The Dearly Departed (4 page)

He always answered the same way: Communication didn't always have to be spoken, did it? Wasn't what they had special and unconventional? Did she prefer a restaurant dinner to a passionate lunch?

If he asked about Sunny, it was from the polite distance of a man who had no reason and no desire to meet his occasional paramour's child. On these trips—fish all morning, fuck Margaret at lunch without any wining or dining or conversation; nap, read, drink, sleep—he didn't want to think about anyone but himself. His son, Fletcher, was a teenager, the same age as the girl. These visits wouldn't last forever: Fletcher was asking questions, and Margaret was asking for proper dates. She'd even used the words “Maybe this isn't such a good idea anymore.” Margaret, he gathered, had other men calling her among the locals. And soon a devoted, alternate-weekend father like himself, claiming to be tying flies and frying trout alone in New Hampshire, would have to invite his kid along.

 

F
letcher knew that managing Emily Ann Grandjean's congressional campaign would mean fourteen months of spinning, baby-sitting, and chauffeuring, followed by a loss of the most humiliating kind—a landslide victory for an incumbent who didn't have to shake one hand.

And then there was Emily Ann herself. In an exploratory meeting, she demonstrated one of her most annoying tics: constant sips from a large bottle of brand-name water, then the ceremonial screwing of its cap back on once, twice, full-body twists as if volatile and poisonous gases would escape without her intervention.

They met in a conference room at Big John, Inc., the family business, founded by Emily Ann's grandfather after he took credit for discovering exercise in the form of a stationary bike. Subsequent generations invented a rowing machine with a flywheel and, most recently and profitably, a stroller for joggers. Emily Ann's three older brothers, whose tanned and photogenic faces anchored the annual report, went happily into the booming family business. But the baby sister made a fuss about striking out on her own—like those Kennedy cousins who went into journalism or the Osmond siblings who didn't sing. Emily Ann went to law school, dropped out, went back, and at her graduation heard Congressman Tommy d'Apuzzo—beloved, honest, monogamous; a man for whom a district's worth of highways and middle schools were named—urge the new lawyers to consider careers as public servants. “Where are the dreamers?” he cried, waving his arms. “Where are all the little boys and girls who wanted to grow up to be president? Are you all heading for Wall Street? To white-shoe law firms in New York skyscrapers? We need your energy and your idealism. Run against me! Challenge me! Provoke me! Defeat me!”

Only Emily Ann thought he meant it; only she thought a seat in the House of Representatives was attainable to a member of the Class of '96. When she returned from her graduation grand tour (London, Paris, Venice, and the Greek Isles) she took a bar-review course by day. By night she found a campaign to work for. Conspicuously wearing outfits of Republican red and Betsy Ross blue, she volunteered for an earnest young firebrand running for the city council. She stood in for him at a Republican kaffeeklatsch after practicing answers and sharing aphorisms with a voice-activated pocket recorder.

“You should run,” said an elderly man by the dessert table as his wife dusted confectioner's sugar off one of his veiny cheeks.

“Maybe one day,” said Emily Ann.

“Don't wait too long or I might not be able to vote for you,” he said, chuckling.

“This evening,” she reminded him nobly, “is about Greg Chandler-Brown and
his
race, and about the bond rating of a dying city.”

“I didn't catch your name,” he said.

“Emily Ann Grandjean.”

“Mrs. or Miss?” he asked.

“I'm not married.”

“Have a piece of fudge cake,” he said. “You could use a little meat on your bones.”

A year later, Mr. Grandjean was sliding a Big John catalog across the conference table to Fletcher, who had managed the last candidate to lose to d'Apuzzo, under budget and with dignity. “You look like you work out. Is there anything in here that appeals to you?”

Its glossy cover displayed the rowing machine that was the Rolls-Royce of Fletcher's health club. Through some trick of digital photography, it appeared to be gliding past pyramids on the Suez Canal. Fletcher didn't open the catalog; didn't even touch it.

“No obligation. Absolutely none,” said Mr. Grandjean. “A thank-you for your time and attention today, no matter what you decide. And, please. It's nothing to us. This is what we do. We assemble parts and turn a few screws and—presto—we have a bike.”

Fletcher turned the catalog facedown. Equally compelling was the back cover—a computerized stationary bike, titanium, featuring a built-in CD player and a Tour de France winner perched on its fertility-friendly seat.

“She can win the primary,” continued Mr. Grandjean. “I don't think there's any question about that.”

“When you run unopposed, you win,” said Fletcher. “But I'm not interested in being the campaign manager for a sacrificial lamb.”

Emily Ann snapped, “You've never heard of upsets?
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
?”

Fletcher folded his hands in front of him on the hammered-copper conference table. “Let me paint a picture for you: Yesterday, in the village center of a very staid Republican suburb, in a chic café named Repasts, I ate a sandwich called The d'Apuzzo. Not a sandwich meant to be an insult, like baloney or marshmallow fluff, but one named out of affection and respect and because it was what Representative d'Apuzzo ordered on his last whistle-stop there.”

“What kind of sandwich?” asked Emily Ann.

“Tuna club. Traditional yet popular. No negative symbolism there.”

“Your point being that a man who has sandwiches named in his honor is unbeatable?” she asked.

“When he's a Democrat and it's on a Republican menu? Yes.”

“Rather unscientific,” grumbled her father.

“Can I be blunt?” asked Fletcher.

Both Grandjeans sipped their water.

“Miss Grandjean would be a gnat on the campaign windshield of Tommy d'Apuzzo and nothing more. He wouldn't respond to her speeches, he wouldn't pay for ads, he wouldn't campaign, and he sure as hell wouldn't fly home from Washington to debate her. And the editorial writers? Forgive me—they'll dismiss her as a rich girl without experience or convictions, looking for a career after law school.”

“That's so unfair. I have convictions! I'm deeply committed to education—”

“Who isn't?” he asked.

“And to cutting taxes and to term limits—”

“Every man or woman who's ever run against Tommy d'Apuzzo has supported term limits. It ain't going to get you elected.”

“This is about exposure, about building myself a base—”

“I just don't think I'm your man,” said Fletcher.

Emily Ann gathered her water bottle, her Filofax, her pen and cell phone and said, “Then let's not waste anyone's time. A can-do attitude is the very least I would expect in a consultant.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” said Fletcher.

She walked to the door, the skinniest girl on the skinniest legs he'd ever seen. Mr. Grandjean motioned that Fletcher should stay behind. As the door closed, Mr. Grandjean's fond, fatherly smile collapsed. “I'm going to ask you one more time to take this job. I'm going to name a salary that is the going rate plus—”

“Based on …?”

“A dark-horse congressional race.”

“Un-uh. Not interested.”

Mr. Grandjean screwed the cap back on his water bottle and looked thoughtful. “It's September. The election is fourteen months away.”

“I know that.”

“Exposure for her is exposure for you. You can lose, and six months later I'll tune in to MSNBC and see you opining about presidential politics with
REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST
superimposed across your tie.”

“Here's my problem,” Fletcher said. “Tommy d'Apuzzo chairs two committees. He loves his wife and doesn't fool around. His secretary is widowed, Native American, disabled, and loves him like a son. His kids went to New Jersey public schools, then to Seton Hall, Rutgers, and Fairleigh Dickenson. His father was a cobbler. His mother was a Freedom Rider. His dogs came from the pound. Everybody except your daughter knows it'll take plastic explosives to unseat Tommy d'Apuzzo.”

Mr. Grandjean shrugged. “You must have a price.”

Fletcher scribbled numbers on his legal pad and slid it across the table.

Mr. Grandjean shook his head even before the notepad came to a stop in front of him. “Can't do. It's money out of my own pocket—a price I have to justify to her brothers.”

“Are they in or are they out?” Fletcher asked.

Mr. Grandjean shifted in his back-saver chair. “You know how kids are. They keep score—who got a new car and who got a used one; who got semesters abroad. On one hand, they resent this pissing into the wind; on the other, they're glad to have her . . . gainfully distracted.”

“I'm getting the picture,” said Fletcher.

Mr. Grandjean wrote a sentence on the top sheet of Fletcher's yellow pad, tore it off, folded it into the most elaborate and aerodynamic paper airplane Fletcher had ever seen, and sent it sailing across the table.

2,000
shares of Big John stock,
it read.

Fletcher rose, and walked it around to the other side of the table. “For your signature.”

“Aren't you going to ask me what they're worth?”

“I know what they're worth,” he said.

First, he tried to drop the Ann and make her only Emily. The double name lacked authority, he said. It was too cute, too wholesome, too Miss America.

“Too bad,” said Emily Ann. She was not pandering to the small percentage of the electorate who cared about the sociological implications of a conjoined name. She was proud of it. It was her two grandmothers' names. People were so superficial. Like that reporter for the
Times-Record
who was obsessed with her weight and her percentage of body fat—as if
that
had anything to do with her capabilities; as if anyone would even mention it if Emily Ann had been a man. When eating-disorder speculation became the only thing about Emily Ann's candidacy that engaged the public, it was Fletcher's unhappy task to pour Diet Coke into Classic Coke cans when she drank in public, to insist that she stop pulling the doughy insides out of her bagels, and to answer questions about the candidate's preternatural thinness. She allowed herself to be photographed with her teeth around a clam fritter at a state fair, a sausage-and-pepper grinder at an Italian street festival, a knish at a B'nai B'rith brunch. But she didn't consummate any of those acts; didn't even sink her teeth into the first bite after the photographer's flash. If there had been a position paper on her weight, it would have said:
All the Grandjeans are fit and rangy. Long and lean. Their veins show under the epidermal layer of their inner arms. Their faces are pinched and skeletal. It runs in the family. It's not a disorder. Candidate Grandjean's metabolism is incredibly efficient. If she appears to pick at her food, it's because she eats six or seven small meals a day and never much at one sitting. She may look as if she's been constructed of Tinkertoys, but that's because she works out faithfully on a Big John SB2000. All rumors about anorexia, bulimia, and terminal illnesses are defamatory and false.

Worse, and just as he had feared, Emily Ann warmed to Fletcher. The first time she reached over and took a sip from his coffee in the van's cup holder, he saw it as an overture, especially when he was faced with the two coral blots on the rim. “Hey,” he said. “That's mine.”

“So?”

“It's polite to ask first. Some people don't like sharing.”

“Big deal—my lips on your cup. Do you get so annoyed when someone kisses you?”

He didn't look over and didn't answer.

“What a grouch.”

He was tempted to say, It has cream in it, which I know you'd never let pass your lips unless you are before a convention of dairy farmers.

“Doesn't coffee have a diuretic effect on you?” she asked.

Pissing, she meant: urological. Personal. He wasn't going to discuss the properties of coffee with this annoying bag of bones. “I don't like lipstick on my cup because it tastes like perfume,” he said. “If you want your own cup, you should say so at the appropriate juncture.”

Emily Ann turned away and studied the scenery.

“Let's go over some questions, Em.” When she didn't answer, he asked if she was sulking.

“No I am
not.
I'm meditating.”

“Here. Be a baby. Drink my cold coffee. I wouldn't want you arriving at the meeting with a long face.”