Domestic Affairs

by Bridget Siegel

  She studied him like an ongoing thesis project, picking up every fact, big or small. From his antipoverty speeches to the kind of shoes his gorgeous wife wore—Christian Louboutins, of course—Olivia knew the governor inside and out. He stood in stark contrast to the transactional candidates she had come to know in the last few years. They changed positions on major issues when public opinion shifted, made bland speeches so as not to ruffle any feathers even when the feathers clearly needed to be ruffled, and would say just about anything to get a donation. But with someone like this, like Taylor, her fundraising could serve a cause, not just her résumé.

  So here she was. Running late, half-put-together, but as excited as she’d ever been for this life-changing meeting in the misleading calmness of the Brinmore.

  The Brinmore was one of the most exclusive hotels on Park Avenue. It used to be the place ladies went to lunch, but fundraisers in New York had turned it into a political cafeteria. Its dining room, lined in dark wood and deep red fabric, had enough of a library feel to project gravitas, and it was just overpriced enough to make a politician feel fancy, yet affordable enough to not seem excessive to the donors, who always picked up the check.

  Jo, the hostess, was a short, well-put-together woman who could best be described as a yenta, except she never gave away the gossip she collected. She ran the place with a gracious composure. Her control over where people sat at breakfast made her one of the most knowledgeable and powerful women in New York. Knowing who wanted to be near, or far, from whom gave her insight into every friendship, political alliance, affair, and divorce, often well before the heartache flamed up. Yet she held that power through a combination of intelligence and withholding. She never gossiped, never gave a single detail away. Not to anyone. When Jo knew something about you, her subtle glances and moves told you she did, but they never seemed to tell anyone else. She also had an uncanny knack for knowing exactly who someone was meeting as soon as they walked in.

  As Olivia turned the corner into the restaurant area of the hotel, she gave a quick smile to Jo, who blew a kiss, called her “sweetie,” and knowingly pointed to the back of the dining room. Olivia looked and saw the two men sitting in the large, couchlike chairs at a table in the back corner. The governor was laughing as she approached and Olivia caught herself smiling along. He had a nice way about him. His hair bounced lightly over his blue eyes, which could be seen from a mile away. There was something much more familiar about him than she had expected. She switched her coat and two bags to one hand and smoothed out her hair in an effort to condense the mess that she felt she couldn’t completely contain.

  “Hello.” The governor stood and reached for her hand. “How are you today?” His Southern drawl was the perfect add to the smile. It was clear why everyone was drawn to him, she thought. He took her hand and clasped it with his other hand, holding on just a little too long.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “We wouldn’t expect anything else,” Jacob said, chiming in with his normal dose of candid humor.

  Olivia turned and hugged Jacob, struck by how much he and the governor looked alike. Jacob was a little taller, standing at about six foot one, but he had the same sandy brown hair and effortlessly charming smile. She wondered if he had let his bangs grow a little long so they would flop over his brown eyes just like the governor’s did. As Olivia sat down on the couch next to the governor she wondered if campaign staffers spent so much time with their candidate they could actually start looking like them, the way people said dog owners did with their dogs.

  “Nooow, sit down here,” Taylor said with an extra-slow drawl, settling back into his chair and ushering Olivia with an outstretched hand. “Jacob here tells me that you are interested in education reform. Do you know that down in Georgia we’ve started to build communities that are working toward complete integration with every public school?”

  Olivia knew but found herself hardly able to respond, she was so mesmerized by his desire to start off on policy. He fed right into the part of her that still believed in changing the world.

  From as far back as Olivia could remember she’d gotten the same rush of excitement when a politician spoke with flair that most girls got from the high school quarterback’s waving to them from the field or from buying a new bag. She wasn’t immune to cute boys or new bags and was the first to admit she wanted a big white wedding dress and lots of kids. Five to be exact. But she had yet to meet anyone who could make her feel as alive as she did at a political rally. That was a foreign thought to the kids at her suburban high school, who’d rarely signed her petitions or even known when Election Day was. In her seventh-grade English class, Olivia was the first to volunteer to read her essay on love aloud. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” she said, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.

  She continued on talking about love’s role in civil unrest. It wasn’t until she sat back down that she noticed the giggling around the room. The next forty minutes had seemed like forty hours. Olivia sank into her chair, feeling more alienated every time a new classmate got up to talk about Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, or David, the star of the junior high basketball team.

  Though her parents supported what she did, they never quite understood where it came from. Her father was a Republican, her mother a Democrat, but neither had a strong enough attachment to either party to keep them from voting for Perot in ’92, despite Olivia’s best arguments.

  “Born that way,” her mom would say when asked why her twelve-year-old daughter, Olivia, was protesting about environmental issues outside the middle school. Her sister’s good looks and her brother’s natural talent for sports were much easier to appreciate, even for Olivia, who herself had no explanation for why she loved politics. It was understandably simpler for her parents to come to school to see her sister in the school play or her brother in the state championship basketball game. A protest wasn’t really the kind of thing they could pull up a chair to or invite the grandparents along to. Working on campaigns, though, had been the home she had always been looking for. She could eat, sleep, and breathe world events. The age-old question of why she had not yet found a long-term boyfriend was answered not by the incomprehensible idea that she would rather change the world than fall in love, but by the simple fact that she was just too busy.

  The governor leaned over to her with that stare she had only heard about. With quiet earnestness he said, “This world needs people who believe in the promise of a better day—not just in words and in rhetoric, but in every step we take. We’re going to build something that will reroot this country in the freedom and justice it started on.” She was sold. He would do something about poverty, about justice, the issues that literally kept her awake at night, aching with a desire to stop the suffering. Amazingly, she thought, there wasn’t anything corny about what he said. And his hand was enveloping her bicep to emphasize his sincerity. Hook. Line. Sinker.

  “My man,” a voice bellowed a few feet from the table.

  Governor Taylor looked over her shoulder and got up with a huge smile. He moved to hug the enormous man looming over them.

  Olivia shook off her rapt haze as she recognized the statuesque man.

  “How are you, man?” Taylor was saying. “You remember Jacob, right?”

  “Of course.” Dikembe Mutombo casually threw a fist-bump toward Jacob. “Jacob introduced us!”

  “And this,” the governor said as he put his hand gently on her back, “is Miss Olivia Greenley, the most sought-after political fundraiser in New York.”

  Olivia shook her head in humble disagreement but she couldn’t hide her smile. She knew it was a typical political embellishment, but she didn’t care. Here she was being introduced to one of her favorite athletes by one of the nation’s most famous politicians as “sought after.” She hated to admit it even to herself—as a hardened staffer she was supposed to be above the celebrity factor of it all—but this w
as Dikembe Mutombo and she was excited. “Olivia, this is—”

  “Dikembe Mutombo.” She cut him off, trying her best not to sound like a schoolgirl.

  “Ahhh, a basketball fan in our midst apparently.”

  “More specifically, a Hoyas fan. Class of ’06.” Olivia smiled.

  “Gotta love a Hoya,” Dikembe replied. “Sorry to interrupt, but I was just telling my office to reach out to yours. I have a charity event coming up next month and we’d love to get you out there. Three-on-three for kids. All the old Hoyas are in—Touomou, Owinje. David Henley is hosting.”

  “Done. I will be there. Jacob, let’s make sure that’s on my calendar. I’m shocked that Henley hasn’t mentioned it already.”

  Dikembe looked a bit confused. He said, “Oh, I thought he was going to tell you about it, Governor.”

  “I bet he’s already emailed me and I missed it,” Jacob said, falling on his sword as all good staffers reflexively do. “Let me get the details from you.” He smiled.

  Olivia knew exactly what Jacob was thinking. She was thoroughly aware that he knew full well that the governor would not be going to that event. A good deal of staffers’ time was spent “getting things on the calendar” and then breaking the news to people when they didn’t stay on or, more likely, had never gotten on in the first place. Politicians had an uncanny ability to cancel and move things without reprimand. If Olivia or Jacob had gone into film or finance or anything else after college, either one of them would probably have given life and limb for a meeting with Jamie Dimon, Orin Kramer, Harvey Weinstein, or even Dikembe Mutombo. Olivia would have probably have shown up an hour early to any of those meetings.

  Instead, Olivia knew that Jacob, at the age of twenty-nine, was as accustomed as she was to calling his financial idol to tell them that his candidate wasn’t going to make it to the lunch that started in twenty minutes, but they could squeeze the financier in later in the day for a forty-five-minute coffee (to which Taylor would undoubtedly be fifteen minutes late). If that had been a business meeting of the highest importance, a call like that would have been answered with a dial tone and a cancellation of all future business. But this was politics, so the response usually sounded something more like, “Perfect, see you soon.”

  “I have all the paperwork with my staffers over there,” Dikembe said, pointing toward the lobby. All of a sudden, he seemed more like a schoolgirl than the seven-foot-two basketball superstar that he was.

  “I’ll come grab it,” Jacob said. “I’m pretty sure we have a Habitat event the same day as your event but let me get the info and double-check.”

  That was another trick that any good staffer used to smooth the we-can’t-make-it message: tell people that there was something else scheduled on that date from the get-go. If the governor had seen the specific date before he said yes, that always made it a little more difficult. But for a staffer, looking at an invite and saying, “I know we have yada yada on that date but let me see if I can try to move things around,” crafted a win-win situation. If the boss didn’t go to the event in the end, it was clearly because there was something important on the calendar. And if by some off chance the candidate could go, the staffer was the hero who moved things around to make it happen.

  Being a hero to the donors definitely garnered privileges. Donors needed contact with the candidate to feed their egos. And wealthy donors’ thank-yous for that access ranged from tickets to sold-out concerts and sports games (like the ones to last year’s Final Four that Olivia scored), to Hermès bags, to weekends at their Caribbean homes. While those staffers working in government offices were limited in what they could accept (Jacob’s friends on the Hill couldn’t even be bought more than $20 in drinks), campaign workers were completely unrestricted in what they could accept.

  Jacob followed Dikembe to the lobby. As he disappeared out of sight, Olivia joked with the governor, “Jacob seems so smitten by Dikembe. Are you worried he’s over there asking for a job?”

  The governor laughed with ease. “Please, he could never leave—his grandmother loves me. Plus, there’s more basketball on this campaign than in any of Dikembe’s days. Seriously, did you see the last Dick Vitale March Madness scouting report?”

  “No, but I’m interested in working on any campaign that promises good basketball talk. Where does someone even get the scouting report? Is it part of your presidential-run briefing?”

  “If I had my way it would be! Dick did some events for us down by Chapel Hill and I figured getting on his scouting email lists might be even more valuable than his fundraising.”

  “So you adhere to God, family, and then college basketball as the natural order of things? I love it.”

  “Something like that.” He smiled like a five-year-old boy. “Here,” he said, flicking through his BlackBerry, “I’ll add you onto his list. What’s your email? Consider it a welcome to the team.”

  She spelled out her email address, beaming.

  Taylor barely looked up, seamlessly turning the conversation from basketball back to the campaign. “This is a big job we have here,” he said, hitting the SEND button. “You really ready for this?”

  “Definitely.” She tried to disguise her total insecurity in the answer.

  “This is going to be a good one. We’re going to change the world.”

  Even now Olivia felt as if she were reading a really good book about the beginnings of a great social movement or a heart-shaking romantic tale, one she would get so lost in that she could believe the world really was the way she wanted it to be: the man really does come running back for his true love; and the woman overcomes her fears and admits she adores him too; and a kiss at sunset promises a long and happy life together. Olivia was a political romantic and those moments—which had become fewer and farther between—when she could really believe, as she could with Governor Taylor, made her feel completely high.

  Jacob returned with a T-shirt draped over his shoulder. He dropped a handful of papers about Dikembe’s charity on the table.

  “Papers for you, shirt for me. See,” he said, showing Olivia the extra-large neon tee complete with a caricature of Dikembe on it, “this campaign gets the good stuff!”

  Another cup of coffee later, Olivia’s job was solidified, the final approval in, and Jacob was eyeing their next meeting, who had just walked in the door. Knowing the look on Jacob’s face from firsthand experience, Olivia understood that he was concerned with transitioning from one meeting to another. She said her thank-yous and excused herself from the table.

  The governor stood and shook her hand. “Welcome to the team, kiddo. Get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. I can’t promise we’ll win, but I promise we’ll change lives.”

  “Be careful of that one, sweetie,” Jo said to Olivia as she said goodbye to her in passing.

  “Okay, thanks!” Olivia might have said the words too cheerfully and too quickly. She turned back to ask what Jo had said, realizing she hadn’t really heard the exact wording of the warning, but Jo was already showing someone else to his table.

  As Olivia walked out of the hotel, the day seemed more vibrant than it had been when she walked in. She had gotten lost in the dark library-like dining room and even more so in the governor’s gaze, which seemed to have a magnetic quality to it. She felt almost flustered by his genius.

  She grabbed at her BlackBerry, which had been out of her hands for longer than she was accustomed to, and read down the thirty-two new messages. Ugh, she thought, back to life.

  By the time she got to her apartment, a cozy junior one—or at least that was the way the ad had described the tiny one-bedroom apartment—it was six p.m. It was much earlier than she got home most nights. Her soon-to-be-ex-boss, the newly elected district attorney, was traveling this week, so she could savor a few early nights. He was off to California until Tuesday, partially on vacation, but with a few meetings squeezed in. It was a trip she would usually have gone on, but with no need to fundraise so soon after the electio
n, she had talked him out of taking her. Though she liked having a little time to herself and the relative quiet of a post-election fundraising job, she had to admit she missed the craze of a real campaign and was excited to start a new one.

  She reached for the box of pasta that sat on the counter because her cabinet could only accommodate two boxes of cereal and threw her culinary specialty on the stove. As she waited for the water to boil she began to Google Governor Taylor. The articles were endless, and that was just from today. She couldn’t wait to be an official part of the team that would “re-dream America” and get to work.

  TWO

  What a waste of time, Jacob thought as the next meeting slid into the chair at their table. Lori Sanders adopted her signature perfect posture as she unbuttoned the jacket of her maroon tweed suit, which looked like the ones his grandmother wore whenever she saw the governor. “Proper church clothes,” she called them. Lori’s blond hair was tied up in such a high bun on top of her head it looked like it pulled her eyes skyward. Hah! Probably her attempt at a cheap face-lift!

  Jacob sat back and began rewinding the meeting with Olivia as the governor and Sanders began their small talk. For a second, Jacob let himself admit that it wasn’t the smartest plan to bring his buddy into the campaign.

  When he’d first suggested Olivia he wasn’t completely serious. He and the governor had been through three fundraisers in the last year, all of them unable to keep pace, and they weren’t getting any traction from their other prospects for the job. Their main opponent, Senator Kramer, was the former head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and since almost all good fundraisers went through there at some point or another, he had close ties with just about everybody. Jacob had tried them all—Dara, Annie, Dennis, Jill, Allison, Meredith, Emily, Stephanie, Rachel, Leigh, Hildy, both Jennifers, Jordan, Lenny, Jamie—the list went on and on. People didn’t necessarily want to work for Kramer, but they didn’t want to work against him either.