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The Candidate

Elizabeth Sachs

    What was she thinking, she in her red dress, being introduced to Edwin Meese at the Cambridge Union Society reception? She wasn’t thinking. She was smiling, holding the glass of sherry she’d been handed, unable to hear over the hubbub. Edwin Meese looked her up and down then turned to Mark and said something rough and unintelligible. She hadn’t understood much of Meese’s speech before the Society, either, except that it was Reaganomics, and the Union didn’t like what he said and he didn’t care. He and Reagan were thick with Thatcher. “. . . Duke of Edinberrgggg,” Meese said, and again “. . . Edinberrrgggg.” A taunt. The Society hissed, deep inside their mouths and with faces still as masks so the sound couldn’t be traced. They thumped sticks invisibly against interiors of wooden desks. “. . . Edinberrrrrrgggg. . .” “Ssssssss. . . . thump, thump. . . Sssss.”
    Clever. She’d take the strategy back to the States, try and sell it to unions over the course of her career. They’d be too timid to buy it, she’d lack confidence enough to press, and they’d get beaten, over and over again. But all that was in the future. This was a June night in 1983, the last spring freshness lingering in the air.
    Mark smiled like a wolf.
    “Ed thinks you’re pretty,” he said. “He likes your dress.”
    Well, that was okay. Wasn’t it? It was nice to be attractive, even to politicians from the other party. It was also okay when Mark put a small hand to her back, just above her panty line so she shifted in order that he not feel it. He already had, and smiled weirdly, but moved his hand to her elbow, steering her aimlessly and probably for show. She didn’t much mind, though was glad when he stopped. She was a little dizzy. He’d never touched her before. She’d assumed he didn’t really want to, which was fine because she didn’t want him to. She was here for a semester, and for two weeks after that to travel. She’d already traveled for five weeks, on the Continent. Now she could say she’d been to “the Continent,” and own everything wonderful that meant. It was a wonderful time to be just who she was, twenty and poor, but very pretty, and smart. She was also tall, nearly as tall as Princess Diana, whom everyone said she resembled. She’d been a little worried about wearing heels this evening, not just because they hurt her feet quite a lot but because Mark was short. Short, rich, American, here for a Ph.D. he was earning in record time, before he’d go back to Georgia and into politics, behind-the-scenes. She knew all that, vaguely, but it didn’t matter to her yet. She was having such fun. The ratio of men to women at Cambridge was seven to one. She couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a dozen swains plying her with invitations, which was good because otherwise she wouldn’t have eaten well at all. Mark had invited her to the Canary Islands over the spring break, but coldly, and she’d have said no in any case. He’d taken another girl and they’d both come back orange, the girl dangling a Tiffany watch on her skinny wrist.
    “Shall we go?” he said, surprising her. She’d assumed he’d want to hob-nob, which would give her a chance to wander a bit, eat canapes, squint at volumes in glass cases, at plaques and busts. She’d left her glasses back at the flat, but was nearsighted and could lean to peer. An Episcopalian, she thought she could understand this place pretty well. Soon, she would learn that Princess Diana’s favorite hymn, sung at her wedding and much later at her funeral, was also her own favorite. She would understand, somewhat, why Dodi Fayed was Diana’s true love. She’d completely understand why it could never have been Charles.
    “Did you get what you needed?” she asked, as Mark hailed a taxi—because of her shoes, and because he was rich. He nodded, his smile less wolfish, a brief, satisfied gleam. He didn’t explain, but she imagined: a de-briefing the next day at which he would be told he’d done very, very well at whatever it was rich sons did to play an early part in Halls of Power.
    “I really like that dress. It’s the greatest dress I’ve ever seen. You should wear dresses like that more often,” he said, slipping in the other side after handing her in. He slid quite close, his hip touching hers. Primly, she moved a little aside, but it was hard. The leather was slippery, and so was her dress, the hem hiking up to expose her long legs in the high shoes awkwardly wedged, canted sideways in the short seat. She hunched forward, understanding Diana’s hunch in taxis, caught by paparazzi, demonstrating pendulous cleavage that would later cause Charles to tell Camilla that his beautiful wife made him think of a cow.
    Her own bust was of moderate size, and Mark’s arm, thrust for the putative purpose of depressing the lock button on her side, brushed nothing. She gave him a cool, near-sighted stare. His orange skin was smooth as Malibu Ken. His red-orange hair looked stiff and artificial. One of her flat-mates said he was attractive. But that flat-mate was majoring in political science and on the hunt for an internship when she returned Stateside. Her flat-mate would probably have gone with him to the Canaries. He hadn’t invited her.
    “Hungry?” said Mark. She was. In fact, she felt a little faint. She’d managed only a Camembert on toast before he’d put a sherry in her hand and steered her Meese-ward.
    “I thought I’d see whether Peter is back, and maybe Simon,” he said. “We can all step in at the pub for a Welsh rarebit or something. Sound good?”
     She sighed, relaxing. She loved that pub, the Three Crowns, where their classmate staying over from the fall semester to pursue her love affair with an English don had taken them, their very first night here last January. A world ago. Sure enough, the boys from Magdalen had been there, boozing and playing darts, waiting for Kristen to bring in the new flock. Five new girls, all tall, clear-eyed, exhausted by the trip from the Middle West. “Ohh, I love American girls’ teeth. You can read a book by their reflected light,” said Simon, landed gentry and snaggle-toothed. She’d eaten a Welsh rarebit, reviving when the melted cheese and horseradish hit her bloodstream, then blanching at the bill. Mark had reached to take it from her, but Peter intervened, plucking it from her loose fingers.
    “Allow me,” he said.
    Peter Futali. She’d begun to fall in love with him that night. He was so sophisticated. Such a playboy, though. She’d learned that, half a world ago.
    Mark paid the taxi fare while she balanced gingerly on the cobblestones outside his low door. None of the boys lived on campus anymore, not even the elegant dormitories surrounding Magdalen’s shaved-close quadrangles. “We’re fledged, thank you” they said, and only attended halls and garden parties there. She’d liked hall, the white-gloved porters filling her glass, serving her, pouring sauces from a silver urn when she leaned right and left. Later, those same porters would at first watch indulgently as “gentlemen” scrummed on snowy quads. Then, when things got ugly, would heave and toss the gentlemen off the yards like dogs, gloved hands gripping collars and waistbands. These elegant, unsupervised flats were an easy, windy walk from the house on Madingley Road where the flock stayed. Easy, in sensible shoes.
    She waited, while Mark scratched keys into his double lock, reversing the order roughly when the first proved wrong.
    “Peter—? You there?” he called, into the dark parlor, and in the answering silence she noticed the silence all around. No music, or voices, or wands of light beneath silent doors. She held her watch face close. Ten, on a Saturday night. She folded up her arms.
    “No, of course. They’re at the pub,” said Mark. “I’ll just step in and change, then we’ll head out. All right? Sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
    He flicked the overhead, flooding the interior with bald light, then turned, holding the door wide. His face was blurred, and she felt, more than saw, the irony there. She’d “showed him up a proper chump” regarding the Canaries, Peter said, laughing handsomely at the humiliation of his friend. She’d felt sorry. These men could be brutal with each other.
    “Stay out there if you want to,” Mark said. “Be that way—your choice. I’ll only take a minute.”
    She was suddenly impatient with herself. The other girls dared so much more than she did. “Goody-goody,” they teased her. Mo-pedding from Nice to Monaco she’d been terrified, wondering what on God’s green earth she’d do if the vehicle got damaged. She’d used her father’s credit card as security deposit. Then she’d relaxed, and had a wonderful time. Only to learn, when they reconnoitered with the rest of the flock in Paris, that another of them had wound up staying a weekend in half of the Villa Emma in Naples, guest of the U.S. head of NASA. “The Italian president lives in the other half!” she’d gushed.
    “No, that’s okay,” she said, just as glad when Mark turned off the overhead and clicked on a single, low lamp. The room looked elegant again, smoke-stained walls thrown in shadow, leaded windows gleaming. The coat of arms in the center of one was a blood-red shield whose motto in Latin like small, gold daggers Peter had interpreted for her. “The Power of the Liege is our Device,” he’d intoned, fervently and without a trace of irony.
    Clearly, she remembered taking off her shoes. Putting her feet up on the ottoman. After that, she didn’t remember much. Mainly shapes and shadows, slippery in the shifting light. A lorry trundling past, beams delineating Mark’s form as he shucked off his shirt with a liquid, boyish motion that pushed his hair askew. Him bending, such a smooth, hairless chest with nipples like stains, to retrieve and uncap a tube. The guttural splooge of lubricant squeezed onto his fingers. The yank of his belt like unwinding, and the clank of the buckle onto soft carpet. She remembered, not thinking much. Not being able to, because of what he’d evidently dropped into her drink, but also because it was hard to believe that this was really happening to her, or that it could be rape. It couldn’t be. What he grasped and kneaded, paused and pulled and kneaded once again was soft as dough and disappeared inside his hand. It was violation. That much felt real, even then. But what she mainly thought, as fretfully he pushed her hem high and leaned to peer, then pawed the bodice, yanking loose a button, and, with a gasp, another, was that her dress was ruined. Her one good dress, vermillion acetate with tiny stripes. She remembered buying it, on sale, at Casual Corner. Wishing it were blue instead. Red wasn’t her color.

    She’d tell the story, though not for a while. She’d furled it like an umbrella, propped in a dark corner of her imagination. Then, events unfurled it. Listeners cringed. It was becoming such a familiar story. Anita’s. Monica’s. Diana’s, first and last. Increasing, countless others’. Her story was far less significant, of course, and much less hurtful. Of course. Still. What to do with it? Anything?
    Her listeners speculated. So did she. What if she’d kept a diary? Or, the dress? She waved her hands. She’d thought of this, and heaven forbid. The diary would have been a damning list of swains. And, long before anything remotely like DNA, the poor dress was best gone. She’d stuffed it, along with hosiery shredded by her unshod stumble home, into the incinerator on Madingley Road.
    “You left your slipper, like Cinderella,” said one listener.
    “I left them both.”
    “What happened to the prince?”
    She hesitated.
    For years, Mark’s fame had risen, though always behind the scenes. He’d advised, machinated, helped pull strings of various puppets, until one got very close. That fat, bombastic blond, an early front-runner, had been terrifying. Then the blond was flummoxed, flailed, and failed. Mark failed along with him, the party splintering like old wood. She’d rejoiced. She’d hoped for more change, and gotten some.
    Now, he was back. Her political science classmate confirmed it. She wasn’t surprised. She’d sensed him, felt him switching gears, greasing works, bringing matters to climax if he could. Sometimes she almost saw him, infused in the new candidate like ink. The orange skin. The smirk, angry and arrogant. Even the red-orange hair, whose mess Mark had settled, that night, first thrusting a hand into shadows, making her think he was fetching up a weapon to bludgeon her with, before she saw that it was hairspray, had even made out the blurry label, “Happy Hair,” before he sprayed a fog about his head and she leaped up and fled.
    The memory chilled her, and made her laugh. Shrill laughter, ugly and tense, carrying the load of generations. It had to be a joke. It just had to be. Even a joke was bad enough.
    “He’ll get trumped,” she said. “She’ll bury him.”

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