Authors: Emma McLaughlin
“I’m just here because I want to be able to say in twenty years, ‘Hey remember that losing candidate who made me come to house the Monday after the election? That was crazy,’” Peter Doran agreed, biting a muffin. His skin was literally green, like he was a tank someone had forgotten to clean.
“Okay let’s get started.” Tom clapped his cupped hands and the twenty or so people took seats in the redecorated living room. I looked around for an empty chair, but even the window bench was full.
“Amanda,” Lindsay whispered, “Would you mind keeping everything refreshed? I need to sit down.”
“Are you okay?” I whispered back.
“Yes, I just can’t believe we’re already at this. I’m just—” she blinked hard. “It’s like he can’t stop being the candidate.”
I swallowed, feeling guilty, because I didn’t want him to stop being the candidate, either. I stationed myself in the double doorway to the hall, where I could keep an eye on the table without making it seem like I was counting how many mini corn muffins each person was taking.
“So where do we start?” Tom asked the room.
“Well,” Michael answered, pausing to swallow and taking a breath like he could
just not believe
he was answering this question. “We have to answer the same question we always have to answer—why you. You’re a half-term senator and you’ll be running against the V.P.”
“We’d need to beef you up,” Peter added.
“Find you an issue to keep you relevant.”
“And on the radar.”
“Climate change?” Tom quipped and everyone laughed except Lindsay.
“It needs to position you as an expert on something, as someone who is in every way the opposite of the V.P.,” Michael clarified as if he hoped he could just leave us with that assignment.
“Well, my heart beats so that’s one thing I have going for me.” More laughter.
Across the room Lindsay glazed over.
“What about local industries?” someone asked like they were reciting the times tables by rote. “What can he plant his flag in as the former Senator?”
“Oranges and old people,” Peter answered.
“That’s what we got,” Tom agreed.
“Agriculture?” someone else suggested.
“Too subsidized—too polarizing.”
“Old people?” someone else joked.
“Too subsidized—too polarizing,” Peter joked back.
“What about the Gulf?”
“Wait,” I interrupted. The heads that weren’t facing me turned.
“Yes, Amanda,” Lindsay encouraged.
I swallowed. “Well, really, it’s the opposite, right?” I saw Delilah in front of me—shot at forty. How would she make it to retirement? What did that word even mean anymore? People looked at me blankly. “I mean, subsidized, yes, but that’s exactly why it’s a good issue—and it make sense since you’re Florida—and the elderly are not polarizing.” I wasn’t sure if I was making sense. I had a gut feeling, but was struggling to put it into words like an anxiety dream. “Everyone is old or taking care of someone old or scared of getting old.”
“Exactly,” Tom said, “Which is why no one wants to talk about it—it grosses people out.” He started to spin back to Michael.
“Right,” I agreed, not letting him. If this was it—my last chance to be more than a body man, more than the muffin girl—I was going out swinging. “Which is why you could own the conversation. In five years there will be more people over fifty-five than under it. This is your constituency—and they’re not being leveraged. It hits every major issue—health care reform, inflation, affordable housing, entitlements. Put a face on it and you target not the just the seniors, but their grown children as well who want to think that someone is going to come figure this shit out for them.”
“I actually like it,” Peter said through a full mouth, “But we need to formalize it somehow.”
“What if you open a research center?” someone suggested.
“The senior center?” Tom quipped.
“The Center for Aging?”
“Sounds like a spa.”
“The Center for Age-related Issues.”
“Sounds Medical.”
“The Center for Human Solutions,” I threw out.
“As opposed to cats?”
“As opposed to old people,” I explained. “This is everyone’s problem. And the name begs the question, which allows you to give the answer and get the conversation going.”
“The Center for Human Solutions,” Tom repeated.
“The Davis Center for Human Solutions,” Lindsay corrected him. I wondered if I was the only one who could hear the resignation in her voice.
“I like it,” Michael agreed as the energy in the room crackled back to life.
“Great. Done. You’ve cracked it, Amanda.”
Lindsay spun in her chair and looked at me and I wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. I had just been the kid in the room who finds the lost spring hidden between the floorboards that makes the machine go again. The Lindsay of a week ago wanted me to do anything in my power to help her husband become president. But now?
One of the aides made room for me on the piano seat.
As I sat down I felt like the mechanical bull had just come to a stop. I knew under my arms my shirt was drenched.
The state office was gone. Merrick was gone. The campaign money was gone. And Pax might be gone. But I was still holding on.
Part III
Chapter Seven
“Lindsay!” I called out. “Lindsay!” I raised a flap of dusty blue tarp, seeing if perhaps she was in the ‘room’ where the contractor had ‘temporarily’ plugged in the fridge and microwave. Not there. “Lindsay!” I called over the pounding of drywall being hung two rooms over. That was exciting. The drywall had been stacked in the foyer for so many months Lindsay was starting to wonder if she was supposed to make a slip-cover for it.
While leading the charge to open the Davis Center it had taken Lindsay over a year to find a piece of land outside Jacksonville that spoke to her, another six months to hire the right architect, approve the plans, file the permit requests and break ground. Then the construction delays started. The septic line hit bedrock, the electric circuit overloaded, the foundation wasn’t poured correctly and the basement flooded in the first rain. They had been promised a comfortable Valentine’s move-in date, yet here we were in April and the house still had only one working toilet. But, even though the upper floors looked like a rib cage, the house was clearly going to be every inch the ‘dream home’ Lindsay had been longing for.
Currently they were living out of three unfinished rooms on the ground floor and hoping the nights were going to start getting warmer. “In here,” she called. She was slicing into large garment boxes we had carefully sealed against the dust. “Looking for something to wear to New York.”
Without Merritt to lend him gravitas, the major donors Tom had hoped would back him out of the gate were still hedging, concerned, as Taggart had once expressed, about his inexperience. So it had been decided the day before by Tom’s team that Lindsay’s ‘coming out’ party as a contender for First Lady would take place over three events spanning two weeks at the end of the month. They had been together over twenty-years and Michael thought her presence at his side would reassure those still on the fence. He may be a passionate out-of-the-box thinker, but at heart he was a man who valued tradition. The first event would be a red carpet walk at the Tribeca Film festival to promote a documentary called Aging in America that the Davis Center helped finance. Followed by the Alzheimer Foundation’s annual benefit, and culminating in the Met’s Costume Institute gala hosted by Anna Wintour. This year the show was a retrospective of Hervé Leger, known for his body-conscious “bandage” dresses.
“Amanda, can you help me?”
“Sure—we don’t leave for an hour. If you could just direct me to Tom’s outdoor gear, I’m all yours.” We’d just found out that the potential donor we were on our way to court loved off-roading. As Tom’s new executive assistant at the Davis Center I had been accompanying him as he criss-crossed the country to sit on any panel that would have him, befriending powerful allies in geriatrics and economics, gleaning insights and seeking endorsements. Not a week went by that I wasn’t thirty thousand feet in the air watching him try to synthesize the presentations into one cohesive vision for older Americans and the people they depend on.
I was only half-listening to her as I pulled the clothes Tom had sent me to fetch from the box she pointed me to. “My life is contractor meetings and kindergarten tours—I haven’t needed anything like this since the last campaign. Maybe this one will work.” She pulled out a dry-cleaner bag with the maroon dress she had worn to the Merrick fundraiser at Sarah Jessica Parker’s house two years ago. Like those mornings I’d be half-listening as Billy called out action steps that would lead to disaster—“I’m putting the plank on the steps, Mandy! I’m getting my skateboard!”—I snapped out of autopilot. Lindsay was easily twenty pounds heavier than she had been then, when she adopted the ‘I only eat when Nancy Merrick eats’ diet, which led to fainting.
“You know what, Lindsay.” I put my hand on hers to pause her from lifting the plastic. “This is a fresh campaign, and a fresh opportunity, why don’t you go to New York a day or two early so you can buy something knockout.”
She smiled at me, tacitly accepting that I was preventing a scene neither of us needed to go down, and slid the bag back in the box. “One day—that’s it. I hate to be away from the twins longer than necessary when Tom travels so much. But, I have to admit, that might be the best idea.” She lifted the sealing tape dispenser. “Do you want to invite Brian to join us?” In September, fourteen months out from Election Day, Tom would officially be announcing his candidacy to be the Democratic nominee. So he was starting to staff up—and Brian was coordinating his fundraising. Brian’s mother had built an entire wing of Mass General and he liked to say that parting people from their money for a good cause was in his blood.
It had taken me months to accept that the six weeks I’d spent with Pax weren’t the beginning of anything, but the thing itself. It was so hard to believe that, after all those stops and starts, we still hadn’t been able to make something beyond sex happen between us.
Once I realized it was over and forced myself to get back out there it was still a struggle not to compare every guy to Pax. The kisses weren’t hard enough, the observations weren’t funny enough, their hair wasn’t soft enough. But, as Becky reminded me, even if that was true, Pax was no longer an option on the menu—and I was hungry.
So Brian and I had been dating for six months. “The campaign has a hotel room for you already,” Lindsay pointed out. “I’m sure we’ll be able to spare you for a few hours here and there. New York is so romantic.” But was Brian? “Did I tell you Tom proposed to me in New York?”
“No.” I sat on the plastic sheeting covering their duvet, sad that the question of my boyfriend joining me in New York was clarifying my feelings for him.
“Oh, this is good.” Her face lit from inside like an LED box. “We went for the weekend to celebrate Tom passing the bar.”
“You didn’t take it together? “
“Oh, we did the first time. But the next two times Tom was on his own.” She laughed. “Anyway, he’d finally passed and we were all of twenty-five, staying at this grotty little hotel off Times Square—it had a name like the Royale or something—I thought it sounded nice—this was before Trip Adviser. Our flight was delayed—thunderstorms—and we arrived in the dead of night. In the morning I said, ‘Tom, do
not
get out of bed without your shoes on. The floor is moving.’”
“Oh my God.”
“We checked out and walked miles and miles in the August heat looking for a hotel we could afford that could take us on the spot. We were soaked. We stank. But we were laughing. We finally found a place on Madison with tiny rooms—the Wales. The AC was broken, but we scrunched in the bathtub together and he said, ‘Linds, I had a whole big plan, a carriage ride, reservations at a French restaurant, but I just want to ask you, here in this bathtub, will you marry me?’”
“I love it!” I said. “That is a great story. You should tell Diane Sawyer that story.”
The light in her eyes dimmed. “Ashleigh used to make me tell her over and over when she was little. Of course one day she was about twelve and suddenly put it all together. ‘Mom, did you and Daddy
sleep together
before marriage?’ She was horrified.” Lindsay laughed. “I like to think later she actually found that endearing.”
“I’m sure she did,” I said, picking up Tom’s work boots—the ones he’d worn to tour wet factory floors with Merrick.
“Having some time together in New York will be good for us,” she said, fingering her gold band. “Tom’s been travelling so much—and he’s so stressed. I wish just one of these money guys would be the domino to fall already. Just one. And between living in a construction site and the kids I haven’t been much help. As hard as it will be to leave them behind it might be just what we need. And think about inviting Brian.” She smiled coyly. “Who knows—maybe history will repeat itself?”
“Oh God,” I laughed. “I hope the Mandarin Oriental doesn’t have roaches. For all our sakes.”
In the end Chip had an ear infection so Lindsay didn’t fly to New York until the morning of the first red carpet walk. Sensing her nerves, Tom sent me back to make the trip with her. Jeanine Strathairn, Tom’s recently hired public relations strategist, was waiting for us in the lobby, looking tense. She is one of those people who can manage to conjure the energy and impression of pacing while standing still. I’m amazed she didn’t meet us at the airport. “We have five hours to get you red carpet ready, Mrs. Davis,” was her opener.