Trumped

In retrospect I should have figured out something had happened that day after the morning show appearance, she was so giddy. If I were the jealous type, I’d think she’d had a celebrity crush flirt with her. Things got more heated with us, she was more energetic, even chipper. I mistook the sentiment for some kind of domesticity settling over our lives but it was the other way around. 

We kept ourselves largely confined to her home on nights we spent together ever since the ruckus over the resort, but a few days after the phone call I didn’t know about yet, she said we should go to a hotel. I thought it was ridiculous, which surprised me, how much I’d been shaken by the media frenzy. I keep using that word but that’s what it is when it happens, a feeding frenzy, wild animals to rip at the flesh of the victim the pack decided on. Yuck. I get to use that word once.

-Come on, what are you worried about? A little more media attention? We know how to be discreet, I’d think.

I did know better, so I agreed. It was the nicest hotel in town, at the center of the remnants of the downtown commercial district, next to the historic department store that closed decades ago. Greg arranged it, and he checked in for us. Kendra came in through a special VIP elevator. Performers at the local arena usually stayed there. The hotel also boasted that it had hosted four president, thought not one in eighty-something years, and it was the year he was elected, before he became president. He wasn’t president long.

The number wouldn’t go up that year, even though it turned out the former president was in the area and maybe would have stayed there if he’d bothered to stay the night. Apparently in a previous life he’d wanted to buy the hotel.

We stayed there for two nights. On the second afternoon she said she had business in city hall. I stayed in the hotel all day, that was the day she met with the former president, who I’m sure convinced her she should run for mayor. She came back in the evening, and things felt tense from the start.

She talked about him a lot, it was getting to be a sore point. After all, I was convinced he wouldn’t be able to get himself elected president a second time. I ignored the sense of dread that was obviously premonitory. It probably contributed to how things played out that evening. She brought up running for mayor again, for the first time in a long while.

-I’m not a fascist, she said at one bitter turn of the conversation. And I won’t build one unit for it.

My hopes had been trumped by her renewed political ambitions, and by him. I’m sure that’s what they talked about. I should have stayed that night but I didn’t. I made up some sorry excuse but it was clear I was leaving because we were arguing ugly, and to be honest with myself more than you, I was shaken.

On the way back from the hotel I got stopped by a couple of secret service agents, who took me for a radical, clear as day even in the night, and stopped me. They said the president was there, but I’d seen him on the television that night or the day before at the United Nations. They meant the former president of course.

They asked for my identification, and I had no will to fight left, spent and smashed down as I felt, so I gave it to them. This was starting to feel repetitive. They’d bring up the incident with the photographer, or even the street fight with Jeff.

-No arrests, the secret service who called in my name reported back. It was technically true. And no warrants.

We didn’t have any contact over the next few days, and just when the days felt like they were stretching into weeks I decided to text her.

-Ideology is a scam.

She responded: What isn’t? Then her next message, the dots followed by: we do what we can, until we can’t. We can, right?

We met the next day. Our arguments got more passionate and more exciting. We got sloppier with the media. She turned openly hostile to them, accusing them of tearing down a middle-aged woman, a silly thing to say when she still seemed pretty far on the other side of forty from me, and I felt barely there. But it did the trick, with the press dutifully explaining that middle-age starts at 45, offending people in their late forties who said they weren’t middle-aged, and anyway that was ageism.

Or they’d argue whether she was 35, 36, 37 or 38. Her online encyclopedia entry had two different birth years, her high school graduation year had suggested a third and she had been quoted with a fourth. She’d post a picture of a male politician from the other side and ask if anyone cared how old he was, but that she was sure it was a decrepit age. She was getting good at it. That made her more excited to run for mayor. I wasn’t sure if our political arguments were getting anywhere with her and I wasn’t sure if I cared. It got us excited.