Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  “Am I interrupting?” she asks.

  “No, no,” Laura says. “We were just talking about the campaign, actually. How do you think it’s going?”

  After a quick, observant glance at me, Ms. Tucker accepts this partial truth and tells us the preliminary polling has Bobby in a fairly substantial hole. “But polls taken this early are very changeable,” she adds.

  “And that new campaign consultant,” Laura asks. “Is he helpful?”

  “Scott? He will be,” she says.

  “I miss the old days,” Laura says, starting to serve out the dinner she has prepared onto three plates. “Bobby and Ben and I and maybe a couple of other friends used to plot out the whole campaign. It was so much simpler and more personal. Now there are all these pollsters and media advisers and managers and consultants. It’s c-crazy.” Laura has dozens of ways of masking her slight stutter from strangers, ones running from poses of the thoughtful and reflective to, as now, the especially emphatic.

  “And expensive,” Cindy laughs. She turns to me. “You used to do campaign work?”

  “A little.” Laura asks pardon for her forgetfulness and introduces us. I wait to see if the press secretary offers a hand to shake. She nods instead.

  “I thought you were deputy prosecutor for Morris County.”

  “I was that, too.”

  “Tough job,” she says.

  “You’re well-informed.” She smiles and gives a small shrug. “Well, it was no tougher than covering the legislature and the governor’s office,” I say, indicating I know about her former beat as political reporter for the newspaper.

  She has the air of a thorough professional, softened slightly at the moment by the sense she is actually curious. She begins to pursue the question of why I left the prosecutor’s office for private practice, a question Laura relieves me from having to answer by saying dinner is ready. She hands us each a plate steaming with food and invites us to go to the dining room. Her interest or politeness or perhaps her instincts as a trained reporter making her persistent, Cindy tries to follow up on her original question. I tell her I found I needed a change and, groping for another subject, ask about her children.

  “I’m sorry for prying,” she says. “It’s just that I had the impression doing appeals work is a big change from what you used to do.”

  “I don’t mean to be abrupt,” I say, and find, abruptly, that I have nothing further to say. I look in the kitchen, hoping to see Laura coming.

  Cindy breaks the silence by telling me her children’s names and ages and, after a moment’s discomfort, adds almost parenthetically that her older one, Jennifer, is doing better recently in dealing with her father’s divorce and live-in girlfriend. I look back at her. Her son, Ken, she says, at three, seems less affected. The slightly padded shoulders of Cindy’s gray-green jacket make her look, instead of larger, paradoxically smaller, her short brown hair showing a slim and willowy neck. I am aware I find her attractive. No sooner does this thought register than an old, familiar phenomenon occurs. I get a tiny inner jolt and then a kind of numbness spreads, as if I have received a microscopic shot of novocaine. If the event were not so familiar, I think I would be unnerved by it. But I know the numbness will soon pass, and though Cindy will no longer seem quite so vividly appealing when it does, nothing else will have changed.

  “They must keep you busy,” I say.

  “They can be a lot of fun. Though there are still times they make me want to scream.”

  Since I am not good at generating social conversation, it's up to Cindy and Laura to keep a pall from falling over us, something they do with skill and good spirits.

  “Laura tells me you and Bobby are old friends.”

  “Neither of them had brothers,” Laura says before I can answer. “So I think instead they had each other.”

  “Not because we’re much alike,” I add, wondering to what degree Laura is right. I had always thought I was drawn to be a friend of Bobby’s for many reasons, but perhaps mostly because he had some quiet inner certainty of self that had almost nothing of bravado or egotism in it, and it awed me. I hoped to gain some of it just by proximity. It never occurred to me to analyze why Bobby was a friend of mine; I was just grateful he was. Lots of things began to fall my way after I became friendly with him, including lots of appreciation from family, teachers, and classmates, and back then I believed some magic had rubbed off. And maybe it had.

  “You had similar taste in women,” she says. She turns to Cindy. “Ben and I dated for over a year back in college. I met Bobby through him.”

  Cindy’s eyebrows go up. “That sounds…complicated.”

  Laura laughs. “Ben and I were no longer an item.” She looks at me, perhaps waiting for the kind of joke I used to make about our early romance. I try to think of one, or even remember an old one, but nothing occurs to me.

  “But Laura says you might have some advice about why he’s been so, I don’t know, up in the air about planning.”

  I try to say this with some humor. “Because, as Laura knows, he has been up in the air about planning. When he comes down, and I think he already has, planning will be the least of your problems. Once he focuses, he’ll go through the process like Sherman through Georgia.”

  Cindy looks at Laura for confirmation. She nods, the corners of her mouth turning down, and says, “Precisely.”

  As if telepathic, the children come thundering up from the basement when we reach dessert and request their portions. Laura asks me if I would mind going to the store for some ice cream to go with the fruit salad she’s made. Cindy’s children and Annie ask if they can go along.

  I hesitate for a second and Annie says with a kind of familiar insistence, “Puhh-leeese!” She is, I can tell, enjoying being the big kid.

  “Okay, Pie. Since you put it that way. But I have to drive.” She nods, Jennifer laughs, and Ken, removing the thumb from his mouth, hops up and down and claps his hands. I look at the little boy. “But I’m afraid I don’t have a car seat for you, my friend.” In his face storm clouds gather.

  “I’ve got one,” Cindy says. “Why don’t I go?”

  “You could move the seat to my car,” I say.

  “Oh, Ben,” says Annie in an exasperated tone. “Just come along.”

  As we leave, Laura yells, “Something low-fat!” Annie rolls her eyes. As we get into Cindy’s car, I can smell stale cigarette smoke in Annie’s hair.

  Cindy decides to head to Baskin-Robbins instead of the grocery store, since it is closer. Just in front of us in line, washed in blue-white fluorescent light, is a familiar face, one I haven’t seen up close in a number of years, though I have seen it on television and, more recently, across the room of a dimly lit bar. Clive Sanford has fleshed out considerably since our high school days, but he carries the weight comfortably, less as if it is a challenge to his cardiovascular system than it is money in the bank. Even his lips, across which his tongue used to nervously dart and which in the old days were lizard-thin, have seemed to puff out to nearly normal size. He turns to survey the room and catches me looking at him.

  “Ben Shamas,” he says. “You old reprobate!” He smiles broadly, a smile in which his eyes do not fully participate. I begin to introduce Cindy and Annie, but before I can say their names, he claps me on the shoulder—as if he and not his employer were the politician—and tells me how good it is to see me back in the swing of things. I think he has decided these people with me are my new wife and stepchildren.

  “Clive,” I say. “I didn’t know you were still in town.”

  “Oh, yes,” he says airily, with slow nods of the head. “Business. Research for the boss,” he confides.

  Something about seeing this figure from my youth causes a layer of my old self to surface for a moment. “I saw you and Freddie McMasters the other night.”

  He looks at me sharply and his tongue da
rts nervously across his lips, a gesture which gives me inordinate satisfaction. “Just talking. You know, old times and all.”

  “But you have old times with a lot of people.”

  His shifts weight from one foot to the other. I can see I’ve brought him up short. “If you’re thinking about my old boyhood taunts…” I don’t say anything. “If…well, let me be the first to say I was a stupid, stupid kid. I apologize here and now.” He glances at Cindy and the children in back of me.

  “Cynthia Tucker,” I say. “Clive Sanford.”

  “Cynthia Tucker,” he repeats. His mouth opens, then closes. Light bulb. “The reporter.”

  “Actually, I’ve got a new job.”

  “I hope it’s honest work this time,” he says. When no one laughs, he fidgets nervously and fills in the vacuum by laughing horsily himself.

  “You have been busy,” I say. “You haven’t kept up with the papers.”

  “Yep. Pretty busy,” he acknowledges.

  “It was a small article. But it’s very honest work,” Cindy says. “I’m the new communications director for the Parrish campaign.”

  He stares at her for a moment, wondering if his leg is being pulled. “No,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I’ll be dipped,” he says.

  “And this tall young woman,” I say, gesturing toward Annie, “is Anne Elizabeth Parrish, Bobby and Laura’s daughter.”

  He stops breathing. I can see the color rise in Clive’s face and the flesh under his left eye twitch. He nods with a degree of self-control he never had in the old days and says to Annie with a grave face, “I have a lot of respect for your father.” Annie’s mouth pulls down and she nods.

  He pays for his double chocolate malt and turns to me. “As I said. Glad to see you back in the swing of things, Ben-boy.” He says goodbye to Cindy and Annie and heads out, though not without a backward glance, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s seen. Or can’t resist checking to see if we’re still looking at him.

  “You know him?” Cindy asks. I nod. “I’ve always wondered how he ever got to be Wheatley’s chief aide.”

  “I’ve wondered that myself.”

  “He is so dumb!” She makes the last word sound as if it has two syllables.

  “I hear that Wheatley’s a reasonably bright guy. Maybe he needs someone to complement him instead of duplicate him. Actually, Jeannie says Clive and Richard Wheatley are like hemispheres of the moon. Clive’s the dark side, where his nature is fulfilled and he is no doubt very happy. She says when the congressman needs to cut a deal, or cut somebody off at the knees, he calls in Clive Sanford. And from Clive he gets a canny operator and absolute devotion. And a willingness to do just about anything.”

  “You think he’s in town to dig stuff up on Bobby?”

  “Yes, I do. Which suggests to me that Wheatley’s early polling must not put Bobby in as deep a hole as yours does. He’s getting ready for a slugfest.”

  She nods grimly, then looks at me. “You sound like you know your way around this kind of thing.”

  On our drive back to Laura’s, Cindy presses me about my previous experience with elections.

  “I was an assistant in Governor Roberts’ first campaign. Almost twenty years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ever hear of Jerry Jepson?”

  “Chief judge for the family court?”

  “Yes. He happened.”

  “What do you mean?’’ she asks.

  “He was director of Roberts’ campaign. He had no clue about how to run someone for statewide office. He kept puffing his pipe and saying, ‘All politics is local.’ Somebody, anybody really, would call up and invite Bill Roberts to speak and Jepson would say sure. No advance work, no issue development. Poor Roberts was running from one end of the state to the other. Coffee klatches, church teas, and town socials at which a handful of bored senior citizens would show up. One time Jepson sent him to something called Candidates’ Night. He got sandwiched among four locals running for town council and six running for the school board. The crowd, if you can call it that, ignored him completely. In the meantime, I was fighting with Jepson over this stuff every day. He didn’t like me questioning him to begin with—I was twenty-four and just out of law school—and he got so sick of it, he stopped even the pretense of listening. So I began to send notes directly to Bill Roberts.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Basic stuff. ‘Do some issue polling. Do some advance work. And if you do go to a coffee klatch, at least make folks pay a couple of dollars before they can attend so they won’t take you completely for granted. Later, when you are governor, you can afford to go for free.’”

  “Did he do it?”

  “Yes, but not until the morning after the infamous Candidates’ Night when a statewide poll came out showing he was getting killed. Then he began to do most of the things I suggested. Though it still had to get done in notes, an end-run around his old friend Jerry Jepson. Since few good deeds go unpunished, Jepson got wind of what was going on and fired me.”

  “Fired you?”

  “For ‘going outside the chain of command.’”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The candidate had a chat with his campaign director. I got my job back. In those days, my ambition in life was to work in the state attorney general’s office. So, before I went back, I requested a position in the AG’s office, any position really. He agreed, no doubt thinking that the way things were going, he wasn’t going to get elected, anyway. I came back, got him to play up the fact that while he didn’t drink himself, he favored ending our status as a dry state. The rest, as they say, is history.’’

  “So you worked in the attorney general’s office?”

  “For about one week.”

  “Why only a week?”

  “Civics quiz. Who was Roberts’ attorney general for the first four years?”

  “Oh, God. Jerry Jepson.”

  “Jepson cut me off from the rest of the staff, including from use of a pool secretary, and instructed people not to route anything past my desk. I spent a week looking out the window and then I quit. If it hadn’t been a basement window, I might have lasted longer.”

  “Governor Roberts didn’t do anything?”

  “He said he was very sorry, but he wasn’t going to fire Jerry Jepson.”

  “And that was it?”

  “You know the old saying. When the elephants dance, the grass gets trampled.”

  “And Roberts never contacted you?”

  “He learned his lesson. He went out and hired professionals for his next run. And by then I wasn’t all that interested in working on campaigns. It had been a way to get a job in the attorney general’s office.”

  I have not talked this much at one stretch in a long time. Seeing Clive Sanford must have set me off. We pull into Laura and Bobby’s driveway. Cindy’s son, thumb back in his mouth, has almost dozed off in his car seat, his head lolling against the straps.

  As we are walking up to the door, Cindy’s daughter, five-year-old Jennifer, grabs my arm at the elbow with both hands. I smile down at her and compliment her on her grip. She squeezes harder, grimacing with the effort, trying to hurt me or to hang on or both; I pretend pain. Gratified, she squeezes harder still, and continues working on my arm all the way inside. Her mother calls her name and tells her to stop. She ignores her. “I said stop it, Jen.” Jennifer takes a breath and squeezes my arm with a last ferocious effort, her face reddening with strain, and she looks at me with an expression akin to rage, or hatred.

  “Now, how am I going to spoon out your ice cream if my arm’s broken? Medic! Dr. Parrish! Arm needs setting in front hall, stat!”

  Jennifer grimaces anew and does not let go until Cindy physically separates her from my elbow, and then she starts to cry. He
r mother takes her aside and talks to her in a low voice for a long time.

  We are in the middle of eating our desserts when a car pulls into the driveway. Annie runs to the window to see if her father has surprised them by coming home early. A moment later she says, “It’s Jimmy!”

  Jimmy, camera and other equipment in hand, has driven all the way from Chicago, hoping to get some footage of rioting in the capital, but first he wanted to stop and drop off some laundry. He introduces a friend from his media and communications class who is going to be helping him: someone, he says, who knows all about lights and sound and the rest of that technical stuff. From under a mop of brown hair topped by a Bulls hat appears Alexander Stafford, someone built like a young man who knows all about swimming. Annie keeps looking at him, and then nervously away.

  Laura gives a weary sigh at seeing Jimmy go ahead with his moviemaking plans.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back until next week.”

  “My last class was today,” he says. “I can study here during exam week at least as well as at school. Can Alex stay?”

  Alex smiles upon hearing his name. Annie looks at her feet while waiting tensely for the answer. I have the fantasy that the self-contained Annie is poised somewhere between wanting to jump on Alex and joining a nunnery.

  Laura says he can stay and asks if they are hungry. Alex says he is, but Jimmy wants to head straight to the capitol for pictures.

  Laura shakes her head. “Your father says things have gotten quiet. But they are not so quiet that two white boys should go waltzing into the south side late at night looking for photo-ops. And carrying expensive equipment, no less.”

  Jimmy says in an “Aw, Mom, you’re a worrywart” tone that they’ll be careful. Alex, looking doubtful, says his mother has a point. Maybe they should go in the morning.

  “Will Dad still be there?” Jimmy asks.

  “In the morning,” Laura tells him.

  “All right,” he concedes grudgingly. He bends over to pick up his laundry bag and mutters to Alex, “You’re a wuss.”