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Gina Softens, Just a Little
The following morning was not at all like anything Gina had ever experienced in her life, and it took all she had not to say anything about it in the moment.
When Del drove home the morning after his night at the hotel, he decided on the way home that he shouldn’t say anything about what had happened to him, and especially about the voice. It was probably best since he didn’t know what had happened to him, and Gina would probably think it was all some kind of manipulative trick anyhow. But he also knew that to say nothing at all would be the same as saying a great deal, and a great deal that was wrong, and so he resolved to gather up his work stuff before heading out to campaign headquarters, and speak briefly to Gina on the way out. And so that is exactly what he did.
She was in the kitchen, and so he stopped in on the way to the front door. “Gina,” he said. “I know we can’t talk about it now, and I don’t know how to do this . . . but I do need to say one thing before I leave for headquarters . . . um . . . sorry for how I left last night . . . no, that’s not right . . . I was wrong to leave last night, I was very wrong to be angry, and I completely understa . . . um . . . actually I probably don’t understand, but I am trying . . . why you have decided to do what you obviously need to do. There. I am sorry. I will be back this evening by dinner, if that is all right with you. Will the boys be home?”
Gina turned around, and nodded briefly, both to acknowledge his comment and to indicate that the boys would be home. Something is different, she thought. What is different?
And she kept her own counsel for a full week following. Del was not on the road because of certain key Senate votes that were coming up, and so even though it was a busy time in the Senate, at least he was not off campaigning. And this meant that he was home every night for dinner, which is why Gina was quick to pick up on the fact that something was radically different. Their boys did, too.
About two days in, the oldest, twelve-year-old Will, asked his mother about it. “Mom, is something up with Dad?”
“Why do you ask, honey?” she said.
“Last night I asked him if he wanted to play chess, and he said sure. He just said sure. He never does that.”
“Well, I do think something must be up, but I can honestly say that I have no idea what it might be.” And these were true words. She had no idea.
Nobody had any idea, except for Del, and it was dawning on him, albeit somewhat slowly, that the Democratic nominee for the vice-presidency, a true-blue liberal and secular progressive, had prayed a prayer in a hotel room that was looking fair to turn him into a Jesus freak. This was not the sort of thing that turns up in a normal news cycle, and Del had a notion that when it did turn up there, it would appear in lurid and gaudy colors.
On the one-week anniversary of the day she had confronted him about Kara, she confronted him again about this new thing, whatever this new thing was. The boys were in bed and safely asleep—she had checked because they had the kind of house where voices carry—and she asked if he would be willing to talk for a few minutes. He said sure, and stuck his campaign briefing papers into his briefcase, and came out to the living room where she was, and sat down across from her.
“Okay,” he said, spreading out his hands.
“All right, Del,” she said. “I don’t even know what I am asking for, or asking about. So the best thing I can come up with is ‘what happened?’”
He grimaced slightly, drawing his breath in over his teeth. This is it. Stalling for a little bit of time, he said, “Why do you ask? What do you mean, ‘what happened?’”
Gina sat for a moment. “Well, for the last week, you have been unbearably pleasant. Pleasant to be around. Easy to be around. Your apology last week was different from anything I have ever heard from you. And you have been so . . . pleasant . . . so easy . . . and all in the week after I caught you cheating on me again, and I honestly don’t know what to make of it. None of this has changed my mind about the divorce or anything I said, but I will confess that my curiosity is kind of on fire.”
Okay, Del thought. Lord, help me out here. I don’t know how to do this.
“Okay,” he said. “Promise to hear me out, and not to laugh at me?”
“Well, that’s an odd request. But sure, I won’t laugh.”
And so Del explained the whole thing. He unloaded everything. He confessed to the two affairs that Gina had not known about. He told her that he had felt sexually entitled to whatever he had wanted since he first arrived in high school, and that he had decided at that time that it wasn’t really anybody else’s business. He said that she was completely in the right for wanting to divorce a man who was like that, and how his anger was an attempt to get her angry so he could justify things retroactively after the fact. “Please forgive me for that,” he said. “I know I have done it many times. Too many to count, probably.” And then he explained his sleeplessness at the hotel, how he got up, how he tried to watch some porn, and how he had stumbled onto the televangelist. And how he had gotten down on his knees and repented.
“The long and short of it, Gina,” he said, “is that I think I got saved.”
Gina sat quietly. Her reactions had been fluctuating wildly while he was talking. There was hope, then anger, then exasperation, then some more hope.
“Saved,” she said. “Saved from what?”
“Well, principally from being the kind of toad I was being. But probably from Hell, too.”
She flushed at the mention of Hell. Both Del and she had grown up in secular, liberated homes, and she felt like a fundamentalist just having the word mentioned in her living room. He noticed her discomfort, and said, “Look, I know next to nothing about all of this. I am only beginning to figure out what exactly has happened to me, and I am not expecting you to accept any of it. I am just trying to tell you what happened.” They both sat quietly for a couple of moments. Then he added, “Because I don’t know anything, I ordered a couple of ebooks about religious experiences. That’s where some of this language is coming from—getting saved, and all that.”
“Has anybody in the Senate office noticed anything?” She asked. “Or at the campaign?”
“Well, Kara noticed,” he said. “I broke up with her the next day. And a couple of staffers have mentioned in passing that I wasn’t cussing them out like I usually do, and was anything wrong? But I have also been here a lot and not there.”
“Maybe they won’t notice,” she said.
“No, they will,” he said. “That is the thing about all this that is on my mind a great deal. The problem is that this . . . this event . . . didn’t just affect my heart and my attitudes about adultery.”
Gina looked up sharply at that. It was the first time in all their conflicts about his straying that he had ever used the word adultery.
“This has affected everything. It gets into everything, and I honestly don’t know what I am going to do about it.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“Well, you know that big climate change speech I am giving at the Smithsonian next week? I went over the draft today that the speech writers delivered to me. I have never read such a bowl of tripe in my life before. It is crammed full of lies, and half- truths, and then a layer of dishonest evasions. A month ago I would have asked for a bigger spoon and eaten the whole bowl. It turns out that Jesus has opinions on the ninth commandment, and not just the eighth.”
Gina’s eyebrows went up.
“Lying is the ninth,” he said. “Adultery is the eighth. And I am not showing off. I had to look them up three times today.”
Gina was still waiting, and for the last three minutes had been doing so on the angry side, and so Del continued. “What I am saying is that when it becomes obvious to my staff and to the DNC that I have turned into . . . into something else . . . they are going to have a major crisis on their hands. As will I.” He almost said “as will we,” but he caught himself just in time. Gina still noticed it. “I don’t know what to do,” he added. “Nobody to talk to about it.”
Gina was thinking hard. This is surreal. She had known for years how ambitious he was, and how his eye had always been on the top slot, the presidency. If he mentions stepping down from the nomination for veep, then I will know for sure that something is real about this.
“I have been thinking about stepping down,” he said.