The Governor's Lady (30 page)
“Can you do that?”
“No, and I wouldn’t if I could. Can you imagine being protected by that idiot?”
“Did he go for it?”
“It’s not enough.”
“Then what?”
“I’ll think of something else.” His stood and reached for his coat.
“Have you talked to Woodrow in the past twenty-four hours?”
He turned with a jerk, on guard. “No. Why?”
She told him.
“What did he mean, Pickett? What am I supposed to know that I don’t?”
He flashed with anger. “Goddammit, I don’t have time to fool with this right now. You have piled enough crap on my plate.”
She kept her voice steady. “You can tell me what you and Woodrow cooked up, or I can ask him myself.”
They glared at each other. Then Pickett gave a dismissive shake of his head and threw his coat back on the table. “All right,” he said, his voice steely, face grim. “He stays out, you hand it over.”
“Hand what over?”
“After the election. If I win, you become first lady. If I don’t, you plead fatigue, incompetence, whatever. You bow out gracefully and pass the gavel to Woodrow. That’s the deal. That’s why he dropped out. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to be anointed than to have to run.”
Pickett waited.
Finally, she said, “You actually promised him that?”
He didn’t answer.
“And you thought I would go along?”
“You’ve mostly been reasonable, Cooper. Not always, but mostly.”
“God forgive me, too many times. Pickett, this is the second enormous lie I’ve caught you in. A lie a day. How in the hell can I ever again trust anything you say?”
“I didn’t actually
lie
to you.”
She looked at him for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “I think you really believe that, Pickett. My God, what’s happened to you?”
“Cooper,” he said, pleading, “this is the real deal. I can be
president
,
for God’s sake. How many human beings can say that?”
“So, to get there, it’s okay to lie to people, trample on them?”
“It’s a brutal game. Sometimes you have to—”
“Compromise,” she finished for him. “Compromise your sense of decency and loyalty, or at least the sense of them I thought you had. Pickett, you don’t get it. This deal you cut with Woodrow, it isn’t some business arrangement, it’s about
us
.”
His face was impassive, and she realized in that instant just how far he had gone, and how little chance she had of getting him back.
“Whatever happens, I will not quit.”
He pondered that, then said with a shrug of his shoulders, “Okay, don’t. When the time comes, just don’t.”
“And Woodrow?”
“It won’t be the first time we’ve screwed Woodrow.”
“Don’t try to put a guilt trip on me, Pickett. Woodrow may have some notion that you and I owe him—atonement for an old hurt, something like that—but we don’t. It’s ancient history.”
“Maybe
we
don’t, but right now, I do.”
She reached for her own coat and pulled her cell phone out of a pocket. “Let’s clear the air with him.”
He grabbed her arm. “Good Lord, no. If he gets wind of it, he’ll fuck me over. And he could do it.” She pulled her arm away. “Help me, Cooper. Please, help me. Keep quiet about Woodrow. Don’t make waves. We’ll deal with it later. Okay?”
She didn’t answer.
“Plus, think about this: You’ve got a legislative session coming up. Woodrow could scuttle anything you want to get done.” His cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at it, put it back. “I’m running late.”
She waved her hand. “Then go.”
“Walk with me to the plane?”
When they were there, just the two of them, buffeted by the wash from the plane’s propellers, he gave her a peck on the cheek. “Please,” he said. “Don’t do anything.”
“Keep your hands off my business.”
“I will,” he said. “I promise. I really mean it.”
He climbed the steps, turned at the top to give her a last look, then disappeared inside as the door swung up and closed. She stood unmoving for a moment, then turned and walked away, giving way to hurt, loss, grief, the knowledge of things once cherished and now all but irretrievable. For her, for them. They had passed over some continental divide of the heart and seemed to have no chance of turning back.
Did politics change Pickett, or just bring something to the surface that had always been there? She thought about it often during the years.
It started innocently enough. A member of the county commission, a university professor, died of a massive heart attack on an anthropology trip to Central America. The remaining commission members approached the university president about having another faculty member fill the unexpired term. The president called in Pickett.
Cooper was hesitant but saw how much he wanted to do it, and with her heart full of him and what they had together, she said, “All right. Do it. Just don’t make a habit of it.” But when the term was up and he wanted to run for a full four years, she relented again, more reluctant this time but reassured by the way he had so carefully kept it from coming between them.
He won handily. It was a joyous thing for him. He was by nature competitive, and there was a zest to his approach to contests of any kind, a free-flowing looseness that was as much about the game as about the
prize. In that one respect, he was perhaps more like Woodrow Bannister than he would have admitted.
He relished the office, the give and take, the jousting and negotiating and accommodating, even the phone calls from constituents grousing about potholes in the roads in front of their homes or the latest property-tax assessment. He was patient and had a self-deprecating sense of humor that deflected criticism and helped him accomplish things. He maneuvered an overhaul in the county Social Services Department to put more emphasis on child protection. He persuaded the commission to approve a modest property-tax increase that went to the school system. He was progressive but cautious. When a citizens’ group demanded the commission reprimand the long-serving sheriff, an entrenched vote-getter with a reputation for roughing up suspects, Pickett and the rest politely heard them out and went on to the next item of business.
There was some awkwardness about that. The newspaper backed the citizens’ group with editorials and a series of articles on the sheriff’s abusiveness. Cooper had seen and heard enough to know the paper had its facts straight.
“He’s a nasty sonofabitch,” she said to Pickett.
“Uh-huh,” he agreed amiably. “I hear he swings a mean piece of rubber hose.”
“So?”
“I applaud the newspaper’s crusade. Muckraking journalism at its finest.”
“
And?
”
“Let the voters take care of him.”
“So you’re not going to stick your neck out.”
“If I’m learning anything, it’s when and where to pick a fight, and how to avoid pissing into the wind.” He turned on his smile, trying to take the edge off the conversation. “So, no, my darling, I’m not sticking my neck out.”
He reached for her, and she pushed his hand away. He gave her a hurt look and walked out. She spent an hour in huffy silence, then went looking for him.
She heard his guitar and found him in a rickety chair tilted back against the side of the weathered toolshed next to the garden, shirt off, feet bare, picking idly at notes and chords, eyes closed, a look of utter serenity, bathed in gold by the late-afternoon sun. He must have heard her coming, feet crunching through the litter of drying weeds they had pulled from the garden, but he didn’t open his eyes as she stood over him, her shadow crossing his face. He kept picking, fingers coaxing a rich texture of notes from wood and steel. And then he started singing:
If I was a three-legged dog, two legs front and one leg rear,
I’d rouse myself in the evening time, get my three old legs in gear;
Leave my place in the cool, cool shade, drink my fill of Gatorade,
And hippity-hop to you, my dear.
He kept playing, fingers flying, intricate licks and runs, spinning out the melody and humming along, finishing with a flourish. Then he finally looked up at her. “I love you, and you love me,” he said. “Let’s don’t ever let anything get in the way of that.” He put the guitar aside, then reached for her. She went to him, and they made love right then and there with her on his lap, the old chair banging wildly against the shed until pieces began to fly off and they collapsed, rolling and howling with laughter, in the grass.
Two weeks later, she missed her period, and then came Allison. They took an exquisite joy in her. They wrapped themselves around the baby and each other and made a hiding place of their lives, keeping the other things that mattered in their place.
Pickett was adept at separating the parts of his life. He relished teaching, worked hard at it, and was awarded tenure. People at the university had their eyes on him—maybe department chair someday, even
a dean. A sharp, attractive young man who got along. He worked, too, at being a commissioner. Cooper saw him as balanced, and saw, too, a fine balance in their life together. It was better than she could have imagined. She even found herself beginning to look at politics in a different light. Pickett’s light.
It might be possible
, she thought,
to be
in
it without being
of it. Pickett seemed profoundly un-Woodrow.
Then life, she understood later, caught up with them. Allison (“She’s such a
good
baby,” people said) turned sickly. Nothing really scary, just a series of bouts of colic, rashes, respiratory ailments, strep throat, an intractable ear infection that kept her in a constant fit of angry pain. For Cooper and Pickett, it meant long nights walking the floor with her, trying unsuccessfully to soothe and comfort, an unending struggle that left them harried and exhausted.
And then Cooper was suddenly, stunningly, pregnant again. There was never any question that they would go on with it, but the thought of another baby and the constant worry over Allison, along with the daily pressures of their jobs, cast a pall over them. Her new pregnancy was much harder than the first. It seemed she would never get over the nausea. And when she did, she felt bloated, awkward, drained. Pickett shied from her, wary, puzzled by the changes, both in her and them. They endured long silences, an exaggerated politeness born of a fear that one or the other might say or do something that would open a rupture they could not stitch back together.
Things at work grew complicated. Stressful squabbling in the business school escalated into warring factions of faculty members and ended with the dean being forced out and nobody happy, Pickett included. Cooper thought fleetingly about quitting the newspaper but clung to the job, fearful of giving up a part of herself that she considered vital
and entirely her own. Instead, she gave in to the pleading of the editor and took over the education beat, which meant night meetings of the school board. Pickett encouraged her to take the new assignment and get out of the house. He would keep Allison.
And then, when the weight of it all seemed beyond what they could stand, it happened.
She arrived home one evening after a long board meeting to find a college-student babysitter there with Allison, who was screaming inconsolably with pain. Where the hell was Pickett? Gone to some kind of meeting, the girl said. When he got home after eleven, Cooper was waiting for him at the door, stupid with fatigue, boiling with anger. He was profusely apologetic and full of news, which he seemed to think made everything okay.
The incumbent state senator had been arrested the night before for drunk driving—no surprise, since she frequently appeared on the floor of the Senate smelling of a pungent combination of Listerine and Jack Daniel’s. Despite previous brushes with the law, she had never faced charges. But this time, she had taken out a fire hydrant and the lighted sign in front of the Lutheran church and had been treated at the emergency room for cuts and bruises. On this night, the local party committee had summoned her to a meeting and read the riot act. She had to go, resign now, make way for a special election. As soon as she fled weeping and defeated into the night, the committee members had called in Pickett Lanier, the popular young county commissioner, and pressed him hard to run. Pickett had put them off until he could talk to Cooper, but by the time he arrived home, it was clear he had made up his mind.
They argued bitterly and loudly. They woke Allison, who hammered at her ears with her fists. It was an hour before Cooper could get her calmed and back to sleep. By then, she was long past protest, much less fighting.
“You’re a selfish, self-centered asshole, Pickett.”
“Cooper,” he pleaded, “honey, I just need to try this.”
“Why now? For God’s sake, why now?” She waved her arms, taking in everything weighing on her, on them.
“I might not ever get this chance again.”
She stared at him a long time, feeling the earth lurching, wrenching apart, and Pickett on the far side. She turned away. “Then go,” she said. “Just leave us alone and go do it.”