Little by little, other things about Grace started not looking good to him. She wasn’t good at political talk. She wasn’t good at hosting dinner parties. She wasn’t good at elegance. Her flair had become a liability, drawing attention away from him. And then there were her roots, about which his constituents often asked. She came from nothing. Her parents were working class, which hadn’t bothered him when they first met, but suddenly did.
“He told you this?” Ben asked.
“Well, I sure didn’t imagine it,” she shot at the window to which he’d returned. “Do I look that insecure?”
She actually did, tucked in her protective corner, though I’m not sure the men sensed it the way I did. Confidence could be applied like makeup. I knew this for fact.
Jay had been pacing but now stopped before her. “Verbal abuse?” he asked.
“Not at first,” she said and picked at a nail. “It started innocent, like, ‘Can you do something with your hair,’ or ‘Maybe not that sweater.’ Then it got worse, and it wasn’t only Carter. His sister got in the act”—she made air quotes—“to help me out. She’s a bitch in the best of times, which shopping with me was not. She kept choosing things that were totally not me then rolling her eyes at what I did want, like I was hopeless. Add that to all the nights he was out, and, well, yeah, I guess I did start feeling insecure.”
“All those nights out?” Ben asked, leading her without quite saying the words.
“Of course. I mean, a guy with an ego way bigger than his dick? Of course, he cheated.”
“And you let him?” Jay asked.
“What in the hell could I do, Jay?” she cried, but at least bits of color had returned to her face. “I asked him about it, but that only unleashed a long list of everything I was doing wrong. It was little nothing me against big powerful him.” She considered that summation and let out a breath. Quietly, she said, “It went downhill from there.”
“The abuse?” Again, from Jay.
“Yes. I kept thinking he wouldn’t do anything major, because I was the mother of his son. But the words got more vicious, and he hit me where no one would see. I mean, women go through that all the time, right? I wasnota great wife for him. I hated those political dinners, hated trying to look good and coming up short, hated the way he would find fault when we were out and blame it on my upbringing—I mean, right in front of other people.” She looked up at her audience when she said the last. Every face held concern. “He said I broke my own arm tripping over one of the baby’s toys, I was such a klutz.” She looked at me. “Am I a klutz?”
I pictured her skiing those Black Diamond slopes. “Absolutely not.”
“Thank you.” She took another sip of water and tucked the bottle back in. Eyes downcast, she said, “I came to hate him—I mean, really hate him. I dreamed of leaving him, fantasized about it all the time, but I was worried he would take it out on the baby. Then he started losing patience with Chris, too—you know, complained that he wasn’t walking early enough, wasn’t talking early enough, made too much noise, didn’t make enough noise. One spanking was all I could take. I said if he ever again lifted a hand to the baby,everagain, I would go public with it.” She grunted. “Not one of my wisest moves.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Her eyes met mine. “Because Carter Brandt loves a challenge. Heneeded dirt on me in case I went public with dirt on him, so he started having me followed.”
“Followed,” Jay said.
“He hired someone to go where I went and take pictures of anything that was remotely suggestive.”
“Like what?” I asked, covering her hand to stop the picking.
“I had defied him and gone back to work, just a few afternoons a week while Chris napped, because I neededsomeoneto say I wasn’t a worthless piece of shit. So his guy planted a camera where it would capture my hands on men’s bodies. Add those shots to ones of my talking with a guy at Starbucks or smiling at the pizza delivery guy or hugging my hairdresser—myhairdresser,for Christ’s sake—well, you get the idea. But infidelity wasn’t enough. He wanted to totally destroy me, which meant showing I was an unfit mother.”
“How were you unfit?” I asked, indignant this time. Not seeing what your teenage son was doing on a computer wasn’t being unfit. It was being distracted.
A tiny bell rang in my head. I hadn’t been unfit, either. I’d simply been distracted.
But Grace hadn’t heard the bell. “For starters,” she said, “he claimed I drank. There were dozens of photos of me with a glass in my hand.” She looked at me again. “Do I drink?”
“No.”
“Thank you—but oh, I forgot to mention that most of the shots were taken at campaign events, which were a nightmare for me. I wouldn’t havedaredtake more than a sip or two of whatever was put in my hand, because even with a clear head, I had trouble remembering who was married to who and which donor’s son just got into U-N-M or U-A or U-S-C, because as far as I was concerned, that brownnosing is total C-R-A-P.”
Throaty sounds came from Edward and Ben in varying degrees of appreciation, but Jay was brooding. “Carter Brandt? Isn’t there a Carter Brandt in Congress?”
“That would be theUSCongress,” Grace confirmed in a voice laced with sarcasm. “But you’re jumping ahead, Jay. Don’t you want to hear about the videos?”
“Absolutely,” Jay said and stepped back.
“There were videos?” Ben asked.
“Oh, you’d love to see those, Ben.” She was running on anger now, reliving all she must have suppressed for so long. “His guy shot videos of me lounging at the pool while the soundtrack had Chris screaming inside. Forget the fact that the drink I held was an iced espresso because I needed the caffeine because we’d been at one of those godawful boring events the night before and Chris had woken up when we came in and hadn’t wanted to go back to sleep, so he was overtired, too, and was screaming because I’d just put him in for a nap. There were videos of me laughing on the phone while, behind me, Chris was in a little floaty thing drifting toward the deep end of the pool.”
