American Wife

yesterday, the air thick with Washington’s swampy humidity. I’d bet that outside, even this early, the temperature has passed eighty.

I extend both arms to take the newspapers, and Charlie shakes his head. “I didn’t hear a promise.”

“Are there new developments?”

He makes an expression of disgust. “Guy’s a pawn of the Democrats. I guarantee he’s on the payroll of some lefty kooks.”

“I don’t think he’s being paid,” I say.

“Give your word—no lobbying.”

“I give my word,” I say, and Charlie tosses the newspapers onto the duvet; they land with a thud. As he returns to the bathroom, he says over his shoulder, “Look in the business section, because I heard a rumor that General Electric and Alitalia are merging.”

“Very funny.” This is a joke I have heard so many times that the punch line

—And they’re calling it Genitalia!—

can go unspoken. Charlie’s second favorite joke on passing off the papers is stock-related:

Did you hear that Northern tissue touched a new bottom yesterday? Thousands were wiped clean.

My usual pattern is to first scan the front page and then the editorial and op-ed pages of each paper, starting with the

Times,

and if there are no particularly alarming news articles, I go to the

Times

’s arts section, which I read in full. On the cover of today’s

Times,

the headlines are about a helicopter crash yesterday afternoon that killed six marines; about the visits Charlie’s Supreme Court nominee, Ingrid Sanchez, will make this afternoon to various senators in advance of her confirmation hearings; about Congress’s vote on the new energy bill; about the damage caused by flash flooding in South Dakota; about Edgar Franklin; and finally, also on the front page, there’s a feature on the increasingly popular cosmetic surgery procedure known as vaginal rejuvenation. After reading the Edgar Franklin piece, I skip to the arts: a profile of a nineteeen-year-old hip-hop artist named Shaneece, no surname; a review of a biography about Mary Cassatt; reviews of an opera in San Francisco, two plays in New York, and a ceramics exhibit in Santa Fe. When I’m finished with that section, I return to the hard news, which I also read thoroughly, at least in the

Times;

in the

Post,

I fully read only the articles pertaining to Charlie’s administration and the style section, including, I admit it, “The Reliable Source.”

Charlie and I sleep in what is technically the president’s bedroom—many first couples have used separate rooms, and the adjacent first lady’s bedroom is larger than the president’s, with its own sitting room and bathroom, which I do use. (In the sitting room, I keep both my papier-mache Giving Tree and the Nefertiti bust I inherited from my grandmother; Charlie decreed the bust too creepy for the room we share.) While I read, Charlie showers, shaves, and brushes his teeth as Mozart plays on a Bose stereo in a recessed section of his bathroom wall. Though he hasn’t learned to distinguish baroque from romantic and isn’t interested in which composer wrote what, classical music is something Charlie acquired a taste for during his governorship, when we attended symphonies at Madison’s Oscar Mayer Theatre. I have mixed emotions about his late-in-life musical appreciation—I am glad that he enjoys it, but I can’t help suspecting his enjoyment is tied directly to the hectic pace of his life, all the demands placed on him. He likes classical music, I’m almost certain, for what it doesn’t contain, which is words or requests or criticism. It is only melody and mood, and so long as the mood doesn’t become too somber, it soothes him.

When Edgar Franklin first staked his tent on the Ellipse, the

Times

buried the articles about him—they put them on A16 or A19—and the early pieces were less than a sixth of a page. Today’s article, following two separate op-ed columns yesterday, is the most prominent yet: He has no plans to move, and he has been joined by supporters numbering in the hundreds, who stay overnight with friends or strangers in row houses or apartments all over the city, in hotels and motels, in tents of their own on campgrounds as far away as Millersville, Maryland, or Lake Fairfax Park in Virginia, then return each morning to Capitol Hill. Colonel Franklin has also received dozens of bouquets of flowers, hundreds of pounds of food, thousands of dollars in donations, and he has been joined by a Manhattan publicist who took leave of his job to work for free. In response, the

Times

quotes a White House spokes-woman, Margaret Carpeni (Maggie is thirty-one, an athletic young woman who has run two marathons and who just broke up with her boyfriend, a medical resident, though none of us is sure why) who said on Sunday, “The president continues to pray for our fallen soldiers and the loved ones they’ve left behind, recognizing the ultimate sacrifice these individuals have made to protect freedom and liberty in the United States and around the world.”

He is a trim African-American man, Edgar Franklin, fifty-six years old, and for the last five days, he has worn not his army uniform—if he did, it would make me side more with Charlie, distrusting the staginess of it—but rather, khaki trousers and blue or white short-sleeved shirts, his sleeveless undershirts visible beneath them. He looks remarkably pulled together for having spent nights in a tent, although I assume he is showering each morning at the house belonging to the couple on whose lawn he sleeps. After originally setting up camp on the Ellipse, he was forced to move. Despite grounds for arrest, he was let off with a fine (he has told reporters he will pay it), and this was when a sympathetic couple in their late thirties who live on Capitol Hill offered to let him stay in their front yard. Whether Colonel Franklin is still in violation of an ordinance against camping is a question the advisory