This wasn’t the New York that Shannon loved. These weren’t the people who normal y lived here. Everyone had gone crazy. Dan was gone and maybe he was never coming back. Shannon thought, as she waited in line, that she was crazy too, that she should have never waited for Dan in the first place. She should have made him choose: “Me or the Candidate,” she should have said.
Shannon thought this as she stood in line and as she voted. What had she done? Why had she chosen to stand by and support Dan as he’d left her? When she came out of the building, the group of people waiting to get in smiled and waited for Shannon to smile back. She didn’t. Final y, one of the women said, “I hope you made the right choice.” Shannon just looked at her and said, “Me too.”
That night, Shannon sat in a bar with her friends to watch the returns. Everyone was anxious, and they drank quickly. “So, our feeling is hopeful but cautious, right?” Mary said.
“Sure,” Shannon said. She was drinking faster than any of them. Vodka went down like water. No one real y noticed until she fel off her stool.
“Whoa,” Isabel a said. “Are you okay?”
“Maybe we need some chicken fingers,” Lauren said. She held up her hand for the bartender.
“She’s just real y excited,” Shannon heard Mary tel ing someone at the bar. “Her boyfriend’s been working on the campaign and now he’l final y come home.”
“He’s not coming home,” Shannon tried to say. But it didn’t come out right and no one seemed to understand her.
When the Candidate gave his speech that night, Shannon cried, of course. Everyone did. The whole bar watched in tears because it was amazing and inspiring and they were al relieved. But Shannon didn’t cry like the rest of them. She didn’t have little tears dripping out. No, Shannon had flared nostrils and she heaved and hyperventilated and her face turned red. It was the way she used to cry when she was little, when her mom used to say, “You need to calm down” and would send her upstairs to do just that. Shannon sat in the middle of everyone and cried like a red hog.
Al of her friends sat around her, taking turns patting her on the back. Final y, Lauren took her home and made sure she got into bed and took some Advil.
“Just go to bed,” Lauren said. “You’l feel better tomorrow.”
“Nothing wil ever be the same,” Shannon said.
“That’s right,” Lauren said, misunderstanding. “It’s al different now.”
Dan was offered a job in D.C. shortly after. Shannon cried and they fought, and he took the job and moved there. They tried to make it work for a while. She took the train to visit him, and he drove up to New York on free weekends. But it wasn’t working. Shannon couldn’t shake the feeling that she was his second choice, that Dan had chosen someone else over her. She couldn’t forgive that.
One of the last times Shannon visited Dan, she ran into an old friend from col ege. He was sitting in a bar, drinking beers with a friend. He told her that his longtime girlfriend had joined the campaign and then gotten a job with the administration. She was in charge of finding hotels for the president and his staff and was currently in Germany. “I haven’t seen her in two months,” he said.
“Are you stil together?” Shannon asked. He shrugged and took a long drink.
“How can you be with someone if you never see them?” he final y responded.
“That,” Shannon said, “is a great question.”
Dan and Shannon broke up over the phone about two weeks after that. She blamed the Candidate for their breakup. (She didn’t cal him the president, like everyone else. To her, he would always be the Candidate.) When Shannon thought about it, the Candidate was probably responsible for al sorts of breakups. She and Dan were just the tip of the iceberg. Al over America, boyfriends and girlfriends had been ripped apart in the name of Hope.
Shannon was angry that no one was covering this news story. People were talking about health care, but no one was talking about the Relationship Misery Phenomenon that the Candidate had caused. She started writing an op-ed for the
She couldn’t put into words what had happened.
Shannon stopped reading the newspapers. She stopped watching CNN and MSNBC. Every day that she woke up seemed to matter less. It was Tuesday or Monday or Friday or Wednesday. What difference did it make? She didn’t care who the president was or what changes he was going to make to the country. She was alone and that was al she had room to think about.
Her friends tried to cheer her up. “Come on,” they said. “Come out. Forget about Dan.” But Shannon refused.
“You know,” Lauren said, “you were too good for him anyway.”
“That’s just something people say,” Shannon said.
“Shannon,” Lauren said, “the guy wore two BlackBerrys on his belt. He wasn’t perfect.” But this only made Shannon cry.
In her darkest moments, Shannon wished it had gone another way. Lying in bed at night, with her head under the covers, she wished that the Candidate had lost. She never admitted this to anyone, and she wasn’t sure that she real y meant it. But maybe she did. She felt reckless when she had these late-night thoughts. She was a lifetime Democrat and here she was wishing that the Republicans had squeaked out another one.
Sometimes she laughed by herself, feeling giddy, the same way she’d felt when she’d stolen a candy bar in the fourth grade. How ashamed her parents would have been if they’d known. How ashamed she was of herself when she looked in the mirror in the morning.
She thought of cal ing Dan just so she could say, “I wish he’d lost,” and then hanging up. But she couldn’t do it. She was afraid it would only reaffirm his belief that he was right to choose the Candidate over her, that it was the smartest thing he’d ever done.
Shannon wished that she were a stronger person, a more selfless soul that would be happy to put the needs of
