In a year when everything else would go his party’s way, Vance Hiddell would lose his September primary by twelve percentage points.
Richard walked past camera two, unclipped his IFB, then headed through the narrow corridor behind the control room, where he was surrounded by stagehands offering back slaps, laughs, murmurs of congratulations.
In the reference monitor, Richard saw Max Peterson stack the papers of his fake script one last time and smile at the camera. “We’ll return in a moment.”
3
AT THE deserted concourse gates of the Salt Lake City International Airport, the waiting areas flickered with the light of soundless televisions blinking out the last of the year’s news. A science correspondent talked about the prevailing winds, the patterns of frigid Pacific currents, the historical increase in temperatures, all to an audience of empty plastic chairs. At each gate, video terminals predicted the on-time departure of tomorrow morning’s earliest flights. Maintenance personnel tended to the business of cleaning; their slapping mops and whirling floor polishers, their muffled whistles of boredom and melancholy, all reverberated off the terminal’s exposed girder-and-crossbeam ceiling. Forty-gallon garbage bags stuffed with stale cinnamon rolls sat abandoned near an unattended customer-service kiosk.
Because the most delicious cigarette is a surreptitious one, the workers inside smoked too; cigarettes dangled from their pursed lips as they completed the last items on a checklist of second-shift chores. Behind the closed pull-down gate of an airport shop, a twentysomething employee they called Heavy Metal Bob stacked and tied together bundles of the previous morning’s newspapers, December 31 headed for the recycling bin. Tomorrow’s travelers would congregate over a stack of them, four different varieties with the same set of headlines: Sri Lankan Ferry Disaster Claims Hundreds; Heat Wave Dominates for Third Straight Day; For California Businesses, Everything Turns Up Roses.
They called him Heavy Metal Bob thanks to his long, straight hair and endless supply of concert T-shirts. Behind his back, coworkers scoffed at his ratty jeans and the navy suede sneakers that on rainy days left his white tube socks stained at the toes and heels. The people he worked with assumed he was high, but he’d gotten and stayed clean, if only to spite the naysayers. He blocked out their sniping comments and the day-to-day sounds of the airport with an old Walkman he’d found near gate A18, and worked with the perpetual slowness of someone barely awake.
Bob spent the end of his New Year’s Eve shift dusting around shelves of souvenirs, stuffed animals, shot glasses and snow globes, bric-a-brac labeled with the city’s name, purple T-shirts emblazoned with the incongruous words Utah Jazz. He’d volunteered to work, to give the family men on the custodial staff the evening off, and in the near solitude of late evening, he did what so many others across the nation were doing at that exact moment, using the year’s waning hours for self-assessment—this personal inventory his only distraction as he counted his way through a rack of paperback bestsellers. His resolutions were meager—put away a few dollars for the future, stop wasting so many on 900 numbers and late fees at the video store, get a few more fresh vegetables into the diet.
Bob dreamed of an airline job, counter agent or baggage thrower, one that might mean someone to talk to at work. All he’d ever wanted was to help people, to be dependable; in the parlance of the cop show he’d watched last night at 2:00 a.m., you could say anything you wanted about Bob Denovo, but he was a stand-up guy, the kind of guy who’d bail you out of the city lockup, no questions asked, the kind of guy who, if there was one sandwich left in all the world, would offer you half. How easy it had become to ignore the guy with the garbage bags and the headphones; most evenings, as he passed the women who worked at the hamburger joint on the A concourse, he received only a nod in return to his greetings. Someday, he hoped, one of them would wave him over and say thank you for carrying out the bags of stale buns and rancid meat. They might talk for a few minutes, but it wouldn’t be anything like working on the ramp.
Maybe he could be the guy with the flashlights, steering the pilots toward the Jetway. He had no idea what the guys with ear protection and fluorescent vests actually did, just a peculiar confidence: whatever it was, he could do it too. Besides, no way you could sit out on the ramp all day, loading and unloading planes, and never find anything to talk about.
His plans were for an evening of television and a modest splurge, delivered pizza and a Sprite (he wasn’t Mormon but had adopted some of the Latter-Day disciplines, such as skipping caffeine, mostly to avoid strangers who might ask the question of his faith). As he watched the illuminated ball descend over the Times Square throng, he would feel the total absence of human contact in his life, a longing for someone, anyone, to kiss at midnight. What else could he do besides watch television? A cable network offered a marathon of reruns, this science fiction series he was trying to catch up on, where government agents were complicit in the cover-up of an impending alien invasion. This plot made perfect sense to Bob; on the edge of the high desert, he’d seen inexplicable displays of celestial lights, phenomena known by obtuse-sounding titles that combined numbers and initials. The only other thing on TV was going to be the news, and whenever he could help it, Bob paid no attention to the events of the world outside.
At the top of the ten o’clock news, a fat weatherman—the standard-issue avuncular type—offered a scientific explanation for the week’s weather pattern. We were just two days away from perihelion, the time when the earth moved closest to the sun; B-roll video showed coastal North Carolina, buffeted by a week’s worth of unusually strong surf, the result of a convergence of the latest nor’easter and the tidal pull of a full moon. Under the constancy of fifty-knot winds, a handful of million-dollar homes had already toppled into the sea near Wrightsville Beach, but those disembodied images were the nation’s only bit of bad news this New Year’s Eve.
The optimism of the New Year was reflected in the forecast: the jet stream crept farther north across Canada’s prairie provinces, flooding the states below with an abundance of surprising warmth; the weatherman spoke of the prospects for record high temperatures, a dearth of snow. The first day of January would arrive from sea to shining sea under the brightest spotlight of clear winter, American sunlight, no chance of foul weather.
4
THE HOTEL, an elegant stone high-rise off Temple Square, stood just feet from the spot where the city of Salt Lake began. Tourists gathered in the shadows of the six steeples of the great temple and took photographs of the statue of the angel Moroni as he beckoned the faithful to arms with his blazing golden trumpet.
In the dead hours just before dinner, the lower floors of the hotel bustled with preparations for the evening’s festivities. Uniformed employees vacuumed ballrooms while men in jeans and black T-shirts assembled modular stages; bar backs sliced limes, and $6.74-an-hour kitchen help wrapped frozen scallops in bacon slices. The musicians in cover bands—a schoolteacher, a car salesman, the produce manager of a local market, a hired-gun horn section that had once, in an emergency, played behind Chuck Berry—geared up for their various New Year’s Eve parties, restringing guitars and reviewing their cheat sheets, the charts that would allow them to churn out perfunctory versions of the top hits of yesterday and today.
And on the seventh floor, Mary Beth Blumenthal primped for a night out. She opened her room’s window to release the accumulated steam of her shower and admit the lush breeze of a warm December night, pausing in her preparations to admire the precise layout of the city. In front of a vanity mirror that made her look ten pounds heavier, she vowed to be remarried by this time next year, a preamble to her next New Year’s resolution: provide a strong male role model for her son, Gabriel, who on his next birthday would be seven years old and had never known his biological father.
Mary Beth’s strongest prospect was Mike Renfro, the Texas insurance man who also happened to be her boss. They’d been dating clandestinely for months, but this weekend was the first i
nkling she’d gotten that their future contained something more, maybe even something permanent. Mike was the only reason she would be in Salt Lake City. She could think of only one other reason people might come to Utah on holiday—skiing—and she hadn’t been much for winter sports except for a few college-era trips down the bunny slopes. A romantic getaway meant the islands, St. Barts maybe, or dinner and a show on Broadway. Mary Beth had a tough time picturing romance in Utah. She had been meaning to ask about this strange destination ever since Mike snuck into her office the Wednesday before Christmas and left her an envelope stuffed with colorful brochures and airline tickets; there had been only two tickets, Mike’s and Mary Beth’s, and she’d been angry that he’d made no accommodations for Gabriel.
It had taken intense bilateral negotiations before Mary Beth agreed to leave her son with Sarah Hensley, one of Mike’s cadre of just-out-of-college assistants. They would stay at Mike’s house, where Gabriel could avail himself of the big-screen television and the heated pool, all under adequate supervision. Still, her worries had dominated the last three days, feelings of guilt about being apart from her son for the first time in his six years, a sense of remorse tempering the joy she felt at relaxing in the hotel-provided terry-cloth robe, the snacks of fourteen-dollar macadamias and honey-roasted cashews from the minibar.
In the evenings, Mike ministered to her feet, massaging them with peppermint-scented cream. They sipped mimosas and Bloody Marys with breakfast, quaffed Irish coffees after the last run down the slopes. She’d decided to be a gamer, what her late father would have called a good egg, and gone along with Mike’s every suggestion, even ordering a Flintstone-size New York strip, slathered the way all mediocre hotel steaks are in a sauce whose main ingredient was a stick of butter, as her holiday dinner. The austerity program could always start tomorrow. What was the New Year for if not solemn pledges, draconian diets, another chance for reinvention?
She knew herself well enough to call this creeping feeling entitlement. The truth of her guilt: she felt she was entitled to exactly nothing, and she had felt that way ever since her ex-husband had moved out almost seven years ago. Six weeks after his departure, she discovered she was pregnant, her morning beginning with the sign of the cross, the symbol on the home pregnancy test that she stared at in disbelief, thinking of all the worrisome precautions she’d taken for some fifteen years to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. She’d sat through that particular set of holidays on her own, living off her savings, trying to minimize her interaction with the modern world. Ever since, New Year’s Eve had always been a reminder to Mary Beth of the paucity of her romantic prospects, and now, on the last evening of her short holiday, she wanted to enjoy herself. She could not help but think that being away from her son at this time of the year served as evidential proof—she was a bad mother. But she’d made her choice, and Gabriel was safe in the custody of a good friend, so tonight Mary Beth intended to head downstairs to the hotel ballroom, to drink and sweat and grind suggestively up against her stodgy boyfriend and boss in a way she knew couples around her would think undignified.
For this holiday evening, she would not deny herself anything. She wanted to beat perfection—or at least the illusion of it—into her body. In the bath, she ground away the frayed edges of her heels with a pumice stone. She wielded a triple-blade razor to smooth over her legs, underarms, bikini area. She wanted nothing more than to misbehave—she still thought of sex as something to be embarrassed about, something to hide. Just as she rarely hit the dance floor anymore, it had been years since she had found herself lost in the animal compunctions that came over her younger self, the way the twenty-year-old Mary Beth occasionally lingered in the bath or her own bed, masturbating through the melancholy of an anxious Sunday evening. Sex was still an adventure but no longer a thrill ride, a train about to leave the tracks. Now it required preparations—shopping, shaving, personal lubricants—and happened with all the spontaneity of an Everest expedition.
At the end of her ritual, she tended to her hair, molding it in place with a combination of fixatives, including a space-age goo that contained micropolymers designed to add an illusory, silk-like finish; the combination of dry air and winter sun had fried her frosted locks, leaving them as thirsty as an abandoned houseplant. Her eyes received similar detailing: she filled the half-moons of her lids with two tones of color called Shimmering Smoke. The blush that amplified the domes and arches of her cheeks could not hide that her weight had been creeping upward. As she traced the outline of her lips with a deep burgundy pencil, she made her second resolution for the New Year: Lose the baby weight.
She fetched a tube of hand cream from her bag, then collapsed into a wingback chair striped in a pink-and-black fabric that reminded her of carnival tents and children’s games. She sat there listening to the forecast for tomorrow’s good weather, kneading her calves. She did not even like to ski—that was Mike’s thing, this almost comically large man careening down a mountain—and her knees and quadriceps ached after a long weekend learning to flex with the lifts and falls of the slopes. Nor did she care much for the strange homogeneous nature of Utah; it was self-defeating, comparing herself to the flotilla of impossibly lithe blondes who swooshed across the icy slopes, a sorority of phosphorescent teeth and pastel ski jackets. They hightailed past her on both sides, showering her legs with a fusillade of wet snow and ice crystals.
Mary Beth tucked her hair behind her shoulder, then added a reserve of fragrance to her pulse points. She practiced the small talk of New Year’s Eve parties, the explanations of who she was and what she did that would dominate the evening’s conversations. She did not want to talk in the language of Mike’s business, about retirement plans, employee benefit administration, policies for whole and term life insurance, or accidental death and dismemberment. She wondered if she could even talk about anything else, the volatile stock market, the recent presidential race, the prospects for a unified Europe. She’d once had the confidence that she was an intriguing and complex woman; that confidence had gone, she suspected, with her ex-husband. Before him, she went to museums, concerts, farmers’ markets, lectures, charity events, and she’d done it all on her own. The soundtrack of her childhood had been Rostropovich conducting the National Symphony Orchestra. She could manage to sit by herself in a restaurant, shielded behind a paperback, and not feel the weight of self-consciousness. At the movies, the old Mary Beth could buy a drink and a large buttered popcorn and sit by herself through an afternoon of subtitled films, but now, at age forty-seven, she was a single mother on some sort of inadvertent vacation, and she could not remember the last decent film she had seen, or when she’d had time to finish a book.
Mary Beth was using her hair dryer to cure the top coat of her nails when she noticed the blinking message light on her hotel-room phone. Her son and his sitter were the only ones who knew she was in Salt Lake; no one else had the number or the name of the hotel.
So she dialed and listened to what she immediately knew would be a hurry-up reminder from Mike Renfro. His message was nearly lost in the noise of the bar, the clinking of glasses and the liturgical commotion of small talk, all of which made her think of Mike’s familiar hands, likely as not cupping a tumbler of bourbon, then throwing down a handful of salted peanuts. She pictured him tapping his index finger against the crystal of his watch, a gesture he often made around the office. His recorded voice told her, You’re going to need to shake it. And bring my briefcase with you.
That was the quintessential Mike Renfro. Always on the debit. That was what the insurance guys called it, trying to make the sale. An old-fashioned term, but then again, he was kind of an old-fashioned guy. He drove nondescript American cars, the leather seats the only nod to luxury. His latest Cadillac had nearly two hundred thousand highway miles on it from client trips all over north and east Texas. He had a routine and a cocktail of choice and a favorite restaurant where he always ordered the same meal, a New York strip, medium rare, and a baked potato crus
ted in sea salt and slathered in both butter and sour cream. She liked to tease him that vegetables were not poisonous. Yet he never took a sick day and rarely managed a vacation. He walked in the office each morning at 7:30, wore conservative dark suits and a white shirt, his ties always one of those French patterns with repetitive rows of small fish, birds, or turtles. He was the kind of guy who, although he did not know it, wanted to be a husband, a father. He wanted someone he loved to remind him where he’d left his briefcase and car keys, to brush off the shoulders of his suit jacket as he headed out the door each morning, and at the office, he needed someone to remind him about his lunch meetings and quarterly payroll-tax deadlines. He was in obvious need of two wives, one at the office and one at home, and here she was in the vague land of being a candidate for both.
She pressed the Delete button, then thought of checking on her son one last time. Ten times in three days, Mary Beth had called to remind Sarah that she was as close as the telephone. Gabriel wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but his one-word answers and the pattern of his breathing as amplified by the telephone made the separation tolerable. She thought of a cartoon from her own childhood, Winnie the Pooh offering his nubbly paw to Christopher Robin, the two of them holding hands. New Year’s Eve should have been a family night and was no time to be doing business. She certainly didn’t need Mike asking for his briefcase, a reminder that, above all other things, Mike was still her boss.
There were sentences she could say to Mike, her boyfriend, that she could never speak to Mike Renfro of the Mike Renfro Agency. She knew the opposite to be true as well, and that only fueled her doubt; everything she knew about business and men both told her that dating her boss was a bad idea. She still remembered a story that her father, who had been dead for more than twenty years, had once told. Her father’s college roommate, this guy they called the Maverick, worked as a vice president for a Fortune 500 behemoth that manufactured industrial lubricants. At a hotel along the San Antonio River Walk, the Maverick, emboldened by a quartet of strong Manhattans, made certain mistakes with his assistant. If it was a parable, it was about consequences: the necessary investigations, the divorce, the children testifying in open court as to which parent they preferred, the dissolution of community property, the recriminations. Amid all that destruction Mary Beth remembered only the blunt advice of her father, the career political hack: Don’t shit where you eat.
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