Elinor Lipman - The Dearly Departed

For a long time, she thought she had no right to mind. Twice-yearly dates didn’t make her his girlfriend or his confidante. She wasn’t above this flimsy attention—she who’d broken her marriage vows and several Commandments. But eventually she joined the Players, and was lauded in print for her understated ardor. Now when he called from the road, Margaret was not being coy when she hesitated before answering his “Guess who?”

“Is someone there with you?” he asked.

“Miles? Oh, sorry. I wasn’t sure. How are you? Where are you?”

“I’m about twenty-five minutes from there, and you know how I am.” He dropped his voice. “Ready, willing, and able.”

She began to ask, as she sat on the edge of the bed, rolling her panty hose back up, if they could go out, if he could pick her up, if they couldn’t have something approximating a date. “I know what you’ve always said: ‘No calls, no letters between visits, no paper trail.’ But we never get a chance to talk. We could drive to Vermont, to an inn, then stay the night. Sunny can stay with a friend. We’re both divorced. There wouldn’t be a scandal even if we were caught.” She didn’t say, “You lost the election sixteen years ago. You’re a private citizen. No one knows who Miles Finn is anymore.”

He always answered the same way: Communication didn’t always have to be spoken, did it? Wasn’t what they had special and unconventional? Did she prefer a restaurant dinner to a passionate lunch?

If he asked about Sunny, it was from the polite distance of a man who had no reason and no desire to meet his occasional paramour’s child. On these trips—fish all morning, fuck Margaret at lunch without any wining or dining or conversation; nap, read, drink, sleep—he didn’t want to think about anyone but himself. His son, Fletcher, was a teenager, the same age as the girl. These visits wouldn’t last forever: Fletcher was asking questions, and Margaret was asking for proper dates. She’d even used the words “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea anymore.” Margaret, he gathered, had other men calling her among the locals. And soon a devoted, alternate-weekend father like himself, claiming to be tying flies and frying trout alone in New Hampshire, would have to invite his kid along.

Fletcher knew that managing Emily Ann Grandjean’s congressional campaign would mean fourteen months of spinning, baby-sitting, and chauffeuring, followed by a loss of the most humiliating kind—a landslide victory for an incumbent who didn’t have to shake one hand.

And then there was Emily Ann herself. In an exploratory meeting, she demonstrated one of her most annoying tics: constant sips from a large bottle of brand-name water, then the ceremonial screwing of its cap back on once, twice, full-body twists as if volatile and poisonous gases would escape without her intervention.

They met in a conference room at Big John, Inc., the family business, founded by Emily Ann’s grandfather after he took credit for discovering exercise in the form of a stationary bike. Subsequent generations invented a rowing machine with a flywheel and, most recently and profitably, a stroller for joggers. Emily Ann’s three older brothers, whose tanned and photogenic faces anchored the annual report, went happily into the booming family business. But the baby sister made a fuss about striking out on her own—like those Kennedy cousins who went into journalism or the Osmond siblings who didn’t sing. Emily Ann went to law school, dropped out, went back, and at her graduation heard Congressman Tommy d’Apuzzo—beloved, honest, monogamous; a man for whom a district’s worth of highways and middle schools were named—urge the new lawyers to consider careers as public servants. “Where are the dreamers?” he cried, waving his arms. “Where are all the little boys and girls who wanted to grow up to be president? Are you all heading for Wall Street? To white-shoe law firms in New York skyscrapers? We need your energy and your idealism. Run against me! Challenge me! Provoke me! Defeat me!”

Only Emily Ann thought he meant it; only she thought a seat in the House of Representatives was attainable to a member of the Class of ’96. When she returned from her graduation grand tour (London, Paris, Venice, and the Greek Isles) she took a bar-review course by day. By night she found a campaign to work for. Conspicuously wearing outfits of Republican red and Betsy Ross blue, she volunteered for an earnest young firebrand running for the city council. She stood in for him at a Republican kaffeeklatsch after practicing answers and sharing aphorisms with a voice-activated pocket recorder.

“You should run,” said an elderly man by the dessert table as his wife dusted confectioner’s sugar off one of his veiny cheeks.

“Maybe one day,” said Emily Ann.

“Don’t wait too long or I might not be able to vote for you,” he said, chuckling.

“This evening,” she reminded him nobly, “is about Greg Chandler-Brown and his race, and about the bond rating of a dying city.”

“I didn’t catch your name,” he said.

“Emily Ann Grandjean.”

“Mrs. or Miss?” he asked.

“I’m not married.”

“Have a piece of fudge cake,” he said. “You could use a little meat on your bones.”

A year later, Mr. Grandjean was sliding a Big John catalog across the conference table to Fletcher, who had managed the last candidate to lose to d’Apuzzo, under budget and with dignity. “You look like you work out. Is there anything in here that appeals to you?”

Its glossy cover displayed the rowing machine that was the Rolls-Royce of Fletcher’s health club. Through some trick of digital photography, it appeared to be gliding past pyramids on the Suez Canal. Fletcher didn’t open the catalog; didn’t even touch it.

“No obligation. Absolutely none,” said Mr. Grandjean. “A thank-you for your time and attention today, no matter what you decide. And, please. It’s nothing to us. This is what we do. We assemble parts and turn a few screws and—presto—we have a bike.”

Fletcher turned the catalog facedown. Equally compelling was the back cover—a computerized stationary bike, titanium, featuring a built-in CD player and a Tour de France winner perched on its fertility-friendly seat.

“She can win the primary,” continued Mr. Grandjean. “I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

“When you run unopposed, you win,” said Fletcher. “But I’m not interested in being the campaign manager for a sacrificial lamb.”

Emily Ann snapped, “You’ve never heard of upsets? DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN?”

Fletcher folded his hands in front of him on the hammered-copper conference table. “Let me paint a picture for you: Yesterday, in the village center of a very staid Republican suburb, in a chic café named Repasts, I ate a sandwich called The d’Apuzzo. Not a sandwich meant to be an insult, like baloney or marshmallow fluff, but one named out of affection and respect and because it was what Representative d’Apuzzo ordered on his last whistle-stop there.”

“What kind of sandwich?” asked Emily Ann.

“Tuna club. Traditional yet popular. No negative symbolism there.”

“Your point being that a man who has sandwiches named in his honor is unbeatable?” she asked.

“When he’s a Democrat and it’s on a Republican menu? Yes.”

“Rather unscientific,” grumbled her father.

“Can I be blunt?” asked Fletcher.

Both Grandjeans sipped their water.

“Miss Grandjean would be a gnat on the campaign windshield of Tommy d’Apuzzo and nothing more. He wouldn’t respond to her speeches, he wouldn’t pay for ads, he wouldn’t campaign, and he sure as hell wouldn’t fly home from Washington to debate her. And the editorial writers? Forgive me—they’ll dismiss her as a rich girl without experience or convictions, looking for a career after law school.”