American Wife

room, lots of beds, and you couldn’t ask for a more spectacular setting.”

“I’ll let you know after I see it tomorrow. But if we do it in October, there might be snow on the ground.”

Charlie thought about this for a moment, then said, “Damn your practicality.”

I hesitated. “I’ll finish out the school year, right? Even when we live in Houghton, I’ll just drive back to Madison?”

Charlie shrugged. “If it’s important to you.”

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable resigning in the middle of the year. People do it, but Lydia—our principal—hates when it happens.”

“So long as this is your last year at Liess, do what you like. I’ll need you around next summer, that’s for certain. Being the wife of a candidate is a job in itself, which Maj knows all too well.”

“I’ll never have to speak in public, will I? I won’t have to give speeches?”

He grinned. “Is that a condition of marrying me?”

“Charlie, I can hardly talk at faculty meetings.”

“Okay, okay, you never have to give a speech.” He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone was serious. “I won’t win. You understand that, don’t you?”

“That’s not very optimistic.”

“This isn’t a fake candidacy, I don’t see myself as a straw man. That’s not what I’m saying. I’ll campaign my heart out. But the numbers aren’t there. The focus isn’t on getting elected, not yet. It’s about putting my name out there, letting people know I’m an adult. I’m a serious person with serious ideas about the state of Wisconsin.”

Looking at him, I had the uneasy thought that I could not imagine saying to someone: I’m a serious person with serious ideas. I couldn’t imagine needing to.

Slowly, I said, “But won’t a lot of people be putting a lot of time and money—”

He shook his head. “This is how it works. We’re laying a foundation.”

“A foundation for what? Are you planning to run for Congress again in two years?”

“I’m keeping my options open. Probably not in two years, no, but down the line, who knows? Maybe a position with the Republican Party, maybe a Senate run. So much of the political process is nothing but timing.”

I set down my hamburger. “You sound incredibly cynical.”

“I didn’t write the rules,” Charlie said.

“You seem happy to play by them.”

“Dammit, Alice—” He put his hamburger down, too, and moved his plate to the coffee table in front of the couch. The table was shoddy white Formica, and he’d told me with evident pride that he’d gotten it off the sidewalk a few months before, when his neighbors had set it out with their trash. “I thought you were going to support me. Isn’t that what you said in the car, or did I misunderstand?”

“Don’t you ever just want a regular life? I don’t see why it’s so much better to be a public figure than a private citizen.”

“For one thing, this is about service, not ego. Some people are in it to satisfy their own narcissism, sure, but not the Blackwells. Alice, if you’re trying to talk me out of running, we have a serious problem.”

“You gave me the impression that this was a onetime thing.”

“Meaning you also thought I’d lose. Here you pretend to be aghast at me wasting money on a campaign when you’ve been counting on the other guy winning.”

We both were quiet. “Let’s not argue,” I said.

He balled up his napkin and tossed it across the room toward the fireplace. When I stole a look at his profile, I saw that his expression was churlish.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

“That might not be a bad idea.”

I stood and carried my plate into the kitchen, and my hands were shaking. Were we still engaged? Were we still a couple, even? If we hadn’t told anyone we were getting married, we wouldn’t need to tell anyone we weren’t. Perhaps there had been something vaporous about our relationship all along, something unreal. We could end things and there’d be nothing to explain. If anyone asked, I could simply say that it had fizzled.

Driving back to my own apartment, I thought that maybe it was for the best. Was I really so keen to trade my independence for a boosterish supporting role? Why would I want to sign on for a lifetime of listening to speeches like the one I’d heard him give at the Lions Club in Waupun? Putting aside the question of whether I agreed with his political platform, those types of speeches were just boring. Their repetition and their wheedling undertone and their righteous scorn and their phony clarity—they were so false and silly exactly as they pretended to be honest and important. And Charlie expected me not merely to tolerate his participation in this culture but to be excited about it? Yet would I ever expect him to come sit in the library and listen to me read Bread and Jam for Frances?

These thoughts roiled in my brain for over two hours—I was lying in bed, above the covers, reading Humboldt’s Gift—and then I looked up from the middle of a paragraph on page 402, my certainty disintegrated all at once, and I was left with a feeling of heavy, insistent badness. What Charlie and I had been quarreling about seemed abstract and insubstantial. I could hardly remember the words either of us had used, and I just wanted to be sitting next to him, lying beneath him, my arms around him and his arms around me. He was the opposite of vaporous; everything else was vapor, and he was solid and central. The possibility that we might have broken up was devastating; it was unbearable.

I willed myself not to give in to the temptation to call him—it would be better to wait until the next morning. It was presumptuous to think his anger was on the same time line mine was, to imagine that he’d already have