Elinor Lipman - The Dearly Departed

“That’s so unfair. I have convictions! I’m deeply committed to education—”

“Who isn’t?” he asked.

“And to cutting taxes and to term limits—”

“Every man or woman who’s ever run against Tommy d’Apuzzo has supported term limits. It ain’t going to get you elected.”

“This is about exposure, about building myself a base—”

“I just don’t think I’m your man,” said Fletcher.

Emily Ann gathered her water bottle, her Filofax, her pen and cell phone and said, “Then let’s not waste anyone’s time. A can-do attitude is the very least I would expect in a consultant.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” said Fletcher.

She walked to the door, the skinniest girl on the skinniest legs he’d ever seen. Mr. Grandjean motioned that Fletcher should stay behind. As the door closed, Mr. Grandjean’s fond, fatherly smile collapsed. “I’m going to ask you one more time to take this job. I’m going to name a salary that is the going rate plus—”

“Based on …?”

“A dark-horse congressional race.”

“Un-uh. Not interested.”

Mr. Grandjean screwed the cap back on his water bottle and looked thoughtful. “It’s September. The election is fourteen months away.”

“I know that.”

“Exposure for her is exposure for you. You can lose, and six months later I’ll tune in to MSNBC and see you opining about presidential politics with REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST superimposed across your tie.”

“Here’s my problem,” Fletcher said. “Tommy d’Apuzzo chairs two committees. He loves his wife and doesn’t fool around. His secretary is widowed, Native American, disabled, and loves him like a son. His kids went to New Jersey public schools, then to Seton Hall, Rutgers, and Fairleigh Dickenson. His father was a cobbler. His mother was a Freedom Rider. His dogs came from the pound. Everybody except your daughter knows it’ll take plastic explosives to unseat Tommy d’Apuzzo.”

Mr. Grandjean shrugged. “You must have a price.”

Fletcher scribbled numbers on his legal pad and slid it across the table.

Mr. Grandjean shook his head even before the notepad came to a stop in front of him. “Can’t do. It’s money out of my own pocket—a price I have to justify to her brothers.”

“Are they in or are they out?” Fletcher asked.

Mr. Grandjean shifted in his back-saver chair. “You know how kids are. They keep score—who got a new car and who got a used one; who got semesters abroad. On one hand, they resent this pissing into the wind; on the other, they’re glad to have her … gainfully distracted.”

“I’m getting the picture,” said Fletcher.

Mr. Grandjean wrote a sentence on the top sheet of Fletcher’s yellow pad, tore it off, folded it into the most elaborate and aerodynamic paper airplane Fletcher had ever seen, and sent it sailing across the table.

2,000 shares of Big John stock , it read.

Fletcher rose, and walked it around to the other side of the table. “For your signature.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what they’re worth?”

“I know what they’re worth,” he said.

First, he tried to drop the Ann and make her only Emily. The double name lacked authority, he said. It was too cute, too wholesome, too Miss America.

“Too bad,” said Emily Ann. She was not pandering to the small percentage of the electorate who cared about the sociological implications of a conjoined name. She was proud of it. It was her two grandmothers’ names. People were so superficial. Like that reporter for the Times-Record who was obsessed with her weight and her percentage of body fat—as if that had anything to do with her capabilities; as if anyone would even mention it if Emily Ann had been a man. When eating-disorder speculation became the only thing about Emily Ann’s candidacy that engaged the public, it was Fletcher’s unhappy task to pour Diet Coke into Classic Coke cans when she drank in public, to insist that she stop pulling the doughy insides out of her bagels, and to answer questions about the candidate’s preternatural thinness. She allowed herself to be photographed with her teeth around a clam fritter at a state fair, a sausage-and-pepper grinder at an Italian street festival, a knish at a B’nai B’rith brunch. But she didn’t consummate any of those acts; didn’t even sink her teeth into the first bite after the photographer’s flash. If there had been a position paper on her weight, it would have said: All the Grandjeans are fìt and rangy. Long and lean. Their veins show under the epidermal layer of their inner arms. Their faces are pinched and skeletal. It runs in the family. It’s not a disorder. Candidate Grandjean’s metabolism is incredibly efficient. If she appears to pick at her food, it’s because she eats six or seven small meals a day and never much at one sitting. She may look as if she’s been constructed of Tinkertoys, but that’s because she works out faithfully on a Big John SB2000. All rumors about anorexia, bulimia, and terminal illnesses are defamatory and false .

Worse, and just as he had feared, Emily Ann warmed to Fletcher. The first time she reached over and took a sip from his coffee in the van’s cup holder, he saw it as an overture, especially when he was faced with the two coral blots on the rim. “Hey,” he said. “That’s mine.”

“So?”

“It’s polite to ask first. Some people don’t like sharing.”

“Big deal—my lips on your cup. Do you get so annoyed when someone kisses you?”

He didn’t look over and didn’t answer.

“What a grouch.”

He was tempted to say, It has cream in it, which I know you’d never let pass your lips unless you are before a convention of dairy farmers.

“Doesn’t coffee have a diuretic effect on you?” she asked.

Pissing, she meant: urological. Personal. He wasn’t going to discuss the properties of coffee with this annoying bag of bones. “I don’t like lipstick on my cup because it tastes like perfume,” he said. “If you want your own cup, you should say so at the appropriate juncture.”

Emily Ann turned away and studied the scenery.

“Let’s go over some questions, Em.” When she didn’t answer, he asked if she was sulking.

“No I am not . I’m meditating.”

“Here. Be a baby. Drink my cold coffee. I wouldn’t want you arriving at the meeting with a long face.”

“You work for me,” she said. “I’m the candidate and you’re the hired help.”

Emily Ann reached down to the giant turtle-green leather satchel at her feet for her water bottle.

“Are you really thirsty all day long, or is it just a prop?”

“Neither. Everyone needs eight glasses a day.” She took her usual swig, like punctuation. “I won’t always be running for Congress. The question of who’s the boss and who’s the employee won’t be an issue after Tuesday, November ninth.”

Fletcher turned on the radio.

“Because we’ll be equals when this is over,” she said. “Possibly even friends.”

“Not advisable,” said Fletcher. “Lines get blurred.”

“Not that I need any more friends,” she continued. “And not that I intend to lose. I was only thinking it would be an interesting experiment.”

“What would?”

“The occasional informal meeting over a glass of wine, post-campaign: candidate and manager minus the occupational constraints.”

Fletcher took a gulp of cold coffee from the clean half of the rim.

“I sense you’re uncomfortable parsing feelings and emotions,” Emily Ann said, trying again, her bottle nestled in the crook of her arm.

“Correct,” said Fletcher.

Every spring Nancy Mobilio, assistant headmaster of Harding Academy, found the school’s varsity golf coach at the center of the same tedious rumor: that he was having sexual relations with the school’s newest female hire. For compelling personal reasons—she was married to him—Mrs. Mobilio chose to ignore the latest groundless gossip, namely that Sunny Batten, who’d been recruited as j.v. golf coach, equipment-room overseer, and part-time health teacher, was this year’s crush.