#EricEllsworthForPresident
Without thinking, Eric gave a joyous leap and threw his phone high in the air. He knew he would catch it. As it came down, he swiped it with one hand. But he would have to be more careful, he thought; people can’t think you’re reckless when you’re running for president. He looked around and breathed a sigh of relief. No one had seen him except a solitary crow perched on a streetlight. Who throws a seven-hundred-dollar phone? The person who is a hundred percent sure, that’s who.
It was a warm, end-of-summer day in Washington, DC, and Eric Ellsworth felt like he was twenty-five again. Henry had told him the effects would take some getting used to, an adjustment period, but he could hardly think why. He felt like he was flying. #EricEllsworthForPresident wasn’t the only thing going well in his life. He’d made some investments in a military contracting company, Sonintech, that were paying off surprisingly well. Apparently they had some big breakthrough in technology? Biochem? It wasn’t clear. It was a quiet company, not much marketing but steady earnings in military contracts. That he could invest in the company privately despite being on the Armed Services Committee was a wonderfully lucrative loophole. Even though he’d been a senator for six years, it still amazed him that some things were not illegal. Despite exposé after exposé, no strict legislation challenged the lawmakers’ ability to invest privately, even in companies directly affected by the legislation they were writing. This country was too in love with wealth to put an end to real insider trading, and Eric was thankful for that. If they wanted a presidential candidate who wasn’t investing in the same markets he or she influenced, they would have to look on another planet. Certainly, none of his known opponents would question him on his private investments. They wouldn’t want to be questioned on theirs.
But would any of them question what Henry had offered him? That was more complicated. Of course, it would never come to light; how could it? It was not something even the tabloids would be willing to cover. Eric lived such a normal life; it would seem insane to accuse him of dabbling in the occult. And he was sure that Henry had an effective way of staying out of the papers. Actually, now that he thought about it, it had been Henry who had recommended Sonintech. The owner was Henry’s friend, a friend Eric had never met. He had only met a few of Henry’s friends, but every one of them could be instrumental in his election. He was flattered to be counted among them. He tried to put out of his head the question of why he was counted among them.
He strode through the parking garage and clicked open the door of his little black sedan. It was a one-meeting day. He’d scheduled a light day because he’d thought he’d be tired from the trip, but nothing could be further from the truth. The way he felt now, he had enough energy to get through a hundred meetings. Still, he wasn’t sorry to have the afternoon off. As he pulled out onto Interstate 66, he was humming a little tune to himself. He realized, with some embarrassment, that it was “Hail to the Chief,” and he tried to nonchalantly change it to “God Bless America” even though no one was listening. He headed west toward his house in Sterling. The flat, lush, green, semi-swampland of DC transitioned to the low rolling hills of Northern Virginia. He noticed that he was running out of gas. He felt so good, it almost surprised him, but then a voice in his head said, Really? You expected Henry to fill up your tank with gas from across the country? And yet Eric couldn’t quite shake the feeling that if Henry wanted to, Henry could.
When Eric had gotten that first phone call from Henry, he could hardly believe it. There on the other end of the line was a calm, serious voice telling Eric that he could help him run for the presidency. Eric thought that was twenty years away. He would have hung up the phone except for that strange forewarning. He had been in the elevator with Senator Kelsey, a senior leader whose clout you had to appreciate, even if you didn’t admire his bullish personality. They had only spoken a few times outside of the regular Washington small talk. Kelsey got into the “members only” elevator and said to him, “Good, I was looking for you, Ellsworth. Whatever you do, take my next phone call.” The elevator dinged the next floor and Kelsey strode out as soon as the doors opened, without looking at Eric. Eric had been too surprised to respond. That afternoon, the call from Henry was a transfer from Kelsey’s office. Still, Eric almost didn’t meet with Henry. It just seemed too improbable. How could someone have that kind of wealth and power and yet Eric had never heard of him? Eric had been a fool to doubt. The second he had taken Henry up on the offer of a quiet drink, his approval ratings began to rise. He had gotten little pieces of national attention. Then there was that article about him in Forbes. He could see the cover clearly in his mind—“Can This Guy Save Congress?”—with a picture of him, Eric, smiling. No doubt about it; he looked good on the cover of a magazine.
He felt, yes, like he was flying. That was the only way to describe it. He couldn’t imagine anything going wrong today, on a day after he’d met with Henry. This was only their second meeting, but hadn’t the first one yielded the cover of Forbes? And yet he had a nagging suspicion. Maybe it was his Puritan roots. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Anyone is allowed to have a drink with a wealthy benefactor. But there was surprisingly little about Henry anywhere on the internet. He hadn’t questioned Kelsey; he didn’t want to seem ungrateful. But if Henry was in fact someone he didn’t want to be associated with? No one would know he had been there. And maybe that knowledge itself was the source of the nagging guilt. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was being watched or followed. He kept looking over his shoulder for the telltale signs of reporters. Nothing. He stopped at a gas station, filled the tank, and went in to buy a bottle of water. His eyes were irresistibly drawn to the scratch lottery cards. He had never felt so lucky. He bought two.
“Senator?” said a low voice.
Eric jumped. He hadn’t even realized there was a man behind him in line. The man was tall, athletic, wearing a faded baseball cap.
The gas station owner looked at the two men from his perch behind the counter. He recognized the senator. The other man, he thought, looked suspicious. It was almost as though the senator was clear and the other man was blurry. He blinked at them, but the effect was the same. He glanced up at the security cameras, as though they could somehow tell him about the stranger. The senator didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.
“Yes, what can I do for you?” Eric turned around with his campaign-winning smile.
“You look lucky today, sir,” said the man in the cap, gesturing to the cards. “I hope you win.”
Eric couldn’t resist the opportunity to gain a vote. He handed the man one of his scratch cards. “Let’s hope we’re both lucky today. ” He smiled.
The man took the card but returned no expression. If anything, it looked as if he was searching Eric’s face, maybe even smelling him? His head moved slightly side to side, eyes half closed under the brim of his cap. But Eric was too cheerful to let one strange interaction affect his mood. There were a lot of peculiar people around Washington. Eric walked back to his car whistling. He didn’t notice that the man barely looked at the card. Eric scratched his own. It was a ten-dollar winner. He paused, but decided he would redeem it next time. He got into his car and pulled away. The man in the baseball cap held his nose up to the wind appreciatively, and then disappeared behind the gas station. The station owner watched him out the window, looked at the parking lot. He realized the man in the baseball cap had no car. This was a highway station. The gas station owner grabbed his handgun from the drawer, tucked it in his pocket, and walked behind the building. He didn’t like the look of that guy. What look? He couldn’t remember a single distinguishing characteristic except the faded cap. The senator, on the other hand, looked like a man you would vote for. The station owner rounded the corner of his building and stopped, surprised. No one was there. All he could see was a large crow flying away. Just to be sure, he cautiously approached the dumpster, gun drawn beneath his jacket. There was the card, still unscratched. He pi
cked it up and brought it back inside. It was not a winner.
Sarah Ellsworth stood in her living room, her feet rooted to the ground, her chest heaving. Her breath was coming in short bursts as though her anger had depleted the oxygen in the room. She stared at the fresh vacuum lines in the carpet. Fresh vacuum lines in a beige carpet, what a ridiculous life! But she couldn’t see a way out. She had reached the point where even in her own head she called herself “The Senator’s Wife.”
She had made herself perfect, even perfect at being imperfect. Last year she admitted with casual intimacy to a large crowd at a campaign fundraiser that she struggled with browning the thanksgiving turkey, giving them a wink. When she married Eric she had believed in him, or at least agreed with him, but now? Could she stand next to him, knowing what he had done, for the next four years? Eight years? Forever? Because it would feel like forever. Or could she mire him in a messy divorce just as he was on the verge of every man’s dream? Was it a man’s dream? Perhaps it was the dream of a child. And he was like a child, thinking only of his own desires. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to be her president. But she had married him. She turned the receipt over again in her hand, for the hundredth time.
He had been in LA.
She retraced their conversation. He said he was going to meet with some possible big contributors to his campaign, his upcoming campaign, in Ohio. If those contributors were really in LA, why not tell her he was going to LA? Because he was meeting her, of course. He was meeting the woman that he had confessed to having an affair with a year ago. He had met her in LA, at a fundraising event. He had an affair for six months and then told Sarah about it on her birthday in a poorly timed attack of guilty repentance. He stopped the affair, or so he said. At least he had chosen someone with some sense of propriety. There had been no leak, no public embarrassment. Sarah knew she could say nothing. Wasn’t she also dependent on his career? Apparently, the other woman had similar constraints, a movie star? Sarah had never asked. It made her blood pressure rise just thinking about it.
Their house was quiet, their perfect, stupid, stinking house. Afternoon light poured in the windows; birds chirped. A large and rather precocious crow was stalking the bird feeder, hanging on one side of it, then the other. The feeder swung wildly under the large bird’s weight, and the other birds flew around, agitated. She hated Eric Ellsworth. Why had she taken his rotten, cheating name? She thought the crow at the feeder was looking at her a little too intently. Stay sane, she thought.
She heard Eric’s car drive into the driveway and sucked in a deep breath. His footsteps were light. He was whistling. He sounded happy. She heard him hang up his coat, put down his keys.
She stayed where she was in the living room, transfixed in the moment before their inevitable fight. He was magnificent, she thought, especially since he had returned from his trip. There was something about him. He was glowing, magnanimous. They had made love last night when he returned. How could he, when he’d been in LA with another woman? How could he even look at her, much less touch her? She thought she could tear out his heart with her fingernails, or maybe her own heart. Would he regret it if he found her lying on that clean, vacuum-striped carpet with her heart in her hand? Would he just cover up her suicide, or play the sympathy card and use the tragedy in his election? Would he pretend it wasn’t his lying, cheating ways that drove her to it? Was there ever a man in the world who hadn’t had an affair? They run statistics on these kinds of things. But the statistics can’t be right. She would lie about it to anyone.
He rounded the corner of the living room and stopped when he saw her there, breathing, staring at him.
“Sarah?” he said tentatively.
“I don’t go through your pockets,” she started, almost whispering, her breath was so labored. “I don’t look at your phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
There was a moment of silence between them and then she blurted out, “You didn’t come back from Ohio yesterday!”
“Oh, no.” He looked terribly guilty.
“No! No you weren’t in Ohio! What were you doing in LA? You bought-” she looked at the receipt even though she had memorized it. “You bought a water bottle in LA yesterday.”
“Honey, you think I-? It’s not what you think!”
“What do I think?”
“I assume you think that I was…” here he paused, struggling to get the words out. “…with, with another, with a woman. But I assure you I was not. She doesn’t…she doesn’t live there anymore anyway.” He hurried past that thought as her eyes started to smolder. “I was meeting a donor. It’s just, I said Ohio because this donor doesn’t want to be associated with me yet. He is a very private person.”
“So private that you had to lie to me?”
“Sarah, I’m sorry. I lied to everyone; it was just easier to lie to you too in case you talked to someone about where I was. I shouldn’t have. I just did to make it easier. This is big money. This is really, really big money. And this is not a guy who wants everyone in the world to know his business.”
“Oh? What kind of business is that?”
“Sarah.”
“Secret business?”
“Please, honey,” he pleaded.
“Right, it sounds like this guy is a pillar of society.”
“Sarah, don’t make assumptions.”
“So you’re not having an affair again, you’re just taking donations now from Al Capone?”
He gave her a look that said she almost wasn’t wrong. “Not, not like that.” He knit his eyebrows. What idiot keeps a cash receipt? he thought.
“Who is this donor?”
He took a deep breath. “I’d rather not tell you.”
“Then I will walk right out that door.” Sarah gestured to the foyer. She felt his panic, and she liked it. “Need I remind you how a pending divorce would affect your candidacy?”
“What kind of threat is that?” He tried to sound calm, but the pitch of his voice started to rise.
“The kind you will listen to! The kind that threatens the only thing that’s important to you anymore.”
“Sarah, that’s not fair. You are important to me.” He was not lying, but partly, yes, their marriage was important to him because it was important to his career. “I have made mistakes. But I have been honest with you about them. Yesterday, I was meeting a donor.”
“Eric, you need to give me a reason to believe you, pronto, and that better start with the name of this gangster who’s funding your campaign.”
There was a moment of silence. Even the birds outside seemed still.
Eric thought about lying, making up a name, but if she found out…she was right. She could ruin everything. She might be the one person in the world who could most easily ruin everything. Yet Henry had been cagey, so secretive about their relationship. Eric didn’t really know what he did, where the money came from. He weighed them against each other in his mind. But Sarah was right. She could ruin him. Finally, Eric sighed and said, “Henry. Henry Halstead.”
He couldn’t tell from her look whether she believed him or not.
“Sarah please don’t….” He was about to say, don’t look him up, but realized how that would sound to her.
“Don’t what?”
“Believe me, please. At least believe me when I’m telling the truth.”
The set of her jaw could have brought on an ice age. She left the room.
As soon as he was alone, Eric pulled out the phone that Henry used to communicate with him. He texted, “Had to tell my wife your name.”
He followed up quickly with, “Nothing else.” Sweat broke out on his brow. The phone felt slippery in his hand. He put it in his pocket. He couldn’t just stand there and wait for a response for hours. That would be crazy.
It buzzed almost immediately and he yanked it out, typed in his unlock code. The response surprised him. “That shouldn’t be a problem. Make sure you bring her to New York. It’s time I met your
wife.”