"And I apologize for calling so late. But I wanted to tell you personally how sorry I am for your loss."
"Thank you," Corey answered. "It's been hard. I helped Clay get in, you remember."
"I remember. I also know how hard this is on your parents."
This, Corey knew, was his opening. "Not as hard as it could be."
"I understand. So let me assure you that it will get no worse for them. At least as far as the air force is concerned."
Corey felt a surge of relief. "Thank you, sir."
After a brief silence, Lane asked, "So what will you do now?"
Unsure of how to interpret the question, Corey answered, "I don't really know. It's hard to imagine waking up tomorrow, let alone campaigning."
There was another brief pause. "As a military man, Corey, I'm not supposed to care who wins. But I do. The day we met, I said you'd have to find your own way to live with Joe Fitts's death. Perhaps you've found it--as a senator you can do the country some real good. And losing will make this loss no better."
Four days later, Corey resumed his campaign.
Each appearance required an act of will. But in early November, at the age of thirty, Corey Grace was narrowly elected to the Senate.
15
LEXIE LISTENED IN SILENCE. WHEN AT LAST COREY TURNED TO FACE her, her expression was dispassionate, as if nothing he had told her was in any way remarkable.
"So you never told your parents?"
"I never even told Janice."
Lexie studied him. "Do you know why?"
Corey leaned forward, arms resting on his knees as he stared at a patch of dirt. "What I told myself," he said, "was that teaching my homophobic parents a moral lesson was cruel--if they wanted to blame me, that was the price of compassion, and probably fair enough at that.
"As for Janice, I worried there might be some edgy night, maybe after a drink or two, when she zinged my mother with the truth. So it was better just to add another brick to our wall of silence. Or so I told myself at the time."
"And now?"
"Now I wonder. As long as my parents are living, I've got the same excuse. But there's something more to this.
"Right now, a lot of people see me as a 'good Republican' when it comes to gays. And what's my big contribution? I don't actively hate them. I don't beat the drums against gay marriage. I barely say anything, actually." Corey's voice turned harsh. "If I tell the truth about Clay, I've got no excuse for not confronting Christy and Marotta about victimizing people for who they were born to be, or for not labeling all their crap about protecting the sanctity of marriage the joke that it is. I mean, does anyone really think that Janice and I got divorced because we figured out that ten years later guys would be marrying each other in Massachusetts? Not only is it bullshit, but it's exactly the kind of calculated cruelty Price and Marotta profit from ginning up. They're generating hatred against gays as surely as Bob Christy helped push my brother off the roof--except that Christy may actually believe what he's saying." Corey's voice flattened. "That's what I believe, Lexie. And if I said it in public I'd be absolutely dead as a presidential candidate--over with, as in 'stick a fork in Corey Grace.' That's a pretty good reason to leave my brother behind."
"But you haven't."
All at once, Corey felt drained. "No. Clay's still with me. Only now he knows that I'm a coward."
Lexie considered him, silent.
"Say something," Corey demanded.
"About what? We're not defined by any one thing we're done--or haven't done. The truth about most people is more complicated than that." Pausing, she finished softly, "And kinder, I hope."
After a time, they began their slow descent to the wooded trail below, quiet until they reached the parking lot. Lexie turned to him, hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt. "You're only forty-three, Corey. You've got time to sort it out."
THE LATE-AFTERNOON FOOTBALL game pitted the Cleveland Browns, Corey's team, against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Sitting at the kitchen counter, Corey and Lexie ate salmon steaks and watched the Browns take a brutal pounding. But the game, Corey knew, was Lexie's way of leaving him in peace.
Shortly before halftime, his phone rang. "You watching CNN?" Rustin asked.
"Not if I can help it."
Even on the telephone, Corey could hear his adviser exhale. "Get back to Washington, Corey. Marotta's declaring tomorrow, and it's time to get moving. You've got no real campaign infrastructure or fund-raising operation--"
"I can raise money on the Internet," Corey objected. "I've got the name recognition to do it, and supporters on Wall Street who honestly care that our country's going off the cliff. So don't push me, Blake--I can wait a while longer."
Lexie, Corey saw, was trying to focus on her salmon. "Why risk it?" Rustin asked. "What will you know in a month or two that you don't know now? We both know you want this more than anything in the world."
"Do 'we' now," Corey said sardonically. "How nice for both of us--"
"Where are you, for Godsakes?"
"In Palm Springs with my lover, Michael, who looks fetching in the feather boa I just bought him. Using my own charge card, by the way, so Price will know where to send the reporters from Rohr News." Pausing, Corey finished tersely, "I'll be sure to watch Marotta. The rest can wait till I get back."
Hanging up, he clicked the television off. Lexie looked up at him, her expression indecipherable. "Do you think any less of me?" he asked.
"For what?"
It took Corey a moment to realize that in her mind, and perhaps in his, the question did not refer to Clay alone. "Whatever."
"No," she answered, and then amended this with a smile. "At least not yet."
That night, Corey lay awake, wishing she were close. But what he might say or do, and how she might respond, was as unclear to him as what his future held.
16
AT SIX A.M., ROB AND MARY ROSE MAROTTA SAT DRINKING COFFEE AT the breakfast table of their modest home outside Pittsburgh.
In one sense, this was typical, part of the fabric of their marriage--Rob, restless and unable to sleep; Mary Rose, despite her own weariness from the various demands of their children, stirring herself from the warmth of their bed to serve as a sounding board. But today was different: in four hours, he would declare his candidacy for president of the United States.
Despite this, Rob saw the two of them clearly: he in his robe, the thick black hair on his crown standing up in the way that amused Mary Rose, who, as she did so often, appraised him with a look combining keenness with affection. She battled with her weight now, and the fifteen extra pounds blurred the gamine face that had charmed him at age nineteen, but the girl he had fallen in love with still shone through the woman who had been his partner for twenty-four years of marriage. Whatever good fortune Corey Grace enjoyed, Rob told himself, he would not have traded this moment for the best moment of Grace's life.
Putting down her coffee mug, Mary Rose touched his wrist. "Once you start speaking," she assured her husband, "people will feel what they always do--that they're listening to someone smart and solid, who can meet whatever challenges we face. That's what people need so desperately, Rob--to feel safe."
Rob felt himself smile. "'Solid,'" he repeated. "'Safe.' It sort of sounds like cement settling in a driveway."
Mary Rose smiled. "You know what I mean. This is about Corey, I suspect. But why worry about Corey Grace when he's not what the party wants?"
"Because he's the kind of man who lightning strikes--a risk taker who doesn't care about much of anything but what he wants to do." He stirred more creamer into his coffee. "Most everyone else in our caucus is pretty simple to decode--they want to keep their seat, and they want their dignity honored, and it's all a matter of assessing how those needs affect them on a given issue. But Corey is unpredictable. And he's a much better intuitive politician than even Magnus gives him credit for."
Mary Rose sipped her coffee, her clear blue eyes gauging her husband's mood. "Why b
rood over him, Robbie? He may have good looks and good luck, but the same things that perplex you about Corey Grace bother other people."
Rob sat back in his chair. "He's already affecting me in ways I can't help. He gave Christy his excuse to run--you don't think Grace intended that when he stuck it to me on stem cells? Now I have to pretzel myself trying to keep Christian conservatives from voting for Christy, knowing that if I 'go too far' I may give Corey an opening to the left.
"That's the reason I've moved up my announcement--to regain the momentum and keep party people from looking toward Grace. In a two-way race I'd beat him--I've got the organization, the financial backing, and I've worked damned hard to keep the major factions of our party together. But in a three-way race, who knows?"
"What does Magnus say?"
The carefully neutral tone of the question, Rob knew well, reflected their shared but unspoken misgivings about his master strategist. "That my first job is to preempt Christy, then finish him off in the early primaries. Worry about Grace later, is the strategy. Problem is, Christy's got his own money and a hard core of followers who get him confused with God. He may wind up being tougher to kill than a cockroach."
The faint smile this elicited from Mary Rose did not conceal her worry. "Sometimes I don't know whether Magnus is Mephistopheles or only Machiavelli. But you seem to think he's right about most things."
"He is." Marotta paused, reluctant to express his deeper feelings. Then, because they were partners in everything, he did so. "The problem with Magnus is that he respects no one as much as himself. Sometimes I think he believes he could make a tackling dummy president and I'm the dummy he's using to prove it."
His wife's smile vanished. "He chose you because you'd make a fine president. And because he needs you. Without you, Magnus Price is that nerd in glasses who couldn't get a date in high school. Just be yourself."
It was the closest she dared come, Rob perceived, to expressing her deeper concern: that the 'price of Price,' as she called it, would be for Rob to become so enmeshed in tactics that he could lose some part of himself. "Only Grace gets to be himself, honey. Mere mortals have to choose their spots. The key is to remember why we're doing this."
"Because you should be president," Mary Rose answered simply. "Whenever I listen to you, I'm so proud of what you stand for. And whatever doubts you may feel, people see how capable you are. That's why you'll win."
Rob smiled. Though this encouragement was typical, her reassurance buoyed him--he had come far, and she had been with him at every step. And now, as he had first imagined as a boy, he might be within sixteen months of becoming president.
"You know what I really look forward to today?" Mary Rose told him. "Being off my feet for a while." She took his hand. "Let's go look at the kids, Rob. We love them even more when they're asleep."
Rob caught something wistful in her expression, the shadow of a feeling she had expressed only once. "I know we're not enough for you," she'd told him after their second child was born. "I know what you need, Robbie, and that's okay. It's enough for you to love us."
Kissing her on the forehead, he went with her to Bridget's room.
17
COREY AND LEXIE SAT AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER, WATCHING Marotta's announcement on Rohr News. Now and then the camera would pan to Mary Rose and the children. "When the rest of us were trying to find prom dates," Corey observed, "Rob was auditioning first ladies."
"What's their marriage actually like?" Lexie asked.
Corey shrugged. "Who really knows about someone else's marriage? But as near as I can tell, Mary Rose Marotta has both feet firmly located on planet Earth. She's the clearest evidence I've uncovered that beneath the layers of calculation Marotta has a core of decency."
Seated with Mary Rose and the children were Marotta's mother, his parish priest, and the Jesuit high school debate coach who had told him that, with diligence and the help of God, he could become a senator. Recounting this story, Marotta said, "I've asked Father Frank if he wouldn't mind amending that prediction upward."
The audience chuckled approvingly. But, Corey thought, there was something strained about Marotta's humor or perhaps something too telling about his ambition for it to be tossed off as a joke. "This is the America I grew up in," Marotta said. "A community of faith and love in which the dream of a working-class family for its oldest son could become, with God's blessing, a reality."
"When you were a kid," Lexie asked, "did you imagine being president?"
"Never. That's part of what unsettles Rob, I think. But then my family life wasn't quite so idyllic."
Marotta's voice grew stronger. "And at the heart of that world," he stressed, "was faith. That's the world Mary Rose and I want for our children, and America's children. Not simply a place that is safe from terrorism, but a place where it is safe to worship God ..."
"Here we go," Corey said.
"A place," Marotta continued, "as blessed by God as the America that survived a depression, defeated Adolf Hitler, and vanquished the bleak vision of a Communist system that conceived of mankind without a precious spark of the divine.
"A place where men and women--and only men and women--marry for the reasons ordained by our Creator: to love and cherish each other, and to give their children the mother and father a loving God intended them to have ..."
"In other words," Corey told Lexie. "'You don't need Christy to protect you from gays.'"
"Schools where your children can pray, go to libraries free of obscenity, learn alternative explanations for the miracle of our existence, and be taught to appreciate that our flag stands for principles too sacred to permit its desecration. A country," Marotta concluded firmly, "where parents can still direct the moral and religious education of their children. Because our war against terror depends not only on the valor of our military, but the strength of our commitment to God ..."
Once again, Rohr News panned to Mary Rose Marotta, holding the hands of a son and a daughter to each side of her as she listened intently to her husband. "That's an object lesson in the power of a single image," Lexie observed. "Mary Rose as message."
"She's a help," Corey agreed. "But I think he's going too far."
"In what way?"
"Rob's becoming a shape-shifter. Price told him to evoke Christy, so that's what he's doing. It's a bad road to start down--the idea of a president unsure of his own identity makes voters feel uneasy."
When Corey's cell phone started ringing, he turned it off.
LATER, AS COREY and Lexie sat on the deck, gazing at the ocean on a gray and misty day, he took her hand in his. "I'm already sorry to leave," he said.
She turned to him. "Those phone calls you ignored--"
"Were from Rustin. His message was: 'What, you want an engraved invitation to run? Marotta's given you an opening.'"
"Has he?"
"He's certainly given Republicans nervous about Christy reason to be nervous about him, especially after we got killed in the midterm elections last year. But the money people like Alex Rohr know the score. Right now, Price is whispering into their collective ear that Rob just has to say this stuff to make sure Christy doesn't screw things up." Corey gazed at the distant gray-white spume of the surf. "The problem with that is Christy. Price's idea is to unite the godly and the greedy behind Marotta. Christy's idea, I think, is to pit the godly against the greedy in order to draw me in. If I erode Marotta's support from the other side, Christy believes, he could actually win the nomination. What Christy doesn't believe is that I could actually win."
Lexie's tone was carefully dispassionate. "What do you believe, Corey?"
"That I'm sick of politics as usual. The Democrats are so bent on holding one interest group or another that they stand for absolutely nothing. They caved in on Iraq, afraid of being called wimps. Now the war's gone south, and instead of a coherent policy all they can offer is the stirring slogan 'We're not them,' and deadlines for withdrawal.
"Then there's us. A couple of inaugur
als ago I saw with utter clarity what my party had become. D.C. was awash in fundamentalists, of course--I saw one bus with pictures of Jesus and the president painted on its side. But most striking was a reception for our biggest donors. The place was jammed with fat, rich guys and their wives, the women wearing more fur than I'd seen this side of an old movie about the Visigoths invading Rome. There was so much smugness in the air I nearly choked.
"At the Inaugural Address, I occupied myself by watching them. When the president gave his riff about opportunity and diversity, they rarely applauded, though a lot of it was pretty good. But then he mentioned tax cuts." Corey turned to Lexie. "Suddenly they were on their feet, screaming like their team had won the Super Bowl. They'd come to Washington to celebrate their own greed."
Lexie smiled without humor. "And that surprised you?"
"The single-mindedness of it did. That's why they don't mind giving half the store to fundamentalists--if you're rich enough, they figure, whatever else happens in society won't affect you. At least until Al Qaeda eradicates the New York Stock Exchange.
"Hell, Price and Rohr even put Osama to work for them. In the last presidential election, our slogan came down to 'Vote for us or die.' But our foreign policy was run by the dumbest, most self-satisfied bunch of white guys who ever fucked up a savings and loan--except they fucked up an entire war. So now our slogan's 'Only we can save you from the consequences of our own disaster.'" Restless, Corey stood. "We've got to be about something other than fundamentalism, fear, greed, and nailing Mexicans at the border. And we need to offer young people a cause bigger than themselves, maybe even compulsory national service. The air force taught me that much."
Turning, Lexie gazed at their interlaced fingers, and then into his eyes. "You're running, aren't you?"
Corey jammed his hands in his pockets. "If the party nominates me," he answered, "I'll become president. There's no Democrat who can beat me, and the people who support Marotta know it. The question is whether they'd rather risk losing than risk what would happen if I won, and what they might do to stop me."
The Race Page 12