“You did indeed,” he will agree, forcing himself despite his shyness to look her in the eye, “but Lydia doesn’t hold it against you, and Harry doesn’t, and I certainly don’t.”
She will stop crying and will change the subject, grinning at him. “You’re such a bad boy. They let us watch TV, you know, and I’ve heard about all those awful things that Governor Bradfield says you did. Is any of that stuff true?”
“Believe as much of it as you want to believe,” he will offer, and his shyness will make him remove his eyes from hers.
“I don’t want to believe any of it.”
“Then don’t. It’s all just politics.”
“But I told myself, if people are going to vote for you despite all your sins, then one more sin won’t make any difference, if they knew about me.”
“They don’t know about you yet,” he will say, and will try to look at her again. “Maybe Bradfield is saving you for next week, the last week before the election. But truly it won’t make any difference if he does, not after all those awful things he’s already revealed about me. The public simply doesn’t care any more.”
“So if I wanted to, I could live in the governor’s mansion with you, and the public wouldn’t care?”
He will put his hand over hers. “Juliana, I don’t think I’m going to be elected. Really.”
“Don’t say that!” she will plead, and then she will offer, “Let me pay for a media blitz or anything. Let me buy you the election.”
“That’s generous of you, but it would be illegal. I’ve resigned myself to defeat. As I once explained to you, this whole campaign has just been a part of my education in politics. Now I need to learn how to lose.”
“But—” She will tilt her head and toss her lovely long black hair and will say “But—” again before finding the words. “But Ben and I are counting on you to become governor so you can pardon us if we’re sent to prison.” When he will not comment immediately on that, she will say, “You know our lawyers think there’s a chance we’ll have to serve time, maybe years and years. I’ve heard so much about how people like Ben get treated in prison. You’ve got to become governor so you can keep that from happening!”
“Maybe it can be arranged that Ben won’t be kept with the general prison population,” Vernon will suggest.
Juliana will resume crying, not sobbing this time but allowing the tears to flow down her cheeks. “You know what I do with all my free time here? I have fantasies about living in the governor’s mansion with you, and decorating it and turning one room into a nursery and throwing parties and thumbing my nose at prying reporters. Wouldn’t we have fun?”
“I’d be delighted,” he will say, to console her, but he will be slightly disturbed about that reference to a nursery. “Especially since Jelena has made it clear she’d never want to live in the governor’s mansion herself.”
Juliana will laugh with pleasure. “I’ll just take her place! She’ll stay in Stay More and Bo can have her.”
“That would appear to be the likely arrangement,” he will observe, but then will insist, “assuming I got elected. Believe me, it seems much more probable that you and I won’t be living it up together in the governor’s mansion.”
“Then you can just come to my Stay More mansion any time you feel like it.”
“Juliana,” he will say with dead seriousness, “it’s not probable you’ll be living there. It’s more likely you’ll be living for a number of years in prison.”
“But I can’t have my…I don’t want to let the…. Prison’s no place to have a…” She will struggle to find the words, but then the guard will return.
“Folks, let’s say our goodbyes,” the guard will suggest.
Juliana will say hers: “If you don’t get elected, and therefore you can’t pardon me, will you pardon me anyway?”
“There is nothing for me to pardon you for,” he will say.
Moments of silence will pass during which they will be able to hold each other only with their eyes. He will reach across the table and touch her hands as they are held to her waist. He will smile and try to think of something cheerful to say. The guard will take one of her arms gently and raise her to her feet.
Wanting not to lose the conversation, she will ask, “Is my house still going up?”
“Last time I looked, they were nailing on the rafters,” he will tell her.
“Whatever happens,” she will say, “I intend to live there. Some day. For the rest of my life.”
“Our lives will be long,” he will predict, accurately enough. And then they can merely touch hands before the guard leads her away.
For a while afterwards, for a little while at least, he will have regained his determination to be elected governor, just so he will be able to issue a pardon for Juliana and Ben.
George will suggest, since they will be only a few blocks away, that they ought to drop by campaign headquarters and say hello. So they will go there next. Vernon will be surprised to find the place a hive of activity: everybody will be on the telephone or the fax machine or the computers’ email, and Monica will be using two telephones and a laptop simultaneously. Lydia Caple, although she will have gracefully surrendered her position as press secretary to Monica, will be very much in the middle of things.
“I just thought I’d better hang around and keep an eye on Monica,” Lydia will say to Vernon. “But she doesn’t need any advice from me. Now you be a good boy and say howdy to all these people.”
Everyone will be looking adoringly at their candidate. Vernon will obligingly go from person to person, shaking hands, smiling encouragingly, and thanking the person for doing such good and hard work. Most of them will be female, and Vernon will feel a bit panicky in his shyness, but, having gained the practice with Juliana, he will force himself to look each of the women in the eye.
“Our office at that statehouse will be a picnic compared with this,” Monica will say to him, when her turn will come to shake his hand.
“Indeed it will,” he will say. “Especially if you’re in charge there too.”
He will have intended to have another chat with Monica, to tell her to take it easy for the rest of the campaign because it’s all a lost cause anyhow, but somehow he will not be able to say such things to her. And she will go on.
In the new year, Lydia Caple will give herself a long vacation before she returns to politics again. She will fulfill a long dream by taking a safari into darkest Kenya, and will follow that up with a bicycle tour of Tuscany. But she will be heard to say, and in fact will be quoted in the Democrat-Gazette as having said, that none of her adventures will have equaled the weeks she had spent in a lost hollow with a great waterfall near Stay More, Arkansas.
Her penultimate words to Vernon will be, “I know nooks and crannies of the governor’s office at the statehouse that I’ll be waiting to show to you.” And then, at the door to campaign headquarters, her ultimate words to him will be, “Straighten your shoulders. Walk like you have somewhere to get to.”
The newspapers, all of them, that last week of the campaign, will have little or nothing to say about the campaign or the candidates. “What else is there to say?” Hank Endicott will demand in print, of his journalistic colleagues, of the public, and especially of himself. And then will attempt an answer: “It’s all been said.”
Vernon will drive George back home to Stay More. This time, when he will notice, as he has noticed every time he’s come back to Stay More after being away, how the very sight of home sends little tinglings up his spine, he will decide, spontaneously but conclusively, that he will not want to leave again. He will want to hole up in his study and forget this damned election and become the world’s foremost authority on quantum theory. But first he will simply drive around what’s left of Stay More, taking it all in. It will seem that the hogs who overrun the place will be looking at him and grinning at him, as if they know, all of them, that he will be home to stay. His drive will take him by the constructio
n site for Juliana’s mansion, just to observe the progress. They will have not merely nailed on the rafters but will have completed the roofing: it is going to be a fabulous house, not just a vast enlargement of the wigwam but an elaboration upon it, as if the wigwam is the statement of a theme that the mansion will endlessly embellish. It will make his own “double bubble” seem somehow very old-fashioned and outmoded.
So his first thoughts, as he approaches home, will not be the formulation of the long-delayed serious chat with Jelena, but rather will center upon what he needs to do to his property to make the house seem not like some Sixties freak but a truly postmodern dwelling belonging to the 21st Century…or better yet, timeless. In fact, this will still be very much on his mind when he enters for the first time Jelena’s secret garden and finds her there down on her knees, planting bulbs, alone except for that overstuffed feline which she had named after him.
She will appear to levitate suddenly at his approach. Jumping up, she will protest, “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” And then, wiping the soil off her hands so that she will not get any on him, she will give him a hug and a kiss and will ask, “How did you know where I was? How did you know about this?” sweeping her hand to indicate the expanse of the secret garden, where now in November nothing will be growing but everything will still have been arranged by the loving hands of a woman who will be a genius and an artist as well as a descendant of Governor Jacob Ingledew.
He will ask her if she has not realized that her secret garden is visible from the air, and that he has often landed nearby in the helicopter. Hadn’t she heard the helicopter? “Why did you want to hide the garden from me?” he will ask.
She will ponder the question before answering. “I wanted just one thing in all the world that was my very own,” she will say.
“But you shared it with Bo,” he will point out.
“How did you know that?” she will bristle. “Did Bo tell you?”
“No, I just assumed that since he shares your interest in gardening you’d want him to see it.”
“I did.”
“But you didn’t share with him your other secrets, which are your very own.”
“What other secrets?”
He will name them: her Bible, her journal, her little TV set, her box of chocolates, her cigarettes, and her vibrator.
She will blush, but will become angry. “You snoop! Do you search through everything in the house looking for my secrets?”
“Not deliberately. But over the years it’s hard to keep all those things hidden. For example, sometimes there is the smell of tobacco smoke on your breath.”
“Why haven’t you ever told me?”
“You’re entitled to your own life. If I had told you I knew you read the Bible, even if I told you I approved of it, you might quit. If I told you I knew you made yourself come with a vibrator, you’d be so embarrassed it might screw up our whole relationship.”
“If you’ve found my journal, did you read it?”
“I did not. I swear. You’re entitled to your own life.”
“You keep saying that. Are you getting ready to tell me that when you’ve moved into the Executive Mansion in Little Rock, it’s all right for me to have my own life here with Bo?”
“I’m not moving into the Executive Mansion.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I’m reclaiming full possession of my house, and I’m going to stay in it. Where is Bo, by the way?” Vernon will decide that his next act would be to evict his former campaign manager from the premises.
“He’s over at Sheila Kimber’s house, working with Cast Sherrill. They’re brainstorming a strategy to reawaken the public’s interest in the campaign and get you elected.”
“Well, you can tell him—no, I’ll tell him myself, that I have ceased running. I am no longer a candidate for governor of Arkansas. It’s obvious why he’s knocking himself out to get me elected. He just wants to get me into the Governor’s Mansion so he can have my house and my true love all to himself.”
“Bo doesn’t want your study.”
“I’m talking about you. And don’t try telling me that Bo doesn’t want you. Or hasn’t been having you.”
“I’ve never tried to keep Bo a secret from you. Except maybe the first night, when you asked me if I knew that he sleeps in the nude and I lied and said I didn’t.”
“The two of you have been conspiring behind my back, not only in bed but also in the process of plotting your life here together after I’ve gone away to Little Rock to live for four years. Don’t deny it.”
“I won’t deny we’ve talked about it. But I’ve never told Bo that I would, or could, live with that arrangement. In fact, I think that if I tried to do that, after a few months of it I’d miss you so much I’d change my mind about living in Little Rock.”
“You would?” Vernon will be incredulous.
Jelena will smile, and Vernon will notice, as if he will not have noticed it before, that there will always have been a certain charm about her smile, a certain cuteness and warmth, which Juliana’s broader and more beaming smile does not possess. For all her glamour and sexiness, Juliana lacked the sort of down-home sweetness that Jelena possessed. “I suppose I could stand it for just four years,” Jelena will say. “It would be kind of like a sentence to prison, but I can imagine that a woman sent to prison for four years could endure it with the thoughts of her eventual freedom.”
Vernon will of course catch the allusion she is making to Juliana. “It’s purely academic anyhow,” he will point out, “since my chances of getting elected have disappeared.”
“But Bo and Cast—and no doubt all the rest of the Samurai—are busting their asses to make your chances reappear.”
Vernon will smile at that allusion to Monica’s remark in her original letter, which had got the whole thing started. Then he will ponder the fact that when he and Jelena had made one of their extended trips away from Stay More—in the Sixties they’d gone all the way around the world for months, and in the course of his courses of study they had lived in Ireland and Japan and New York City for long stretches of time—they had simply closed up the double-bubble house, draining the pipes, and George had kept a periodic check on the place (break-ins were unknown in that part of the Ozarks). “If we closed the house for four years,” he will now ask her, still purely hypothetically, “could you live without your secret garden? Could you live without Bo?”
“Why would we have to close it? Couldn’t we visit on weekends?”
Vernon will think about that. “I suppose we could,” he will say.
“As for Bo,” she will say, “I suppose I could live without him. But I know I could never live without you.”
When he will be an old man, and you may be sure that he will live to an age as old as all his Ingledew forebears, Vernon will look back at his long life and reflect that in the entire course of it there were only two moments that he will regret. One was when he was a boy of ten, and his cousin Jelena, eighteen, was walking down the aisle of the school/churchhouse to marry Mark Duckworth and she paused to whisper into little Vernon’s ear, “I was going to wait and marry you when you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” And Vernon looked into her eyes to understand if she were teasing him, and, understanding that she was serious, shook his head and declared, “I will never marry.” And even though he was right, and never would get married, he would always, will always, regret that he had not said “Yes.” The other thing he will regret is that when, in her secret garden, Jelena will have said, “I could never live without you,” he will not have, immediately and passionately, enfolded her in his arms and will not have taken her straightway to bed or even to a soft patch of the cool November secret garden.
Instead, he will say, “I’m going up to my study for a while. I’ll see you at supper.”
And the moment will have been lost. Just as he will have expected the election to be lost. From his stu
dy he will call Sheila Kimber’s house and will ask to speak to Bo and without giving Bo a chance to say a word he will tell him that he has made up his mind to do nothing further to gain the statehouse, that in accordance with Taoist principles he will strive no more, that while he will be deeply appreciative of Bo’s and Cast’s efforts he will not be interested in hearing what scheme they are hatching up to reestablish the reputation that was tarnished by the one hundred Vices, and that Vernon will intend to remain here in his study until such time as he will have utterly mastered quantum mechanics, and if Bo will need a place to sleep tonight he had ought to ask Sheila and Cast if they have an extra bed. Thanks, and goodbye.
Vernon will, at least, not only sleep with his beloved Jelena this night, but also, in accordance with Taoist principles, will withhold his own orgasm until she will have had more than enough of them.
The next morning, after a good workout in his gym in the annex, and a three-mile run, he will seclude himself in his study and virtually memorize three books on quantum theory. Then he will go out to his lab, also in the annex, and will conduct some experiments involving reduced temperatures, magnets, electrons, and superconductivity. At supper Jelena will offer him a thick sheaf of the day’s phone and fax messages, but he will politely tell her that he will have managed to get through the entire day without one single thought of politics, and this will be no time for him to break that incredible willpower.
In fact, the only time he will think about politics will be a couple of days later when he will have decided to pay a long overdue visit to his father, John Henry “Hank” Ingledew. He will not have hated his father or anything like that, but will simply not have had much to say to him.
“I changed my mind, boy,” Hank Ingledew will say to his son. “Come Tuesday, I’m a-fixin to vote fer ye.”
Vernon will be flabbergasted, because his father will have been a life-long die-hard Republican. “You don’t have to do that, Dad. I don’t want you going against your beliefs just on account of I’m your son.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 141
