The Perfect Candidate Read online

  “There’s this diary of hers that says you did it with her on top of the copy machine. How exactly does that work?” Steele was apparently not better than “such garbage” as he plowed on.

  Mrs. Beck, ever voiceless and slightly uncertain, looked to her husband with incongruous pride.

  “Dirty old man!” shouted Hillary at the TV.

  “Sterling, you have been at this since you revealed the recipe for Mamie Eisenhower’s fudge on national radio, and you’ve been a fine reporter and a fine friend. But this is not reporting. This is . . .” He hesitated. “Katherine and I have been married and devoted to each other for twenty-eight years, and what has sustained us is our faithfulness to each other and our faith in God.”

  “But where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” suggested Steele.

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke,” BIB stated firmly. “And I hope we can all clear the air now so we can focus on the Lancaster family’s tragic loss.”

  Someone behind the camera mercifully played The Week’s patriotic, flute-based theme, as an overacted commercial for night-driving glasses appeared.

  “Well, that was a disaster,” said Hillary. “Let’s see if Nadia still has a job on Monday.”

  “Or was that perfect?” I asked. I tried out the lens of Lena’s recent suspicion as a way to think about the situation. “Use the doddering old man to discredit the accusations. Remind viewers that this guy was around for some cooking show on the radio in the 1950s. Keep the message on the family in mourning. The wife, the faith in God . . . and our man BIB gets bullied by a misinformed old man . . .”

  “You’re saying this was intentional,” Hillary said, shaking her head.

  “I’m saying I think Nadia knows what she’s doing. Give that interview to a reporter who knows what a blog is, and BIB would have walked out of there with some bruises.”

  “Our little boy is growing up to be such a cynic—and an ageist!” cracked Zeph.

  BIB and Mrs. Beck did not return after the commercial break, but the news stories paraded on: There were interviews with Ariel’s teachers and more than one former boyfriend from Virginia Beach. Minibiographies of BIB followed—detailing his almond-growing roots, philanthropic efforts, service in Congress, as well as this new disgraceful asterisk that would now disfigure an otherwise pristine profile. A particularly desperate reporter probed a barista from a coffee shop near Ariel’s apartment: “What did she order every morning?” One blogger celebrated that “the slow news of spring” had finally come to an end.

  I guessed the news landscape had been a little dry. For weeks, the media had been testing the limits of a jet plane disappearance in Indonesia. Our very own Ariel had lit a spark in the middle of a thirsty forest of readers and reporters—who got fire instead of water, and eagerly spread the flames. And my chat with Lena at the end of the night made me wonder if the dramatic headlines were real or arson—lit by hack bloggers eager to watch the story burn brighter.

  The PR firefighters came in the form of Nadia Zyne and Jigar Shah—who looked uncharacteristically exhausted when we showed up at the office on Monday. Throughout that week, Jigar’s stubble and Nadia’s wrinkled blouses denoted multiple all-nighters, as they worked to salvage the boss’s suddenly sullied name. And BIB’s resolute manner, reverence for Ariel’s loss, and focus on work gave everyone confidence that he was right; the rumors had to be garbage. The affair news didn’t add up for me, either. I hadn’t gotten to know Ariel very well, but if anything, she was wary of BIB, not attracted to him.

  In an apparent victory for either the truth or good PR, the week yielded multiple stories about how Sterling Steele was better suited as the emcee for an old folks’ home talent show than for the serious news show he once confidently helmed. How the writing in the diary didn’t necessarily match Ariel’s. How the dates of the alleged encounters corresponded to times when BIB and Ariel were on opposite sides of the country. The carelessness and desperation of online journalism. The need to focus on one girl’s brilliant life, and not on ugly rumors. It was as if the talking heads looked back on the earth they had scorched over the week and now pointed fingers at one another for the destruction that had been caused. Their own hastiness became a whole new story. The show’s over. Nothing to see here.

  And then we were back to stories about that lost Indonesian plane.

  Through it all, I thought about Lena and her skeptical response to the news. But mostly, I wanted to hang out with her again. Tuesday felt about right for following up—I didn’t want her to think I was too into her and freak her out. Wait until Wednesday, and I’m a dick. But Tuesday—Tuesday is just close enough to aloof dickness while still being a good guy. I sent her a note on MessageNow: Are there more exceptional bookstores you’re going to take me to?

  It took her fifty-seven minutes to reply: Ha! No, K-books is the only one.

  Well, then, my turn to pick a venue, I replied. But mine’s going to be more obvious: Washington Monument this week?

  I’m not above touristy stuff, but unfort I’m traveling with my dad in Mexico until Sunday. He’s put me to work—embassy event planner for the summer. :(

  I was trying to be hard to get, but she had turned the tables. I had to wait almost a week to see her again?!

  Okay, I replied. You, me, and the obelisk. Next week.

  That sounds vaguely risqué, but, um, sure. She abruptly logged off before I could assure her that my reference to the phallic monument was mainly innocent.

  On Friday afternoon, one brief televised statement seemed to shut everyone up for good. As the evening shadows grew—and families across America settled in for a weekend together—the staff gathered around the multiple TVs in the office for “a statement by Congresswoman Nani Lancaster.” I found myself standing next to Nadia as the screen cut to a plush DC apartment living room.

  Representative Lancaster sat on a couch, flanked by her frowning husband and framed by an array of family pictures featuring the various stages of her dead daughter’s life. Though she had passed through horrible events in the past weeks, Nani looked sharp and intense and ready. She took a deep breath, and then said, “My fellow Americans. My fellow mothers, and sisters, and friends. One week ago, I was discussing the menu for my daughter’s funeral dinner. Everyone told me to stay out of those details, but I couldn’t. All of the moms listening will relate: that’s what we’re supposed to do. You care even when it’s almost impossible. And Jim and I have felt a similar kind of care from all of you. Thank all of you for your words of comfort, the letters, and even some wonderful pictures your children sent us.” Nani smiled as she held up a Crayola masterpiece of a blond girl floating up to the clouds. Her angel. Her Ariel.

  “Since our baby’s funeral, there have been unfortunate statements bandied about in the media. I am here to tell you that these stories are untrue. Congressman Billy Beck is an upstanding and moral man and faithful husband, who I am lucky to call a friend. I assure you that you can call him that as well. And I think the American people want to talk about more substantive things.”

  As the sentence ended, I glanced over to see Nadia subconsciously mouth every word. Her words. Her speech. Representative Lancaster’s statement, as heartfelt as it sounded, was not her own. I snapped my head back as I felt Nadia’s gaze shift toward me. Representative Lancaster ended the statement with the obligatory “God bless America” as Nadia grabbed Jigar and her tall leather purse and walked out of the office.

  “BIB, are you there?” she spoke into her phone as the front door closed behind her.

  “Am I the only person who thinks that every time politicians say ‘God bless America,’ it sounds like they really mean ‘God bless me’?” Zeph mused to himself.

  “Zephaniah! The woman lost her daughter,” scolded Hillary with sudden moral superiority.

  “And God bless Friday!” shouted Marcus. He declared an impromptu office party at Tortilla Coast. “It’s the best bad Mexican food you’ll ever have, right by the Capito
l South metro stop. No excuses!” He pointed at Katie.

  Based on the way he singled her out, it appeared that she usually had an excuse.

  “Marcus,” she said, “if you must know, I’m going on a date tonight.” Though Katie was technically senior to Marcus, they were all pretty close in age. The long hours and intensity of their jobs seemed to foster an informal, family-like dynamic.

  “Good for you,” he said. Not letting Katie kill the party recruitment momentum, he added, “Last one there picks up the first round of ’ritas!” announced Marcus as he rushed out the door with a few others in tow.

  “I feel sorry for him,” said Hillary. “We should at least make an appearance.”

  “That is so sweet of you,” observed Katie, as she headed out the door. “With all the help he’s getting from you with his social life, Hillary, and from Cam on all that research—I don’t know what the poor guy is going to do after you guys leave here.”

  We followed her out the door soon after, and I briefly thought that instead of helping Marcus with “all that research” I could have been working with Ariel on whatever it was she’d urgently wanted to tell me.

  9

  My Alabaman alter ego came in handy yet again, since a guard checked my ID as we entered the packed doors of Tortilla Coast. Clearly, Marcus was not alone in his surrender to the cheap and convenient draw of this restaurant—so close to the Capitol complex, it might as well have been named after a famous lawmaker. Manic Spanish guitar blared through the speakers—and although this music choice wasn’t exactly culturally accurate for a Mexican restaurant, I was willing to forgive the oversight because the chips and salsa were actually quite good. Though I lost Zeph and Hillary to the throbbing Friday-night crowd pretty quickly, Marcus appeared out of nowhere and frantically offered me a half-eaten enchilada before disappearing again.

  “Thanks?” I asked.

  The anxious guitar, the constant bumping into strangers, the decomposing mound of cheese and tortilla, the more confident guys hitting on the girls who only saw straight through me—it was a lot to take in, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to anymore. So I texted Berto: Que pasa, Humbertonius?

  He wrote back immediately: TV reruns with the old lady. Can life get any better?

  I answered, Yes, it can. It gets better in DC. Then I stretched the truth a little. Okay, a lot. I needed to prove to him that DC was the right decision, and for Berto, that meant simply texting: I am at a party and there are so many hot girls here.

  Get some! he replied.

  I texted back an ambiguously confident Yup, when some random guy asked me, “Are you going to eat that?”

  “All yours,” I told him as I pushed Marcus’s plate his way. That’s pretty much what I told the whole restaurant, too, as I Irish-good-byed my way out the front door.

  The breezy core of the Capitol South station was deserted as I stepped on the Franconia-Springfield train just as the doors were closing. A few lonely stops later, I got off at Foggy Bottom and emerged to the sidewalk. The humidity that was so punishing during the day felt like a comforting blanket in the dark, late-June evening. And partly because it was a nice night, but mostly because only losers get home before nine p.m. on a Friday, I walked in the direction opposite my apartment—south, to the Lincoln Memorial.

  I shared Honest Abe with a number of tourists that night—shuffling back and forth from reading the second inaugural address, etched into the interior wall, to fulfilling requests for family photos. The marble cavern glowed with a gentle golden light. Though visitors’ talking bounced off the walls, there was a reverence befitting the Greek temple structure that enclosed the massive seated statue of the “Savior of the Union.” I turned my back to Mr. Lincoln to see the adjacent pool and the distant, towering Washington Monument reflected there. I weaved my way down the stairs between a few seated couples and a group of fiftysomething men dressed in military fatigues, who must have been veterans.

  The ghostly, underlit figures of the Korean War Veterans Memorial beckoned me from the right as I continued my solitary, improvised tour. About twenty statues of servicemen—wearing helmets and ponchos and weary looks on their faces—treaded through a triangular patch of fenced-off grass. A woman and what appeared to be her grown children clustered and hugged one another in the far corner of the monument area. In my US History class, we spent three weeks on the Vietnam War, and like half of a period on the Korean War—and I wondered how these guys standing before me and that family in the corner would feel about that.

  I followed signs toward the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. Was it too nerdy of me to be excited about this historical scavenger hunt I’d found myself on? It was the first time I’d come face-to-bronze/marble-face with these monuments. At the entrance of the FDR Memorial, I looked out across the large body of water—a sign identified it as the Tidal Basin—and saw the gleaming Jefferson Memorial around the bend of the tree-lined water. For a moment, I wasn’t thinking about Ariel’s death or the affair gossip—and how my time in BIB’s office so far had featured about 100 percent more tragedy/scandal than I’d been expecting back home. If only for a few seconds, it was the stately, grand place I had always imagined.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a whip of hair of a person seated on a bench by the water. The kind of “whip of hair” that results from someone who has seen you and doesn’t want to be seen back. Unsuccessfully. Because I immediately knew who she was.

  Katie Campbell turned and made eye contact with me just long enough to prompt the requisite “Hello”/acknowledgment that Wow! What a coincidence we’re both in the same place at the same time. She sat on a green bench at the edge of the Tidal Basin—slightly hunched over and looking rather timid, even apologetic. Nothing like the preppy, crazed, and authoritative chief of staff who ran the office each day. Her date had apparently stepped away, because she was alone on the bench. I noticed that she was engaged in a rather elaborate textile project, hands clasped around knitting needles and frozen, as if this was a secret hobby and she had been caught.

  “Hi, Cameron.” She lifted her right hand for a quick wave.

  “Hey, sorry, you don’t have to talk to me,” I said and started to walk away. “Don’t mean to interrupt your date.”

  Her face hesitated for a moment before she replied, “No, no, don’t worry. Come over here.”

  I walked closer to her as she moved across the bench to make room for me. I sat down next to her and asked, “So, where’s the guy?”

  “He’s over there,” Katie motioned behind us, toward a cluster of Asian tourists who admired the towering statue of a seated FDR—green from the oxidization of its copper material.

  “You’re dating a middle-aged Japanese man,” I said.

  “No such luck,” she mused. “I’m with him.” I realized she was pointing at the statue, not a person.

  “You’re on a date with Franklin Delano Roosevelt?”

  “Yes, yes, I am. Standing date. Every Friday night, this bench. We talk about the evolution of the welfare system, Scottish terriers, and you should hear the juicy stuff he’s told me about Eleanor. Let’s just say that she was a very complex lady. But you have to keep our relationship a secret, okay?”

  “Sure.” I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Because I need to keep my legitimate excuse for not schmoozing every weekend,” she continued. “And I wouldn’t want to disappoint the other men.”

  “Others?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Abraham, Thomas, George, and George,” she said as she pointed at the distant monuments that surrounded us.

  “Not just one, but two Georges!?” I asked.

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s go over to TJ,” she said as she motioned toward the shining white dome of the Jefferson Monument. We stood up and headed in that direction when she asked, “Why don’t you tell me about your internship so far?”

  “Well, Ariel was kind of the only nonintern in the office who really talked to me during my first
week,” I said. “She showed me around, got me started on a project with Marcus, and—”

  “Cameron.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I asked you about the internship, and you’re talking about Ariel.”

  “Oh, wow. Sorry. I thought you asked about her. Or maybe I was just thinking about her.”

  “She’s on your mind; it’s fine,” she assured me. “She’s on all our minds.”

  “I just really appreciated how she saw me as capable of being more than just an intern,” I said. “I’m not above opening and sorting mail, but she had me doing research on my second day. . . .”

  “You’re ambitious,” she said.

  “I’m just finishing week three of the most important summer of my life. I guess you could call it ambition. Maybe a bit of desperation,” I answered. “If you were from Lagrima, you’d be the same.”

  “You’re desperate,” she said.

  “No, not exactly,” I replied. “Desperation” was a bit dramatic. Or maybe a bit too true. “I just want this summer to mean something—to be the start of a new direction, a career.”

  “I hear you; I know,” she said. “I’ve been there.”

  “How did you get your start?” I asked.

  “Well, unlike a lot of my fellow staff here on the Hill, I did not start out at Andover, Exeter, or Phillips. . . .”

  “Where?” I asked.

  Katie laughed to herself. “Oh, bless your heart. Please never know what those places are. Please never change.”

  I shot her a querying smile.

  “I’m a single-mom-raised public-school girl from Philadelphia. I was smart and I think I filled part of the ‘poverty’ quota, so UPenn let me in. Poli sci. Even though Philly is technically a big city, DC was always The City for me. So I guess that was always the next step, you know?”

  “Yeah.” I could relate to poverty quotas. “I know.”

  “So I spent a couple summers in my local congressman’s office, and then got a full-time gig on the Ways and Means Committee, where I met BIB, who ran the committee and was on the rise. . . .”