The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch Page A

pick?”
    He looked at us. “I hadn’t decided. Kerry or Dean, one of ’em. I was still up in the air. Probably Dean.”
    “Well, shit,” I said.
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Alison. “As long as you’re safe, obviously.”
    “Do you think Dean can beat Bush?” he asked.
    “No,” we said simultaneously.
    “Do you have a laptop?” he asked. “I can get my Kerry piece off my e-mail. I write up all the endorsements, see how they feel.”
    “You don’t have to change—”
    “I’m endorsing John Kerry,” he said, shortly.
    I texted Rix. Al and I got him. Long story. Back late.
    Nobody at the headquarters slept that night, we were so elated. A bunch of us, the senior staff, sat around on the couches, talking about the campaign, about who would get what job in the White House when we won. We played Scrabble and got through huge urns of coffee and refreshed the news Web sites to see what was getting play.
    Polsky’s endorsement loaded onto the Star-Herald ’s Web site at seven in the morning, and twelve hours after that we won.
    The ecstasy of it was overpowering. Everyone thought we’d come in third, maybe second. It was certainly the end of Dean, and effectively the end of Edwards.
    It also marked a turn in my relationship with Alison. Throughout the party that night we kept grinning at each other, and right after Kerry spoke—stopping on his way to the podium to say, “Nice work on Polsky, lovebirds”—we went to an empty conference room and fucked. When O’Leary’s closed at four in the morning we picked up burgers at the all-night diner, in a group of ten or so, all of us full of the future, since when you win it seems impossible that you’ll ever lose, and then she and I went back to our little studio apartment, the one the campaign rented for us.
    Before that night our relationship had been loving, but we had never promised each other too much, in all those years. Now it was something else. “I hope we’re always together,” she said as we fell asleep.
    “We will be,” I told her. “This is just the beginning.”
    Of all the hours I’ve spent on earth, rising and falling away like waves, I think that I was happiest during that one.
    I thought of that night when Sophie kissed me, nearly eighteen months after Iowa; I thought about Alison and realized where we had come from that night, realized that I was in trouble. It was too much of a change, too fast. Jess I could ascribe to madness or unsettledness, but now twice in two weeks I had kissed other people—and Sophie was a different kind of trespass. Or maybe I was just spiraling, or at rock bottom, whatever language of crisis people use—and I understood then why that language exists, it’s a comfort to have it there, as if elsewhere, in other places, it’s happening to them, too, so often that they need phrases to describe it, it’s not just you.
    “Do it one more time,” I said to Sophie.
    She laughed and turned away, and I thought she was going to leave, but she only flicked her cigarette onto the wet cobblestones, then came back to me and put her mouth against mine, cool and soft—tasting faintly of cigarettes and red wine—tasting of silence.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    I don’t know what I thought would happen the day after that. Certainly something dramatic. I woke up—the guilt fainter, perhaps because I was growing accustomed to a sense of such terrible transgression—and half-expected Alison and Sophie to walk through the door together. It shows, the world is always less about you than you think it is.
    In fact, it played out differently. When the group went to hear the bell ringers, Sophie had slipped away, and when I saw her two days later she was merely friendly, not unlike Anneliese or Tom. I wondered if she had chalked it up in her mind to free wine and start-of-the-year mischief, or to the end of her relationship, or perhaps even forgotten it.
    So it went for that whole first month at Fleet, seeing each other here