Cape Disappointment by Earl Emerson

going to take us up on that second debate.” They'd already had the first of three promised meetings between the candidates, but the morning-after poll numbers for Maddox had dipped substantially, and now all talk of a second meeting had been nixed.
    “What do you think about this shindig?” Maddox asked. “Pretty nice, huh?” Maddox was looking around, standing too close to Kathy, but looking around. It was as if he wanted to move in on her and thought I wouldn't notice if he did it without looking. Like a lot of male politicians, Maddox had an eye for women and, like others before him, seemed to believe he gave off some sort of natural aphrodisiac. I had no information to make me think he was a philanderer— he'd been married to the same woman for thirty years— but he sure liked to eyeball. James Maddox was fifty-five, a man with a broad and impassive face, pale, with a booming voice he spent a lot of time modulating. Around the office people called him Old Iron Pants because of the rigid way he stood, legs apart and anchored to the floor, unmoving from the waist down as if he had the legs of a statue. Maddox hated the appellation.
    “It is a nice gathering,” Kathy said. “I find it interesting the governor invited both parties.”
    “Well, she's a Democrat and her fiancé is a Republican, so I guess they decided to go nondenominational,” Maddox said, smiling humor-lessly at Kathy. Maybe I was getting touchy about guys slobbering over my wife. Or maybe I was still tweaked because Kathy thought Deborah had been making a fool of me. Maybe that was why I did what I did next.
    The room was enormous, but even so it was beginning to bulge at the seams. The decibel level was rising, and Maddox and I found ourselves leaning down to talk to Kathy, while she was almost on tiptoes trying to hear us. It occurred to me that I was next to Maddox's bad ear.
    Everyone who worked with him knew he had a good ear and a bad one, that you needed to be on his good side when there was a lot of background noise.
    Speaking loud enough for Kathy to hear but not so loudly that Mad-dox would distinguish anything but gibberish, I said, “You probably don't know this, but Kathy likes to call you Old Iron Pants. In fact, she may be the person who got it started.”
    “I
certainly
was not,” Kathy blurted. She turned to Maddox. “That isn't true. It's not true at all. I don't even know why he said that.”
    Maddox looked at Kathy curiously, leaned over, gave her his good ear, and said, “What?”
    Now Kathy was almost yelling. “I said I'm not the one calling you Old Iron Pants. I'm not the one who made it up. ‘Iron Pants' came from somebody in our office, but it wasn't me. Honest.” Maddox still didn't know what she was talking about, but she hadn't realized it yet. “I apologize for calling you Old Iron Pants,” Kathy yelled into Mad-dox's good ear.
    Taking it poorly, Maddox gave Kathy a caustic look, turned to one of the sycophants who'd been behind him, mumbled something I couldn't hear, and left.
    “I can't believe you did that,” Kathy said.
    “Did what?”
    “Why on earth would you want to embarrass me and him at the same time?”
    For a few moments I found myself grasping at straws to explain. “I thought it would be funny. I mean, I was talking into his bad ear. I thought you would figure it out. At a party with this much background noise you can say almost anything on his bad side and he won't hear it.”
    “So why didn't you stop me?”
    “It happened too fast.”
    “It wasn't
that
fast. You made me look like an idiot.”
    “I couldn't stop you. Besides—”
    “You deliberately maneuvered me into saying I call him Old Iron Pants.”
    “I didn't think you'd repeat it to him. I just wanted to see the look on your face.”
    “Well, you've seen it.” She turned and walked away.
    It was a dim-witted stunt if ever there was one. Even I didn't know why I'd done it. I couldn't blame alcohol because I hadn't been