Кевин Уилсон - Nothing to See Here

“You look so beautiful,” she said, and I believed her.

“Well, you look like a supermodel,” I replied.

“I wish I were a supermodel,” she said. “I wish I had a calendar that was nothing but me.” And like that, it was the two of us again, me being weird and her revealing that, by god, she was weird, too.

Carl checked his watch, did this little bow, and then hopped back in the car and drove away. We could have spent the rest of the day watching him drive away. I kind of wanted to. I kept waiting for his car to turn into some dumb gourd and him to turn into a mouse. I waited for magic, and I didn’t think I would be disappointed.

“It’s so hot out here,” she said. “Come inside.”

“This is your house?” I asked.

Madison smiled. “It’s one of them,” she said, and her nose wrinkled and her eyes got all twinkly. She couldn’t talk like this with her husband, none of the other women who lived in luxury. This was good. She couldn’t believe her good fortune, either.

Inside the house, I don’t know what I’d expected, but it was pretty plain. There wasn’t a lot of crazy art on the walls, and I guess I thought maybe there would be space-age furniture, but this was the kind of wealth where things were so plain that you didn’t realize how expensive they were until you touched them or got closer and saw how they were made with great care and with super-fancy materials. In the hallway was a huge portrait of Madison and her husband from their wedding. She looked like she’d just been crowned Miss America and he looked like the emcee who had once been famous. I couldn’t tell if it was love, but I also knew that I was no real judge of love, having never experienced it or even witnessed it a single time in my life.

Madison had met Senator Jasper Roberts when she’d worked on his reelection campaign right after she’d graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in political science. She’d started at the lowest rung, brought on because the normally untouchable senator had recently left his wife and two kids and started dating one of his biggest donors, some heiress who was obsessed with horses and wore crazy hats. They wanted to get a woman’s perspective on things, I guess. The dudes at the top, who had the senator’s ear, had told him that he had to be super dignified about it and never talk about it and harrumph like a Muppet if anyone even brought it up. I remember her letter to me around this time. Jesus, these guys are so stupid, she wrote. It’s like they’ve never followed up on a single stupid-ass thing they’ve ever done so they could just fix it. Because Madison was brilliant and because she had that slightly skewed way of saying things in a straightforward manner that broke you in half, the senator ended up putting her in charge of the campaign. And, of course, he did this because he was falling in love with her, like everyone did, and because the heiress wouldn’t shut the fuck up about some horse that she wanted to buy.

Madison made him conciliatory. She wrote his speeches, every single one. He confessed to his failings, that his desire to make his constituency prosperous, to help every single person he represented, had caused him to lose sight of what made his own family happy. And now that he’d lost that family, he could not lose his larger family, the voters of the great state of Tennessee. It wasn’t that hard. He was a political legacy, generations of Roberts men running things, so much wealth that people just assumed they had to vote for him. He merely had to show that he was aware that he’d done a fucked-up thing.

And he won. And Madison got kind of famous in these political circles. It’s really all because his stupid fucking opponent didn’t know what he was doing, she’d admitted in another letter. If I’d been on that side of things, Jasper would have lost. And then they got married. And then she got pregnant. And now she had this life.

We sat on the sofa, and it was like sitting on a cloud, the exact opposite of my ratty futon, which felt like getting stuck in a hole in the floor, just trapped there for all eternity. I wondered how much of this decor had been Madison’s choosing and how much of it was left over from her husband’s previous wife. There were sandwiches on a tiered tray, lots of mayo and cucumber, so tiny that they looked like dollhouse food. There was a pitcher of sweet tea and two glasses with big solid chunks of pristine ice in them. The ice hadn’t even begun to melt, and I realized that they must have materialized just seconds before we’d entered the room.

“Do you remember that day we first met?” Madison asked.

“Of course I do,” I said. It hadn’t been that long ago. Had it been a long time ago to her? “You had a dress with goldfish on it.”

“My dad had that dress made for me by a dressmaker in Atlanta. I hated it. Goldfish? He was clueless.”

“Wait, is he dead?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.

“No, he’s still alive,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. It just came out. “Good,” I added, just in case.

“I remember that maybe you hadn’t even brushed your hair,” she said.

“No, I’d definitely brushed my hair,” I told her.

“I remember when you walked into the room, like a lightning bolt, I knew that I was going to love you.”

I wondered where her husband was. I felt like we were about to make out. I felt like maybe the job was to be her secret lover. My pulse was racing, as it always did in her presence.

When I didn’t respond, her eyes turned a little glassy all of a sudden, and she said, “I always felt like I missed out on something really wonderful when you left Iron Mountain.”

We weren’t going to have a reckoning, not really. Not yet. She wasn’t going to bring up the fact that her not-dead father had paid me off to take the fall for her, so that she could have this mansion, this senatorial husband, and all these expensive things. We were, I understood, being polite.

“But now you’re here!” she said. She poured sweet tea, and I drank it down in, like, two gulps. She didn’t even look surprised, just filled my glass up again. I ate one of the sandwiches, and it was gross, but I was hungry. I ate two more. I didn’t even realize that there were tiny plates stacked on the tray. I’d held the sandwiches in my dumb hands. I didn’t even want to look down at my lap because I knew there were crumbs there.

“Where is Timothy?” I asked, expecting to see her son walk into the room with a coonskin cap and a wooden popgun, his skin pale like old royalty’s.

“He’s taking a nap,” she said. “He loves naps. He’s lazy, like me.”

“I love naps, too,” I said. How many sandwiches did you eat at something like this? There were nearly twenty more on the trays. Did you leave some for propriety’s sake? She hadn’t touched them. Wait, were they decorative?

“I bet you want to know why I asked you to come all this way,” she said.

It sank in that this was temporary, that I’d have to leave, so I became curious as to what had been so important that we finally had to see each other face-to-face after so many years of correspondence.

“You said there was an opportunity for me?” I continued. “Like a job, maybe?”

“I thought of you because, Lillian, this is honestly very private, what I’m about to tell you, regardless of what you decide to do. I needed someone who could be discreet, who knew how to keep a secret.”

“I can be discreet,” I said. I loved this stuff, bad stuff.

“I know,” she said, almost blushing, but not really.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” she said, twisting her mouth like she was rinsing it out. “Yes and no. Did I ever tell you about Jasper’s first family?”