American Wife (67 page)

The next morning, Howard went running with Charlie, and then Howard and Petal took off for Madison around the same time we left for church. Not for the first time, there turned out to be a local news camera waiting for us after the service at Heavenly Rose—this was in October—and Charlie stopped and spoke to the reporter for a few minutes while Ella and I waited in the car. That evening, Charlie was giving a speech in Green Bay, and I was staying in Milwaukee but meeting up with him Monday in Sheboygan, where six hundred area Republicans had paid a hundred dollars each to attend a luncheon with us. It was following the lunch, over twenty-four hours after it had happened, that Charlie told me: During their Sunday-morning run, Howard had said it would be a huge favor if he could set up a meeting between Charlie and his brother, Dave, who was the CEO of a large engineering firm hoping to win a contract with the state. Between the two of them, Howard said, Dave’s firm was vastly more qualified than any of the ones currently doing business with Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation. “You think that’s why they came to see us?” Charlie asked.

“I’m sure it’s not,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. Charlie and I were sitting in the first row of the conversion van, headed to the town of Little Chute, where Charlie was to give a speech to a bunch of dairy farmers, and I told myself that no one else in the van was listening to us. At that moment, our driver, Kenny, was in the front seat; a speech-writer named Sean O’Fallon was in the back row, wearing headphones and typing on his laptop; and Hank and Debbie Bell, a strategist, were in the second row, having a noisy and impassioned debate about whether the Garth Brooks song “Friends in Low Places,” which had just come on the radio, would be a good one to play before Charlie’s rallies. With the song’s reference to places “where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away,” it seemed clear to me that using it would be a disastrous idea, which was the argument Hank was making—he said it was practically baiting the media to uncover Charlie’s 1988 DUI, then still a secret—while Debbie was insisting that it was such a beloved song and so perfectly captured Charlie’s unpretentious personality, as well as the Wisconsin way of life, that the alcohol references didn’t matter; plenty of voters liked Charlie better because of his struggles.

Sitting next to me, ignoring the Garth Brooks argument, Charlie seemed melancholy rather than irritated when he said, “I guess this is how it works now, huh? We ask everyone we know for money, and everyone we know asks us for favors.” He chuckled, though not happily. “I’m a high-class hooker.”

“If that’s how you see yourself, I don’t know why you’re running,” I said. “A governor can be a great force for good, and anyway,
high-class hooker
is an oxymoron.”

“Now, hold on just a second.” Charlie grinned, this time for real. “Who’re you calling an oxymoron?”

“Seriously,” I said, “if you get elected, and it looks like you will”—this was not simply optimism on my part; his polling numbers were in the high fifties—“you’ll have the opportunity to improve the lives of lots of people. Isn’t that why you’re running?”

All these years later, I see the question of why Charlie ran for governor, or for president, as moot—our lives have become what they’ve become—but at the time, it mattered to me, it felt like an important puzzle that could be solved if I examined it thoroughly. I suppose I believed that if I understood Charlie’s impetus, I might agree that running for election was a good idea. “Because he feels called to lead,” Hank would tell reporters. Charlie himself, refusing to be serious, would say to me, “For the same reason a dog licks his balls—because I can.” Because he wanted to prove that he was as smart and ambitious as his brothers, journalists speculated, or because he wanted to avenge his father’s own humiliating presidential run in 1968, and while neither of these possibilities reflected particularly well on Charlie, they were more flattering than my own theory, which I shared with no one: because of his fear of the dark. Because if he were governor, and then president, he’d be guarded by state troopers and later by agents, he’d never be far from people specifically assigned to watch out for him; he might be assassinated, but he wouldn’t have to walk down a shadowy hallway by himself. (Indeed it seems clear that I fear Charlie’s assassination more than he does. Before he officially entered the presidential race the first time, I felt compelled to tell him about my peculiar, guilt-ridden relief when Kennedy was shot. Wouldn’t it be a perfectly symmetrical kind of punishment for having had such thoughts, I said, if my own husband became president and was killed similarly? To which Charlie replied, without a second’s hesitation, “You know that’s bullshit, right? That’s hocus-pocus teenage-girl thinking.”)

The reality of why Charlie ran, I imagine, was a combination of factors, including ego: He did feel some sense of public service, as he defined it; he did feel some sense of “why not?”; he did want to prove himself to his family and to prove his family to the world; he did want the perks. Such motives, inglorious as they are, do not offend me; they never persuaded me that Charlie’s entry into politics was wise, but I wonder if anyone else’s motives are nobler.

For his first presidential campaign, in 2000, Charlie ran as a “tolerant traditionalist,” a bit of alliteration that was Debbie Bell’s brain-child. Ironically, Charlie’s avowals of sympathy for the marginalized and the underclasses, and his credibility with more left-leaning voters, were bolstered not only by his centrist record as a governor but also, predating his public life by over a decade, by his consistent history of donating to organizations such as food pantries, after-school centers, shelters for women and children affected by domestic violence, and AIDS clinics. These were, of course, the modest donations I had made surreptitiously; when our financial records were first vetted and this bit of duplicity emerged, Charlie and Hank were both thrilled. “God bless your sneaky liberal ways!” Charlie exclaimed.

Another irony when it came to Charlie’s tolerant traditionalism was that the tolerance did not seem to extend to sexual orientation, yet I had never doubted that Debbie Bell was a lesbian. I didn’t know whether she had romantic involvements—she never referred to any and hadn’t been married—but she had a certain comradely air with men and a more flirtatious way with women. She was tall, with short blond hair, and even when she wasn’t wearing a pantsuit, she carried herself as if she were; in everything about her, her voice and posture and opinions, there was a briskly athletic confidence that unfortunately you rarely see in heterosexual women. It was on the infrequent occasions when she’d remark on a man’s handsomeness, or lament her unmarried status, that she seemed most obviously gay to me—the comments came off as forced and unpersuasive. I discussed my view with Jadey and later with Jessica, both of whom agreed, but I never mentioned it to Charlie because I thought he’d be distracted by it, he might start acting strange around Debbie, teasing her outright or making jokes behind her back. I was surprised Charlie didn’t pick up anyway on her mysterious sexuality, but I think he was so gratified by Debbie’s unswerving devotion to him that he may not have wanted to analyze it for fear of finding something psychologically iffy. And in fact, I suspect Debbie has spent her interior reservoirs of love, the ones most people save for a partner or children, on Charlie. (Many times, I’ve longed to pull her aside and whisper,
You deserve better than a mere surrogate; you, too, are entitled to the real thing and not just scraps from my husband.
Needless to say, I have bitten my tongue and hoped she leads a private life about which we know nothing.)

Debbie had worked as a publicist for the Brewers—she was as passionate a baseball fan as Charlie, herself a former softball star at UW, and she also, with Charlie’s encouragement, had joined Heavenly Rose Church and been born again in 1990 —and when Charlie had left the Brewers, she’d gone with him. In those early days of Charlie’s political climb, I was sometimes surprised by how willingly and even ardently people followed him. Because he did not, as I had learned over time, inspire much confidence among his own parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law, it was hard for me not to see him as a bit of an underdog. But particularly during and after his stint with the Brewers, others saw an idealized version, as if Charlie were the star of a movie about his own life: a handsome, funny, good-natured guy who’d graduated from prestigious schools, had a prominent and successful career (was he the son of privilege? Sure, but with baseball, he’d gone in a different direction, and within a minute of meeting him, you could tell how unaffected he was—he preferred burger joints to fancy restaurants, he’d joke around with your kid, he was impishly self-effacing). He was confident and fit and religious, with a marriage that bore no trace of scandal, and a close relationship to his only child. In this narrative, he was the kind of guy whom men wanted to be friends with and women wished their husbands were more like. While my proximity to Charlie is undoubtedly part of the reason for my own less worshipful perspective, I can say sincerely that the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people. Even in our cynical age, the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true—it’s staggering. In a way, it’s also touching; it makes me feel protective. (To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you’re not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?)

I had assumed everyone and particularly political insiders harbored the same private skepticism that I did, especially about the discrepancy between an individual’s words and actions, and that decorum made all of us conceal this skepticism; I was evidently wrong. I love Charlie as much as—or, I should hope, more than—someone like Debbie, but I love him differently, with a sharper understanding of his faults. If I believe he ran for president because it was a way of allaying his fear of the dark, then I am able, on my most generous days, to see this motive as endearing. Debbie, on the other hand, believes Charlie ran for president because God summoned him, and she sees him as heroic.

As I sat in the van next to Charlie, heading toward Little Chute, what came on the radio after “Friends in Low Places” was “Achy Breaky Heart,” a song that had become a joke during that campaign because no one would admit to liking it, yet we all knew all the words, and we ended up hearing it on the radio everywhere we went, particularly in the staticky backwaters. Hank called to Kenny in the front seat to turn up the volume, and Hank and Debbie sang jubilantly, their Garth Brooks argument suspended. Next to me, quietly and seriously, Charlie said, “You think I’m up to the task of being governor, don’t you?”

“I think you’ll be wonderful.” I wasn’t lying. When Charlie had decided to run over a year earlier, he’d known little about our state that hadn’t been filtered through family lore or his own experience as a congressional candidate in ’78, but he had diligently immersed himself in the history and politics of Wisconsin. Hank had arranged for experts in economics and education and health care to come in and brief him, usually confidentially, and Charlie had worked on memorizing facts and statistics until he could recite them fluently.

Hank tapped my shoulder. “Why aren’t you two singing? ‘You can tell your ma I moved to Arkansas / You can tell your dog to bite my leg . . .’ ”

I flashed him a smile. “Looks like you’ve got this verse covered, Hank.” When he had leaned back again, I said softly to Charlie, “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of challenges, but if you stay focused on what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll be great.”

“You know what I realized today?” Charlie said. “Shaking hands with people at lunch, I thought, I’ll never make another friend. Assuming I’m elected, I mean—from here on out, it’ll only be people wanting favors and access.”

I couldn’t disagree. “You’re lucky, though, that you already have so many friends,” I said. “We’re both lucky.”

“But that’s the thing.” He was very reflective in this moment, especially in contrast to Hank and Debbie hamming it up behind us. “After Howard asked me about the engineering contracts, I’m not faulting him, but I better always be ready for that from now on. I shouldn’t let down my guard and assume any get-together is just fun and games when even people we know—heck, Arthur or John or Ed—a lot of them will have an agenda. When I think of it this way, I nagged Ed about the baseball stadium.”

“You should talk to him about this, or your dad. I bet they’d have good insights.” Ed was still a congressman, and though there had been discussion of his running for Senate in the ’92 election, he hadn’t, and I wasn’t sure why.

“You know the one person who’ll never use me?” Charlie pointed at me.

“Sweetheart, I’m sure I’m not the only one. It might be a transition for some of our friends, but I wouldn’t underestimate them.”

“People get funny, though. I’d forgotten about this until earlier today, but when my dad was governor, there was an old friend of the family who ran afoul of the law, I think for embezzling, and he wanted Dad to intervene. When Dad refused, this guy’s kids—fellows I knew well from the country club—they quit speaking to me. The man didn’t end up going to prison, either, so I don’t know what the family had to be so sour about.”

From the seat behind us, Hank leaned forward again—the song was nearing the end, with the chorus repeating several times—and called, “Last chance. Chuckles, you’re lucky you chose politics, because you’d never have made it in a traveling minstrel show.” (Chuckles was Hank’s nickname for Charlie, payback for Shit Storm. Of course, while Charlie is now Mr. President, the Shit Storm moniker has endured.)

Agreeably, Charlie joined in: “ ‘Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart . . . ’ ”

I took his hand, lacing my fingers through his, and I leaned in so my mouth was by his ear. “I love you very much,” I whispered.

IN THE TOWN
car, Jessica is on the phone with Hank. “She’d prefer not to,” Jessica keeps saying in a level tone—she has impeccable manners—and I can hear fragments of Hank’s voice, wheedling but insistent; he wants to talk to me directly. “No, she wasn’t,” Jessica says. “She doesn’t think Gladys Wycomb is concerned about that. No. No. All right. I’ll call you from the plane.” She presses the red “end” button on her cell phone, folds it shut, and immediately reaches for her Black-Berry and starts typing with her thumbs.