Saturday, May 17, 2008
If Giacomo didn't know better, he'd be convinced he had feelings for Rebecca, unrelated to this election. But how?
Feb 25, 2004 | Eastern Illinois University, home to about 11,000 students and alma mater to Burl Ives, Joan Embry and John Malkovich, was not to be confused with Northern, Southern or Western Illinois universities, nor with Illinois State or the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign or the University of Illinois-Chicago. It was part of this vast state university system, one of the largest in the country, one that was still strong but had seen better-funded days. Rebecca and Giacomo had each spent time, many years ago, on the Eastern campus during the summer, at Girls State and Boys State, respectively, with about 800 other promising high school juniors, chosen by American Legions in communities all over Illinois, there to learn about their country and democracy in general through model elections, model governments, the writing of patriotic essays and the marching of marches and the raising of flags. Girls State and Boys State, much to the teenagers' eternal dismay, were not held at the same time, but instead on consecutive weeks, casting over each event an unfortunate single-sex pall. As Giacomo followed Rebecca's car, they approached the town limits, trading Boys or Girls State memories via cellphone. They'd been talking for about two of the three hours they'd been on the road.
"Did you guys try to leave campus?" Giacomo asked.
"Of course!" Rebecca laughed.
"We thought there'd be girls everywhere, just off that damned campus. This guy Michael and I, a kid from the Robert Taylor Homes, he and I actually climbed out the window, jumped two stories, and made our way to some mini-mart off campus. We thought we'd hit the center of the Charleston social universe. Maybe we had. I don't know."
"No one was there."
"Not really. A group of townies came by. They knew we were from Boys State and made fun of us. The Boys State people made us wear white T-shirts and jeans."
"Us too," Rebecca remembered.
"So these townies pulled up in a truck and saw us sitting there on the ice machine, waiting for something to happen. They threw bottles at us. So that was something."
"Something happened."
"Yeah, I guess. I got hit in the ass by a full bottle of Milwaukee's Best."
"Thus beginning your ass saga."
"That's where it all began, yes."
All this talk about his buttocks only reminded Giacomo of the pain he was now feeling in that region. Long drives were difficult now; it was like sitting on a lumpy pillow, like sitting on two small baseball gloves -- fine for a while but soon enough your real ass would spill over your augmented ass, and that spillover began to rub against the edges of the--
It was too painful to think about. Giacomo was just glad that they were there, pulling into the campus, and soon after the speeches, which he dreaded as much as Rebecca, probably more, he'd get to see his cousins Ted and Janice and their four kids, all under 12, and he could relax for a few days -- as long as the two older kids, boys 11 and 12, weren't still hitting each other with brooms covered in jelly. This was their thing, last time he'd been to Charleston. The jelly, as far as Giacomo had been able to surmise, was to simulate blood. Those boys... the jury was still out on those boys.
Giacomo turned into the parking lot in front of Lumpkin Hall and watched Rebecca getting out of her Chevy Capri. She stood on her tiptoes, turning in a kind of exercise motion, stretching her arms to the sky, extending herself as high as her small frame would allow.
Giacomo let out a gust of air. He hadn't been breathing. What was wrong with him? If he didn't know better, he'd be convinced he had feelings for Rebecca, unrelated to this election. But how? She was probably eight years older than him, treated him like a little brother, and besides, he couldn't make any sort of move until November, so why even think about it, as he'd been doing every night and morning and afternoon and late afternoon and evening since he'd met her? What was the point?
It would be best of course to keep everything absolutely professional, keep the relationship almost clinical in its sterility, until November at least. At which point... what? If she won, what would it look like if she started dating her campaign manager? It would look silly, make her seem unserious, and would impede any and all of her efforts in Washington. Anything like that distracted from a senator's first term. Look what they did to Carol Moseley Braun...
It was best to forget all this, to focus on getting Rebecca Romaine elected for all the reasons she deserved the office. Giacomo spent many hours, when he wasn't imagining himself on a horse on a flat shoreline, riding right behind Rebecca, on the same saddle, his arms around her small waist, his cheek against her back, watching the ocean spray in tiny jewels away from the thunder of their horse's hooves, counting Rebecca's many virtues, not least of which was her lack of awareness about the pettiness of others, her inability to be dragged into the muck the rest of the business lived in, nourished itself on, like amniotic fluid. Though Rebecca appeared in all situations to be engaged and listening, always paying attention, there was a part of her -- you noticed it when she walked through airports, or across a wide park on the way to a barbecue or Shriners' T-ball game -- that she had an ever-present sense of the spiritual. This made her every so often seem aloof to aggressive people wanting her attention, but in the electorate, in young volunteers and retirees longing for days when they believed, it was magnetic.
Giacomo had long thought that the intangible that citizens wanted in their leaders was not exactly character or credibility -- though those two elements were crucial -- but soul. It was soul that the soulful Dukakis had failed to demonstrate after Bernard Shaw's question about how he'd react if his wife were raped by a furloughed prisoner; it was soul that Mario Cuomo seemed to have in spades and soul that presumably prevented him from running for president, and it was soul that Bill Clinton appeared to have and which he seemed to be able to turn on and off at will. It was of course harder for a Republican to put across soul, soul coming from a position of disadvantage, of struggle -- but then again, didn't John McCain have soul? It seemed he did. Wasn't there a shred of soul in Jack Kemp?
And what was soul? How did one get it? It was one of the few things that seemed to be politically unmanufacturable. With so many things, Giacomo could find a way into fooling whoever he chose to fool -- the electorate, the press, the donors. With perfectly timed tutorials and some stage management, he could make a dilettante appear learned. With a bad suit and a well-edited biography, he could transform a Brahmin into a middle-class fighter. A millionaire could become a philanthropist, a loser a survivor. But with soul, you either had it or you didn't. And Rebecca Romaine had it. To have soul you could be enraged but appear passionate. To have soul you could be empathetic without being condescending. To have soul, you could dance onstage, say, during a rally at a Baptist church in North Chicago, and feel absolutely comfortable, which Rebecca had done a few weeks into the campaign, and watching Rebecca up there, dancing with a 400-pound preacher named Joseph, clapping with questionable rhythm but dancing with real abandon, smiling with agnostic eyes glistening, Giacomo had known right then that this was someone he could follow; he could throw everything he had behind her.
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