Ecochondriacs [11]

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Meeting the Senator

Jill Stevens had gotten a ride to work from Shelly, her next door neighbor, because her new employee (and perhaps new friend) Eve and her husband Trevor—Jill hadn’t met him yet— were going to have her out for dinner that night. Eve said that they could easily drop her off at her condo on their way home afterwards, as it was right on the way.

Work, as it happened, was at the Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Jill was a senior staffer for the junior senator from Montana, and had been there for a few years now. She loved her job, actually, and she also loved going briskly up the stairs, which she was now doing.

She was just a quarter-inch shy of six feet tall, which had made her a natural wing spiker for her high-school volleyball team, and then also for four years at college, the last two of which were championship years. When she was in eighth grade, the time when it had first become apparent that she was going to be six feet tall, or something very much like it, her father had taken her out on a date, and solemnly charged her to own it. “This is God’s gift to you. Lean into it. Own it,” he had said. She always looked back on that date as a turning point in her life, and it was the reason why she was wearing heels now.

On top of everything else, she was a striking blonde, which when combined with her height, made it easy to see her a long way off, even down a very crowded hallway.

A few moments later, she got off a jammed elevator, and made her way to the senator’s office. She was five minutes early, which was, according to her punctual personality, five minutes late, and Eve had apparently beaten her by a skinny minute. Eve was already sitting at her reception desk, where Jill greeted her as she walked her purse back to her office, and then came back out to chat for a minute. Jill and Eve had hit it off instantly when they had first met, which is the reason Jill had hired her.

That day, like most of their days, was filled with an alternating pattern—first surges of humanity, and then, as though a hidden somebody had given a signal, absolutely no one. That afternoon, during one of those “no one” spots, Eve stopped her when Jill was walking back to the office. “Trevor has the day off, and so he is doing his specialty smoker/barbecue thing for us. I don’t know what it is he does with that thing, but the results are magical. I am putting together the side dishes. I should have checked earlier, but do you have any allergies?” Jill shook her head no, and so she was standing there chatting easily about how her father used to smoke tri-tip too.

Actually, it looked like they were chatting easily, but Jill was nevertheless on her guard. A few days before this, when the two women had been chatting in just this same way, Eve had asked if she was seeing anyone.

“No, no,” Jill had said. “Nothing against it, I suppose. But the pickings are pretty slim around here, you must admit. And I do have something of a prejudice against dating someone if I thought I could beat him up in a fair fight.”

Eve had laughed at that, but Jill was still a bit wary now. She might bring it up again, and it was not Jill’s most comfortable topic. She started to feel a sense of mild panic. Maybe they asked her to come to dinner that night so they could try to set her up with an ugly cousin or something.

But as they were talking this time, Jill suddenly saw a shadow fall across the desk and a second later she saw Eve’s eyes get a little wider. “Wha . . .?” she said, and turned around. She stood there silently, as she watched the largest man she thought she had ever seen bow his head to come through the door. She had seen men that tall before, but never a man that tall who wasn’t a bean pole.

He was beyond solid, and well proportioned. He looked like Achilles in the middle of an extended Homeric simile. But unlike Achilles, he was wearing slacks and suit jacket, but no tie. His beard was of a medium length, and almost yellow. His hair was a little darker, and Jill swallowed hard. He shifted his tablet to his left hand, and shook the hand that Jill had extended. For the first time in her life, Jill felt understated and diminutive. But she then took her courage in both hands, and spoke up like everything was normal.

“My name is Jill Stevens, assistant to Senator Hart. How can I help you?”

“Larry Locke. I believe I have a 2 o’clock with the senator.” Jill had been an assistant to the good senator from Montana for the last three years. She was a native of Baltimore, and was an ardent conservative, making her a good deal more conservative than her boss’s voting record might have indicated. But the discrepancy was not so great as to cause her a crisis of conscience, at least not yet.

“Larry Locke? Not the author of Ecochondriacs?”

“The same guy. But I do not ask that people love it. It is enough for me that they have simply heard of it, and so you have made me happy already.”

Eve, who was currently reading that very same book on her lunch breaks, had swiftly retrieved her copy from her purse, and slid it open across her desk with a pen on top of it. Larry obligingly stepped over and signed it quickly while Jill had started to head off down the hall. She came back after just a moment, and said, “The senator is finishing a phone call. It should less than five minutes, and many apologies.”

Larry nodded affably, and Jill invited him to take a seat in the corner of the office where there were a couple of chairs of the sort you find in waiting rooms. There was an end table between them with a small stack of National Reviews in a tasteful spread, with a large rubber plant behind the end table. Larry took a seat and, overshadowed by the rubber plant, became as inconspicuous as it is possible for a man of his size to be.

And at just that moment, there was a clatter and a rustle and pother of self-importance at the door of the office, and three women, of the protesting variety, came in. Larry sat up a little straighter, putting down his magazine. He thought he was detecting the approach of something interesting. He was interested at any rate.

Jill was used to this kind of protestor, while Eve, who had only been in the office for a few months, was not. Jill caught Eve’s eye, as much as to say that she would be happy to handle it. Thanks much, Eve thought back at her.

Of the three women, the one who was out in front and apparently the spokesman for them all could have been attractive if she had wanted to be, or she used to be attractive, or some- thing of that nature. The other two were in a different category entirely. They looked like nothing on earth.

“We are here to speak with the senator about her support for the IRS education voucher bill . . .”

“I am sorry,” Jill said sweetly. “Do you have an appointment?” She had just looked at the calendar ten minutes before. They didn’t have an appointment.

“We don’t need an appointment. We are here on the people’s business.”

“Well, being on the people’s business won’t help you if the senator is going to be on the floor of the Senate all the rest   of the afternoon. If you really wanted to see her, the thing to do is to schedule an appointment. What organization do you represent?”

The spokesman turned away in fake wrath, the pique of a toddler unaccustomed to being crossed. “I don’t need to represent any organization. My name is Marcie, and I want to be a witness in the hearing about that bill, if you have one. I am a graduate of one of those crappy Christian schools . . .”

Jill interrupted her, brightly. “Why, so am I!”

“Well, I don’t believe in your God anymore,” Marcie said in a take that sort of way. “And the reason why I don’t believe in God is that the science teacher at that hellhole of a school groomed me for my whole junior year, and had his way with me for my whole senior year. What do you make of that, oh loyal alumnus? There is no God,” she said with finality.

“There is no God?” Jill asked.

“You heard me.” And then, remembering why they had come, she added, “And that is why any kind of tax credit for those places is unconscionable. I find it scarcely credible that anyone from this century would have proposed it. And as a native of Helena, I would like to testify.”

“But if there is no God,” Jill said, returning to the earlier theme, “what could possibly be wrong with what your science teacher did?” Jill had taken an apologetics class her senior year, apparently spending that final year more productively than her interlocutor.

“What?” her interlocutor said.

“I said that if there is no God, and if mores are defined by society, and provided he didn’t get caught—he didn’t get caught, did he?—there is no problem with what he did.”

“You can’t be serious . . .”

“Oh, deadly serious. No God, above us, only sky. It seems that boinking nubile young dopes would be just the ticket. If morality is just a social construct, one has to admire that kind of clear-headed behavior. And in a Christian school, too.”

Marcie just stared. Jill looked back at her with her very best fat face. And, as fat faces go, it was a pretty good one.

Marcie was rummaging around in her mind, trying to think of a clever comeback, but couldn’t come up with one and had to settle for something she remembered from fifth grade. “What makes you so smart?”

“I studied. And I did my senior thesis at my classical Christian school on morality and the existence of God. Instead of boinking any of the teachers.”

Marcie stared some more, completely unused to this sort  of thing.

“Would you like to make an appointment with the senator?” Marcie shook her head curtly. No, she said, for emphasis. The other two preceded her, and she tried to slam the door after going out, but they were the sort of doors that would not slam. The effect was anti-climactic in the extreme.

The three women disappeared down the hallway to the right. “Well,” Eve said.

Larry laughed out loud in the corner. “Well, that made my day,” he said.

Jill flushed, and disappeared down the hall to check on the senator’s phone call.

Reappearing just moment later, she said, “The senator’s office is this way.” Larry jumped to his feet to follow her, and Eve noticed how quick and cat-like he was. Big cat. But when he disappeared from her line of sight, she cocked an ear for a moment. There was no indication, faint or loud, of anything like fee fi fo fum.

Jill came out just a few minutes later, having made the introduction, and having obtained a small bottle of water for Larry and also for the senator. “Well, the introduction went off well enough,” she said.

“I know,” Eve said. “I think I know why you might think that it wouldn’t have. I just completed the chapter where he finished off our dear senator from Montana. Whatever would bring him here?”

They speculated about that for a few moments, and then returned to their respective tasks. Since the senator had budgeted only half an hour for the meeting, and had a committee meeting she had to get to, it was not long before Larry was back out in the front office. Larry had budgeted an hour, and his Uber driver was going to be meeting him out front at 3 on the dot, and besides, when he had first come in he had noticed with his keen-eyed backwoodsman glance that Jill was not exactly an eyesore. He had noticed that right off. She was not an eyesore, she had no ring on, she was tall, and he admired her apologetic methods. That was some fine way she had handled the protesters. There was also that.

It should not have been surprising. Jill was lively, intelligent, articulate, and quite lovely, but a disinterested observer might be forgiven if he wondered whether or not there might be insurmountable cultural differences between them. Jill was a native of Maryland, and she was broadly accustomed to the manners and customs of the western shore of the Chesapeake. Because of her upbringing, private education, and evangelical parents who had been wonderful to her, she very much approved of the kind of person that Larry Locke was, at least in theory, at least in the abstract. But she was about to be almost completely thrown off her game when she got to know him. An actual live one, one who was actually like that.

Given where she came from, it was not really possible to fault her for this, for she had acquired all of her principles from books. In fact, one of those books was Ecochondriacs, which she had read . . . and she had actually read it twice. It was currently in the back seat of her car, but she was really grateful that it wasn’t here on her desk or anything. That way she wouldn’t be tempted to ask for an autograph in the way that Eve had so naturally done. That would seem, I don’t know, kind of forward. And speaking of being forward, she savagely rebuked herself for noticing that he didn’t have a wedding band on. Stupid girl, she thought.

But the fact that she so thoroughly approved of the kind of man that Locke had seemed to be in print, and now even more in person, was more than a tad unsettling. It was an unsettled approval. And so when the senator came out to head off to her committee meeting, and Larry came out at the same time, he showed no inclination to be leaving just yet. He walked over to Jill’s desk slowly, and asked her a perfectly innocent question about whether the senator had produced any statement yet for her constituents on the pipeline bill that was likely going to be on the Senate floor this session. Jill said, no, no, not yet, probably next week. Larry said that he was interested in getting a copy, and she said okay.

From there the conversation moved seamlessly into other topics, and Eve’s left eyebrow went up. Jill couldn’t see Eve’s eyebrow go up, but she could feel it going up. In the space of ten minutes they managed to touch on classical education, a mutual acquaintance in St. Louis, an appreciation for the Brandenburg Concertos, and Larry’s almost total disinterest in how the Washington Nationals were going to do this season. That was the only source of potential conflict. Jill was an avid baseball fan, and was there at the stadium using up her season tickets as often as her schedule permitted. “It gives me an opportunity to yell at people without incurring any societal disapproval,” she said. “That’s an argument,” Larry said.

This went on merrily until Larry pulled out his phone, glanced at it, and said, “Welp, gotta go. Don’t want my Uber driver yelling at me. See you all around. Thanks for the hospitality.”

And with that, he was gone, and he did it without bending any of the frames on the door.

When the door closed shut, and his form disappeared down the hallway to the right, Jill and Eve looked at each other for a moment.

“So then,” Jill said, looking back down at her desk.

“You do know, “ Eve said, “that he is going to be back. Within a few days, I should think. And he is going to ask you out. I think you should prepare yourself spiritually.”

Jill waved her hand dismissively. “Pppptt. Whatever would make you think something like that?”

“Trevor took me hunting with him once. It was a beautiful hike into the back country that morning. We sat up on a small ridge over a broad meadow and shared a thermos of coffee. It was lovely, and very romantic, but I am getting off the point. After about an hour, at the very same moment, a sixteen-point buck came into the meadow from the right just as a beautiful doe came in from the left. I talked Trevor out of shooting the buck, which is why I think he doesn’t take me out hunting any more.”

“And your point . . .?”

“The picture was so beautifully framed. And I thought those two should have a chance to get better acquainted, as I am sure they did.”

“That will be quite enough out of you,” Jill said. Eve laughed. “I don’t think you could beat him up.”

And that is why, later on in the evening, as Jill was preparing for bed, it occurred to her that she had talked to that protester woman that way because Larry was there, and she was showing off. She hissed at herself that she was being so junior high.