“I met your friend about ten minutes before I met you,” he said. “If she thinks she staked some kind of claim on me, she’s crazy, and if you believe her, you’re even crazier than she is.”
“Charlie, questioning a woman’s sanity probably isn’t the most effective way of wooing her,” I said. He laughed, an embarrassed laugh. “But I bet our paths will cross again,” I continued, “so how about if we say goodbye as friends?”
“You know the last time I invited a girl to the Gilded Rose?” He still didn’t sound annoyed; he sounded determined. “Never. I’m a stingy dude, but that’s how hard I’m trying to win you over.”
“I’m flattered, Charlie, I really—”
“Okay, how about this,” he interrupted. “Forget dinner. Come to my speech. It won’t be a date, it’ll be a civic field trip.”
“Your speech tonight?”
“It’s one of those Lions Club gigs. Didn’t you mention that you enjoy listening to people who have nothing to say?”
“Is this because you’re running for Congress?”
“Who says I’m running for Congress? This is how rumors get started, sweetheart.” He was all breeziness and good cheer; when I was talking to him, the world did not seem like such a complicated place. “I promise it won’t be a date,” he said. “We’ll have a lodge full of septuagenarian farmers chaperoning us.”
“Are women even allowed at those things?”
“You kidding me? The Lions love their Lionesses. I gotta go up early and talk with a few folks, so if you’re okay meeting there, the address is 2726 Oak Street, right off Waupun’s main drag. Speech starts at seven.” I could hear him grinning. “Earplugs are optional.”
THAT AFTERNOON, I
went by a store near the capitol that sold not only estate jewelry but also antiques. I felt more comfortable there than I had at the pawnshop, but the man behind the counter—he was about sixty, a thin fellow with a thin mustache and exaggerated inflections that made me almost sure he was homosexual—offered me seventy-five dollars for my mother’s brooch.“But it’s real, isn’t it?” I said. Here, I was less shy of showing my ignorance about jewelry resale.
“It’s fourteen-carat,” he said. “It contains more base metal than gold. I’d guess it’s Victorian.”
At the pawnshop, my unrealistic sense of hope, my hunch that the brooch probably couldn’t solve my mother’s financial problems but my lack of certainty that this was so—they had made me vulnerable, priming me for disappointment. This time my expectations were low. I wouldn’t try to convince this man of anything.
UPON HANGING UP
after my conversation with Charlie, I’d called Dena and asked if we could postpone the ratatouille until the following night—I’d claimed I’d forgotten that I had prior plans with Rita Alwin—and Dena had said, “Okay, but I’m warning you that the eggplant’s best days are behind it.” I tried to justify the lie by telling myself that when we’d been on the phone earlier, she’d hardly given me the chance to confirm that I could come. But this felt like a weak defense, and I was uneasy as I showered and applied mascara and lipstick. My mood lifted in the car, though—Jimmy Buffett was on the radio, and it really was a nice time for driving, the evening sun a fuzzy gold medallion over the fields.The Waupun Lions Club was a low brick building that shared a parking lot with a title company. When I walked inside just before seven, about forty people were sitting in sixty chairs, and most members of the audience were in the rows farther from the front. (Something I was to learn quickly is that a turnout’s success can always be judged proportionally. It is better to have twenty-five people and twenty chairs than a hundred and fifty people and six hundred chairs. Though now, I also must confess, the idea of a public audience of either twenty-five or a hundred and fifty makes me quite nostalgic.) I sat halfway back in an aisle seat, and when Charlie saw me—he was standing in front by the podium, wearing a blue-and-white-seersucker jacket, khaki pants, a wide-collared white shirt, and a fat red-and-brown-striped tie—he gestured for me to come closer. In as unobvious a way as I could manage, I shook my head. He tilted his head—
Why not?—
and I had a flashing realization of how little we knew each other. If he thought I was a person who’d want to sit in the front row or, heaven forbid, a person who’d like to be singled out in any way during a speech, then he had no sense of me whatsoever.He was introduced by a gentleman who identified himself as the club president, and upon my hearing Charlie’s biography, I was also reminded of how little I knew him; as the summary of his degrees and accomplishments gained momentum, it occurred to me that I didn’t have the slightest idea what his job was, or whether gearing up to run for Congress was a job by itself. He had graduated from Princeton University in 1968, I learned, and worked from ’68 to ’73 in the hospitality industry out west. Then he’d gone on to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1975. (
Business school?
I thought.) For the last two years, he’d been executive vice president of Blackwell Meats, where he oversaw product management and sales (so he did have a job) and was currently making his home in Houghton. But wait a second—Houghton?Charlie stood before the podium and adjusted the microphone. “Those of us in Wisconsin’s Sixth District are a strong citizenry,” he said. “We are a self-reliant people, a salt-of-the-earth people, proud but not prideful, forward-looking but respectful of the past.”
I turned my head to the left, scanning the faces in my row. How could anyone mistake this for anything other than a campaign speech? Not that, as a campaign speech, it was bad. He wasn’t electrifying, but he seemed confident and intelligent, and—I could admit it now—he was remarkably good-looking. “It is no secret that we face challenges,” he was saying. “Our state needs more jobs, more comprehensive health care, fewer expenses for working families. These have long been priorities for all Blackwells, and they are important priorities for me.”
When he was finished, questions came from a few men (except for two grandmotherly types, the audience was all men), but it was a typical midwestern audience, polite and deferential. Even the most potentially confrontational question—“How about if you drum up some jobs by opening a Blackwell factory here in Waupun?”—seemed to be meant as a joke or was, at any rate, met with laughter. I stayed in my seat until the lodge had cleared out, leaving only Charlie, the club president who’d introduced him, another man who began folding up the chairs, and a younger man who was standing next to Charlie. From my purse, I pulled the book I was reading—
Rabbit Redux,
which I had started the night before—and after a few minutes, the young man approached me. When he was still a few feet away, he stuck out his hand. “Hank Ucker. You must be Marian the Librarian.”“Alice Lindgren,” I said, standing to accept his handshake. I didn’t acknowledge the Marian reference—I heard them often, usually from men and especially from men I’d just met. The references tended, of course, to be accompanied by allusions to buns, glasses, and frigidity that concealed sexual wildness.
Hank Ucker gestured toward my Updike novel. “I’ve always enjoyed a good animal story.”
In fact,
Rabbit Redux
was about a man in Pennsylvania whose marriage has foundered, but I did not correct him. Hank Ucker was shorter than Charlie, an inch or so taller than I was, with a receding hairline, intelligent and slightly squinty eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, a large upturned nose, and the beginning of a double chin. Although I assumed he, too, was about thirty, he was one of those men who looked like he’d been born middle-aged; indeed, over the decades to come, his appearance would change little, and in his fifties, he was almost baby-faced. “A fine speech on the part of our friend Blackwell,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”“Will you be working on his campaign?” I asked.
Mock-oblivious, Hank Ucker said, “What campaign?”
I hesitated.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “Although we’re keeping a lid on it for now, the better to make a bang when it’s official. You haven’t been married before, have you?”
I blinked at him.
“I ask because you’re so beautiful,” he added, and the absence of any flirtatious energy behind the comment was striking. “I’d imagine a woman like you has many suitors.”
“Are
you
married, Mr. Ucker?”“Hank, please, and yes, I am.” He held up the back of his left hand and wiggled his fingers, showing off a gold band. “The Mrs. and I just celebrated our fifth anniversary.”
“Congratulations.”
“It’s an institution I highly recommend, or maybe you’ve experienced firsthand its myriad pleasures?” He said this jovially—he
was
jovial, he was practically cherubic—but he also came across as entirely calculating. In a tone just as cheerful as his, I said, “I’m
almost
certain I haven’t been married,” and this was when Charlie came up behind Hank, setting both hands on Hank’s shoulders for a three-second massage.“Don’t listen to a word this man says,” Charlie said, and then I could tell that he was deciding whether to kiss me on the cheek, trying to figure out if it would be too forward or public. Instead, he took my hand and squeezed it. Slowly, not showily, I pulled my hand away from his.
As the three of us began walking toward the front doors of the lodge, I said, “I enjoyed your speech.”
Charlie shrugged. “Could have been better, could have been worse. Might’ve helped if the audience wasn’t comatose.” We still were just inside the lodge, and across the room, the club president was unplugging the microphone. I wondered, as Charlie did not seem to, if he could hear us.
“This is all warm-up, Alice,” Hank said, pushing the lodge door open. “Think tonight times a thousand, and that ought to give you some idea.”
Charlie elbowed me lightly. “Don’t bother, Ucks. She’s not easily impressed.”
Standing in the parking lot, Hank said, “An honor meeting you, Alice.” He took my right hand and kissed the back of it. This was both aggressive and parodic, though I wasn’t sure what it was a parody of.
Charlie tossed Hank a set of keys. “Talk in the morning, big guy?”
“You know where to find me,” Hank said. He walked a few feet away, then turned back. “In case you’re worried, Alice, Harry and Janice get back together at the end.”
I must have looked at him blankly, because he pointed toward the novel I still was carrying outside my purse and said, “
Redux
is a more mature work than
Rabbit, Run,
but frankly, I found both books self-indulgent.”“You’d know about self-indulgence, huh, Ucks?” Charlie said as Hank headed to his car. Then, as if something had just occurred to him, Charlie said to me, “Hey, you know what? Looks like I need a ride.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, I heard you don’t really live in Madison, so I’m not sure I’d know where to take you.”
“Oh, that.” Charlie waved his arm through the air. “Obviously, you’ve got to live in the district you’re running in, so Hank found me a rental in Houghton. My place in Madison’s in my brother’s name.”
“Very sneaky.”
“Nah, pretty standard, actually. So there’s a burger joint between here and Beaver Dam that’s out of this world—you a girl that eats bacon cheeseburgers?”
“This is sounding a lot like a date, Charlie.”
He grinned. “Not at all. Just two adults of different sexes out on a summer evening, having a conversation.”
As Charlie spoke, Hank was pulling out of the parking lot, and he honked once. “Your campaign manager or whatever he is just gave away the ending of my book,” I said. “Do you realize that?”
Charlie made a fake-menacing expression. “Oh man, Hank’s in deep shit now. Tomorrow I’ll show
him
which way is up.”“Seriously,” I said. “There was no reason for that.”
“He was just toying with you. He probably wants to talk to you about books—he’s superbly well read—but he’s too clumsy to say so. As for those of us less intellectually inclined—” Charlie took my hand again, and this time I let him. “How ’bout a burger?”
THE RESTAURANT WAS
called Red’s, and the pine walls were covered in a cheap shiny finish, the seats in our booth black vinyl, the table scratched with initials and declarations of love or enmity. “The onion rings here are stellar,” Charlie said. “If I get an order, are you in?”I generally steered clear of both onion rings and french fries—I watched my weight—but I nodded, knowing that when they came, I’d be too keyed up to eat more than a few.
Our waitress was over fifty and wore a name tag that said
EVELYN
. “Thanks, sweetheart,” Charlie said as she set down two plastic glasses of ice water. After we’d ordered, he said, “You gonna make that burger rare like I like it? Full of flavor?”The waitress smiled indulgently. “I’ll tell the cook.”
When she was gone, I said, “Do you know her?”
“In these parts, Alice, I know everyone.” He was grinning his Charlie grin. “Okay, I’ve never seen her in my life. But I bet you dollars to doughnuts if I told her I was running for office, I could win her vote by the end of dinner.”
“Then I guess it’s too bad you’re being secretive. Did you put Hank up to asking me if I’d been married before?”
Charlie whistled. “Boy, he really cuts to the chase. I definitely didn’t put him up to anything of the kind.” I actually believed Charlie—he seemed to be someone who found his own flaws endearing and thus concealed nothing. “I imagine he was vetting you to see if you’re acceptable to date a congressional candidate. He doesn’t understand that the question is whether I’m good enough to date
you.
I probably should have warned you about him—he’s not a master of subtlety, but honest to God, he’s absolutely brilliant. Twenty-seven years old, graduated first in his law school class at UW, and the guy was weaned on the Wisconsin Republican Party. You can’t imagine anyone more devoted. He started interning when he was sixteen, seventeen, and after he graduated college Phi Beta Kappa, he became an assistant to my dad.”“Are you two friends?”
“He’s not who I call to have a beer with, and that’s only partly because he’s a teetotaler. But we’ve begun to log a lot of hours together, and he holds up. He’s a quality guy, and the sharpest mind. I’ll bring in the big guns as the race heats up, but I’m not sure there’s a more talented strategist out there than Ucks. He’s spectacular at thinking through the big picture, anticipating attacks from the other side—I’ll be sure to get a lot of nepotism crap, and his thing is, address it and move on. We control the agenda.”