Chapter Seven: The Inevitable Candidate

Available Chapters: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight

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Chapter Seven

The Inevitable Candidate

WISCONSIN, FEBRUARY 19, 2008
BARACK OBAMA, 58% OF THE VOTE, HILLARY CLINTON, 41%

After our contentious breakfast meeting with the reporter Jilly Norton, Caroline and I headed back to the office, Obama National Campaign Headquarters. We took the El and discreetly argued in whispers about the identity of X, Jilly’s contact inside the campaign who was a spy for the Clinton side - or so we surmised from her written notes, which I had surreptitiously photographed. My money was on Reggie, Caroline’s lover. (Or was he still her lover? Her engagement to the tall and handsome lawyer Evan seemed to be back on track.)

“It’s Reggie,” I hissed in her ear. I watched the flush spread across her cheeks and briefly wondered if that was how she looked post-orgasm. Two high school boys were watching too. They looked from her to me and back at her again and I could read on their faces the question: But isn’t he gay? “You know he interned in Bill Clinton’s Harlem office and worked on Hillary’s Senate campaign.” Her silky, long blonde hair smelled like orange blossoms as I kept whispering in her ear. “Do you really believe that he flew across country to work for Barack out of a new sense of purpose?”

“Yes, I do,” she fiercely whispered back, her big blue eyes shooting angry sparks. “Reggie is very idealistic, the purest person I’ve ever known. The Clintons disappointed him. He hates the way they practice politics.”

A ray of sunshine bounced off the huge diamond on her left hand ring finger and nearly blinded me. Covering my eyes, I muttered, “Oh, yeah, right.”

She folded her arms and glared at me.

“So who is your suspect?” I asked. Before we left the diner, she’d reached across the table, taken my hand and said, I think I know who X is. “Well?” I demanded quietly. “Who is X?”

“I need a little time to think this through before I tell you,” she said. “I want to have my facts organized logically before I make an accusation.” She paused. “Just because you didn’t do that doesn’t mean I am free to speculate randomly.”

Again, I said,“Yeah, right.”

I gave her a scathing look while simultaneously pulling her close in a hug. She was stalling for time to come up with a credible X. But how could I really be mad at Caroline? We’d been friends for years and I loved her truly. Whoever X was and whatever mischief X meant to wreak on the campaign, I would survive unscathed but Caroline would be hurt badly if the ultimate story of X and his or her exploits began with the replay of the campaign sex games that brought Jilly to Chicago in the first place. Caroline and her black activist lover Reggie. Kanesha and her white boy/policy wonk Michael. Evan and his rebound fling with our sexy little Chloe. (Or is it technically speaking a “fling” if the erotic menu consists mainly of blowjobs?) The list of lovers was the bait X dangled in front of Jilly’s reporter’s nose. But if X thought Jilly wasn’t smart enough to figure out that campaign worker sex-capades were the amuse-bouche, not the main course, X wasn’t so brilliant that I couldn’t get over on him (or her) too.

“I love you, Thomas,” Caroline said, returning my hug.

“I love you, too.”

*

Kanesha was waiting for us when we got to the office. Her black skin a bit ashen, she looked tired, even haggard, and her anxiety touched me. Both Caroline and I embraced her. (Group hugs. Hate the concept. But sometimes they happen.) Kanesha wanted a career in D.C. politics as badly as I wanted to see my photographs featured in contemporary art museums and Caroline wanted to live a good and virtuous life. Jilly Norton could make her goal difficult, if not impossible, for Kanesha to achieve.

“Details,” she said. “Tell me what happened!”

“You first,” I insisted. “Bring us up to speed and then we’ll dish breakfast.”

When I left Kanesha after our brief conversation that morning to rush off to the airport to pick up Caroline and head for the meeting with Jilly, she was going to “have the private word” with Michael, then Chloe, and call Reggie in Wisconsin. We agreed to keep Evan out of this particular loop. Presumably Chloe would either tell him they couldn’t have sex in the office anymore - or, even better, stop calling him. (Well, Kanesha presumed the latter was one of two possibilities. I didn’t. When Chloe liked the taste of a particular dick in her mouth, she wanted to enjoy it again and again.) Even before she knew about Jilly‘s notebook and the existence of X, Kanesha suspected Reggie of using Caroline to create a sexual diversion that could wound the campaign.

This is how things actually went down while I was with Jilly and Caroline:

Kanesha’s hands started to shake as she closed and locked the door behind Thomas. How could they all have been so stupid as to let that conniving journalist have free and full access? What were they thinking? What was she thinking - because ultimately Kanesha was the person in charge on a daily basis. Everyone higher up in the campaign traveled with the candidate or led advance parties into the coming battlegrounds. She was more consistently in the Chicago office than anyone with authority. Moreover, she needed this campaign to make her résumé and her future in politics in Washington D.C.

And you risked all of that to lean over the desk and get spanked by a white man? Dumb black bitch. Stupid just-like-the-Hip-Hoppers-call-it - HO!

At first, she wanted to die. Then, she wanted to kill.

Maybe it was not in Jilly Norton’s best interest to write about interracial sex in Obama campaign headquarters - at least now. But writing that article might become the only way she could justify the time in Chicago if she didn’t discover any “inside info” on Clintonian dirty tricks. She couldn’t leave town empty-handed. Michael! Evan and Chloe! Elizabeth and Reggie! What were they all thinking when they had sex in campaign headquarters?

Fighting back tears, she sat at her desk, head in hands. Screaming out the names of the guilty in her head again, she paused on one name. The light of righteous truth shone on that name. Reggie Williams. She’d distrusted Reggie the minute she caught sight of him, sauntering, dreds swinging, into Caroline’s life. Had that been part of some game plan? Was his public and very physical interest in Caroline merely the set-up? And was there more to it than that? Her head ached. She couldn’t think clearly.

Kanesha grew up listening to her mother Joelle and the sisters put down black men - and the white women who loved them. Our men like white women because white women put up with their shit. They can do anything they want with white women. He’s not putting that thing in my mouth. Let him find a white woman to open her mouth for that. Oh, yes, Mama and the sisters had a point or two. She would save calling Reggie for last. And then what? Did she think her righteous wrath would bring him to his knees in confession?

Picking up the phone, she summoned Michael Westwood, the white boy who spanked her at her request. What would her mother think of that?

“Jesus! Fuck!” Michael said after she’d tersely related the story. She liked the way his face bloomed like a rose when he was excited - for any reason. A swath of blonde hair fell across his forehead; and she had a vision of it pasted with sweat to his skin. “We all had our heads up our asses on this one!” He smacked his forehead with his open palm. The sound of it made Kanesha‘s pussy wet. “I can’t believe we let her hang around the office while we were going at it in here.” He touched her arm gently. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have been looking out for you better than this.”

“All right!” she snapped, but she was soft, molten at the core, creaming in her panties because he wanted to look out for her. “I’ve been beating myself up over this since Thomas told me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He opened his arms and she went into them, burrowing into his chest, which she knew was surprisingly hairy beneath his white shirt. She loved a hairy chest. “Baby, you don’t deserve this,” he said softly, one hand closing over her breast, the nipple hard and aching. She had stopped wondering/worrying if he found her big dark nipples too big and dark. Clearly, he had no problems with them. “You’re too good for this shit.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said weakly.

Now he pulled her roughly against him and kissed her full and hard on the mouth. Briefly, she wanted to resist for the sake of propriety. He held her face in his hands and kissed her again. She leaned her head back, encouraging his mouth to her throat and then her breasts. What was wrong with her? She pulled his hair with her hands and guided his mouth to her nipple. Bite me, she begged. Why did she want this so much?

“We can’t do this in your office any more,” he said, holding her so close to him she could feel his heart pounding, nuzzling her hair, his hot agitated breath on her scalp. “Tonight? My place?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes.”

Closing the office door after him, she thought: Oh, yes, I handled that well, very tough and professional and all that. Now she had an actual date with her white boy. And she was weak in the knees in anticipation of it.

After her breathing regulated, she left Chloe a terse voice message; Jilly Norton is working on an article for The New York Times on sex in the workplace - our workplace. We‘ve been busted. Don‘t talk to her and don‘t even say Hello to Evan in this office again! Kanesha thought Chloe was the ultimate white girl piece of work, using Evan for her sexual and ego needs while feigning loyalty to Caroline. White girls played the game so well. When cornered, they cried. They didn’t really lose even when they lost.

Reggie picked up on the first ring and put her on the defensive with his first sentence.

“Oh, fuck,” he said irritably. “Who brought her into the office? Didn’t anyone vet her? What the fuck were you thinking, sister girl?” He gave her perhaps a second to answer. When she didn’t, he continued his rant in an increasingly aggrieved tone. “You know what we’ve been through this weekend with the Clinton aides accusing Barack of plagiarism because he used a line of Deval’s!”

The “plagiarism” scandal grew out of a speech Barack gave refuting Hillary’s accusation that he was nothing but an eloquent speaker while she had the “experience” for the job. “Just words?“ he asked several times before quoting from some of the greatest speeches in U.S. political history including John F. Kennedy’s inspiring words: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.“

The “just words” speech was adapted from one given by Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts, co-chairman of the Obama campaign and a longtime close friend of Barack’s. In fact, Deval suggested he use it and went on the talk shows saying that he had and Hillary‘s accusations were ridiculous. Senator Clinton cribbed speeches from her husband and borrowed slogans like “I’m fired up!” from Barack. And she was accusing him of plagiarism!

“Her comment during the debate about Barack only being capable of ‘Xerox change’ drew audience boos,” Kanesha reminded him. “It actually worked in our favor.”

“Right –a take on the old maxim, All publicity is good publicity,” he said sarcastically. “But this is a different issue. That was a nothing issue but remember - it was still in the media for days. How much more play would a campaign sex story –with interracial twists - get?” And he asked again, “Who brought Jilly Norton into the office?”

“She asked Caroline and Evan if she could do a human interest feature on their love story for Chicago magazine. At the Regency on Super Tuesday. You remember - the night they re-announced their engagement.” And you, her lover, smiled and clapped on the sidelines! “Or was it the night they got re-engaged?”

“You let an unpaid campaign worker and an Obama supporter agree to a story related to the campaign?”

Whose public flaunting of his interracial sex episode with an unpaid campaign worker probably started all this? She wanted to ask, but didn’t.

“Yes,” she said, her mouth dry. You were doing that unpaid campaign worker, you asshole. Can‘t you even call her by name? Caroline! Why didn‘t she come out and say what she was thinking? “Apparently I did.”

“Damage control,” he said, contempt in his voice. “I need to talk to Thomas. Apparently you’ve put him in charge of damage control?” He paused, giving her time to mount a defense, but she couldn’t. For all her tough talk, Kanesha blossomed under showers of praise and withered under the assault of criticism, especially criticism from a brother, tougher to take any day than the hard words of sisters who often spoke harshly to one another. White girls smiled and paid sweet compliments they didn‘t mean while black girls roared insults they didn‘t mean either. When they did pay their respects to one another, they were loudly boastful. Girl, you got it goin‘ on! You‘re workin‘ that dress! “What’s happening with you, Kanesha?” Reggie demanded. He surely heard in her voice and even more in her silences that she blamed him for Jilly Norton. His high profile courting of Caroline had brought the enemy into their camp. Suddenly he feigned understanding. “Would you like to talk about it?”

“I’ll have Thomas call you when he gets here,” she said.

“Anything else?” he asked.

She hung up on him. For a brief moment, she felt exhilarated because she had done that, but triumph was small and fleeting.

Yes, she’d handled that one badly too. Advantage, lost. More than losing a point, she had tacitly admitted something she should not have. She was sure Reggie knew from her guarded and distant tone what he may have only until then suspected: She didn’t trust him. They were not fully on the same side anymore. If he’d trusted her before, he didn’t now. And she would pay the price for letting him know she distrusted him, whether her suspicions about him proved justified or not. A proud black man who expected loyalty, he had her on his enemies list now.

Fingers trembling, she called her mother, Joelle Bradley, Manhattan’s leading African American female ad exec. When things were really bad, she called her mother and told her everything - leaving out, of course, the part about having sex with the white boy. She’d always left out the part about sex when confiding in her mother.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it, Baby,” Joelle soothed in the husky voice Kanesha associated with cigarette smoke and lullabies and her mother‘s big soft breasts enfolding her in hugs. “There wasn’t anything you could have said to him over the phone that would have made him confess his secrets, if he has any. You let him put you on the defensive. That’s a good tactic.”

“Tactic?” Kanesha laughed in spite of herself. “Right, Mom! I played him, huh?”

“You did, Baby. If he is a campaign spy, you didn’t give him any reason to think you suspect him. Isn’t that better than coming out and asking him: Wassup, Brother, did you plant that sex story? Did you use that white girl?”

"I knew he was using Caroline from the minute he fixed those bedroom eyes on her. Why else would he stand by smiling while she went back to her fiancé?”

“Maybe he got tired of her, Baby. Maybe he didn’t want her after he got her. Maybe she was hanging on to him too tight and he saw freedom coming from the white man again.” Joelle laughed at her own joke. “She got what she deserved for messin’ with one of our men.”

Kanesha knew her mother. Though she railed against him, Joelle wouldn’t blame the black man if there was a white woman standing beside him who could take the rap. Caroline opened the doors and let Jilly Norton into the private life of the Obama campaign. Reggie was a low life black man, but Caroline was the bitch in heat who should also take the heat for this one. He was one of our men. She had a vivid memory of her mother having dinner at Sylvia’s restaurant with a group of friends and their daughters when a white woman came in with a black man Joelle had dated. Any time we want one of our men back, we can get him, Joelle said loudly. Kanesha and the other daughters were embarrassed, as much at the lie as the loud expression of it. No, Mama, she thought, it isn’t true; you can’t. At age twelve, she knew as much.

Kanesha had tried and failed to explain to white women the basic concept - that the reviled black man belonged to the black woman who despised him. White women invariably responded: We don’t think white men belong to us just because they’re white. They didn’t get it. She couldn’t explain it. Race was like that.

“Mama, please,” Kanesha said. “Use your contacts. Check the brother out.”

“I will,” Joelle promised, a hint of reluctance in her voice. But she always kept her promises to her daughter because the girl‘s father never kept his promises to anyone. You have to trust someone completely in your young life, Kanesha; and that someone is me. Your Mama is never gonna’ let you down. If Reggie was spying for Hillary, Joelle was as likely as anyone on the planet to find it out. “And you keep your eyes on those white girls.”

Before I could pull the photocopied pages out of my pocket, Caroline was dragged into a conference. Kanesha briefed me on her conversations, including the one with her mother - and I was surprised, both that she would draw her mother into the situation and tell me about it. (I didn’t fully understand Kanesha’s relationship with her mother at that point though I would soon. Kanesha intuitively knew that we needed a bigger gun to stand up to Jilly than me. Joelle was the big gun.) Reggie really had rattled her cage. I knew she was taking on the responsibility for Jilly Norton gaining entry to the office. She would be kicking her own ass for that - and for Michael Westwood - for a long time, even if there were no long-term consequences, like a big story in The New York Times. And Reggie was only too happy to help her put the jackboot on her kicking foot.

“You’re sure Caroline didn’t believe it about me and Michael?” she asked.

“She laughed at the improbability of it.”

“Good,” Kanesha said, her cheeks turning darker. “Jilly writes that story and I’m dead, Thomas. Dead in the political waters.”

Caroline came back into the room then; and I pulled the pages out of my pocket.

“Oh, god, oh, god, oh, god,” Kanesha said as she read. When she finished, she looked up at me and said, “Reggie. X is Reggie!”

Caroline turned and walked out without saying a word.

Hours later, Kanesha and I were arm in arm watching the returns come in as Barack scored his ninth victory in the Wisconsin primary, not only soundly defeating Hillary but making inroads into her support from women and unions. He split the women’s vote nearly even with her. Cheers went up in the room when Wolf Blitzer made that announcement on CNN. Obamentum!

“He’s beginning to look inevitable,” Michael said. He was standing directly behind us, beside a momentarily chastened Chloe. Caroline and Evan had gone back to her place to watch TV alone. “That worries me a little.”

“I know,” Kanesha said. “It’s going to get nasty.”

“Women may feel sorry for her and come out like they did in New Hampshire,” Michael said. They talked politics back and forth like baby twins babbling the same stream of conversation in turn. “But it’s a delicate balance for the Clinton camp. If they get too mean, they don’t pick up her sympathy vote.”

“What they throw at Barack has to stick or else they look bad for making the pitch,” Kanesha said.

“Anybody want a glass of plonk?” I asked. “I’m headed that way.”

They didn’t even hear me.

On screen Hillary Clinton spoke from a rally in Ohio. She began by calling the record voter turnout a “great night for Democrats.” You’d never know she’d lost as she said:

"Both Senator Obama and I would make history," the former first lady said in remarks prepared for delivery at a rally in Youngstown. "But only one of us is ready on day one to be commander in chief, ready to manage our economy, and ready to defeat the Republicans.

"Only one of us has spent 35 years being a doer, a fighter, and a champion for those who need a voice."

Her loss in Wisconsin was no surprise to anyone, including her organization. She’d hardly campaigned there at all. That didn’t stop her, however, from running a last minute TV add claiming that Barack refused to debate her in Wisconsin because now “He’d rather give speeches than answer questions.” I turned my back on her as I drank my plonk.

When they cut away from her to pick up Barack’s arrival at his victory rally in Texas, I looked back at the screen. He was magnificent, joyous in victory while retaining his humility. Hillary Clinton was surely toast.

Jilly Norton had put the fear of God into the campaign lovers. As I scanned the early news results online, I was aware of nothing but the quiet hum of the campaign machinery running into the night. Our virtue was restored. (And one hoped that the re-virginization wasn’t too late.)

According to The New York Sun:

“Independents cast about one-quarter of the ballots in the race between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, and roughly 15% of the electorate were first-time voters, the survey said. Mr. Obama has run strongly among independents in earlier primaries, and among younger voters, and cited their support as evidence that he would make a stronger general election candidate in the fall.”

We’d won even more than the Wisconsin primary. I sent Kanesha a victory email. Yeah, I knew she’d gone back to Michael’s for an intimate dinner, his specialty, grilled Reuben sandwiches. I wasn’t expecting a reply. But within seconds, she was IM-ing me.

I found something.

Your G spot?

Oh, ha. I found something bigger than that.

Some G spots are bigger than others. Or so I hear.

A photo.

Are you still at Michael’s?

Yes. He’s sleeping.

So you got up to snoop through his drawers?

I got up to read the media coverage online.

And you found?

A framed photo. He must have dozens of them on the bookshelves.

Like my Aunt Sally.

This one looks like it was taken in college or just after.

He’s arm in arm with Hil and Bill?

Well, there’s one of those too.

He did work for Mark Penn so he was likely at events the Clintons attended.

The photo is of Michael, Reggie - and Jilly Norton.

Omigod.

Yeah.

Get dressed. Put the photo in your bag. Get out of there.

Right.

After she signed off, I began to sweat. Was I crazy telling her to steal the photo? What if Michael walked in on her while she was shoving it into her bag? Would he hit her? I left a message on her home phone telling her to call me as soon as she got in. Was there any good explanation for that photo? And if there was one, why had he failed to mention that first, he knew Reggie, and second, Jilly?

On screen I read that Hillary kept saying, “I’m in this to win. That’s what matters. Winning, winning, winning.”

Kanesha didn’t pick up her house phone or her cell phone when I tried again an hour later. Online I found one of those old articles about the mysterious or violent deaths of dozens of people associated with the Clintons, beginning with Vince Foster, her old Arkansas law partner and rumored lover who walked out of his White House office one day at the height of the White Water scandal, drove to Rock Creek Park and shot himself in the head. (Or didn’t. According to the conspiracy theorists, he was shot because he knew too much. His suicide was staged.)

Suddenly I realized just how dangerous a Clinton camp spy in our midst could be. These people are ruthless. Winning, winning, winning - winning is everything. They have no soul. Hillary didn’t care if her dirty politics hurt the Democratic Party and the nation. Wouldn’t some of the people who worked for her stop at nothing to help her? And what if Michael was one of those people?

I rang Kanesha’s numbers until five in the morning when I decided to go looking for her.

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.