Saturday, May 17, 2008
Rebecca was so appallingly nervous and weird that all who sat witness wanted to douse her with water, throw a Red Cross blanket over her, and lead her to safety.
Feb 24, 2004 | On a blistering Thursday in late August, Rebecca made the drive, down I-57, from Chicago to Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, a small town just next to Mattoon. An old law school friend of Rebecca's, Max McArsnep, taught an ethics course there and had asked Rebecca to come speak; he promised to arrange for a more general audience in the student union afterward. It would be Rebecca's first speech on a college campus in about seven years, and Giacomo and Charlie were hoping Rebecca's low-key style, her clear lack of pretense, would appeal to the students. At the very least, she might relax a bit on the stump.
Her comfort level in front of audiences had never been very high, but even so, her first few dozen appearances had been a new low, had been brutal, had been, even to the disinterested, very difficult to watch. She was so visibly nervous that all who sat witness wanted to douse her with water, throw a Red Cross blanket over her, and lead her to safety. She mumbled, she tangented, she corrected herself -- almost angrily, almost mercilessly -- and she invented, it seemed, a new twitch for every given appearance. In Aurora, speaking at a bottling plant, she pulled on her ear incessantly, in a way deeply resonant of Carol Burnett but without the charm -- Rebecca seemed to be trying to remove it, her lobe, as one would toe cheese or dead skin. In Carbondale, speaking to ethanol lobbyists, she'd begun running her fingers along the front ridge of the lectern, as if sanding it, or measuring it, repeatedly, registering that measurement and then starting over, again and again. Doing it once might have seemed playful, almost sexy, like a finger circling the edge of a wine glass, but on a podium, in a public setting, executed with workmanlike regularity, looked plumb nuts. In Barrington, speaking at a Junior League political forum, she'd pulled every hair away from her forehead, one strand at a time, and inserted each one, carefully, lovingly, behind her left ear. She performed this task with Sisyphean determination and by the end, every Junior Leaguer present was gasping at each new strand taken on its journey. What, they thought, is wrong with that fucking woman?
It tortured Rebecca to think of any one of these speeches, which she knew had not gone well, chiefly because at each, a number of the attendees told her so. They told her in almost scolding tones, evidently upset that their time had been wasted by someone who had not prepared properly, or who was clearly in the wrong line of work. But were things improving, slightly, each time? This was her humble assumption, whether or not it was true (and it wasn't; if anything, she was getting worse). She longed for the days when no one really cared, when as a state senator few people expected much in the way of oratory. Trying to think forward, not backward, trying to concentrate on the straight endlessness of I-57, Rebecca drove alone in her Chevy Capri, screaming the lyrics to and utterly polluting her Joni Mitchell bootlegs, her Rickie Lee Jones rarities, and her most guilty and prized of pleasures, her Greg Kihn boxed set.
Giacomo Skinputty, her day-to-day manager and fundraising man, followed behind her, in his own car, a silver-green Prius, for he had family in Charleston and after her appearance planned to stay through the weekend. Giacomo and Rebecca called each other periodically on their cellphones, each of them wishing they could be driving together. These drives through the middle of the state were beautiful in an austere sort of way, but with few turns and fewer sights or landmarks, it was easy to allow your mind to bend, your eyes to flutter. Through her rearview mirror, Rebecca checked on Giacomo periodically, and even at 75 miles per hour, even with him 40 feet behind her, she could see the anxiety in the set of his mouth, the tension in his brow.
Giacomo was indeed stressed beyond composure. Normally an unshakable sort of man, with a healthy sense of balance and perspective, Giacomo was feeling heat from all sides, but chiefly from Charlie Panglosserman, who felt that the Rebecca Romaine for Senate fundraising efforts were quite sub-par -- those were his words, "quite sub-par," and he'd begun to call Giacomo "Mr. Skinputty," perhaps to reinforce the fact that Giacomo was an employee, not necessarily a friend or even a person. Charlie made clear that if Giacomo couldn't raise at least $1 million by September (and thus far he'd only netted $157,980), Romaine wouldn't be taken seriously by the party in the state or nationally, the campaign would lose any momentum it might have had, Giacomo could and should and would be replaced, and Charlie himself would have to step into the fray. Which Charlie didn't want to do. And besides, it would probably be far too late at that point, what with all the millionaires in the race.
Charlie had given Giacomo a talking to that morning -- Giacomo had called it a "squawkingto" and that made Rebecca, who loved only the stupidest jokes, laugh for a full minute -- and that would have been upsetting enough even if Giacomo wasn't already pretty personally depressed about the whole situation. Rebecca knew that Giacomo wasn't going to last, no matter how well he was or wasn't doing with the bottom line. Lately they'd talked often about his crisis of faith -- he'd lost his love of the absurdity of it all, which was the only part of the equation that kept him balanced: the ability to laugh and continue to play the game, knowing that these were simply silly rules -- he compared it to having to complete an egg-carried-on-a-spoon relay -- to a contest that ultimately, despite the anarchic and disgusting way it was played, mattered. But things had not been breaking their way, Rebecca's and Giacomo's, and they found themselves struggling under expectations more than a year before the general election. If they didn't get a sign, any sign, soon, there didn't seem to be a point in flogging, well, the dead horse that was them.
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