umbrella stand and gave it to him, and then I took him back to the Republican National Committee headquarters and I went back to the office and got to work in earnest. It was going to be a long haul until the polls closed on November 2, and I had work to do.
S OMETIME THAT AFTERNOON I had an epiphany. It isn’t just Kane and his breathtaking sweetness and his body, I realized. I am wonderful too, goddamn it, amazing and unprecedented. I took the life I was given—not that much different from the lives around me in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, although the genes were very, very good, I guess—and I made a hugely successful career. My grandfather had been a chief of the Cherokee Nation and my grandmother was uneducated but strong and wise, and they had loved me and taught me to be strong.
All those blessings given to me, and out of that, I, the love child of a Cherokee girl and a young man from the upper middle class of North Carolina, had brought my talents to fruition in those strange years in the United States, years of upheaval and change, and become the youngest person ever to be editor of the main newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
So what if I wasn’t very good at relationships over the long haul and had fallen for a married man? That’s not much of a stumble in a life that’s been mostly success.
“Don’t do this to me again,” I told him that night. I looked him right in the eye and kept saying it. “I won’t be nice the next time you show up in my office or call me or do anything elseto get me to be a fool. You are married. You have children. Go home and act like a man, Kane. Get the hell out of here.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, baby.”
“Leave.”
Then he was gone and I went back to the office and back to work, waiting to find out what headlines we were going to need in what was now the next forty-eight hours.
“I’ M SICK OF THIS goddamn election,” my best friend, Thomas Keys, said. He is second in command at the paper and a stalwart in every way: a veteran, a war hero, a one-armed wonder in the brains and ability departments. “I don’t even want to know the results of what the American people in all their diversity and craziness and half-educated guesses and real and imagined vested interests decide to do about the future of this, my beloved country. Long may it wave and so forth.”
“How are you feeling, aside from that?” I asked. I was at my desk with my feet up in the second drawer, trying to get a knot in my leg to quit twitching.
“I’m doing okay for a man who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week. I keep waking up thinking I’m supposed to do something.”
“Write me an editorial for Wednesday’s paper about the lessons of history.”
T UESDAY , N OVEMBER 2, 2004. Election day and goddamn it if I don’t run into my ex-husband standing in line atCreek Elementary School, where I go to vote. They had some really good art on the walls where we waited in line. One especially good combination poem-painting was called
A Fast, Fat Squirrel
.
I was halfway to the door of the room where the voting was taking place when I spotted him just turning in his ballot. Bobby Tree, the first boy I ever fucked and the only man except for Kane that I ever loved. You don’t forget your first love. Nothing is ever again that fast and fat.
A minute later he was beside me with his hand on my waist and all that goddamn indescribable sexual stuff that comes out of his five-foot-ten-inch Cherokee body like snowmelt in the high mountains in early May. He used to take me to the Rockies in spring to watch the snow turn into rushing rivers, then take me down the rivers in a canoe.
I was having my second epiphany in a week: in some vast illumination I realized I could love two men at once. That is how men do it, love more than one of us. I want them both, but not together the way men fantasize about their women. I want Kane then and Bobby now, and maybe that’s how you keep it in balance, or
S OMETIME THAT AFTERNOON I had an epiphany. It isn’t just Kane and his breathtaking sweetness and his body, I realized. I am wonderful too, goddamn it, amazing and unprecedented. I took the life I was given—not that much different from the lives around me in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, although the genes were very, very good, I guess—and I made a hugely successful career. My grandfather had been a chief of the Cherokee Nation and my grandmother was uneducated but strong and wise, and they had loved me and taught me to be strong.
All those blessings given to me, and out of that, I, the love child of a Cherokee girl and a young man from the upper middle class of North Carolina, had brought my talents to fruition in those strange years in the United States, years of upheaval and change, and become the youngest person ever to be editor of the main newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
So what if I wasn’t very good at relationships over the long haul and had fallen for a married man? That’s not much of a stumble in a life that’s been mostly success.
“Don’t do this to me again,” I told him that night. I looked him right in the eye and kept saying it. “I won’t be nice the next time you show up in my office or call me or do anything elseto get me to be a fool. You are married. You have children. Go home and act like a man, Kane. Get the hell out of here.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, baby.”
“Leave.”
Then he was gone and I went back to the office and back to work, waiting to find out what headlines we were going to need in what was now the next forty-eight hours.
“I’ M SICK OF THIS goddamn election,” my best friend, Thomas Keys, said. He is second in command at the paper and a stalwart in every way: a veteran, a war hero, a one-armed wonder in the brains and ability departments. “I don’t even want to know the results of what the American people in all their diversity and craziness and half-educated guesses and real and imagined vested interests decide to do about the future of this, my beloved country. Long may it wave and so forth.”
“How are you feeling, aside from that?” I asked. I was at my desk with my feet up in the second drawer, trying to get a knot in my leg to quit twitching.
“I’m doing okay for a man who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week. I keep waking up thinking I’m supposed to do something.”
“Write me an editorial for Wednesday’s paper about the lessons of history.”
T UESDAY , N OVEMBER 2, 2004. Election day and goddamn it if I don’t run into my ex-husband standing in line atCreek Elementary School, where I go to vote. They had some really good art on the walls where we waited in line. One especially good combination poem-painting was called
A Fast, Fat Squirrel
.
I was halfway to the door of the room where the voting was taking place when I spotted him just turning in his ballot. Bobby Tree, the first boy I ever fucked and the only man except for Kane that I ever loved. You don’t forget your first love. Nothing is ever again that fast and fat.
A minute later he was beside me with his hand on my waist and all that goddamn indescribable sexual stuff that comes out of his five-foot-ten-inch Cherokee body like snowmelt in the high mountains in early May. He used to take me to the Rockies in spring to watch the snow turn into rushing rivers, then take me down the rivers in a canoe.
I was having my second epiphany in a week: in some vast illumination I realized I could love two men at once. That is how men do it, love more than one of us. I want them both, but not together the way men fantasize about their women. I want Kane then and Bobby now, and maybe that’s how you keep it in balance, or
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