Field Day

The media is miserable, have I said that already? I saw it first-hand the way they tried to tear Kendra apart, chew her up and spit her out. The story spread quick. First, you notice when they get the things you know better about wrong. I’m sure I’ve said that part already. I saw it here. They invented a story that we were in debate club together in high school. We didn’t even attend the same one. That was malicious. They got the college I went to wrong. That was sloppy.

The press had a field day. Kendra was attractive, she was hot, and the local press knew that sex sold and were more brazen about it than some of the larger, national networks, which would face more pressure from the remnants of polite society or what little influence the left had culturally to tone down the explicit misogyny. Fearmongering over communism sold, too, and the national outlets took more of that angle. The alliance between the commie and the fascist. We didn’t give them much to work with. Kendra and I had been discrete during our burgeoning romance, even though it was a drag.

The local press had always kept one nostril snooping on Kendra’s love life, since her first run for city council. She had the long-term boyfriend during that first campaign who cheated on her. The media loved that one, but it had happened just as Kendra was faltering in the polls and ended up giving her campaign new breath. It wasn’t enough, and of course she lost that first campaign. They’d been together for several years and she thought they would start a family together.

In between campaigns, she dated a local singer-songwriter six or seven years her junior, and I always suspected she dated him knowing it would keep her in the public eye ahead of her next run, the successful one. That relationship fizzled out. She had another boyfriend she had originally met at the library. She didn’t talk about him much, but fondly enough to make me jealous the two or three times she did. She thought he was her last chance to start a family.

-The family is the smallest unit of fascism, I offered. I forget who says that.

-It’s too late now in any case, she said, ignoring my comment.

-We could always adopt, I said without thinking much about what I was saying. She lit up at that idea. I hadn’t expect it.

-You’d really do that?

-Yeah, I said, unsure why she found that hard to believe. Of course.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but I didn’t see a reason not to, in a healthy relationship, adopt a child. They need that. And though I’d never thought of children of my own either, or a partner for an undertaking like that, in that moment I felt like I could definitely do it with her, and whether the child was ours by blood or by choice wouldn’t make a difference.

-It’s something to think about it, she said to herself, but she didn’t really bring it up again.

I briefly considered it as a way to get her out of politics, but I didn’t want to mix the idea of starting a family with her with my own ulterior motives about her career.

That came up during the press’ feeding frenzy after our return from the mountains too. One particularly nasty gossip columnist linked Kendra’s absenteeism to regrets about “sacrificing motherhood for political power.” What a, well, you know what. She certainly wasn’t too old yet, not even accounting for newer technologies that help with mature pregnancies. The media can’t handle a pregnant politician though. They couldn’t even handle one with a real romantic life.

It’s a surprise I managed to get through the period without slugging a reporter or photographer. Kendra joked that it showed that prison does in fact work to discourage recidivism. I had only been in jail a day, but I didn’t want to go back. Blynken didn’t want to stay another day.

We were worried the whole time about the note as well. It had been kept hush-hush on the way to her, and so how could it not be a conspiracy, but at the time we worried it would leak. That would be catastrophic.

Kendra’s chief of staff made herself really useful around this time. I had only met her once or twice before that. A chief-of-staff, basically, is the person who is the politician for all the things a politician can’t do because they’re one person. She was the political operator. She set Kendra up for a couple of morning show interviews. She started with the smallest station in town, because everyone was vapid and it was easy to bamboozle them, but nobody watched it. She’d gotten pretty good at making viral moments, and she didn’t let herself get too much media exposure, but they’d turned on her in a broader sense. And anyway, no one watched that channel.

The much bigger, zany kind of morning show had been trying to get her on, but she knew better. They’d make a fool of themselves, even if they were well-intentioned about it. Then again, it would go viral. And even for a politician flirting with the idea of dropping out, any publicity is good publicity.

She accepted one of their periodic invites by the producers. They wanted to do a funny bit on who else she could be linked to and she said sure. The interview went well. Kendra was likeable. I wasn’t, but she’d disavowed me publicly. The press wasn’t having it, after all what else would she be doing at a mountain resort with some fringe wash up who took a bullet for her when she should be attending city council meetings to get shot at. I still get defensive about her.

At that morning interview, she addressed it directly. She explained that the events surrounding the attempted assassination were so strange that they had brought up together, in a platonic way, because grown ups can be grown ups. She brought up Blynken’s suicide, and obliquely, her own history, as well as the crisis in and out of prisons. The segment ran long.

They took the commercial break and came back with some light questions about what dating actually would be like if a politician had time before segway to the bit. They ran through a series of celebrities and public figures, photoshopping her next to them, asking if it would work. A lot of them were just silly looking or sounding in some way. Like the famous actor with the surname of the badger’s natural predator. The last one picture was the former president.

-Oh I think I’m too old for him, Kendra blurted out.

-Oh, I don’t think so, the silver-haired male of the morning duo shot back. Certainly not for me, he laughed. Her co-host slapped him, it was part of the playful morning banter that people like to watch in the background as they get ready for work or school.

-He probably likes that, Kendra quipped, feeding off their energy. They all laughed.

The little clip went super viral, and, as I found out much later, the next day she got a phone call from that former president.