The Faithful

Chapter Eight: The Empire Strikes Back

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

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Chapter Eight

The Empire Strikes Back

Democratic Primaries and Caucuses in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, Vermont, March 4, 2008

Vermont: Barack Obama, 59%; Hillary Clinton, 39%

Rhode Island: Hillary Clinton, 58%; Barack Obama, 40%

Texas primary: Hillary Clinton, 51%; Barack Obama, 48%

Texas Caucus: Barack Obama, 52%; Hillary Clinton, 48%

Ohio: Hillary Clinton, 54%; Barack Obama, 44%

Kanesha was in meltdown when she answered her doorbell at 6 a.m. Her face had taken on the slightly ashen look that a black woman has when she doesn’t get enough sleep—or maybe fails to moisturize. Her hair was straining to burst out in a triumphant frizz beneath its layers of processing and shining. Beads of mascara were embedded like grit in her eyelashes. The whites of her eyes were so bloodshot they looked like those ghastly orbs served up in bowls at Halloween haunted houses. Still she didn’t look bad; Kanesha never looks bad. But I didn’t see the bruises. Were they not visible on dark skin?

“What did he do to you?” I demanded. She was trembling in my arms. “If he assaulted you, Kanesha, we’re calling the police. Don’t protect him for the sake of the campaign!”

She leaned back in my arms, looked hard at me and asked: “Thomas, are you crazy?”

“Am I crazy? Am I crazy! I can’t get you on the phone. I come over here not knowing if I’ll have to go to his place next and demand to check the closets for your body—and when you answer the door, you look like you’ve been through a street fight—and you ask if I am crazy?”

“Yes,” she said, pulling out of my arms and clasping her hands tightly in front of her body, probably to stop them from shaking. “You know I’ve been involved in a consensual sexual relationship with Michael. He only spanks me because I ask for it.” Her cheeks flushed, like dusk going into night, making her transcendently beautiful in her dishevelment. “Don’t you understand?” she asked, her full lower lip quavering sweetly. “I left him sleeping peacefully, stole a photo from his apartment and ran out of there.”

“How long ago?” I asked.

Right after I hung up with you.”

“And you haven’t been answering your phone? Didn’t it occur to you that I might be worried?”

“I didn’t think,” she said. She was back in my arms, sobbing on my shoulder. “I couldn’t think about anything except what I’d done to him.”

Oh, damn. Kanesha was in love with Michael Westwood, former (and probably secretly current) Clinton-ite, the pasty white boy/policy wonk. I let her cry it out, led her into her bedroom, where I tucked her in and curled up beside her and held her for the three hours we allowed ourselves to sleep. I’d never been that close to a black woman’s booty; and I could see why it would drive a straight man crazy. I doubted that Michael’s life would ever be the same again.

“Where in the hell have you two been?” Chloe asked when we walked into Obama campaign headquarters. Clearly annoyed, she still looked fabulous, wearing tailored black wool slacks and a gray silk blouse with full sleeves and deep cuffs—and red stilettos. The silk caressed her breasts—and don’t think she didn’t know how hot that was. “Hello? We’re three days to Texas and Ohio and counting. So you met for a leisurely brunch?” Kanesha went straight to her office without speaking. “Uh, oh,” Chloe said, her tone softening. “What happened?”

I reached out and squeezed her arm, firm beneath the silk and said, “Find Caroline and meet me back in Kanesha’s office in fifteen minutes.”

“Got it,” she said, turning perfectly on her four inch heels and going in search of Caroline.

I rifled through the pile of mail on the desk as I was pulling up my email on the desktop computer.

Call me—from Jilly Norton, the freelance journalist trying to extort our help for a piece she wanted to write for The New York Times on the Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks. I’d been too tired to look at the photo Kanesha stole from Michael’s apartment—which she said was a snapshot of Jilly, Michael and Reggie Williams, respected Obama campaign staff manager and Caroline’s black lover. Oh, yeah, I would be calling Jilly shortly; and I’d be the one asking the questions.

Need to meet with you and Kanesha ASAP after arriving at office around noon—from Reggie. We were expecting a lecture from him on our stupidity in allowing Jilly Norton access to campaign headquarters where she stood outside closed doors and listened to Caroline and Reggie—and then Kanesha and Michael—and then Evan and Chloe have sex. Oh, yeah, Reggie, we’ve got a question for you first: Why didn’t you tell us that you know Jilly? Or for that matter, that you knew Michael before you met him here in Chicago?

I glanced up from the screen and saw Chloe and Caroline standing in the doorway, two blonde angels, their pale foreheads creased in concern.

“Let’s go,” I said and led the way back to Kanesha’s office.

Composed, coifed and made up, Kanesha appeared calm. Caroline’s shoulders relaxed and Chloe’s expression of annoyance returned to her face. I sat one buttock on the edge of the desk, giving the ladies the chairs.

“I found this in Michael Westwood’s apartment,” Kanesha said, handing the framed 4” x 6” photo in an unadorned brass frame to me. She put up a hand. “Don’t ask. Just look.”

I looked—and I saw Michael and Reggie on opposite sides of a small white girl with brown hair, a girl who was not Jilly Norton.

“That is not Jilly,” I said, handing the photo to Chloe who leaned in to share the view with Caroline.

“No, of course, that’s not Jilly,” Chloe said. Caroline nodded her head in agreement. “Who said it was?”

“Michael and Reggie?” Caroline asked. “When was this taken?”

“And where?” Chloe added.

“Not Jilly?” Kanesha asked, shaking her head in disbelief.

“No,” Chloe said definitively with Caroline again shaking her head in agreement. “Same hair and body type—but not Jilly. Why did you think it was Jilly?”

“God,” Kanesha said, leaning forward on her elbows on the desk, holding her head in her hands. “God. Oh, God.”

Michael Westwood tapped on the door and entered without waiting for a response. In anger, he’d lost his hapless appearance and taken on the mantle of the angry white male. He could be one of those Every White Man voters that all the campaigns were trying to win over.

“Why did you call me on the carpet?” he asked Kanesha whose head was still in her hands. He glanced at the framed photo Chloe held, started, looked more closely and took it from her. His pale face turned pink with indignation. “Where did you get this?”

“I thought…” she said.

“You thought what?” he demanded. “If you wanted to know about my relationship with Emily, you could have asked me. Why steal her photo? Why bring it into the office and show it around?”

“Omigod,” I said to Kanesha who was ignoring me but surely heard. “It’s true. White people really all do look alike to you.”

“Emily?” Caroline asked.

“Who the hell is Emily?” Chloe asked, her annoyance escalating to irritation.

“Emily Ryan. Hillary’s communication director. As if you didn’t know,” he said, in clipped tones. He was answering Chloe’s question directly to Kanesha who could not look up from the desk. “Why didn’t you ask me about her if you wanted to know?”

“But when?” Caroline asked. “When was this picture taken?”

“Four years ago,” he said, answering Caroline this time but not taking his intense angry eyes off Kanesha. Baby blue eyes can turn hard and sharp as glass. “Right before the divorce,” he added.

“Divorce?” Kanesha asked, raising her head. “You were married?”

“And why didn’t you tell us that you and Reggie knew each other?” Chloe demanded.

“Reggie?” he asked, studying the picture. “Yes, I guess that is Reggie, isn’t it?”

“You don’t know it is?” Caroline asked.

“Never thought about it,” he said.

“But you framed a photo of you and him?”

“I framed a photo of me and Emily—and a volunteer for Hillary. I didn’t think about who he was. It was just nice to have, you know, photos of me with a diverse group of people. Diversity,” he said firmly. “I believe in that.”

Jesus F’ing Christ! Diversity! He believed in it so much that he would frame a photo of himself and his wife with a campaign worker whose name he probably didn’t know. It must have been the dreads. Reggie’s dreads were hanging long and proud back in the day—before he cut them off in Chicago. And then I thought: What friggin’ idiots we all are. The rest of the office was worrying about the potential impact of that photo of Barack in ceremonial African garb—taken while he was visiting Africa years ago—released to the media by a Clinton staffer. Would the public now view him as not only a foreigner, but also a secret Muslim? And didn’t we have enough trouble with the Clinton campaign leaking a secret report that Barack had told Canadian government officials he wasn’t as tough on NAFTA trade agreements as he was claiming to be? With all that and more, we were puzzling over a snapshot that only proved we staffers of diversity may not be able to recognize anyone who doesn’t look like us.

Reggie joined us a few minutes later; and for once, I was glad to see him. A diversion!

He looked at the photo and said, “What do you know about that? That’s you, Michael? You’re thinner there. When the hell was this taken? Did I know you then?”

Caroline got up, went into his arms and gave Reggie a big hug. In an angry huff, Michael left the room, taking his photo with him. Chloe muttered something about three days til Texas and here we were demonstrating our inability to tell one member of the other race from another member of that race. Kanesha looked up at me helplessly.

“Let’s go get some lunch and talk over brewskis,” I said to Reggie, Caroline and Chloe—and they didn’t seem to notice or care that Kanesha didn’t come along.

“So Michael was married to Hillary’s communications director,” Chloe said, holding her glass of white wine by the stem. “No wonder he switched allegiance to Obama.”

I nodded in agreement. For an ambitious policy wonk like Michael, working side by side with an equally ambitious ex-wife on the same campaign would not be comfortable. Did that rule him out as X, the informant mentioned in Jilly Norton’s notebook that I had photographed behind her back? Not entirely. Maybe it was a very friendly divorce and he was working with his ex-wife to undermine Obama. Or maybe he was desperate to upstage her and settled on a supreme act of campaign skullduggery as the way to do it. And maybe he was subordinate to X who was really Reggie.

No one was exempt from suspicion now.

Reggie and Caroline seemed enchanted with one another all over again. I wanted to ask her: Hey, what about that reconciliation with your fiancé, Evan? Twirling her wineglass by its stem, Chloe, Evan’s rebound revenge lover, seemed to be asking the same question in her head. Reggie rubbed Caroline’s back, massaged her shoulders and, yes, nuzzled her neck. “Just like old times,” I said, raising my own glass to them.

Blushing and narrowing her eyes, Caroline said, “Something is going on between Michael and Kanesha, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Chloe said accusingly. “What would she be doing in his apartment if they weren’t having sex?”

“What have you got to say, Brother?” Reggie asked, grinning wickedly. “You always seem to be the man in the know.”

“I have nothing to say,” I said. “Kanesha and Michael are as forthcoming as you and Caroline were before Iowa—“ and I didn’t add: when you had sex for the first time in the back of the campaign bus.

Reggie shrugged gracefully and returned to his main focus, rubbing Caroline’s back. Chloe drank her wine. I wondered: Is one of them X? In a few hours, Reggie would be on another plane, joining the campaign in Texas where, according to The New York Times, Hillary had “issued her gunslinger invitation to Senator Barack Obama, challenging him to ‘meet me in Texas…’”

“Hillary is comparing Barack’s foreign policy experience to George Bush’s when he entered the White House,” Reggie said, “while claiming she is ‘tested and ready on Day One.’ If she calls traveling internationally as First Lady a foreign policy test—think what she could do with sex in the Chicago office. She’ll paint Barack as a pimp.”

“They are trying to take everyone’s mind off Bill saying she had to win Texas and Ohio or she couldn’t win the nomination.”

“Maybe somebody is already feeding the Clinton campaign that and worse,” I said; and we all looked in different directions, not able to meet one another’s eyes.

Would we ever fully trust one another again?

“Tell me about Jilly Norton,” Reggie said; and I knew he was talking to me though he didn’t take his eyes off Caroline.

And so I told him about Jilly eavesdropping on the sexual escapades at campaign headquarters—and threatening to write about them if we didn’t give her something better, like an inside scoop on a Clinton operative inside our campaign.

“You can see why she might think there is one,” Chloe said dryly. “She didn’t have any trouble getting in.”

“Right,” Reggie said to her and leaned across her to say to me—“You got into her hotel room and photographed her notebook! Sweet. Do you think you could do it again?”

“I was afraid you were going to ask that.”

Reggie flew off to Texas; Caroline went home with Evan; Chloe pretended she was too busy working to care—and Kanesha and Michael left the office together, not even acting like they weren’t together, not that there was anyone left to notice. I had a feeling she would receive corporal punishment that night for her misdeed and love every minute of it. Me? I was planning another raid on the notebooks of Jilly Norton. The plans were laid. Caroline had arranged for Jilly to be well away from her hotel room—waiting for a meeting with the two of us that wasn’t going to happen in a bar across town. (We hadn’t taken the plan as far as how we would deal with the fall-out later. Did we think Jilly would take kindly to being stood up? Maybe we did. We were still underestimating Jilly at that moment.)

An hour later, my buddy at the Palmer House let me into Jilly’s room. Stealthily, I pulled out my little Nikon. One notebook lay on the table. I slipped on my white cotton gloves and opened it.

From the notebook of Jilly Norton:

What they really think about Hillary out here in Chicago-land.

Campaign volunteer Caroline Milner Stevens, 28, native of Clayton, Missouri, a tony WASP suburb of St. Louis, daughter of Arthur Stevens, Chief of Heart Surgery at Barnes Hospital and Catherine Milner Stevens, a pediatric cranial specialist who teaches at St. Louis University Medical School, fiancé of Evan Templeton, Esquire, scion of the wealthy Philadelphia Templetons—that lovely blonde Caroline, reminiscent of Grace Kelly in her youthful prime, that girl who made her debut into society as The Queen of Love and Beauty at the Veiled Prophet Ball, making her the city’s premier debutante of the year 2000—confided:

“Hillary is a monster. She is frightening. She is crazy. She tells outrageous lies. Hillary Clinton is a monster!”

Caroline never said that. It didn’t sound like Caroline. But it was the only entry in the notebook. I photographed it and left the room quickly, almost expecting Jilly Norton to jump out of the closet screaming, Gotcha! I knew I’d been had, but I didn’t know how I’d been had until Reggie’s call woke me up at 4 a.m.

“What the fuck!” he said. “I get the text of the notebook passage you scanned and sent—and then a few hours later I learn that the same text was published this morning as a blind gossip item in The New York Post. What the fuck happened? Caroline never said anything like that!

“Who set her up?”

The New York Post—everybody’s favorite city tabloid. Did Jilly sell a blind item to the Post? Did X place it there? And why this particular made-up blind item?

Who set Caroline up? And why?

“HILLARY IS A MONSTER!”

The story was everywhere by the time I got to the office around ten. Senior campaign strategists had been conference-calling with Kanesha for hours. A statement was released saying that the campaign was investigating and that neither Senator Obama nor his staff considered Hillary a monster. (Oh, ha!) Barack had called. Michelle had called. Caroline was home with orders not to leave her apartment. Paparazzi were camped outside her apartment building.

“The Queen of Love and Beauty in the Veiled Prophet’s Court?!” Chloe snickered. Waving a copy of The New York Post, she was sitting in a chair with her legs propped up on the front edge of the desk. Fine white cotton shirt, black wool skirt, dark sheer stockings and purple suede stilettos.

“Nice heels,” I said.

“So what is this all about, Thomas? Caroline never said anything like that.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“No. I don’t think she’s answering her phone, but I know she never said anything like that. Caroline is too smart to make a stupid comment about Hillary Clinton to a reporter.”

“How did you score a copy of the paper?” I asked. I took it out of her hand, walked around and sat down behind the desk. “I can see your panties. Black lace.”

“You can’t borrow them!” she retorted. “You’ll stretch them out of shape.”

“Damn.” I quickly perused the short article at the top of Page Six. “Nice photo of Caroline. Looks recent.”

“I thought so too.” She paused. “Did you take it, Thomas?”

“Omigod,” I said. “I did. You’re right.”

I’d taken so many photos of the campaign staff that I didn’t immediately recognize this one. I opened the Picture File on the computer in search of it. Yes, there it was.

“What’s going on, Thomas?” Chloe asked, her voice soft yet cold. I looked up. The severe expression didn’t suit her pretty little face. “You took that photograph. How did it end up in the Post?”

“Jilly Norton….” I began before I realized that Chloe didn’t know the full story.

“We all know that Caroline didn’t call Hillary a monster, but I hear there isn’t going to be a denial, only a formal apology to Hillary. What’s up with that?”

“You don’t think I had anything to do with this?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Thomas,” she said, swinging her legs down to the floor and standing on those amazing purple suede heels. “I just don’t know,” she added on her way out the door.

A few minutes later as I headed down the corridor between cubicles to Kanesha’s office, I could sense a change in attitude in the room. People were looking at me. (No, it wasn’t like that dream where you’re naked or wearing shabby drawers and people are staring. It was the real thing.) Their stares were curious or in some cases accusing. How did a photo that I took end up in a New York newspaper beside a piece of gossip that effectively finished Caroline in the campaign?

“What’s going on, Kanesha?” I asked as I closed the door behind me.

“Jilly Norton set us up,” she said, rubbing her temples with the first two fingers of each hand. “What else could it be?”

“Yeah, I figured out that part.” I poured two cups of coffee from her private pot and set them down on the desk. “She knew I was going to photograph that notebook. There was nothing in it except that one entry. And she waited for me to photograph it before she sent it to the Post.”

“You need to change your passwords,” she said, holding the thick white cup in both hands before she took a sip. “Everyone needs to change their passwords.”

“She probably downloaded the photos to her own email account while she still had free rein of the office,” I said. “I usually leave files open and minimized. Anyone could have had access.”

“Yes—but you don’t think anyone else did this, do you?” She took another sip of coffee, put the cup down and got up. “Jilly got you both with this one, you and Caroline. Why did she make it so personal? I don’t get that part.”

“I thought I was so smart,” I said.

“Why did she do this?” Kanesha asked.

“I don’t know. To force us to bring her the information she’s looking for—even though we don’t know what that is? To get even with me and Caroline for disrespecting her at breakfast? Or with me for coming into her room and photographing her notebook?”

None of it made sense. We both knew that.

“Maybe she just wants to turn us against one another,” Kanesha said sadly. “Perhaps that’s the whole point—to change the tenor and tone of the Obama campaign——force us to distrust one another…”

“You think she is a Clinton supporter?”

“I think she has no politics, no ethics. She wants a story, a big one. And she’s trying to goad us into providing one.”

She sat back down and picked up her cup. We drank coffee in a state of mutual brooding. She’d turned off the phone when I came in; and the silence was eerie. In a few days or weeks, would Caroline’s phone be this silent, her life unbearably quiet?

“Poor Caroline,” I said, suddenly miserable at the thought of her isolated in her apartment. “Why is the campaign throwing her under the bus for something she didn’t say?”

“No choice,” Kanesha said. “Voting in Texas and Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont tomorrow. We need to shut this down. Fire the staffer; apologize for the comment. Get it off the news. Besides,” she added grimly, “I had to tell them”—and by them, she meant the senior strategists—“everything. Well, almost everything. I said that Jilly Norton overhead what she assumed to be sexual activity and threatened Caroline with exposure if she didn’t get the story she wanted.”

“Sexual activity?” I raised my eyebrows. “Name names?”

“Caroline and Reggie; Chloe and Evan.” She threw up her hands. There were tears in her eyes. “I know! I’m the monster. But I couldn’t do it to Michael, I couldn’t do it to myself. You know we both want a career in politics. I couldn’t throw us both away.”

“I know,” I said; and I did know.

We sat together in silence for a few more minutes before someone pounded on the door, demanding that Kanesha turn on her phone.

“My mother’s on it,” she said. “I mean really on it.”

I nodded. Kanesha’s mother Odelle was a legendary advertising executive and, according to her daughter, capable of getting the real truth about anything. She’s on it. Okay, that had to be good for us and bad for Jilly Norton and Reggie. Walking back to my cubicle, I held my head up and looked straight ahead. Reggie, I thought. Reggie sent me to Jilly’s room the second time. He was in on this.

“So?” Chloe asked when I got back to my desk.

“Staffer fired, apology issued, over and done.”

“Poor Caroline,” she said, but did she really mean it?

I searched her face for sympathy but saw only a smooth surface. Was Chloe involved? Did she want to get back at Caroline for reclaiming Evan?

On Tuesday March 4, Hillary Clinton got back in the game. I watched the results with Kanesha and Michael, Chloe and a few hundred other staffers in the Chicago office. She squeaked by in Texas, took one small state while Barack took another but she did win Ohio convincingly. Overall, Hillary Clinton didn’t win big, but she won big enough to set the media off on a new course: She was the comeback kid; and Barack had failed—failed to close the deal. Blame the NAFTA flap, the Bush comparisons, the photo of Barack in African dress? Blame the cry, “Hillary is a monster?” Despondent, most of the staff went home as soon as the numbers were called.

As usual on primary or caucus nights, I sat in a nearly empty office reading what The New York Times had to say online:

“CLINTON SUCCESS CHANGES DYNAMIC IN DELEGATE HUNT.

OBAMA LEADS IN COUNT

The Momentum Slows—Concern in Party on Longer Fight

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victories in the primaries on Tuesday barely dented Senator Barack Obama’s lead in delegates, but they seemed to slow the Democratic Party establishment’s move in his direction while giving her campaign time to try to turn the race in her favor…

Mr. Obama now has 1,299 delegates compared with the 1.100 for Mrs. Clinton…”

As I pondered how those numbers would change again in a few days when the votes were fully tallied, I heard faint sounds coming from Kanesha’s office. Curious, I made my way softly down the corridor. I paused outside the door.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, sheeeeeettt! Oh, yes, that’s your dick, Baby….suck that dick….Oh, God…

The door was not fully shut. Leaning into the crack, I could hear the sounds of sucking. My own dick grew hard in response.

“Oh, God!”

The recipient of what sounded like a superior blow job was getting close to orgasm. Without fully reasoning it out, I gently pushed the door open. I’m not sure who I thought I might find—but I was shocked at who were in the classic pose as the door swung open. She was on her knees in front of him. He held her head in his hands. His large member glistened in the light from the hallway as her jerked it suddenly out of her mouth. They both looked at me.

“Oh, God!” he said—and not in orgasm but in dismay.

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.