You Think It, I’ll Say It
Eligible
Sisterland
American Wife
The Man of My Dreams
Prep
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Curtis Sittenfeld 2018
Cover design: cabinlondon.co.uk
Curtis Sittenfeld has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The following stories in this collection have been previously published, sometimes in a different form: ‘The Nominee’ in Esquire (US), ‘Gender Studies’ and ‘The Prairie Wife’ in the New Yorker and ‘Bad Latch’ in the Washington Post Magazine. In addition, ‘A Regular Couple’ was published as a Kindle Single in partnership with the Atlantic, and ‘Volunteers Are Shining Stars’ was published in the anthology This Is Not Chick Lit.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473552623
ISBN 9780857525383
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For
Susanna Daniel,
Emily Miller,
and Sheena MJ Cook—
my fellow writers and confidantes
THE JOURNALIST WAS born in 1964, which is to say she’s seventeen years younger than I am. She has, starting in 1992, interviewed me several dozen times—she was at The San Francisco Chronicle when I met her, then moved to The Washington Post, and for the last eight years has been at The New York Times—and while we aren’t friends, she reminds me of a neighbor or cousin; we didn’t exactly choose each other, but we are ineluctably part of each other’s lives.
What I appreciate about her is the blazing, undeniable intelligence that manifests itself in her ability, in our conversations, to recall minutiae from a transportation bill I sponsored in the Senate, or a 1994 speech I gave in Stockholm as First Lady; in her observations, appearing in her articles, of the perfect colorful detail from a state fair or pancake breakfast that I myself, sitting amidst it, missed; and in her snapping, spontaneous sense of humor. Once, at a signing ceremony for a greenhouse-gas-emissions law, when the president inadvertently referred to “hair pollution” instead of “air pollution,” my eyes landed on the journalist’s, and I had to look away and bite my tongue. When we spoke after the ceremony, she began by saying, “Like when you spill conditioner in the shower?” and I replied, “I was actually thinking about a certain perm I got in the mid-eighties.”
The truth is that when she interviews me, I feel an alertness, a welcome kind of challenge, that’s deeply satisfying. I’ve sometimes thought that the reason people who aren’t particularly bright don’t care for people who are is the hunch among the former that the latter speak to one another in code. Which we do: brain to brain, with an explanation-dispensing briskness, a shared understanding of subtext. I would never publicly admit this, least of all to her, but I believe the journalist is worthy of interviewing me in a way many kinder reporters are not.
What I care for least about the journalist is the sense of entitlement she demonstrates in small and large ways. Small: I never witness it, but according to my staff, she’s a notorious pain about the logistics we’ve arranged for the press corps in a manner no print journalist from anywhere other than The Times would dare to be; she complains about which hotel room she’s been assigned, or where she’s sitting on the plane or bus. Large: I believe she’s quite sexist and either is blind to it or, more likely, sees herself as impervious, what with her fancy education, her cynicism, and her job at the cultural nexus of our post-everything society. Over and over, year in and year out, she asks me questions she’d never ask a man running for public office, a man elected to public office, a male senator or secretary of state or presidential candidate: Who designed the pantsuit I wore to the State of the Union? How has my husband influenced my foreign-policy views, stance on minimum wage, and opinion of vegans? Do I consider my marriage to be a good one? Is the country ready for a president who’s also a grandmother? And always—always—some variation on this: Why do so many voters, even ones who admire my record, have difficulty connecting with me? Why do the American people find me fundamentally unlikable?
The journalist cushions her rhetoric. She says, Some people say … or There’s concern that …, as if she is a mere observer of the questions’ perpetuation. She then muses over the questions, and my responses, in her articles, which have become longer, less newsy, and more leisurely and reflective as she has achieved greater professional success. Granted, it is her editors who conjure the headlines and decide upon the accompanying art: a caricature of me with eyes and mouth opened so widely I look deranged, possibly about to devour a small child; or a photograph shot close up then magnified in such a way that every line on my face is a ravine, even beneath a visibly massive quantity of powdery foundation. However, I hold the journalist accountable for steering the packaging. The words in the headlines are someone else’s, but it is she who has written the original sentences resulting in a magazine cover asking (with prominent bags beneath my eyes, no less), FRONTRUNNER FATIGUE?
At this point, I expect to be burned by the journalist. No matter how friendly our encounter, how personal, even, I will at best be irritated by what she writes. Years ago, when her child was a toddler, I found myself describing the bribing-with-Skittles method of toilet-training I’d used with my own daughter; a few days later, I read the journalist’s borderline defamatory article about the controversial, and unprofitable, real-estate investments my husband and I had made in the late seventies. I might be irritated while recognizing that a piece does more harm than good, or I might be irritated and know it will lose me votes. Nevertheless, right now, in this moment, in July 2016, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, deep in the bowels of the Wells Fargo Center, in the minutes before I go onstage, she—the journalist—and the photographer accompanying her are the only media in the greenroom. My husband is here, our daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren, their nanny, many members of my campaign staff—my political director and communications director and media consultant and chief strategist, a handful of policy advisors—as well as my closest friends, among them my college roommate and the woman who was the second female partner at the law firm where, in 1979, I became the first. And of course our own photographer and videographer are here, the ones who chronicle the version of the narrative I not only prefer but believe to be true. Apart from the journalist and her photographer, however, there is no press.
“Madam Secretary,” the journalist says, “how are you feeling?”
“I feel great,” I say. When I smile—my smile, of course, has been compared to that of a vulture and a hag, that of Lady Macbeth and Cruella de Vil and Joker from Batman—she smiles back.
“You’ve talked about this ad nauseam, obviously,” the journalist says, “but now that it’s really, officially happening—what’s it like to be the first major party female nominee for president of the United States of America?”
I feel the way you felt at your high school graduation, I think. It’s anticlimactic. We’ve been marking time, waiting for this, since April 2015, right? Or since 2007? Or perhaps since 1992 or 1969 or 1789? But I also know some specific instant tonight will seize me, will catch me off-guard in spite of myself, and I’ll be struck by the enormity of the situation and probably tear up, thereby launching a thousand articles about gender and crying.
Aloud I say, “I’ve been preparing for this moment for my entire life. I’m confident, I’m humbled, and I’m very optimistic about the future of our country.”
In 2002, when I was a senator and the journalist was at The Washington Post, she interviewed me in a hotel suite in San Francisco on a day on which I’d first traveled to meet the survivors of a tornado in Oklahoma and would spend the evening at a million-dollar fundraising dinner in Pacific Heights. In the suite’s living room, we sat facing each other in armchairs a few feet apart; her recorder was set on a small round glass table to my left. Also in the room were my deputy chief of staff and two aides. My Secret Service agents stood outside the suite’s exterior door.
The journalist has dark, short hair, and both of us were wearing pantsuits, mine navy and hers maroon (Ralph Lauren, though I’m speaking only for myself here). We’d been talking for about ten minutes, and my communications director had promised the journalist fifteen more, though I was prepared to go to twenty or even twentyfive.
“With regard to recent comments made by your colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee—” she began, and then her torso pitched forward and she vomited partly onto her lap, partly onto the floor, and partly onto my lap. Although it happened quickly, some impulse had told me to cup my hands together, and a portion of her vomit, which was plentiful and dark tan in color, also landed in this ad hoc receptacle. (I’ve always suspected she’d recently eaten curried tuna salad; I have, since 2002, never eaten curried tuna salad.) The journalist raised her head, and her expression was so stricken—a bit of vomit clung to her lips—that truly, I felt far more concerned about her than me. “Oh, my God,” she said, and her face had gone pale. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well, I am a mother,” I said, “so it’s not the first time. Do you think there’s more coming?” Already my deputy chief of staff had sprung up and was approaching us, but her revulsion was undisguised. She’s one of the most competent people I’ve ever worked with; she’s also squeamish, and I wondered if she might be the next to unleash the contents of her stomach.
“I can’t believe I—” the journalist was saying, but didn’t complete the thought. Instead, again she said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Are you staying in this hotel?” I asked.
The journalist nodded.
“Give her your room key,” I said and gestured to my deputy chief of staff. “She’ll get a change of clothes from your suitcase and bring it back here.” Unsteadily, the journalist passed off a key card—“Room 318,” she called as my deputy hurried away—and, addressing my personal aide, I said, “Please bring over a glass of water.” I stood, crossed the carpet, and entered the bathroom off the living room. Without closing the door, I scrubbed my hands; small brown chunks lodged in the drain. When I emerged, I asked the journalist, “Do you need to lie down?”
I could see her hesitate—it’s easy enough for one workhorse to recognize another, and I knew she wanted to continue the interview—and I said, “Go into the bedroom. Put on a robe and rest on the bed, at least for a few minutes. All the linens can be changed tonight while I’m out.”
Still she hesitated—behind me, I heard my two aides murmuring to each other—and I extended my hand. The journalist grasped it as she stood, and I could feel her shakiness, a literal shakiness, as we walked arm in arm into the suite’s bedroom in our vomit-bedecked pantsuits; the smell was disgusting, and later that night I ended up moving to a different suite altogether. I had never been this physically close to the journalist. I escorted her to the threshold of the bathroom inside the bedroom and asked, “Shall I wait while you clean up?”
She shook her head, and when she spoke, some firmness had returned to her voice. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“I’ll give you privacy,” I said. “Take your time.”
“I’m not pregnant,” she said, and though I can’t claim the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, it was her very adamance that made me question the statement. She was at that time recently divorced and her son was in grade school. She didn’t go on to have another baby, which, of course, is proof of nothing.
I began to close the bathroom door and she said, “Wait.”
Our eyes met.
“I trust that this is all off the record,” she said, and even then it occurred to me that if the situation were reversed, she’d never have extended such a courtesy.
“You’re in luck,” I said. “Because I’m not a journalist.”
“How would a female president change other countries’ perception of America?” the journalist asks in the Wells Fargo Center’s greenroom. We stand next to a long table covered in a white cloth, beside the huge platter of sliced pineapple and strawberries; all around us are the hum and laughter of other conversations as well as the words and applause from the speech currently being delivered on the arena stage and broadcast on a TV on the greenroom wall.
I say, “I imagine many countries will be pleased that we’ve caught up to a milestone they reached years ago.”
“And what might your presidency mean for women?”
“If elected, I’ll proudly work on behalf of all Americans.”
“But it’s no secret that you’ve always been a Rorschach test for people in terms of where they stand on issues like feminism and women in the workforce. Just as a symbol, you—”
I shake my head, interrupting her. “Surely you realize that no one sees herself as a symbol?”
In 1957, my friend Carol Gurski’s tenth birthday party took place at her house in Park Ridge, Illinois, a block away from where my own family lived. Six of us fifth-grade girls sat at the Gurskis’ dining-room table eating cake, along with Carol’s younger brother; her parents stood nearby. The subject of baseball arose—I was an ardent Cubs fan, despite their terrible record that year—and I said, “Even if the White Sox are having a better season, Ernie Banks is clearly the best player on either team. If the Cubs build around him, they’ll be good in time.”
Carol’s father was across the table, behind Carol and facing me, and he smiled unpleasantly, in a way I had never previously recognized but have observed on a daily basis ever since. He said, “You’re awfully opinionated for a girl.”
And, really, there are so many other words people use to express the sentiment, but I always hear the echo of Bud Gurski.
When, in a 1995 speech in Beijing, I resisted pressure from both the White House and the Chinese government to tone down my declaration that human rights are inseparable from women’s rights? You’re awfully opinionated for a girl.
When I criticized the Taliban before everyone criticized the Taliban? You’re awfully opinionated for a girl.
When I pushed for universal health care, a goal that turned out to be so controversial that my security detail required me for a time to wear a bulletproof vest in public? When I insisted, as secretary of state, on directly addressing with other governments the diplomatic damage wrought by the rash choices of the previous president? When I made that now-infamous crack about how I could have stayed home baking cookies and having teas? All those times, I was awfully, awfully opinionated.
During my tenure at the state department, I visited 112 countries, and much of what I did, in Pakistan and Russia, in Indonesia and Israel and Angola and El Salvador, was listen. Indeed, though I’ve failed at various times on various fronts, I’ve often thought that the bulk of my professional achievements have rested on two equally unsexy strengths: I am always willing to do my homework, and I am always willing to listen.
Also: I actually know, in a daily, granular way, what it’s like to live in the White House, and the difference between thinking you know what it’s like to live in the White House and living in the White House is the difference between thinking you know what it’s like to be a parent and being a parent.
Yes, I get it—the typical American voter possesses no more than fleeting familiarity with my résumé while feeling that he or she has been choking on my public image and my politics for almost twenty-five years. The typical American voter doesn’t wish to share a beer with me.
I have my supporters, of course, and then some. But it’s a bitter pill to swallow for those who aren’t in that category: that the person most qualified to be the next president is an awfully opinionated girl.
Is the journalist’s sexism attributable to the age difference between us, because she always took for granted her entry into the workforce? But surely she has experienced discrimination in the newsroom, at press conferences, on campaign planes and buses? Although she seems friendly with her male colleagues, sometimes her very jocularity suggests a compensating energy.
Is it because she was just nine years old when Roe v. Wade was decided?
Is it because, while I grew up middle-class, she grew up rich? She’s from Boston, I know, and she attended Choate and Yale.
Or is it because fundamentally, as a writer, she’s a bystander instead of a participant?
We still are next to the greenroom’s buffet, in this thicket of people I have known and mostly loved for many years. It’s strange how much I feel and cannot say. Even stranger is how much I can say without being believed, without my words being considered anything other than hollow propaganda. The irony: I really have been preparing for this moment for my entire life. I actually am confident, humbled, and optimistic about the future of our country.
I plan to win the election in November, and I plan after that to win the reelection. I trust that Americans will become accustomed to a female president in much the way they became accustomed to a black one—in some cases enthusiastically and in others gracelessly. The thought of what will happen if I don’t win, if my opponent somehow triumphs, is almost inconceivable, less for me personally than for our country. I am not exaggerating when I say it could be catastrophic; fortunately, I also don’t believe it will occur.
Thus, it will likely be January 2025 when my presidency concludes. I will be seventy-seven years old, and the journalist sixty-one; we’ll have known each other for more than three decades. And undoubtedly, before I return after so long to private life (Will I ever return to private life? Presumably not really, but such things are relative, and I might feel as if I have), the journalist and I will have one final encounter: my exit interview.
How delicious it will be to stop trying to convince people! To stop pretending that I don’t hear the criticism, or that I don’t care about it—there are, of course, ways in which I really don’t hear it and really don’t care about it, but neither can be entirely true so long as a heart still beats inside my chest. But it will be only after my long stretch in the public eye has concluded, after all my bids for quantifiable and unquantifiable approval, that I can be honest with the journalist and by extension with the American people.
The journalist will end my exit interview in the way she ends all interviews, which is by saying, “Is there anything I should be asking you that I’m not?”
I cannot lie; more than once I’ve been tempted to say, Do you remember when I caught your curried-tuna vomit in my hands? Because I do. But the truth is that I had forgiven her even before she finished throwing up; that, at least, was out of her control. So, no. Such a question would be a waste.
Instead—I’ll be casual, as if it’s an afterthought—I’ll say this: “You’ve mentioned many times over the years that you find me unlikable. How do you think I find you?”
NELL AND HENRY always said that they would wait until marriage was legal for everyone in America, and now this is the case—it’s August 2015—but earlier in the week Henry eloped with his graduate student Bridget. Bridget is twenty-three, moderately but not dramatically attractive (one of the few nonstereotypical aspects of the situation, Nell thinks, is Bridget’s lack of dramatic attractiveness), and Henry and Bridget had been dating for six months. They began having an affair last winter, when Henry and Nell were still together; then in April, Henry moved out of the house he and Nell own and into Bridget’s apartment. Nell and Henry had been a couple for eleven years.
In the shuttle between the Kansas City airport and the hotel where Nell’s weekend meetings will occur—the shuttle is a van, and she is its only passenger—a radio host and a guest are discussing the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. The driver catches Nell’s eye in the rearview mirror and says, “He’s not afraid to speak his mind, huh? You gotta give him that.”
Nell makes a nonverbal sound to acknowledge that, in the most literal sense, she heard the comment.
The driver says, “I never voted before, but, he makes it all the way, maybe I will. A tough businessman like that could go kick some butts in Washington.”
There was a time, up to and including the recent past, when Nell would have said something calm but repudiating in response, something professorial, or at least intended as such. Perhaps: What is it about Trump’s business record that you find most persuasive? But now she thinks, You’re a moron. All she says is “Interesting,” then she looks out the window, at the humidly overcast sky and the prairies behind ranch-style wooden fencing. Though she lives in Wisconsin, not so many states away, she has never been to Kansas City, or even to Missouri.
“I’m not a Republican,” the driver says. “But I’m not a Democrat, either, that’s for sure. You wouldn’t never catch me voting for Shrillary.” He shudders, or mock-shudders. “If I was Bill, I’d cheat on her, too.”
The driver appears to be in his early twenties, fifteen or so years younger than Nell, with narrow shoulders on a tall frame over which he wears a shiny orange polo shirt; the van is also orange, and an orange ballpoint pen is set behind his right ear. He has nearly black hair that is combed back and looks wet, and the skin on his face is pale white and pockmarked. In the rearview mirror, he and Nell make eye contact again, and he says, “I’m not sexist.”
Nell says nothing.
“You married?” he asks.
“No,” she says.
“Boyfriend?”
“No,” she says again, then immediately regrets it—he gave her two chances, and she failed to take either.
“Me, I’m divorced,” he says. “Never getting wrapped up in that again. But I’ve got a four-year-old, Lisette. Total daddy’s girl. You have kids?”
“No.” This she has no desire to lie about.
Will he scold her? He doesn’t. Instead, he asks, “You a lawyer?”
She actually smiles. “You mean like Hillary? No. I’m a professor.”
“A professor of what?”
“English.” Now she is lying. She is a professor of gender and women’s studies, but outside academia it’s often easier not to get into it.
She pulls her phone from the jacket she’s wearing because of how cold the air-conditioning is and says, in a brisk tone, “I need to send an email.” Instead, she checks to see how much longer it will take to get to the hotel—twenty-two minutes, apparently. The interruption works, and he doesn’t try to talk to her again until they’re downtown, off the highway. In the meantime, via Facebook, she accidentally discovers that Henry and Bridget, who got married two days ago in New Orleans (why New Orleans? Nell has no idea), had a late breakfast of beignets this morning and, as of an hour ago, were strolling around the French Quarter.
“How long you in K.C.?” the driver asks as he stops the van beneath the hotel’s porte cochere. The driveway is busy with other cars coming and going and valets and bellhops sweating in maroon uniforms near automatic glass doors.
“Until Sunday,” Nell says.
“Business or pleasure?”
It’s the midyear planning meeting for the governing board of the national association of which Nell is the most recent past president, all of which sounds so boring that she is perversely tempted to describe it to him. But she simply says, “Business.”
“You have free time, you should check out our barbecue,” the guy says. “Best ribs in town are at Winslow’s. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
She and Henry were both vegetarians when they met, which was in graduate school; he was getting a PhD in political science. Then, about five years ago, by coincidence, Henry went to a restaurant where Nell was having lunch with a friend. Nell was eating a BLT. Neither she nor Henry said anything until that night at home, when she asked, “Did you notice what was on my plate today?”
“Actually,” Henry said, “I’ve been eating meat, too.”
Nell was stunned. Not upset but truly shocked. She said, “Since when?”
“A year?” Henry looked sheepish as he added, “It’s just so satisfying.”
They laughed, and they started making steak for dinner, or sausage, although, because of the kind of people they were (insufferable people, Nell thinks now), it had to be grass-fed or free-range or organic. And not too frequent.
All of which is to say that many times since she learned of Henry’s affair she has wondered not only if she should have known but even if she is at fault for not cheating on him. Was there an unspoken pact that she failed to discern? And, either way, hadn’t she been warned? An admiring twenty-three-year-old graduate student was, presumably, just so satisfying! Plus, Bridget and Henry had become involved at a time when Nell and Henry could go months without sex. They still got along well enough, but if they had ever felt passion or excitement—and truly, in retrospect, she can’t remember if they did—they didn’t anymore. Actually, what she remembers from their courtship is dinners at a not very good Mexican restaurant near campus, during which she could tell that he was trying to seem smart to her in exactly the way that she was trying to seem smart to him. Maybe for them that was passion? Simultaneously, she is furious at him—she feels the standard humiliation and betrayal—and she also feels an unexpected sympathy, which she has been careful not to express to him or to her friends. Their deliberately childless life, their cat, Converse (named not for the shoe but for the political scientist), their free-range beef and nights and weekends of reading and grading and high-quality television series—it was fine and a little horrible. She gets it.
To the driver, she says, “I’m not a vegetarian.”
He turns off the van’s engine. Although she paid online, in advance, for the ride, an engraved plastic sign above the rearview mirror reads, TIPS NOT REQUIRED BUT APPRECIATED. As he climbs out of the front seat to retrieve her suitcase from the rear of the van, she sees that all she has in her wallet is twenties. If it weren’t for his political commentary, she would give him one—her general stance is that if she can pay three hundred dollars for a pair of shoes or $11.99 a pound for Thai broccoli salad from the co-op, she can overtip hourly wage workers—but now she hesitates. She’ll ask for ten back, she decides.
She joins the driver behind the van, just as a town car goes by. When she passes him a twenty, she observes him registering the denomination and possibly developing some parting fondness for her. Which means that she can’t bring herself to ask for ten back, so instead she says, “There’s no way Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
She wonders if he’ll say something like “Fuck you, lady,” but he gives no such gratification. He says, seeming concerned, “Hey, I didn’t mean offense.” From a pocket in his pants he takes a white business card with an orange stripe and the shuttle logo on the front. He adds, “I’m not driving Sunday, but, you need anything while you’re here, just call me.” Then he kneels, takes the ballpoint pen from behind his ear, and uses her black-wheeled suitcase, which is upright on the ground between them, as a desk. He writes LUKE in capital letters and a ten-digit number underneath. (Years ago, Henry had tied a checked red-and-white ribbon, from a Christmas gift his mother had sent them, to the suitcase’s handle.) The driver holds the business card up to her.
For what earthly reason would she call him? But the unsettling part is that, with him kneeling, it happens that his face is weirdly close to the zipper of her pants—he didn’t do this on purpose, she doesn’t think, but his face is maybe three inches away—so how could the idea of him performing oral sex on her not flit across her mind? In a clipped voice, she says, “Thanks for the ride.”
With CNN on in the background, Nell hangs her shirts and pants in the hotel room closet and carries her Dopp kit into the bathroom. The members of the governing board will meet in the lobby at six and take taxis to a restaurant a mile away. Nell is moving the things she won’t need at dinner out of her purse and setting them on top of the bureau—a water bottle, a manila folder containing the notes for a paper she’s in the revise-and-resubmit stage with—when she notices that her driver’s license isn’t in the front slot of her wallet, behind the clear plastic window. Did she not put it back after going through security in the Madison airport? She isn’t particularly worried until she has searched her entire purse twice, and then she is worried. She also doesn’t find the license in the pockets of her pants or her jacket, and it wouldn’t be in her suitcase. She pictures her license sitting by itself in one of those small, round gray containers at the end of the X-ray belt—the head shot from 2010, taken soon after she got reddish highlights, the numbers specifying her date of birth and height and weight and address. But she didn’t set it in any such container. She probably dropped it on the carpet while walking to her gate, or it fell out of her bag or her pocket on the plane.
Can you board a plane in the United States, in 2015, without an ID? If you’re a white woman, no doubt your chances are higher than anyone else’s. According to the Internet, she should arrive at the airport early and plan to show other forms of ID, some of which she has (a work badge, a gym ID, a business card) and some of which she doesn’t (a utility bill, a check, a marriage license). She calls the airline, which feels like a futile kind of due diligence. The next call she makes is to the van driver—thank goodness for the twenty-dollar tip—who answers the phone by saying, in a professional tone, “This is Luke.”
“This is the person who was your passenger to the Garden Center Hotel,” Nell says. “You dropped me off about forty-five minutes ago.”
“Hey there.” Immediately, Luke sounds warmer.
Trying to match his warmth, she says, “I might have left my driver’s license in your van. Can you check for me? My name is Eleanor Davies.”
“I’m driving now, but I’ll look after this drop-off, no problem.”
Impulsively, Nell says, “If you find it, I’ll pay you.” Should she specify an amount? Another twenty? Fifty?
“Well, it’s here or it’s not,” Luke says. “I’ll call you back.”
“I was sitting in the first row, behind you,” Nell says, and when Luke speaks again, he seems amused.
He says, “Yeah, I remember.”
He hasn’t called by the time she has to go to dinner. She calls him again before leaving her room, but the call goes to voicemail. The dinner, attended by nine people, including Nell, is more fun than she expected—they spend a good chunk of it discussing a gender-studies department in California that’s imploding, plus they drink six bottles of wine—and the group decides to walk back to the hotel. In her room, Nell realizes that, forty-two minutes ago, she received a call from Luke, and then a text. “Hey call me,” the text reads.
“You at the hotel now?” he says when she calls, and when she confirms that she is, he says, “My shift just ended, so I can be there in fifteen.”
“Wow, thank you so much,” Nell says. “I really appreciate this.” He will text when he arrives, they agree, and she’ll go outside.
Except that when she reaches the lobby, he’s standing inside it, near the glass doors. He’s not wearing the shiny orange polo shirt; he has on dark gray jeans and a black, hooded, sleeveless shirt. His biceps are stringily well-defined; also, the shirt makes her cringe. She has decided to give him forty dollars, which she’s folded in half and is holding out even before they speak. He waves away the money and says, “Buy me a drink and we’ll call it even.”
“Buy you a drink?” she repeats. If she were sober, she’d definitely make an excuse.
With his chin, Luke gestures across the lobby toward the hotel bar, from which come boisterous conversations and the notes of a live saxophone player. “One Jack and Coke,” he says. “You ask me, you’re getting a bargain.”
Having a drink in the hotel bar with Luke the Shuttle Driver is almost enjoyable, because it’s like an anthropological experience. Beyond her wish to get her license back, she feels no fondness for the person sitting across the table, but the structure of his life, the path that brought him from birth to this moment, is interesting in the way that anyone’s is. He’s twenty-seven, older than she guessed, born in Wichita, the second of two brothers. His parents split up before his second birthday; he’s met his father a handful of times and doesn’t like him. He’ll never disappear from his daughter’s life the way that his father disappeared from his. He and his mom and his brother moved to Kansas City when he was in fifth grade—her parents are from here—and he played baseball in junior high and high school and hoped for a scholarship to Truman State (a scout even came to one of his games), but senior year he tore his UCL. After that, he did a semester at UMKC, but the classes were boring and not worth the money. (“No offense,” he says, as if Nell, by virtue of being a professor, had a hand in running them.) He met his ex-wife, Shelley, in high school, but the funny thing is that he didn’t like her that much then, so he should have known. He thinks she just wanted a kid. They were married for two years, and now she’s dating someone else from their high school class, and Luke thinks better that guy than him. Luke and his buddy Tim want to start their own shuttle service, definitely in the next eighteen months; the manager of the one he’s working for now is a dick.
Eliciting this information isn’t difficult. The one question he asks her is how many years she had to go to school to become a professor. She says, “How many after high school or how many total?”
“After high school,” he says, and she says, “Nine.”
Without consulting her, he orders them a second round, and after finishing it Nell is the drunkest she’s been since she was a bridesmaid in her friend Anna’s wedding, in 2003; she’s wall-shiftingly drunk. She says, “Okay, give me my license now.”
Luke grins. “How ’bout I walk you to your room? Be a gentleman and all.”
“That’s subtle,” she says. Does he know what subtle means? (It’s not that she’s unaware that she’s an elitist asshole. She’s aware! She’s just powerless not to be one. Also, seriously, does he know what subtle means?) She says, “Is hitting on passengers a thing with you, or should I feel special?”
“What makes you think I’m hitting on you?” But he’s still grinning, and it’s the first thing he’s said that a man she’d want to go out with would say. (How will she ever, in real life, meet a man she wants to go out with who wants to go out with her? Should she join Match? Tinder? Will her students find her there?) Then Luke says, “Just kidding, I’m totally hitting on you,” and it’s double the exact right thing to say—he has a sense of humor and he’s complimenting her.
She says, “If you give me my license, you can walk me to my room.”
“Let me walk you to your room, and I’ll give you your license.”