American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Hank Ucker gestured toward my Updike novel. “I’ve always enjoyed a good animal story.”

  In fact, Rabbit Redux was about a man in Pennsylvania whose marriage has foundered, but I did not correct him. Hank Ucker was shorter than Charlie, an inch or so taller than I was, with a receding hairline, intelligent and slightly squinty eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, a large upturned nose, and the beginning of a double chin. Although I assumed he, too, was about thirty, he was one of those men who looked like he’d been born middle-aged; indeed, over the decades to come, his appearance would change little, and in his fifties, he was almost baby-faced. “A fine speech on the part of our friend Blackwell,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Will you be working on his campaign?” I asked.

  Mock-oblivious, Hank Ucker said, “What campaign?”

  I hesitated.

  “I’m kidding,” he said. “Although we’re keeping a lid on it for now, the better to make a bang when it’s official. You haven’t been married before, have you?”

  I blinked at him.

  “I ask because you’re so beautiful,” he added, and the absence of any flirtatious energy behind the comment was striking. “I’d imagine a woman like you has many suitors.”

  “Are you married, Mr. Ucker?”

  “Hank, please, and yes, I am.” He held up the back of his left hand and wiggled his fingers, showing off a gold band. “The Mrs. and I just celebrated our fifth anniversary.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “It’s an institution I highly recommend, or maybe you’ve experienced firsthand its myriad pleasures?” He said this jovially—he was jovial, he was practically cherubic—but he also came across as entirely calculating. In a tone just as cheerful as his, I said, “I’m almost certain I haven’t been married,” and this was when Charlie came up behind Hank, setting both hands on Hank’s shoulders for a three-second massage.

  “Don’t listen to a word this man says,” Charlie said, and then I could tell that he was deciding whether to kiss me on the cheek, trying to figure out if it would be too forward or public. Instead, he took my hand and squeezed it. Slowly, not showily, I pulled my hand away from his.

  As the three of us began walking toward the front doors of the lodge, I said, “I enjoyed your speech.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Could have been better, could have been worse. Might’ve helped if the audience wasn’t comatose.” We still were just inside the lodge, and across the room, the club president was unplugging the microphone. I wondered, as Charlie did not seem to, if he could hear us.

  “This is all warm-up, Alice,” Hank said, pushing the lodge door open. “Think tonight times a thousand, and that ought to give you some idea.”

  Charlie elbowed me lightly. “Don’t bother, Ucks. She’s not easily impressed.”

  Standing in the parking lot, Hank said, “An honor meeting you, Alice.” He took my right hand and kissed the back of it. This was both aggressive and parodic, though I wasn’t sure what it was a parody of.

  Charlie tossed Hank a set of keys. “Talk in the morning, big guy?”

  “You know where to find me,” Hank said. He walked a few feet away, then turned back. “In case you’re worried, Alice, Harry and Janice get back together at the end.”

  I must have looked at him blankly, because he pointed toward the novel I still was carrying outside my purse and said, “Redux is a more mature work than Rabbit, Run, but frankly, I found both books self-indulgent.”

  “You’d know about self-indulgence, huh, Ucks?” Charlie said as Hank headed to his car. Then, as if something had just occurred to him, Charlie said to me, “Hey, you know what? Looks like I need a ride.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, I heard you don’t really live in Madison, so I’m not sure I’d know where to take you.”

  “Oh, that.” Charlie waved his arm through the air. “Obviously, you’ve got to live in the district you’re running in, so Hank found me a rental in Houghton. My place in Madison’s in my brother’s name.”

  “Very sneaky.”

  “Nah, pretty standard, actually. So there’s a burger joint between here and Beaver Dam that’s out of this world—you a girl that eats bacon cheeseburgers?”

  “This is sounding a lot like a date, Charlie.”

  He grinned. “Not at all. Just two adults of different sexes out on a summer evening, having a conversation.”

  As Charlie spoke, Hank was pulling out of the parking lot, and he honked once. “Your campaign manager or whatever he is just gave away the ending of my book,” I said. “Do you realize that?”

  Charlie made a fake-menacing expression. “Oh man, Hank’s in deep shit now. Tomorrow I’ll show him which way is up.”

  “Seriously,” I said. “There was no reason for that.”

  “He was just toying with you. He probably wants to talk to you about books—he’s superbly well read—but he’s too clumsy to say so. As for those of us less intellectually inclined—” Charlie took my hand again, and this time I let him. “How ’bout a burger?”

  THE RESTAURANT WAS called Red’s, and the pine walls were covered in a cheap shiny finish, the seats in our booth black vinyl, the table scratched with initials and declarations of love or enmity. “The onion rings here are stellar,” Charlie said. “If I get an order, are you in?”

  I generally steered clear of both onion rings and french fries—I watched my weight—but I nodded, knowing that when they came, I’d be too keyed up to eat more than a few.

  Our waitress was over fifty and wore a name tag that said EVELYN. “Thanks, sweetheart,” Charlie said as she set down two plastic glasses of ice water. After we’d ordered, he said, “You gonna make that burger rare like I like it? Full of flavor?”

  The waitress smiled indulgently. “I’ll tell the cook.”

  When she was gone, I said, “Do you know her?”

  “In these parts, Alice, I know everyone.” He was grinning his Charlie grin. “Okay, I’ve never seen her in my life. But I bet you dollars to doughnuts if I told her I was running for office, I could win her vote by the end of dinner.”

  “Then I guess it’s too bad you’re being secretive. Did you put Hank up to asking me if I’d been married before?”

  Charlie whistled. “Boy, he really cuts to the chase. I definitely didn’t put him up to anything of the kind.” I actually believed Charlie—he seemed to be someone who found his own flaws endearing and thus concealed nothing. “I imagine he was vetting you to see if you’re acceptable to date a congressional candidate. He doesn’t understand that the question is whether I’m good enough to date you. I probably should have warned you about him—he’s not a master of subtlety, but honest to God, he’s absolutely brilliant. Twenty-seven years old, graduated first in his law school class at UW, and the guy was weaned on the Wisconsin Republican Party. You can’t imagine anyone more devoted. He started interning when he was sixteen, seventeen, and after he graduated college Phi Beta Kappa, he became an assistant to my dad.”

  “Are you two friends?”

  “He’s not who I call to have a beer with, and that’s only partly because he’s a teetotaler. But we’ve begun to log a lot of hours together, and he holds up. He’s a quality guy, and the sharpest mind. I’ll bring in the big guns as the race heats up, but I’m not sure there’s a more talented strategist out there than Ucks. He’s spectacular at thinking through the big picture, anticipating attacks from the other side—I’ll be sure to get a lot of nepotism crap, and his thing is, address it and move on. We control the agenda.”

  The waitress brought our beers—Charlie had ordered a Miller, so I had, too—and Charlie knocked his bottle toward mine. “Cheers.”

  “So what are the other questions that would determine whether or not I’m fit to go out with a congressional candidate?” I asked. “Hypothetically, of course.”

  He took a long sip of beer. “There’s the problem of your party affiliation.” He still seemed mischievous, though, not rea
lly serious. “Why are you a Democrat, anyway? I mean, Jimmy Carter—how can you stand that peanut-growing goofball?”

  “He compares pretty favorably to Nixon.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Nixon is out of the picture. New day, new order.”

  “I think it’s standard for public school teachers to be Democrats,” I said. “You’d be surprised how many of my students have to get free lunches.”

  “I assume these are the kids of the black welfare mothers moving in from Chicago?”

  “That doesn’t seem like a very nice way to put it.”

  “You just have a soft heart,” Charlie said. “That’s why you think you’re a Dem. You’ll get older, come into some money, and see where you stand then.”

  “Aren’t we the same age?”

  “But I grew up around all this. I’ve been thinking about it longer.”

  “I’m not a Democrat because I haven’t thought about the issues,” I said. “I’m a Democrat because I have.”

  “Holy cats, woman, you ever thought of writing speeches? You’re not convincing me, but a lot of people would eat that shit up. Pardon my French.”

  “You know, I grew up in Riley, right near Houghton,” I said. “Houghton High was our rival. So if you need to know anything about the place you allegedly live, I might be able to help you, but only if you quit mocking my political party.”

  “In that case, I don’t have to explain to you why I live there in name only,” he said. “I go once a week, collect mail, make sure a raccoon hasn’t destroyed the place, and get the hell back out of Dodge.”

  “If it’s so awful, you could have picked somewhere else.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Sixth District extends up to Appleton, but we have factories in the north, so that’s taken care of. Down south is Alvin Wincek’s stronghold, where we gotta focus. See, you’re lucky you grew up in Riley instead of Houghton—Meersman is your rep, right? There’s a good Republican team player for you, Bud Meersman.”

  “I’ve never voted in Riley,” I said. “The first time I was eligible was in ’68, and I registered in Madison.”

  “Please don’t say you voted for Humphrey.”

  “Charlie, I’m a Democrat,” I said. “Of course I did.”

  “It’s people like you that cost my dad the race,” Charlie said, and though there were several reasons I could have pointed to that Governor Blackwell hadn’t been elected president in ’68—he hadn’t even been one of the final three Republican candidates—it did not seem that Charlie was completely kidding.

  The waitress appeared carrying red oval plastic baskets, the food nestled inside them in waxed paper. “You see if that’s to your liking,” she said, and Charlie replied, “I’m sure it will be, Miss Evelyn.”

  As I sliced my burger in half, I said, “So why’d you go to school in the East?”

  “Are you referring to my Ivy League education?” He pronounced the words in a mincing way. “Believe me, it’s worse than Princeton and Penn. First, I was shipped off to boarding school—a little place called Exeter that’s basically a breeding ground for snobs. It’s in New Hampshire, my mother grew up in Boston, and she’s still enamored with the East Coast way of life—you can take the girl out of Massachusetts, et cetera, et cetera. So we all did our time at Exeter, then four years at Old Nassau, as the cognoscenti call Princeton, then Wharton. I made some terrific friends, and I did learn a thing or two in spite of my best efforts, but make no mistake, New England trust-funders are not my people. It’s all very Mimsy, won’t you pass the gin and tonic, very cold and fake. You go to one of their weddings—I was a groomsman for a fellow from New Canaan—and it’s the most uptight affair this side of a funeral. That ain’t my style.”

  “But if you were the son of the governor, I’d think you grew up belonging to the Madison Country Club and all that.”

  Charlie scoffed. “The Madison Country Club is for parvenus, sweetheart. The Maronee Country Club is where those in the know belong. It’s north of Milwaukee.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “What?” His expression was defensive but lightheartedly so, how he might have looked if he’d been accused of eating the last cookie in the jar.

  “Listen to yourself,” I said. “Forget your classmates at Princeton—you’re the snob.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with separating the wheat from the chaff, and I’m not saying on an economic basis. That’s the Ivy League mentality—did your daddy join such-and-such eating club, was your grandma a DAR? Those are just labels. But surely you don’t deny that some people are quality and some aren’t.”

  “I have no idea what you even mean by that.” I think I might have turned against him in that moment, at least a little and maybe more, but he furrowed his brow, grinned, and said, “Yeah, neither do I.”

  He took a bite of his burger. Unlike me, he had not cut it in half but held the bun with both hands, and he was plowing through it with alacrity. “I suppose I’m a hypocrite like anyone else,” he said. “But to give a guy a split personality, nothing compares to having your dad become governor when you’re in eighth grade. I’m not complaining, mind you. I couldn’t be prouder of him. But you’re royalty at public events, you’re a bull’s-eye target in the locker room, then you go away to boarding school, and when people hear you’re from Wisconsin, they think you were raised in a barn. My first week at Exeter, I had a fellow ask me, I kid you not, if I’d grown up with electricity. Now, the prejudice I faced ultimately bolstered my pride in where I come from and who I am, but that said, am I about to join a bowling team with Bob the mechanic? Probably not.” He leered. “At least not until I’ve officially declared my candidacy and a photographer from The Houghton Gazette is there to document it. Really, though—” He leaned forward. “I’m not an elitist. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure what to believe.”

  A look of sincere worry crossed his face, and his sincerity won me back. I was pretty sure Charlie’s views were not unlike those of the other men who’d been at the Hickens’ barbecue. The difference was that Charlie was so open about his. I said, “I bet that when you were a tormented eighth-grade boy, you were awfully cute.”

  His grin reappeared immediately. “Damn straight I was. How’s that burger working out for you?”

  “It’s delicious.” He’d polished his off, and I wasn’t yet through my first half.

  “I have an idea,” Charlie said. “It just occurred to me. You want to hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll go settle the tab. Then we head back to Madison—I’m happy to drive. We go to your apartment, we take off all our clothes, we get in bed, and I show you that Republicans do know a little something about a little something.” He paused. “After you’re finished eating, of course.”

  Had I expressed shock or distaste, it would have been disingenuous—enough had happened in my life already that was far more shocking and distasteful than a sexual proposition. And besides, he’d sounded so boyish, so sweet, even. Then, too, I suppose I might have feigned offense not because I really was offended but because I wanted him to think I was, for propriety’s sake. But this seemed silly. I was thirty-one. To hell with my concerns about leapfrogging over the stages of acquaintanceship, to hell with making an argument—the argument against dating Charlie—that I didn’t want to win. No, I wasn’t completely certain about him, and yes, this would strain my friendship with Dena. But the responsibility and caution that I’d tried to employ for so long—since the accident, though in some ways even before that—hadn’t served me well, especially lately. Plus, Charlie was an incredibly handsome man. I wanted to take off all my clothes and climb in bed with him.

  I set down my cheeseburger. “I’m finished eating.”

  BACK AT MY apartment, Pierre and Mr. Sneeze were reclining on my bed, and crouching near them was the baby rabbit from The Runaway Bunny, whom I’d outfitted in fish garb. (The mother rabbit was in the living room, awaiting her fish
ing rod and waders.) I carefully set the figures on the floor by the wall, and when I turned around, Charlie was shirtless and unfastening his pants. “What?” he said. “Did you think I was kidding?”

  “Let me at least put on a record.” As I walked past him, I swatted at the side of his head without making contact, though I did note (subtly, I hoped) that his bare chest was muscular, tan, and had some but not too much light brown hair. In the living room, I first reached for a John Denver album, then remembered Denver had supported President Carter. I imagined Charlie might think I was trying to make a point and instead put on Stevie Wonder.

  A short hall led from the living room to my bedroom, and as I headed back down it, Charlie stood completely naked in the bedroom doorway, his arms folded across his chest, his grin huge. As I approached, he unfolded his arms, opened them, and took me in, he rubbed my back and kissed the top of my head, and in return, I kissed his bare shoulder—it was dotted with beige freckles—and we found each other’s mouths, then each other’s tongues, and his penis flicked toward me a few times before hardening into an erection. It is a pleasantly uneven thing to embrace a man while he is naked and you are clothed, and I could smell his skin, I could taste the beer from dinner, and I was the one who lifted my shirt above my head and let it drop on the floor. He leaned forward and buried his face in my breasts; he didn’t unfasten my bra but simply pushed down the cups.

  Soon all my clothes were off, too, we were rolling on the bed, I’d wrapped my legs around him, and I took his erection in my hand and guided him into me, and it felt so elemental, so necessary, for us to be joined like this and then it was like awakening abruptly, and I gripped his arms and said, “Wait, my diaphragm is in the—”

  “No, I have protection. We’re fine.” It was in his wallet, which was inside his pants on the floor, and as I watched him retrieve the condom, I was already too dazed to feel self-conscious about staring. His butt was small in the way that I always forgot a lot of men’s were; how could he possibly be an unscrupulous politician with such a cute little butt? Back in bed, he knelt on the mattress—I was lying flat, and he was above me—and perhaps it sounds crude to say that this was the moment I knew I could love him, when I saw his penis. With men in my past, the penis had seemed to me an odd creature, both comic and forlorn. But I felt a great devotion to Charlie when I first got a look at his, the ruddy-hued upward-pointing shaft, its swollen veins and cap-like tip. All of it was so completely of him, and I felt how there was no part of his body I wouldn’t want to touch, no way I wouldn’t allow him to touch me.