Belinda, though, delighted in Bernie’s language. He made the most boring, cardboard, state issues entertaining.
She heard him sip his tomato juice and exhale loudly, as if he’d just downed an entire can of Coke. “Well,” he said. “The first thing you should do is close your goddamn drapes.”
Belinda said, “They’re closed.”
When his cigar-lit voice said, “Good girl,” her shoulders loosened a little.
“Next thing,” he said. “Don’t answer your door and don’t answer your phone for those assclowns.”
“Right.”
“I’ll give them some generic statement they can release and hopefully ease ‘em off your back.”
“That’s not going to work, Bernie. And you know it. They want shots of the jilted wife. And words too,” Belinda said, peeking through the sheers again.
“Well, are you willing to give them that?” he asked. “Maybe step out on your porch with a handful of tissues and unwashed hair?”
She laughed again. “Point taken.” Just then, Katie came into the living room eating from a bowl of dry granola. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and said, “What going on?” Belinda wanted to shield her from all this, to usher her back up to her turquoise bedroom strewn with iPods and knitting projects and books. But she’d find out sooner or later anyway, would have to know that she couldn’t hang out with her friends that afternoon.
She motioned for her to look out the window. Katie stared for a long time, then stepped back as if someone had flicked her with a fly swatter. Another sort of teenager might’ve enjoyed the idea of paparazzi outside her house, but Katie had grown up wary of reporters and how they can twist your words to suit their stories. “It’s because of dad,” she said. “It’s because of dad.”
“Poor child,” Bernie said. “I could just punch Fred in the motherfucking nose right now.”
Belinda said. “I could, too.”
Just then the doorbell rang. The room stiffened, the furniture and framed pictures petrifying. “Just breathe,” Bernie said. “And go enjoy your coffee. Take a bath. What the fuck ever. Just don’t, do not, give them a single word until I can phone something in. And, if you want to preserve your sanity, not even then.”
*
Belinda didn’t hear him slip through the kitchen door or creep up the heavily carpeted stairs. She didn’t, in fact, know he was there until she heard the bathroom faucet running. “Madison?” she asked, thinking her younger daughter was washing her plastic ponies or giving her Barbies a bath.
She came around the corner and saw him, his face red and dripping. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey?”
With a thick ivory towel, he patted his features, soft around the edges now. Belinda looked at him. She was aware that for 50-ish, he was a handsome man. A powerful man. But she also knew he used store-bought dandruff shampoo and had to shave with an electric razor or he’d burn his sensitive skin. She was familiar with how the bedroom smelled after he’d slept in it and that his top lip flattened when he was angry.
Knowing these things, she couldn’t imagine how a woman might be so recklessly in love with him. Or, in love with what she thought she knew of him, Belinda reminded herself. “How’d you get in here?” she asked. “Past the vultures.”
“I came through the Kennelly’s yard. On foot.” he pointed his electric razor toward the front yard. “They are looking for a black SUV.” He said smugly. He clicked on the razor and its high-pitched buzz filled the bathroom, echoed off the walls.
When Belinda turned, she saw his still-packed garment bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door. She flinched. She had the urge to walk up to it and sniff it, but, instead, she left the room.
Sometime later she heard his office door close and he stayed there for the rest of the day. Just before dinner, Bernie called, “Things have changed,” he said. “You have to talk to the bastards. Are they still out there?”
“Mostly,” she said. A few had strayed off. She’d seen a little news footage that day of reporters standing in front of her house, spouting what they knew, which was very little. She tried not to watch TV, but the internet, the damn internet, whenever she signed on to check her email or do a little work, she couldn’t resist clicking the headlines that pertained to Fred and her and her girls. She squeezed her eyes closed. “Why do I have to talk to them?”
“People think you should. People want to hear from you, Belinda. You’re the first lady of this state and the wife of a GOP up-and-comer, or former up-and-comer.”
“Have you talked to Fred?”
“About an hour ago. Chewed his pansy ass out.”
“Okay,” Belinda said. “But I’m going to say what I want to say. I’m not taking dictation from you Bernie.” There was silence on the other end. Finally, Bernie sighed and said, “You’re a reasonable woman. I trust you won’t spout anything too vitriolic.”
“Of course not,” she said.
As they hung up, she was already constructing the sentences in her mind. It would be a relief, actually, to put something out there. To take a little control. She sat down at the small, wooden desk in the alcove off the kitchen and began typing on the laptop.
“What are you writing?” Fred asked, sidling up to her, a can of cashews in one hand.
“My statement.” She could smell cipollinis and tomatoes roasting in the oven. She'd finally made an effort with food again. It was then that he grabbed one of the upholstered black leather chairs and sat across from her.
She was struck, suddenly, by a memory of their first house. A bungalow in Wheaton (another DC suburb), with creaky Adirondacks in the living room and framed posters on the walls. She missed it. She missed the simplicity. “Belinda,” he said, popping nuts into his mouth. “We need to talk.”
Her fingers, resting on the plastic keys, started trembling. They did need to talk. She laid her hands in her lap and swiveled so she faced him.
“I know I’ve hurt you. I know that. And I’m truly sorry you’re upset.”
“And the girls,” Belinda said between clenched teeth. “Don’t forget how you’ve hurt Katie and Lindsey.”
“I’d never forget about Katie and Lindsey,” he said.
“And how you’ve hurt them.”
His eyes lowered, then raised to meet Belinda’s. They used to be green. Green as new spring leaves. But they’d faded over the years and now looked more like a freshwater lake on a cloudy day. Colorless.
“They’re resilient girls,” he said. Belinda hated it, despised it, when people used that catch-phrase “kids are resilient” to justify away their poor behavior. Yes, Katie and Lindsey were resilient. But they were not unbreakable.
“You think that excuses you?” she said. She remembered, inexplicably, the tulips, their petal-fingers wilting and falling off. “I told you, Fred. I told you that I couldn’t abide your going down there. That this is not a three-way marriage. And yet you did. And you’ve made a huge mess here. And I’d like to know how you’re going to clean it up. The Oklahoman has copies of your emails, you know.”
His upper lip did that thing, where it pressed to his teeth and slid slowly up and down when he spoke. “Did you forward them?”
She picked at a spot of dried food on the keyboard. Should she tell him what she knew? “Half of them were sent from your work account,” she informed him. “State property. Anyone with a little computer savvy could get their hands on those.”
“How do you know only half of them were sent from my work account?” he snapped.
“Because I snooped, okay? My so-called husband and the so-called governor of Oklahoma went missing for three days. I was looking for clues. I was trying to figure out if we should launch an investigation into your disappearance, Fred.” She hadn’t set an investigation in motion though. She’d known all along she wouldn’t. She’d known that there was a Dezi. Not her name or where she lived or that Fred considered this woman his soul mate, but Belinda had been aware that some silvery, vapory presence out there had captured his imagination in a way she herself never had.
Belinda and Fred, when they’d decided to get engaged, were good friends, came from similar backgrounds (both had lawyer mothers and fathers with sketchy heart health) and had the same corny, dry sense of humor. But there’d never been that flash or sizzle between them. Never what you’d call, infatuation or, she supposed, giddy love.
Fred stood and strode into the bowels of the kitchen, bracing himself on the counter’s edge. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
She got up, too. “Yeah, well, I wish you hadn’t gotten wrapped up with this woman. With this escape…you know that’s what this is, don’t you? It’s an escape. I’d love to have an escape too. Someone 5,000 miles away who I could email when I start worrying too much about the girls or after I’ve been in the office for twelve hours or when you and I aren’t getting along.”
Through gritted teeth he said, “She’s more than an escape, Belly. She’s…she’s part of me.”
Belinda winced. She knew he was full of shit. It was so easy to think the best about someone with whom you never had to replace a faucet or raise children or argue about Oklahoma’s economy. She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling. At the sunken lights, like small, gray plantars warts. “We never should’ve done this. We should’ve bought a motel like your cousin Manny, run that together instead of a whole damn state.”
Fred looked at her as if she’d just announced she was going to run outside and moon the press. “This is what I’m cut out for,” he said. “We’re completely different people than Manny and that wife of his.”
“Yes, we are. They’re faithful to each other.” As far as she knew, but she wasn’t going to add that caveat. There were several moments of silence during which Belinda wondered when the girls would find Fred was home and what else to make for dinner and noticed how the skin around her husband's eyes hung like hammocks.
Finally, he said, “What are you going to do?”
“Do you mean am I going to leave or stay?”
“In so many words,” he said. “Yes.”
She wanted to tell him she would stay. And that if he wanted any hope of salvaging his political career, he’d have to stay too. But, dear God, she couldn’t. Knowing what she knew: that he was so beyond smitten with a Brazilian woman named Dezi, that he would inevitably see her again, that he so lacked respect for Belinda that he’d leave without telling her where he was going or when he might come back, to make love on the beach to this other woman…she couldn’t stay. What message would that send to her girls? That marital vows only applied to women? No. No. She, Katie and Lindsey would move out of the mansion, with its dark wood and dark hallways. She hated its boxy lines anyway. She would miss only the bright kitchen.
The girls, of course, would hate to go, would miss their rooms. She’d have to promise them new furniture or something, flat-screen TVs. A bathroom just for Katie. A window seat for Lindsey. To Fred, she said, “I’ll go, of course.”
He dropped his grip on the countertop and his shoulders sagged. She couldn’t tell if he was relieved or distraught.
“What do you think Oklahomans would think of a Brazilian First Lady?”
He shook his head and wiped his baggy eyes.
She left the kitchen then. She yanked a fistful of curtain back from the front window. There were still twenty or thirty of them milling around, drinking coffee from paper cups, chatting, sitting cross-legged on the grass and typing on laptops. She almost laughed, imagining herself taking them a platter full of cookies, opening dusty lawn chairs and jotting Fred’s cell phone number on Post-Its and passing them out.
She thought how Bernie would kill her if she emerged onto the front porch and offered the journalists the bare truth, laid it out for them like a huge picnic on her front lawn. Or, on the Governor’s front lawn. Soon, she’d be somewhere else with different grass and a different title: Former First Lady? Jilted First Lady? Pathetic Ex First Lady? Belinda supposed those were all better than First Lady Who Condones.
There was one reporter, in particular. A woman wearing a gold sweater. She stood not near a white van with a satellite dish on top, but alone with a camera. She was thin, her dirty-blond hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. And she stared at the window where Belinda stood.
Belinda doubted the woman could see in, with the distance and reflections, but, just in case, she took a step back.
The woman, though, continued to gaze at her. To gaze into her. Her arms crossed under her breasts, a notepad dangling from one hand. Belinda itched to pound on the window and shoo her away. Or to stay there, eyes seemingly locked, visually conveying everything that was inside her, everything that could never come out.
She started to think about logistics, about how a moving truck would be able to snake through the vans and reporters and carry her things back out. She thought about how she’d tell the girls what she knew about their dad. She heard Fred’s cell phone trill from the kitchen and her heart stopped.
Without being able to decipher his words when he answered, she knew by the way his voice dipped and looped that it was her. Dezi.
Striding across the parlor and up into her bedroom (because she thought of it as hers now, not theirs), she called Bernie and said, “Come over here please. There’s a reporter I like and I’m ready to talk.”
