Cape Disappointment (9 page)

LYING IN THE HOSPITAL BED
has become a form of torture. Tonight I'm feeling a dull pain where the metal spike pierced me.

The inability to remember is my personal inquisition, a thousand images teasing me over the agony of a fractured past and a future as blank as the sky. I struggle trying to recall what's happened in my life. I wrestle with disjointed images, some bloody, all confusing. I trap half-remembered scraps of conversation and then drift back to sleep. At times somebody is in the room with me when I awaken. More often I am alone. Rarely am I alert enough to engage in a conversation.

So far I'd seen a doctor, two nurses— maybe three—Elmer Slezak, Kathy, and a redhead whose name I cannot recall without putting more effort into it than I'm able to exert just now. What worries me most is Kathy's sporadic appearances. Something is wrong, but I don't know what. If our positions were reversed, I wouldn't leave her side for a minute.

Is she failing to visit because she's not able? Or is it possible her infrequent visits have all been in my fevered, drug-addled imagination and she hasn't been here at all? I'm beginning to suspect not everything I'm remembering is going to make sense when I come out of this. Once begun, my thoughts are incapable of shifting directions. I worry until I fall asleep, which is not long at all.

Over the past weeks I've been hard on Kathy. Sure, she was irritated
with me, too, stumped by my participation in the Maddox campaign. I had my excuses, but excuses were like … well, we all know the end of that soliloquy.

The governor's engagement party had been the worst.

I'd behaved abominably.

“IT'S NOT LIKE
you don't have your own Deborah in the Sheffield office,” I said, fingering my bow tie.

Kathy and I had just broken off a conversation with two couples from the Tri-Cities, a pair of mayors and spouses, and now the foursome was wandering off to join a group that included Kalpesh Gupta. “Who?” Kathy asked, turning to me. “Who could we possibly have in our office who's anything like that succubus?”

“Oh. Now she's a succubus?”

“Look it up.”

“I know what a succubus is. A female demon who has sex with sleeping men. Your counterpart would be Kalpesh Gupta.”

Her look was incredulous.

“Come on now,” I said. “You know he's the male equivalent of Deborah Driscoll.”

“Kalpesh is not a femme fatale.”

“No, he's a
male
fatale. He uses his masculinity and looks in the same way Deborah uses her feminine wiles. And what's with all the hugging every time you two meet?”

“You're not going to complain about that, are you?”

“He hugs way too long.”

“Kalpesh is a very expressive individual.”

“He didn't give
me
a hug.”

“Did you want a hug from him?”

“I do, but he's not going to do it because I don't have breasts to feel up.”

“No, you ogle breasts.”

“My eyes accidentally strayed. It could have happened to anybody.”

We chewed on that for a few minutes as we made our way through a sea of tuxedos and evening gowns. We spoke with several groups I'd met while on the campaign trail and then with some whom Kathy had
met traveling with Sheffield. We ran into a group Kathy knew from the courthouse. Insider jokes were exchanged; I understood about half of them. Ordinarily, Kathy would have explained the rest, but not tonight.

When we were finally alone again, I said, “Kalpesh is from India, isn't he?”

“His parents are. He was born here, but he goes back occasionally.”

“I read an article where they did a study and found over fifty percent of Indian men are too small for normal-sized condoms.” I let that sit between us for a moment, hoping it would fester, but once again Kathy demonstrated her knack for allowing me just enough rope to hang myself. The cacophony in the room was growing more noticeable by the minute, so I had to speak louder. “Apparently, they have these little tiny dicks,” I yelled. When Kathy still didn't respond, I added, “They must be losing rubbers like crazy. Be like a kid trying to run around in his dad's hip waders.” I couldn't help bursting into laughter. The thought of condoms falling off half a billion undersized dicks did something to my funny bone. Not that there was anything wrong with people who were, on average, smaller than most American males in that department. Still, I couldn't stop laughing.

“Thomas,” Kathy said, solemnly. “Be careful where you're going with this.”

“Hey, I didn't make this up. It was an AP report. Half of Indian men don't fit a normal-sized prophylactic. No wonder they have a population problem. I'm thinking there's a business opportunity here. You have half a continent that needs a product nobody has had the foresight to produce: tiny little condoms. The company that markets these in an intelligent and non offensive way is going to make millions.”

“I'm glad you're thinking about all this in a nonoffensive way.”

“Right, because I'm not insensitive to the shortcomings of others. And I use the term
shortcomings
loosely. The main problem is what are we going to call them? They're going to be about half the size of a normal condom. I've got it. Why not ‘Half Pints'?”

The thought propelled me into another round of laughter. The notion that Kalpesh might have a dick the size of a child's thumb somehow seemed the most hilarious thing I'd ever heard. I knew there was nothing romantic going on between him and Kathy, that there never
would be, just as I knew he was incredibly handsome and devilishly charming and that as long as he was breathing he would continue to ply his wares on every female in his vicinity. My laughter continued for what I admit was probably too long, after which I dabbed at my tears with the back of one wrist. Kathy had not cracked a smile, but even if she thought something was funny, and I could see she thought this was, she could always maintain a straight face. “Or ‘Runts.' We could call them Runts.” More laughter. “How about ‘Mini Mags'? They're not Magnums; they're mini magnums. ‘Shrunken Heads.' I like that.” I was out of control now. My stomach was starting to hurt with all the hee-hawing. “And here's how we'll market them. ‘Shrunken Heads. They're not just for Junior. They're for Dad, too.'”

“Thomas, you better not do any of this where Kalpesh can hear you.”

“I think he would find it amusing. In fact, I'm willing to bet this wouldn't be news to him. He might even have personal experience with this. Maybe I should go ask him to invest in my company, Tiny Dick, Inc.”

“Watch out now. I don't want you doing anything to incite him. He's working very hard on this election, and he hasn't done anything to deserve your infantile jokes.”

“Infantile jokes based on a continent-wide survey. Gee, I wonder how they took the poll.” My laughter was beginning to attract attention. Some of that attention came from Jim Maddox and a couple of sycophants who'd been shadowing him all evening. Maddox had been making his way through the hordes, shaking hands, introducing himself, unable or unwilling to remain in one place for long. I'd learned recently he had restless-leg syndrome when he slept, too. When he saw me and Kathy, he walked over in his stiff-legged gait.

“What's so funny?” Maddox asked, putting on the mask that was half smile and half grimace, the one people used when they'd walked into the back end of a joke.

“Don't mind him,” Kathy said. “He's having one of his girlish fits.”

Maddox, who was as tall as I was, hovered over Kathy while he glanced from her to me and back again, trying to figure out what was so amusing. I'd learned early on that Maddox was usually afraid the
joke was on him, and that as soon as he confirmed otherwise, he was put at ease. “I was making fun of somebody in the Sheffield camp,” I said. “One of Kathy's co-workers.”

“You work for Sheffield?” Maddox asked, as if I hadn't already informed him of that fact.

“Don't mind my husband. He was just being his imbecilic self. How are things, Mr. Maddox? We keep wondering when you're going to take us up on that second debate.” They'd already had the first of three promised meetings between the candidates, but the morning-after poll numbers for Maddox had dipped substantially, and now all talk of a second meeting had been nixed.

“What do you think about this shindig?” Maddox asked. “Pretty nice, huh?” Maddox was looking around, standing too close to Kathy, but looking around. It was as if he wanted to move in on her and thought I wouldn't notice if he did it without looking. Like a lot of male politicians, Maddox had an eye for women and, like others before him, seemed to believe he gave off some sort of natural aphrodisiac. I had no information to make me think he was a philanderer— he'd been married to the same woman for thirty years— but he sure liked to eyeball. James Maddox was fifty-five, a man with a broad and impassive face, pale, with a booming voice he spent a lot of time modulating. Around the office people called him Old Iron Pants because of the rigid way he stood, legs apart and anchored to the floor, unmoving from the waist down as if he had the legs of a statue. Maddox hated the appellation.

“It is a nice gathering,” Kathy said. “I find it interesting the governor invited both parties.”

“Well, she's a Democrat and her fiancé is a Republican, so I guess they decided to go nondenominational,” Maddox said, smiling humor-lessly at Kathy. Maybe I was getting touchy about guys slobbering over my wife. Or maybe I was still tweaked because Kathy thought Deborah had been making a fool of me. Maybe that was why I did what I did next.

The room was enormous, but even so it was beginning to bulge at the seams. The decibel level was rising, and Maddox and I found ourselves leaning down to talk to Kathy, while she was almost on tiptoes trying to hear us. It occurred to me that I was next to Maddox's bad ear.

Everyone who worked with him knew he had a good ear and a bad one, that you needed to be on his good side when there was a lot of background noise.

Speaking loud enough for Kathy to hear but not so loudly that Mad-dox would distinguish anything but gibberish, I said, “You probably don't know this, but Kathy likes to call you Old Iron Pants. In fact, she may be the person who got it started.”

“I
certainly
was not,” Kathy blurted. She turned to Maddox. “That isn't true. It's not true at all. I don't even know why he said that.”

Maddox looked at Kathy curiously, leaned over, gave her his good ear, and said, “What?”

Now Kathy was almost yelling. “I said I'm not the one calling you Old Iron Pants. I'm not the one who made it up. ‘Iron Pants' came from somebody in our office, but it wasn't me. Honest.” Maddox still didn't know what she was talking about, but she hadn't realized it yet. “I apologize for calling you Old Iron Pants,” Kathy yelled into Mad-dox's good ear.

Taking it poorly, Maddox gave Kathy a caustic look, turned to one of the sycophants who'd been behind him, mumbled something I couldn't hear, and left.

“I can't believe you did that,” Kathy said.

“Did what?”

“Why on earth would you want to embarrass me and him at the same time?”

For a few moments I found myself grasping at straws to explain. “I thought it would be funny. I mean, I was talking into his bad ear. I thought you would figure it out. At a party with this much background noise you can say almost anything on his bad side and he won't hear it.”

“So why didn't you stop me?”

“It happened too fast.”

“It wasn't
that
fast. You made me look like an idiot.”

“I couldn't stop you. Besides—”

“You deliberately maneuvered me into saying I call him Old Iron Pants.”

“I didn't think you'd repeat it to him. I just wanted to see the look on your face.”

“Well, you've seen it.” She turned and walked away.

It was a dim-witted stunt if ever there was one. Even I didn't know why I'd done it. I couldn't blame alcohol because I hadn't been drinking. When I thought about it, as I did off and on for the rest of the evening, while the speeches and toasts were being made, while the bands played, and while I had nobody to dance with, I realized that as much as Kathy had been peeved by my actions in the last few weeks, I'd been even more peeved by hers. By and large we did share the same politics, but I wasn't acting on it. But then, where was it written that I had to? I was helping Maddox for my own recently unearthed reasons, and if I chose to do so, she had no right to carp at me. Okay, so I had accidentally on purpose inveigled her into offending Maddox. When you thought about it, except for the fact that I'd gotten Kathy steamed, it had been a slick piece of chicanery.

As the evening wore on and Kathy failed to materialize beside me, I realized I didn't regret having embarrassed Maddox, but Kathy's mortification was something else entirely. What the hell had I been thinking?

“YOU'RE HERE ABOUT
the position on the campaign staff?” asked the redhead.

“Right. I'm Thomas Black. Jim Maddox called me yesterday.”

“He said you'd be coming by. If you don't mind waiting a moment?”

“No problem.”

We were in a small office complex in Kirkland, the windows looking out over Lake Washington about a block away. The day was sunny and warm, considering it was the last week of September, and the building offered an impressive view: Soaring gulls littered the sky; a water-skier made graceful arcs on water that looked like blue molten glass.