American Wife

“You lecture me on how to behave, but you might want to save some of your etiquette lessons for your grandmother.”

“Charlie, she’s eighty-two years old. And she was joking around.”

“You must find her a hell of a lot funnier than I do. You’ll give me crap for saying this, but there are quite a few nice Republican girls out there who’d be plenty happy to date me.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“If we’re going to stay together, I need your support. Running for office puts pressure on a man. I’ve watched my father go through it, and now my brother, and it ain’t easy. It’s exhausting. I have to go out there and convince voters that I deserve to be elected, but if I can’t even convince the girl I’m dating, how ass-backward is that?”

I was quiet, and then I said, “I would vote for you.”

“Lucky for you, I’m not running in your district.”

“Do you not believe me that I would?”

He looked over. “Sure, I believe you. Why shouldn’t I?“

“Charlie—”

“It’s not like you have to put your money where your mouth is.” He leered a little. “So to speak.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“Alice, loyalty is everything to my family. There’s nothing more important. Someone insults a Blackwell, and that’s it. Starting in grade school, kids would think they’d lure me into an argument, or they were just busting my chops—I don’t care. I don’t try to convince people. I cut them off. So for me to hear your grandmother—”

“I wish she hadn’t said that.”

“As a public servant, you rally your supporters, and you try to win over the people on the fence, but your detractors, forget it. You’ll never get ’em. If you’re smart, that’s not how you use your time.”

We both were quiet, and I said, “What about this: What if we don’t talk about the political stuff? Spending time with you this summer has been the most fun I’ve ever had. It really has. But I don’t want to pretend that I believe things I don’t. I don’t want to stand at a rally chanting slogans.” (The number of times I have stood at a rally chanting slogans, chanting onstage, with cameras rolling—years and years ago, I lost count.) “What if I support you not as a politician but as a person?” I continued. “What if we put our differences to one side, you don’t try to convince me and I don’t try to convince you, and we just appreciate being together? Am I crazy, or is that possible? I can assure you I’ll never tell anyone if I disagree with you—that’s no one’s business but ours.”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “I’m running for Congress on the Republican ticket, you’re a hippie who promises not to admit it in public or around my family, and together we make beautiful music?”

I hesitated. “Something like that.”

“And I can’t even try to convince you that Jimmy Carter is a pathetic chump?” But his tone had lightened; I didn’t need to hear him say we were on the same side again to know we were. “To answer your question,” he added, “no, you’re not remotely crazy. I’ve dated crazy girls, and you don’t qualify.”

“Thank you.”

He was looking over at me again. “You’re an unusual woman, Alice.”

I smiled wryly. “Some might say that you’re an unusual man.”

“You have a strong sense of yourself. You don’t need to prove things to other people.”

Did I agree? It had never felt to me like I had a strong sense of myself; it simply felt like I was myself.

“I have this image in my head,” he was saying. “We’re old, older than my parents are now. We’re eighty or hell, we’re ninety. And we’re sitting in rocking chairs on a porch. Maybe we’re up in Door County. And we’re just really happy to be in each other’s company. Can you picture that?”

My heart flared. Was he about to propose?

“I don’t think I’d ever get sick of you,” he said. “I think I’d always find you interesting.”

This was when my eyes filled with tears. But I didn’t actually cry, and he didn’t propose (of course he didn’t, we’d been dating for a month) and for another long stretch, neither of us spoke.

We had just pulled onto Sproule Street when I said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“That’s an auspicious start to a conversation.” He parked in front of my apartment and turned to me, his eyes crinkly, his lips ready to pull into a smile. I knew I had to forge ahead quickly or I’d lose my nerve.

“When I was a senior in high school, I was in an accident,” I said. “I was driving, and I hit another car, and the person in the other car died.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said, and I wondered if telling him was a mistake. Then he reached out to tug me toward him. “Come here.”

I put up one arm, holding him off. “There’s more. It was a boy I knew. I had a crush on him, and I think he had a crush on me, too. There were never repercussions in the legal sense, but the accident was my fault.”

Again, Charlie reached out for me, and I shook my head. “You have to hear all of this. I felt very guilty afterward. I still feel guilty, although I’m not as hard on myself as I was then. But I ended up”—I took a deep breath—“I ended up sleeping with Andrew’s brother. That was the boy’s name, Andrew Imhof, and his brother was Pete. It was just a few times, and no one knew about it. But I got pregnant, and I had an abortion. My grandmother arranged for a doctor she knew, a friend of hers, to do it. I never told Pete, or my parents, or anyone.”

“Alice—” He pulled me in so we were hugging, and this time I let him, and his skin was warm and he smelled exactly the way I’d come to expect him to. Against my neck, he murmured, “I’m so sorry, Lindy.”