Chaper Two: Setback
Available Chapters: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven, Chapter Twelve, Chapter Thirteen
To download a text file of this chapter for printing or ebook readers - click here
NEW HAMPSHIRE CAUCUS
Hillary Clinton 39%
Barack Obama 36%
I sent the same text message to Kanesha, Caroline and Reggie:
“E with us. On way to airport.”
Surely one of them would read it in time. If Kanesha did, she would grab Caroline by the arm and push her out the door ahead of Reggie. I could hear her now hissing: You’re a fool, girl, a fool! Before I met Kanesha, I had never really heard someone hiss. Man, can she make it work, like that snake goddess mask in Caroline’s St. Louis home come to life--all the more impressive because Kanesha is a refined beauty who looks like a cover model for Essence magazine. She has high cheekbones, an enviable nose, neither too long nor too wide and very straight, and perfectly arched eyebrows--in other words the basic structure of a perfect face. Evan would find out sooner or later--and probably sooner because Caroline would surely confess--but he didn’t deserve to be publicly embarrassed in the discovery phase.
“What a night!” Evan said, first clapping me on the back, then drawing me into a big hug, so tight I could smell the rich sandalwood and mossy mix of his fragrance. “This is brilliant! He’s on his way, man!”
Evan’s enthusiasm for Barack’s candidacy was the real thing. He wasn’t just along for the ride as Caroline’s boyfriend; he believed in our man. The son of moderate Republicans, Evan was appalled by George Bush--what he stands for and what he has done to the country. To their credit, my parents hate him too, he told me once. The religiosity makes them uncomfortable; and they are opposed to the war in Iraq on economic and moral grounds. Evan’s father is part of a demographic that Democrats can take from the Republicans this year if Barack gets the nod, the dissatisfied white male voters, a.ka. “angry white men”, who will never vote for Hillary Clinton--if for no other reason than they don’t want to see the Clinton Circus back in the White House. I don’t think that her eight years as First Lady counts as “experience”; and I’ll bet those angry white men agree with me.
“He proved white people will vote for him,” Evan said enthusiastically, his thin lips appearing wider in his big smile. “I knew that all along,” he said, flicking those big midnight blue eyes sideways in the direction of two brothers who had occasionally expressed doubts on that score. (How could Caroline turn away from those eyes? Straight women.) “America is ready for this,” he said, echoing the statement Barack made in that historic November 2006 gathering in a D.C. law office where he met with friends and advisors to send up his presidential trial balloon.
We all often speak in the language of the campaign. Like good Madison Avenue ad men, we repeat key words and phrases in our conversations. We talk the talk and walk the walk. With a paid campaign staff of 700 and thousands of dedicated volunteers across America, that’s a lot of walking and talking. The brothers grinned and gave us the raised fist, the old Black Power salute they learned from their fathers.
Evan grew up in a mansion on Rittenhouse Square, the most ultra-old money address in Philly. A few months back when we were hanging out at a downtown bar cruising for potential volunteers, he told me the servants were African Americans. His parents paid a generous wage; they didn’t hire illegal aliens. That’s class.
“The people who worked for us were employees,” he said earnestly. When Evan is earnest, he scrunches his forehead, bringing his thick eyebrows closer together and making me think of the female artist Frida Kahlo whose eyebrows met in the bushy middle. “They weren’t servants. I didn’t grow up treating the maids badly.”
“Of course not,” I teased him. “Old money knows how to behave.”
He punched me in the arm good-naturedly and our conversation drifted back to politics, as all conversations do when you are part of a political campaign. Something he said that day resonated with me. I was running my finger up and down the stem of my martini glass and wondering if the older guy who had invited me to dinner that night would pick up the tab when Evan said:
“The first time I heard Barack speak at an upscale dinner in Philadelphia, I said to myself, he fits right in. You know that’s what Caroline told me her mother said about me when I went home to St. Louis to meet her family.”
That’s the thing about Barack: he fits right in, whether the crowd is white or black or a “mix like a Benneton ad“--as he described our campaign staff when he pulled them on stage in Des Moines. But when I heard Evan casually say that Barack Obama fit right into a gathering of Philadelphia elite, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. This is do-able. It’s going to happen.
Our man really can win this thing.
That was the feeling in the room the night the mostly white voters of Iowa chose hope over “experience.” Evan went to grab a plastic cup of plonk--red wine of indeterminate origin; and Chloe poked a slender pale pink-tipped finger in my ribs. I pulled my phone out and quickly flipped through the text messages.
“Na da,” I said.
“What are they doing up there anyway?” she asked, casting her eyes upward in exasperation. I raised my eyebrows in alignment with her. Was she thinking what I was thinking? Hand jobs or blowjob under blankets? “I knew Reggie was a user the minute I looked into his eyes,” she said. Chloe had lived in pre-gentrification parts of Harlem and Brooklyn while she was attending NYU. Though she looked as pretty and polished as any upscale ingénue headed for a future as a power wife, she had more street smarts than most of the African American girls in the office who had swooned for Reggie. “He spotted his mark ten seconds into the room,” she said, not for the first time, but definitely with an air of authority the way a sports aficionado can call a play sometimes before it happens.
Walking as gracefully as a white Barack, Evan headed back to us, two cups of plonk in hand, one for Chloe. (Lean and elegant. Caroline, why did you cheat on this man?) Arching her back slightly and raising her chin, she accepted it as if it were a crystal flute filled with costly bubbles. I excused myself to secure my own libation and got hung up at the makeshift bar examining exit poll data with some policy wonks, those people who live and die by the written words, charts and graphs of politics. Chloe kept Evan engaged in exuberant conversation punctuated with frequent hand on arm gestures--her hand on his arm, of course, but he seemed to be leaning into it. When she turned her head, her honey blonde bob shimmied; and his eyes hungrily followed every little movement of the strands. Before we left for the airport, I checked my phone again. Nothing from any of them. Chloe climbed between us in the Lincoln town car waiting in front of the building. The Obama staff was movin’ on up.
It took months for me to piece together the following story of what happened in the private jet (rumored to be, but not likely to be, Oprah’s) plane in the skies between Iowa and Chicago:
Caroline felt a twinge of guilt over how much she was enjoying riding on this jet--whether it was owned by Oprah or chartered by her or by someone else altogether. Opinions differed on that score. And she wondered how they, the staff who were continually correcting false rumors and dispelling innuendo, didn’t know the definitive answer for a simple question: Who owns this magnificent plane? She breathed deeply of the plush leather seats, the fragrances of expensive coffee, cognac and fine chocolate and the floral-scented air that bore no resemblance to the air in a bathroom where someone has dutifully sprayed after herself. Reggie did not approve of ostentatious displays of wealth. He tolerated the wealth that was part of politics--but barely tolerated it. He was purer than anyone she knew; and she was in awe of him. Yet she luxuriated in the scent of money while he slept.
She looked down at Reggie curled around her body, sleeping with his head on her breast, and thought: Thomas will be insufferable when he finds out about this. She didn’t understand why Thomas, who’d liked Reggie so much in the beginning, suddenly turned against him. Unrequited desire? Loyalty to Evan? Resentment that Reggie takes up so much of her time now? She missed Thomas, but, in truth, Reggie had become her life. After what had happened between them in Iowa, there was no turning back. Her heart stopped when she thought again of the moment he’d first penetrated her. She loved the interplay of their skin tones, light against dark, in shifting sensual patterns as they touched and caressed. Their lovemaking was so intensely emotional and spiritual that it was not in the same category as what she and Evan did.
Do you want to fool around? Evan sometimes asked, in that teasing leering way he thought was seductive and she had not so long ago found endearing. Fool around. That was exactly what they did when they had sex. How could she ever have sex that way again? But, of course, she felt another twinge of guilt over Evan. A good man whose heart was in the right place, he did not deserve a cheating fiancée. Before she and Reggie made love, she’d sometimes imagined herself the princess desired by two princes, like Guinevere in the musical “Camelot,” a role she‘d played senior year. She’d fancied herself beautifully tragic in the blue and gold costume complete with that silly big hat. All that seemed ridiculous now. There was only Reggie whose eyes and mouth melted into hers. When she was with him, she lived on a higher plane.
Caroline glanced toward the front of the plane where Kanesha was deep in conversation with Monique, a press aide. No longer offering just hope….he’s offering success….No longer just a candidate but a winner. They were shaping the phrases that would be picked up by the media. Coverage of Barack’s first day in New Hampshire would include those phrases. Somewhere in the sky inside another plane Hillary’s team was shaping the phrases that would describe her arrival into that state. Carolyn watched the two dark heads, Kanesha’s and Monique’s, inclined toward one another in what appeared to be perfect understanding. Kanesha’s hair was smooth, shoulder length and perpetually turned under, a contrast to Monique‘s headful of little braids. She realized that she was the only white person among the eight on the plane, an unusual situation in this campaign.
Suddenly becoming aware that she was the only white person in the room happened to her sometimes; and one day she told Barack about it. He laughed and put a hand on her forearm and squeezed it. We’re the same, she told him, we don’t see race. He turned serious and she was sure he would have shared a profound thought with her if David Axelrod hadn’t swept into the room with his hands full of poll results he was eager to share.
Reggie stirred in his sleep and nestled more snugly against her breast. She felt her heart beat inside her vagina. How could she ever be with anyone else again? After they made love for the first time in the back of the campaign bus, Reggie, without saying a word, removed Evan’s engagement ring from her finger and slipped it into his pocket. She understood that he would give it back to her when they landed in Chicago so she could go straight to Evan and return it. Nervously anticipating that encounter, Caroline glanced again to the front of the plane and caught Kanesha glaring at them. No woman Caroline had ever known projected anger as effectively as Kanesha did.
“Bill Clinton’s been on the phone spinning this since Barack was named the winner,” someone said.
Kanesha who never missed an opportunity to remind them not to be intimidated by the Clintons and their tactics didn’t say a word. She kept glaring at Caroline until the space between them was charged with her anger. Caroline wondered if most of the team misread that anger. Did they think she was jealous of Caroline and wanted Reggie to herself? Or at least wanted Reggie not to be with a white woman? If they did, they were wrong. Kanesha wished that her medium brown skin were much lighter. Her eventual goal was to marry a man as pale as Barack and Michelle and she worried she was too dark for such a man to choose her. I want to give my future children the best possible chance for light skin, Kanesha casually remarked one day as they were splitting a big Cobb salad for lunch. She certainly didn’t want Reggie. I don’t know what you white girls see in that black skin, she’d said when she first accused Caroline of being into Reggie. You girls are slaves to black dick.
“Reggie is really black,” she said the day they all met him, surprising Caroline with the venom in her voice, “and I’m not just talking about his skin. He’s a black man inside.”
Caroline broke the intense eye contact with Kanesha. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes and feigned sleep. Soon she heard Kanesha say: We’re up against a political machine twenty years in the making, created by a President; and most of the Democratic establishment are on their side…
Those were Barack’s words.
“Yes, we are the underdogs,” he told them in the early spring of 2007 when the campaign staff was only thirty people. “But the whisper that started in Springfield has grown louder in Chicago and will continue to grow as it sweeps across the country.”
She thrilled to those words every time she heard them and she’d heard them often since that day. Barack Obama is a poet, she thought. Yet he was so much more too. Caroline truly believed that he was the one who could restore hope and decency to America and set the country on the right path. The country could not stand another four years of Republican leadership; and Hillary Clinton was the wrong woman for the job.
She pulled the blanket more closely around Reggie’s slender body. His hand reached up her firm thigh, under her little black skirt, past the wisp of her black silk panties and pressed against her vagina. She inhaled deeply and flexed her muscle beneath his hand. Everything was red behind her closed eyes, red and pulsing. He pressed in time with her flexing. She suppressed a little cry when she came. That she came like this in public was beyond astonishing.
“Wake up!” Kanesha hissed in her ear. “Wake up before I beat your sorry white ass!”
Caroline’s first thought was to wonder, and not for the first time, why educated black women often spoke like street “ho”s. What white woman would threaten to beat another woman’s ass? One who grew up in a trailer park and tended bar in a redneck enclave. As she struggled to open her eyes, she quickly ran through the places where she might be and then--as Reggie moved in his own waking dream, his hands and body moving against hers-- she remembered.
“Wake up!” Kanesha hissed again. She waved her cell phone back and forth in front of Caroline’s eyes. “Evan is in the car with Thomas and Chloe. He wants to ‘surprise’ you at the airport!”
Reggie was awake now. Caroline’s eyes darted from Kanesha’s to his, from anger to--what? Embarrassment? Discomfort? Fear? Whatever she saw flashing in Reggie’s eyes, it was quickly replaced with the familiar look of attentive concern. Without fully disconnecting from their embrace, he sat up straight, leaned back against his own seat and began stroking her arm that he was holding, one broad thumb running the length of her inner arm from elbow to wrist.
“Calm down, Kanesha. We don’t want a scene either,” Reggie said, his voice gentle, his face kind. “Do you think we are insensitive people--that we want to hurt Evan?”
“You are not walking off this plane with him attached to your body,” Kanesha said sharply to Caroline, ignoring Reggie.
Her cheeks as flushed as a spanked bottom, Caroline nodded her head. Apparently satisfied, Kanesha stomped in her three inch black leather pumps back up the aisle and took her seat. The chattering had stopped; and Caroline looked straight ahead, not wanting to know if all eyes were on her and Reggie. In the silence, she heard the sharp click of Kanesha’s seat belt being fastened.
Caroline’s heart began pounding as the little jet began its descent into Chicago; and, in spire of the gentle circles Reggie kept rubbing into her back, she was almost nauseous by the time it touched ground. She walked out closely behind Kanesha with Reggie three people behind. When she saw Evan’s happy, expectant face, she wanted to turn around and run back into the safety of the plane. But she forced herself to walk into his arms where she crumpled against his chest. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“So tired and so happy,” she explained; and Evan tenderly led her to the car.
Rigid with disapproval, Thomas and Chloe followed. She kept her hands smashed into her coat pockets so no one would notice her missing engagement ring that she’d forgotten to retrieve from Reggie. How could she have the conversation with Evan without the ring to return?
They would all remember the next five days leading up to the debacle of the New Hampshire primary as a time of pure optimism that would never be equaled. After New Hampshire, optimism was tempered. We can’t take anything for granted again, Barack said. And nobody mentioned good polls without adding a disclaimer.
But for Caroline, those five days were torture of a kind she had never known. She was living a lie. How could someone whose own mother once told her that her “moral certainty“ could be “oppressive“ be lying to the man who believed she would be his wife? Reggie hadn’t found the ring in his pocket. He and Caroline searched the campaign bus before he left for New Hampshire and turned up a credit card, driver’s license and four dollars in loose change--but no diamond ring from Tiffany’s. She was heartsick about that too.
When Kanesha told her, “You won’t be going to New Hampshire,” she added cruelly: “That will give you time alone with Evan. You can explain about the ring.”
His thin lips pulled tight in disapproval, Thomas refused to talk to her beyond the necessary exchanges of campaign information. Looking lovely in a new shade of creamy red lipstick that she seemed to re-apply a dozen times a day, Chloe too turned her back on Caroline. The two of them went out for lunch or drinks and didn’t ask her to go along. If Barack had won in New Hampshire, they probably would not have relented. In loss, the friends came together again.
“What am I going to tell Evan about the ring?” she asked; and he shrugged, his eyes narrowed meanly. “How can I break up with him without the ring?”
She knew Evan had guessed that something was wrong because she’d insisted on going home alone to bed when she got back from Iowa and kept finding excuses not to see him every night since. When he walked into the office on the night of the primary, she wasn’t entirely surprised to see him. They already knew that Hillary was scoring an upset so the tears that sprang to her eyes seemed appropriate.
“I’m sorry, Baby,” he said, pulling her close. “This is a tough one, but it’s just one. He’ll rebound.”
He stood at her side, one arm around her shoulder, as they waited for Barack to make his concession speech. She saw Reggie and Kanesha standing side by side among the staff, their faces grave behind the requisite smiles. Irrational jealousy washed over her. She wanted to be there with him, surreptitiously holding his hand. Briefly, she closed her eyes and felt his thumb rubbing her hand as she held his. Behind her, Chloe cleared her throat.
The applause there was dutiful, tepid; in the Chicago office, no one clapped.
Caroline heard Chloe start to cry behind her; and she knew without looking that Thomas was holding her.
“We need to talk,” she said to Evan. She led him back to Kanesha’s office and closed the door behind them. “I don’t know how to say this….”
“Say it, Caroline. I know something’s up.”
“I’m in love with Reggie!” she blurted out, the tears pouring freely down her face. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean…we didn’t mean…for this to happen.”
“You’re having sex with him?” Evan asked, his voice cold and even.
“Yes, but only once! We made love in Iowa…and I knew I had to break our engagement….I knew I couldn’t sleep with you….”
His face flushed, he turned and walked out the door. She sobbed for several minutes. By the time she pulled herself together, most of the staff had gone, but Thomas and Chloe were still there.
“What did you tell him about the ring?” Chloe asked.
“He didn’t ask about the ring. I didn’t…”
“Oh, he’ll ask,” Thomas said. “I saw that ring before you did. And I know what it cost.” He paused. His little mustache seemed to quiver with the special knowledge. “Fifty thousand dollars, Caroline.” Another pause. “When the shock wears off, he will want that ring back.”
“Wow!” Chloe said. She took a theatrical deep breath emphasizing her chest. Caroline guessed she was a 32 or 34 B, but the combination of slender waist and narrow shoulders made her seem larger. “How much do you suppose whoever has it now can get for it on craigslist? Or a pawnshop? Do pawn shops still exist?”
“You don’t think…“ Caroline began, but her voice caught. She realized now what they were thinking and had been thinking all along: Reggie took the ring. That wasn’t possible, but it was exactly what they thought had happened. “How can you think…”
“Let’s go, Chloe,” Thomas said. “It’s time to get out of here.”
Caroline stayed alone to watch and read online how the pundits explained the Obama loss when the polls predicted he would win big.
Andrew Sullivan writing on his blog blamed racism: “Tonight the first primary - not a caucus. People get to vote in a secret ballot - not in front of their largely liberal peers, as in Iowa. They may have told the pollsters one thing about voting for a black man, but in the privacy of the voting booth, something else happens.“
Other commentators jumped on the “race matters” bandwagon. Caroline poured over the exit polls and reached a different conclusion. What made sense to her was gender-ism. Perhaps inspired by Hillary’s tearful moment in response to a tough question on why she wasn’t more well liked--women had voted overwhelmingly for her.
She walked back to Kanesha’s office where she knew there was a position paper on women voters at the top of a pile on her desk. As she read through it, she had some thoughts to share with Kanesha. Searching for a pen, she saw the police report.
Before she left for New Hampshire, Kanesha had reported the loss of Caroline’s diamond engagement ring on the campaign bus in Iowa to the authorities there. This was a copy of that report forwarded to the Chicago police with a notation that read: “Petty cash and small items have gone missing in the office and on the bus. We didn’t report those losses, but the possible theft of this ring is too large to overlook.”
A post-it note on the first page of the report was written to Kanesha in Thomas’ handwriting:
“K, Detective Burnside has been briefed. An ‘unobtrusive’ investigation is underway. Duly noted that Reggie was the last person known to be holding ring.”
Omigod. How could they? How could they do this to her and Reggie?
Copyright © 2008 by Carla Dickens. All rights reserved. Please do not re-publish the entirety of this chapter or novel without the prior written consent of E-Reads.
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction that takes place during the Democratic Primary and Presidential Campaign of 2008. With the exception of casual references to certain living public persons, places, and events, and of speeches, news commentaries or statements that are public record, all characters, names and places used in The Faithful are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The work contains adult themes, language and content and describes sexual situations.
To download a text file of this chapter for printing or ebook readers - click here
Chapter Two
Setback
Setback
NEW HAMPSHIRE CAUCUS
Hillary Clinton 39%
Barack Obama 36%
I sent the same text message to Kanesha, Caroline and Reggie:
“E with us. On way to airport.”
Surely one of them would read it in time. If Kanesha did, she would grab Caroline by the arm and push her out the door ahead of Reggie. I could hear her now hissing: You’re a fool, girl, a fool! Before I met Kanesha, I had never really heard someone hiss. Man, can she make it work, like that snake goddess mask in Caroline’s St. Louis home come to life--all the more impressive because Kanesha is a refined beauty who looks like a cover model for Essence magazine. She has high cheekbones, an enviable nose, neither too long nor too wide and very straight, and perfectly arched eyebrows--in other words the basic structure of a perfect face. Evan would find out sooner or later--and probably sooner because Caroline would surely confess--but he didn’t deserve to be publicly embarrassed in the discovery phase.
“What a night!” Evan said, first clapping me on the back, then drawing me into a big hug, so tight I could smell the rich sandalwood and mossy mix of his fragrance. “This is brilliant! He’s on his way, man!”
Evan’s enthusiasm for Barack’s candidacy was the real thing. He wasn’t just along for the ride as Caroline’s boyfriend; he believed in our man. The son of moderate Republicans, Evan was appalled by George Bush--what he stands for and what he has done to the country. To their credit, my parents hate him too, he told me once. The religiosity makes them uncomfortable; and they are opposed to the war in Iraq on economic and moral grounds. Evan’s father is part of a demographic that Democrats can take from the Republicans this year if Barack gets the nod, the dissatisfied white male voters, a.ka. “angry white men”, who will never vote for Hillary Clinton--if for no other reason than they don’t want to see the Clinton Circus back in the White House. I don’t think that her eight years as First Lady counts as “experience”; and I’ll bet those angry white men agree with me.
“He proved white people will vote for him,” Evan said enthusiastically, his thin lips appearing wider in his big smile. “I knew that all along,” he said, flicking those big midnight blue eyes sideways in the direction of two brothers who had occasionally expressed doubts on that score. (How could Caroline turn away from those eyes? Straight women.) “America is ready for this,” he said, echoing the statement Barack made in that historic November 2006 gathering in a D.C. law office where he met with friends and advisors to send up his presidential trial balloon.
We all often speak in the language of the campaign. Like good Madison Avenue ad men, we repeat key words and phrases in our conversations. We talk the talk and walk the walk. With a paid campaign staff of 700 and thousands of dedicated volunteers across America, that’s a lot of walking and talking. The brothers grinned and gave us the raised fist, the old Black Power salute they learned from their fathers.
Evan grew up in a mansion on Rittenhouse Square, the most ultra-old money address in Philly. A few months back when we were hanging out at a downtown bar cruising for potential volunteers, he told me the servants were African Americans. His parents paid a generous wage; they didn’t hire illegal aliens. That’s class.
“The people who worked for us were employees,” he said earnestly. When Evan is earnest, he scrunches his forehead, bringing his thick eyebrows closer together and making me think of the female artist Frida Kahlo whose eyebrows met in the bushy middle. “They weren’t servants. I didn’t grow up treating the maids badly.”
“Of course not,” I teased him. “Old money knows how to behave.”
He punched me in the arm good-naturedly and our conversation drifted back to politics, as all conversations do when you are part of a political campaign. Something he said that day resonated with me. I was running my finger up and down the stem of my martini glass and wondering if the older guy who had invited me to dinner that night would pick up the tab when Evan said:
“The first time I heard Barack speak at an upscale dinner in Philadelphia, I said to myself, he fits right in. You know that’s what Caroline told me her mother said about me when I went home to St. Louis to meet her family.”
That’s the thing about Barack: he fits right in, whether the crowd is white or black or a “mix like a Benneton ad“--as he described our campaign staff when he pulled them on stage in Des Moines. But when I heard Evan casually say that Barack Obama fit right into a gathering of Philadelphia elite, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. This is do-able. It’s going to happen.
Our man really can win this thing.
That was the feeling in the room the night the mostly white voters of Iowa chose hope over “experience.” Evan went to grab a plastic cup of plonk--red wine of indeterminate origin; and Chloe poked a slender pale pink-tipped finger in my ribs. I pulled my phone out and quickly flipped through the text messages.
“Na da,” I said.
“What are they doing up there anyway?” she asked, casting her eyes upward in exasperation. I raised my eyebrows in alignment with her. Was she thinking what I was thinking? Hand jobs or blowjob under blankets? “I knew Reggie was a user the minute I looked into his eyes,” she said. Chloe had lived in pre-gentrification parts of Harlem and Brooklyn while she was attending NYU. Though she looked as pretty and polished as any upscale ingénue headed for a future as a power wife, she had more street smarts than most of the African American girls in the office who had swooned for Reggie. “He spotted his mark ten seconds into the room,” she said, not for the first time, but definitely with an air of authority the way a sports aficionado can call a play sometimes before it happens.
Walking as gracefully as a white Barack, Evan headed back to us, two cups of plonk in hand, one for Chloe. (Lean and elegant. Caroline, why did you cheat on this man?) Arching her back slightly and raising her chin, she accepted it as if it were a crystal flute filled with costly bubbles. I excused myself to secure my own libation and got hung up at the makeshift bar examining exit poll data with some policy wonks, those people who live and die by the written words, charts and graphs of politics. Chloe kept Evan engaged in exuberant conversation punctuated with frequent hand on arm gestures--her hand on his arm, of course, but he seemed to be leaning into it. When she turned her head, her honey blonde bob shimmied; and his eyes hungrily followed every little movement of the strands. Before we left for the airport, I checked my phone again. Nothing from any of them. Chloe climbed between us in the Lincoln town car waiting in front of the building. The Obama staff was movin’ on up.
It took months for me to piece together the following story of what happened in the private jet (rumored to be, but not likely to be, Oprah’s) plane in the skies between Iowa and Chicago:
Caroline felt a twinge of guilt over how much she was enjoying riding on this jet--whether it was owned by Oprah or chartered by her or by someone else altogether. Opinions differed on that score. And she wondered how they, the staff who were continually correcting false rumors and dispelling innuendo, didn’t know the definitive answer for a simple question: Who owns this magnificent plane? She breathed deeply of the plush leather seats, the fragrances of expensive coffee, cognac and fine chocolate and the floral-scented air that bore no resemblance to the air in a bathroom where someone has dutifully sprayed after herself. Reggie did not approve of ostentatious displays of wealth. He tolerated the wealth that was part of politics--but barely tolerated it. He was purer than anyone she knew; and she was in awe of him. Yet she luxuriated in the scent of money while he slept.
She looked down at Reggie curled around her body, sleeping with his head on her breast, and thought: Thomas will be insufferable when he finds out about this. She didn’t understand why Thomas, who’d liked Reggie so much in the beginning, suddenly turned against him. Unrequited desire? Loyalty to Evan? Resentment that Reggie takes up so much of her time now? She missed Thomas, but, in truth, Reggie had become her life. After what had happened between them in Iowa, there was no turning back. Her heart stopped when she thought again of the moment he’d first penetrated her. She loved the interplay of their skin tones, light against dark, in shifting sensual patterns as they touched and caressed. Their lovemaking was so intensely emotional and spiritual that it was not in the same category as what she and Evan did.
Do you want to fool around? Evan sometimes asked, in that teasing leering way he thought was seductive and she had not so long ago found endearing. Fool around. That was exactly what they did when they had sex. How could she ever have sex that way again? But, of course, she felt another twinge of guilt over Evan. A good man whose heart was in the right place, he did not deserve a cheating fiancée. Before she and Reggie made love, she’d sometimes imagined herself the princess desired by two princes, like Guinevere in the musical “Camelot,” a role she‘d played senior year. She’d fancied herself beautifully tragic in the blue and gold costume complete with that silly big hat. All that seemed ridiculous now. There was only Reggie whose eyes and mouth melted into hers. When she was with him, she lived on a higher plane.
Caroline glanced toward the front of the plane where Kanesha was deep in conversation with Monique, a press aide. No longer offering just hope….he’s offering success….No longer just a candidate but a winner. They were shaping the phrases that would be picked up by the media. Coverage of Barack’s first day in New Hampshire would include those phrases. Somewhere in the sky inside another plane Hillary’s team was shaping the phrases that would describe her arrival into that state. Carolyn watched the two dark heads, Kanesha’s and Monique’s, inclined toward one another in what appeared to be perfect understanding. Kanesha’s hair was smooth, shoulder length and perpetually turned under, a contrast to Monique‘s headful of little braids. She realized that she was the only white person among the eight on the plane, an unusual situation in this campaign.
Suddenly becoming aware that she was the only white person in the room happened to her sometimes; and one day she told Barack about it. He laughed and put a hand on her forearm and squeezed it. We’re the same, she told him, we don’t see race. He turned serious and she was sure he would have shared a profound thought with her if David Axelrod hadn’t swept into the room with his hands full of poll results he was eager to share.
Reggie stirred in his sleep and nestled more snugly against her breast. She felt her heart beat inside her vagina. How could she ever be with anyone else again? After they made love for the first time in the back of the campaign bus, Reggie, without saying a word, removed Evan’s engagement ring from her finger and slipped it into his pocket. She understood that he would give it back to her when they landed in Chicago so she could go straight to Evan and return it. Nervously anticipating that encounter, Caroline glanced again to the front of the plane and caught Kanesha glaring at them. No woman Caroline had ever known projected anger as effectively as Kanesha did.
“Bill Clinton’s been on the phone spinning this since Barack was named the winner,” someone said.
Kanesha who never missed an opportunity to remind them not to be intimidated by the Clintons and their tactics didn’t say a word. She kept glaring at Caroline until the space between them was charged with her anger. Caroline wondered if most of the team misread that anger. Did they think she was jealous of Caroline and wanted Reggie to herself? Or at least wanted Reggie not to be with a white woman? If they did, they were wrong. Kanesha wished that her medium brown skin were much lighter. Her eventual goal was to marry a man as pale as Barack and Michelle and she worried she was too dark for such a man to choose her. I want to give my future children the best possible chance for light skin, Kanesha casually remarked one day as they were splitting a big Cobb salad for lunch. She certainly didn’t want Reggie. I don’t know what you white girls see in that black skin, she’d said when she first accused Caroline of being into Reggie. You girls are slaves to black dick.
“Reggie is really black,” she said the day they all met him, surprising Caroline with the venom in her voice, “and I’m not just talking about his skin. He’s a black man inside.”
Caroline broke the intense eye contact with Kanesha. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes and feigned sleep. Soon she heard Kanesha say: We’re up against a political machine twenty years in the making, created by a President; and most of the Democratic establishment are on their side…
Those were Barack’s words.
“Yes, we are the underdogs,” he told them in the early spring of 2007 when the campaign staff was only thirty people. “But the whisper that started in Springfield has grown louder in Chicago and will continue to grow as it sweeps across the country.”
She thrilled to those words every time she heard them and she’d heard them often since that day. Barack Obama is a poet, she thought. Yet he was so much more too. Caroline truly believed that he was the one who could restore hope and decency to America and set the country on the right path. The country could not stand another four years of Republican leadership; and Hillary Clinton was the wrong woman for the job.
She pulled the blanket more closely around Reggie’s slender body. His hand reached up her firm thigh, under her little black skirt, past the wisp of her black silk panties and pressed against her vagina. She inhaled deeply and flexed her muscle beneath his hand. Everything was red behind her closed eyes, red and pulsing. He pressed in time with her flexing. She suppressed a little cry when she came. That she came like this in public was beyond astonishing.
“Wake up!” Kanesha hissed in her ear. “Wake up before I beat your sorry white ass!”
Caroline’s first thought was to wonder, and not for the first time, why educated black women often spoke like street “ho”s. What white woman would threaten to beat another woman’s ass? One who grew up in a trailer park and tended bar in a redneck enclave. As she struggled to open her eyes, she quickly ran through the places where she might be and then--as Reggie moved in his own waking dream, his hands and body moving against hers-- she remembered.
“Wake up!” Kanesha hissed again. She waved her cell phone back and forth in front of Caroline’s eyes. “Evan is in the car with Thomas and Chloe. He wants to ‘surprise’ you at the airport!”
Reggie was awake now. Caroline’s eyes darted from Kanesha’s to his, from anger to--what? Embarrassment? Discomfort? Fear? Whatever she saw flashing in Reggie’s eyes, it was quickly replaced with the familiar look of attentive concern. Without fully disconnecting from their embrace, he sat up straight, leaned back against his own seat and began stroking her arm that he was holding, one broad thumb running the length of her inner arm from elbow to wrist.
“Calm down, Kanesha. We don’t want a scene either,” Reggie said, his voice gentle, his face kind. “Do you think we are insensitive people--that we want to hurt Evan?”
“You are not walking off this plane with him attached to your body,” Kanesha said sharply to Caroline, ignoring Reggie.
Her cheeks as flushed as a spanked bottom, Caroline nodded her head. Apparently satisfied, Kanesha stomped in her three inch black leather pumps back up the aisle and took her seat. The chattering had stopped; and Caroline looked straight ahead, not wanting to know if all eyes were on her and Reggie. In the silence, she heard the sharp click of Kanesha’s seat belt being fastened.
Caroline’s heart began pounding as the little jet began its descent into Chicago; and, in spire of the gentle circles Reggie kept rubbing into her back, she was almost nauseous by the time it touched ground. She walked out closely behind Kanesha with Reggie three people behind. When she saw Evan’s happy, expectant face, she wanted to turn around and run back into the safety of the plane. But she forced herself to walk into his arms where she crumpled against his chest. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“So tired and so happy,” she explained; and Evan tenderly led her to the car.
Rigid with disapproval, Thomas and Chloe followed. She kept her hands smashed into her coat pockets so no one would notice her missing engagement ring that she’d forgotten to retrieve from Reggie. How could she have the conversation with Evan without the ring to return?
They would all remember the next five days leading up to the debacle of the New Hampshire primary as a time of pure optimism that would never be equaled. After New Hampshire, optimism was tempered. We can’t take anything for granted again, Barack said. And nobody mentioned good polls without adding a disclaimer.
But for Caroline, those five days were torture of a kind she had never known. She was living a lie. How could someone whose own mother once told her that her “moral certainty“ could be “oppressive“ be lying to the man who believed she would be his wife? Reggie hadn’t found the ring in his pocket. He and Caroline searched the campaign bus before he left for New Hampshire and turned up a credit card, driver’s license and four dollars in loose change--but no diamond ring from Tiffany’s. She was heartsick about that too.
When Kanesha told her, “You won’t be going to New Hampshire,” she added cruelly: “That will give you time alone with Evan. You can explain about the ring.”
His thin lips pulled tight in disapproval, Thomas refused to talk to her beyond the necessary exchanges of campaign information. Looking lovely in a new shade of creamy red lipstick that she seemed to re-apply a dozen times a day, Chloe too turned her back on Caroline. The two of them went out for lunch or drinks and didn’t ask her to go along. If Barack had won in New Hampshire, they probably would not have relented. In loss, the friends came together again.
“What am I going to tell Evan about the ring?” she asked; and he shrugged, his eyes narrowed meanly. “How can I break up with him without the ring?”
She knew Evan had guessed that something was wrong because she’d insisted on going home alone to bed when she got back from Iowa and kept finding excuses not to see him every night since. When he walked into the office on the night of the primary, she wasn’t entirely surprised to see him. They already knew that Hillary was scoring an upset so the tears that sprang to her eyes seemed appropriate.
“I’m sorry, Baby,” he said, pulling her close. “This is a tough one, but it’s just one. He’ll rebound.”
He stood at her side, one arm around her shoulder, as they waited for Barack to make his concession speech. She saw Reggie and Kanesha standing side by side among the staff, their faces grave behind the requisite smiles. Irrational jealousy washed over her. She wanted to be there with him, surreptitiously holding his hand. Briefly, she closed her eyes and felt his thumb rubbing her hand as she held his. Behind her, Chloe cleared her throat.
“Thank you, New Hampshire. I love you back. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you so much. I am still fired up and ready to go. Thank you. Thank you.
Well, first of all, I want to congratulate Senator Clinton on a hard-fought victory here in New Hampshire. She did an outstanding job. Give her a big round of applause.”
The applause there was dutiful, tepid; in the Chicago office, no one clapped.
“You know, a few weeks ago, no one imagined that we'd have accomplished what we did here tonight in New Hampshire. No one could have imagined it.
For most of this campaign, we were far behind. We always knew our climb would be steep. But in record numbers, you came out, and you spoke up for change.
And with your voices and your votes, you made it clear that at this moment, in this election, there is something happening in America…”
Caroline heard Chloe start to cry behind her; and she knew without looking that Thomas was holding her.
“We need to talk,” she said to Evan. She led him back to Kanesha’s office and closed the door behind them. “I don’t know how to say this….”
“Say it, Caroline. I know something’s up.”
“I’m in love with Reggie!” she blurted out, the tears pouring freely down her face. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean…we didn’t mean…for this to happen.”
“You’re having sex with him?” Evan asked, his voice cold and even.
“Yes, but only once! We made love in Iowa…and I knew I had to break our engagement….I knew I couldn’t sleep with you….”
His face flushed, he turned and walked out the door. She sobbed for several minutes. By the time she pulled herself together, most of the staff had gone, but Thomas and Chloe were still there.
“What did you tell him about the ring?” Chloe asked.
“He didn’t ask about the ring. I didn’t…”
“Oh, he’ll ask,” Thomas said. “I saw that ring before you did. And I know what it cost.” He paused. His little mustache seemed to quiver with the special knowledge. “Fifty thousand dollars, Caroline.” Another pause. “When the shock wears off, he will want that ring back.”
“Wow!” Chloe said. She took a theatrical deep breath emphasizing her chest. Caroline guessed she was a 32 or 34 B, but the combination of slender waist and narrow shoulders made her seem larger. “How much do you suppose whoever has it now can get for it on craigslist? Or a pawnshop? Do pawn shops still exist?”
“You don’t think…“ Caroline began, but her voice caught. She realized now what they were thinking and had been thinking all along: Reggie took the ring. That wasn’t possible, but it was exactly what they thought had happened. “How can you think…”
“Let’s go, Chloe,” Thomas said. “It’s time to get out of here.”
Caroline stayed alone to watch and read online how the pundits explained the Obama loss when the polls predicted he would win big.
Andrew Sullivan writing on his blog blamed racism: “Tonight the first primary - not a caucus. People get to vote in a secret ballot - not in front of their largely liberal peers, as in Iowa. They may have told the pollsters one thing about voting for a black man, but in the privacy of the voting booth, something else happens.“
Other commentators jumped on the “race matters” bandwagon. Caroline poured over the exit polls and reached a different conclusion. What made sense to her was gender-ism. Perhaps inspired by Hillary’s tearful moment in response to a tough question on why she wasn’t more well liked--women had voted overwhelmingly for her.
She walked back to Kanesha’s office where she knew there was a position paper on women voters at the top of a pile on her desk. As she read through it, she had some thoughts to share with Kanesha. Searching for a pen, she saw the police report.
Before she left for New Hampshire, Kanesha had reported the loss of Caroline’s diamond engagement ring on the campaign bus in Iowa to the authorities there. This was a copy of that report forwarded to the Chicago police with a notation that read: “Petty cash and small items have gone missing in the office and on the bus. We didn’t report those losses, but the possible theft of this ring is too large to overlook.”
A post-it note on the first page of the report was written to Kanesha in Thomas’ handwriting:
“K, Detective Burnside has been briefed. An ‘unobtrusive’ investigation is underway. Duly noted that Reggie was the last person known to be holding ring.”
Omigod. How could they? How could they do this to her and Reggie?
To Be Continued Next Week!
Copyright © 2008 by Carla Dickens. All rights reserved. Please do not re-publish the entirety of this chapter or novel without the prior written consent of E-Reads.
DISCLAIMER
This is a work of fiction that takes place during the Democratic Primary and Presidential Campaign of 2008. With the exception of casual references to certain living public persons, places, and events, and of speeches, news commentaries or statements that are public record, all characters, names and places used in The Faithful are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The work contains adult themes, language and content and describes sexual situations.
Labels: Barack Obama, Carla Dickens, Romance, Serial, The Faithful
posted by E-Reads at
Friday, March 28, 2008 Permalink
