“Alice doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve done this for you,” he said, clutching her elbow in an ancient way. “All my life I’ve worked for you, Molly.” He said her name, but he was looking at me. I hadn’t wanted what he was determined to give me and this was my punishment and his retribution.
“This is your house,” he told Molly again.
He’d gotten his daughter back; whether she loved him or not didn’t matter. He could pretend, and he could picture her here when he was dead. She was not looking for inspiration, but maybe what she felt was owed her. I looked back at Ray’s, but he’d gone inside. In the morning, he’d lock the windows and pull the shades, and the Tillman place would be empty again, and anyone who wanted to sit on the deck and search the view for something they’d never find was welcome to come. I’d do it a couple of time myself most likely, but now August was ready to go home, and he said his daughter would take him.
Not everyone could say they had slept with a felon. Not that the Mayor was a felon back then—or even convicted yet—but still, he’d always been a criminal in Francine’s mind. Since his trial began, she’d taken to watching it every morning before work on the tiny television on the kitchen counter. The June sun fell singular and admiringly on the Mayor who trotted up the courtroom steps, and she noted how porcine he’d gotten in the eighteen years since they’d known each other. Back then in his apartment on Pratt Street, he had preened, sleek and invincible, and she’d been a little awed by him. Now each day she catalogued the sad evidence of age and corruption on his body; the excess of double chin, the money-stuffed bags under his dark and cautious gaze, the infantile white of his scalp where the hair had thinned.
“He’ll walk,” Sanford announced, moving from the counter where he’d also been watching the morning procession of defendants. “Criminal, thug, intimidator. Dag’s always gotten away with it, and he always will. This is his city, after all.”
Her husband’s certainty irked Francine. It wasn’t that Sanford was wrong about the Mayor—she preferred Mayor to the dopey nickname Dag, short for Albert—but his pronouncement provoked in her an unsettling feeling of protectiveness for the man. Somewhere in the grand courthouse, there was a ninety-seven count indictment with the Mayor’s name written all over it. She thought of the document, the history of a public man converted to twenty-five pounds of damning heft, as just slightly more than the combined birth weights of her three children, slightly less than the dog who spent her winding-down days twitching under the deck. The Mayor was charged with running a criminal enterprise out of City Hall. The accusation was like a game, as though he’d been caught cheating at Monopoly, siphoning pastel-colored money from the bank to buy Park Place, juggling hotels in his pocket. He could shrug it off yet.
She wished she could tell Sanford that she’d seen fear and contrition in the Mayor’s expression when he looked out of the television and directly at her, but it would have been a lie on several counts. She’d really only seen the usual arrogance there, a curl of the almost girlish lips, and the knowledge that he could still get a good seat in any restaurant no matter what happened. And, of course, the Mayor hadn’t looked at her at all, as Sanford might have pointed out unnecessarily, but only at his own fearsome reflection in the television cameras. Instead, she was the one trying to penetrate the impossible distance, hoping to find what had once drawn her to the man.
“I’ll give you a lift to work,” Sanford called from the deck where he’d been filling the dog’s water bowl. The Mayor disappeared into the courthouse, and Francine turned off the television.
They lived in a medium-size city, and though it often seemed much smaller, it had taken until last year to actually come face to face again with the Mayor. She’d been in the same room with him before, of course, along with hundreds of other people in ballroom fundraisers for cancer or the shrinking wet-lands, and even at the opening of the municipal skating rink where she’d watched as her son nearly had his hand yanked off by the Mayor’s vigorous shaking of it. But this time it had been at the Mayor’s elegant house during a May fundraiser for the gay men’s health center on whose board Sanford, a shrink, sat. The party was set up in the garden, but she and Sanford had gone inside to snoop. They hadn’t voted for the Mayor and so felt fine about what they were about to do; political dis-alliance justified such an honorable American tradition. Sanford goaded Francine’s curiosity about the Mayor because he assumed it was the same as his and all good citizens; simply, who the hell is this person? In her sudden surge of nerves, being so close again to the man she’d slept with a long time ago, she twisted the silk scarf around her neck, strangled what was left of her better will, and moved forward.
The richly lit public rooms were crowded with leather furniture, brass lamps, spiky plants, and glass decanters of various golden liquors. To Francine the place looked like a set. Shelves displayed an array of cheap tokens given to the Mayor by anyone hoping to do business with him. There were miniature beer steins, origami boxes, the key to another metropolis, a baseball cap preserved in a Plexiglas coffin. Nothing you couldn’t buy yourself in a souvenir shop.
In a minute, they’d found what they weren’t supposed to—the Mayor’s private living room. It was down several steps, relegated to basement status. The lighting was dim and would cast no blame, but still revealed a filthy beige carpet underfoot, a thousand shoes wiped dismissively on it. A distressed couch faced a television, and a signed poster of the Super Bowl champs of a decade earlier hung over the fireplace which held a listing pile of magazines. The room was so reminiscent of the Mayor’s old apartment, so discouragingly the same after all these powerful, commanding years that it made Francine sigh with disappointment—for him and for her. Sanford grinned, nodded, and misunderstood her. Wow, he mouthed as though he’d come across something blinding, yes.
What, she wondered, had they stupidly thought they might discover here? Still, she played along with her husband and sniggered about the secret life of the emperor—open cans of Diet Coke and full ashtrays—realizing with a kind of terrifying amusement that she could have been Mrs. Mayor. Not really, not fucking likely actually, but still within the widest realm of possibility. It could have been her instead of the real Mrs. Mayor who was now the ex and mostly forgotten, living in another state with the lone kid who had a substance abuse problem. The Mayor was a bachelor again, always seen in the company of a drink, a woman, and the rumor that he’d even screwed the six-foot ostrich-necked wife of the college president. He liked them tall. Francine had been part of that pattern, albeit before it was firmly established; she had three inches on the Mayor. He’d measured once in bed, leveling his head with hers while his feet came to her anklebones.
Francine crossed the floor towards where she assumed the bedroom was, the layout of her city’s historic homes being her thing. Behind her, Sanford suggested they’d gone far enough, that their wandering was wandering into something else, and shouldn’t they get something to eat before it was all gone? Two glasses of wine swirled in her chest beneath the silk and perfume, giving her the confidence to be nosing around, and she ignored him. After all, she’d had the Mayor in her mouth more than once, and if that didn’t give her the right to witness now his restless blankets, his pillow indented by his scheming head, the sour bathrobe balled on the floor, then nothing did. She recalled how the Mayor had liked to look at her naked and touch his erection which rose so ambitiously, how they’d both been turned on by their own part in the ritual. It wasn’t thinking about Dag’s hard-on now that made her shiver in discomfort, but a sudden understanding of the humbling nature of longing and that human instant that could make even the most powerful man fall to his knees.
“Francine,” Sanford hissed. “Come on. Even he deserves some privacy.”
But the Mayor’s life was public, though how bereft of contentment and consolation he was in private, she saw. Francine’s pulse beat wildly. She considered telling Sanford that she’d slept with the Mayor way back when, had a thing with him, but then she would have to explain why she’d never told him before. To say that it was a different time in her life was pious and inadequate. Sanford would be speechless,