Ecochondriacs [4]

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Del

Del Martin knew all about Tilton’s hard-left convictions, and had been willing to go along with all of that for the sake of his personal ambition. That ambition was nowhere near the levels that Brock Tilton had gotten himself worked up to, but Del’s visions of future glory were still on the robust side of large. He had no deep leftist principles to speak of, but he wasn’t exactly against them either. Put simply, he was deeply committed to the future career and well-being of one Del Martin.

There is a certain kind of political intelligence—and it can be highly intelligent, as in this case—that for some reason is not connected with first principles. Del could follow the arguments, and he could cite the facts he had readily memorized in one sitting, and he was really good at anticipating what the other fellow was going to say. This was because the other fellow, whether from the left, right, or middle, rarely thought in terms of first principles either. And by rarely, it would be best to say that we mean never.

Tilton’s first principles were almost entirely wrong and cockeyed, but they were first principles, and Tilton knew what they were, and he reasoned from them. Del was not in that position. He was willing to adapt to whatever Tilton was saying currently, and didn’t even have to move that far to do it. And whatever distance he did have to move was fairly easy, because he didn’t have to decouple from any first principles in order to make the shift.

So Del was personally ambitious, and that was the reality that overshadowed everything. He had grown up around the kind of soft left money that is characteristic of the big tech companies, and that had helped establish his factory settings. His father had gobs of that kind of money, and his mother had gobs of those sorts of politics, and they both were heavily invested in their son’s future achievements. It would have been quite strange had Del gone in any other direction.

He had grown up in Cary, North Carolina, and gone off to college in Virginia, where he had decided to remain after graduation. He had gone to law school there, where he had met Gina, a native Virginian, and who was a law student one year ahead of him. They had lived together for a few years and had then gotten married after he graduated.

After law school in Virginia, through some of Gina’s family connections, which went back as far as James Madison on her mother’s side, he was appointed to the Senate seat by the governor after his predecessor had blown up in a gaudy sex and cocaine spectacle. After two years of holding down the fort, he was elected easily and in his own right. With regard to the national stage, it was one of the easiest on-ramps imaginable. Del was ambitious, but he also felt as though fate was somehow in his corner, barking encouraging instructions at him between rounds. For the last few years he had felt like he was living in an invisible cloud of mojo.

As if to confirm this, the vice-presidential slot had come upon him from behind, and entirely unexpectedly. But he was the kind of person who was not averse to going through doors that opened to him suddenly in this fashion. That was how these things happened, was it not? He had been quite surprised when a representative from Tilton’s vetting team had made an appointment with him, walked into his office one 10 am, and told him that he was now on the veep short list, and that they would need his full cooperation if they were to go through all the things he had done back in college while not thinking of his future career. He had not been spotless, but he had been discrete, and that was good enough for them. After the brusque but not unfriendly phone call from Brock Tilton, Del had put his phone away and silently mouthed the inspired words uttered by Plunkitt of Tammany Hall a century and a half before. He had come across the quote while researching for a paper he had written in college. “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

Del was tall, but not outlandish about it, being just a couple inches over six feet. He looked older than he actually was, and had been graced with salt and pepper hair early on. This gave him the look of an energetic middle-aged man, instead of looking like a prematurely aged younger guy, which is what he was. As a candidate, he was attractive to women, and yet somehow not off-putting to men, no small accomplishment. He was a genuine quick study when it came to names. Whenever he was out on the rubber chicken circuit, and talking to some local functionary, Del knew how to connect with him, really connect with him, and how to make that man feel like the most important person in the world. He would learn that person’s name, and he would remember that person’s name, and he would use that remembered name to his advantage some time in the first six months after having learned it. He was good, almost Bill Clinton good.

Gina was a bright, attractive, soft-spoken woman. After they had married, she had at first gotten a job at a prestigious firm, and worked there for a couple of years before she got pregnant. After their first boy was born, she moved to practicing law part-time until she discovered that she enjoyed the mothering part of her day far more than she enjoyed the legal part of her day. She had been staring at some briefs in her brief case, and then went into the laundry room and stared at some briefs in the laundry basket, and decided that work was work wherever you are, but that she preferred being with people she loved instead of being with people she didn’t. So she gradually reduced her hours at the firm until the hours didn’t register much anymore, had a heart-to-heart talk with Del, and just came home.

This was entirely a matter of personal preference. She was not making any social statement. Her upbringing had not been religious at all, and so that had played no part. What she had gleaned from her feminism was that she ought to be allowed to do what she wanted to do, and what she wanted to do was to be with her boys. The only surprise to her had been the reaction of some of the other women at the firm, a mixture of malice and envy. One day when one of the other attorneys had been particularly catty, and Gina was telling Del about it that night at dinner, Del had gotten pretty worked up about it, but Gina’s only comment was that it “takes all kinds.”

Marriage had been all right, mostly. She liked Del, but she really loved her boys.