Now, as we pulled up to the estate, I felt this diamond form in my throat, and I almost grabbed Carl’s hand for support. The house was three stories, maybe more. I couldn’t crane my neck enough to see the top of it; for all I knew at that moment, it went all the way up to space. It was blindingly white, not one trace of mold or dirt, a house that you build in your dreams. There was a huge porch that seemed to wrap around the entire structure; it must have been a mile if you walked it. I had been prepared for wealth, but clearly my life had left me ill prepared for what wealth could be. And was Madison’s husband even really all that rich? He hadn’t invented computers or owned a fast-food empire. And yet his level of wealth had given him this house. It had given him Madison, who suddenly appeared in the front doorway, and she was waving, so beautiful that I knew I’d take her over the house every single time I had a choice.
Carl pulled the car around the fountain in the middle of the driveway and stopped right at the front door of the house. While the car idled, he swiftly ducked out of his seat and came around to open my door. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t make my legs work. Madison suddenly walked down the stairs and held out her arms for an embrace. But I couldn’t meet her. I felt like if I moved one muscle, the whole thing would evaporate and I would wake up back on my futon, the A/C broken again. Carl finally had to haul me up, rag-dolling me as if I were a gift for Madison’s birthday, and then I fell into her arms. She was so tall, so strong, that she held me until I smelled the scent of her, until I remembered her, the two of us in bed in that dorm room, and everything was tangible again. It was real. I straightened up, and there I was, standing there. It was the first time in almost fifteen years that I’d seen Madison, but she looked the same. She’d just gotten a little tanner and filled out in a way that suggested adulthood. She didn’t look like a robot. She didn’t look soulless.
“You look so beautiful,” she said, and I believed her.
“Well, you look like a supermodel,” I replied.
“I wish I were a supermodel,” she said. “I wish I had a calendar that was nothing but me.” And like that, it was the two of us again, me being weird and her revealing that, by god, she was weird, too.
Carl checked his watch, did this little bow, and then hopped back in the car and drove away. We could have spent the rest of the day watching him drive away. I kind of wanted to. I kept waiting for his car to turn into some dumb gourd and him to turn into a mouse. I waited for magic, and I didn’t think I would be disappointed.
“It’s so hot out here,” she said. “Come inside.”
“This is your house?” I asked.
Madison smiled. “It’s one of them,” she said, and her nose wrinkled and her eyes got all twinkly. She couldn’t talk like this with her husband, none of the other women who lived in luxury. This was good. She couldn’t believe her good fortune, either.
Inside the house, I don’t know what I’d expected, but it was pretty plain. There wasn’t a lot of crazy art on the walls, and I guess I thought maybe there would be space-age furniture, but this was the kind of wealth where things were so plain that you didn’t realize how expensive they were until you touched them or got closer and saw how they were made with great care and with super-fancy materials. In the hallway was a huge portrait of Madison and her husband from their wedding. She looked like she’d just been crowned Miss America and he looked like the emcee who had once been famous. I couldn’t tell if it was love, but I also knew that I was no real judge of love, having never experienced it or even witnessed it a single time in my life.
Madison had met Senator Jasper Roberts when she’d worked on his reelection campaign right after she’d graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in political science. She’d started at the lowest rung, brought on because the normally untouchable senator had recently left his wife and two kids and started dating one of his biggest donors, some heiress who was obsessed with horses and wore crazy hats. They wanted to get a woman’s perspective on things, I guess. The dudes at the top, who had the senator’s ear, had told him that he had to be super dignified about it and never talk about it and harrumph like a Muppet if anyone even brought it up. I remember her letter to me around this time. Jesus, these guys are so stupid, she wrote. It’s like they’ve never followed up on a single stupid-ass thing they’ve ever done so they could just fix it. Because Madison was brilliant and because she had that slightly skewed way of saying things in a straightforward manner that broke you in half, the senator ended up putting her in charge of the campaign. And, of course, he did this because he was falling in love with her, like everyone did, and because the heiress wouldn’t shut the fuck up about some horse that she wanted to buy.
Madison made him conciliatory. She wrote his speeches, every single one. He confessed to his failings, that his desire to make his constituency prosperous, to help every single person he represented, had caused him to lose sight of what made his own family happy. And now that he’d lost that family, he could not lose his larger family, the voters of the great state of Tennessee. It wasn’t that hard. He was a political legacy, generations of Roberts men running things, so much wealth that people just assumed they had to vote for him. He merely had to show that he was aware that he’d done a fucked-up thing.
And he won. And Madison got kind of famous in these political circles. It’s really all because his stupid fucking opponent didn’t know what he was doing, she’d admitted in another letter. If I’d been on that side of things, Jasper would have lost. And then they got married. And then she got pregnant. And now she had this life.
We sat on the sofa, and it was like sitting on a cloud, the exact opposite of my ratty futon, which felt like getting stuck in a hole in the floor, just trapped there for all eternity. I wondered how much of this decor had been Madison’s choosing and how much of it was left over from her husband’s previous wife. There were sandwiches on a tiered tray, lots of mayo and cucumber, so tiny that they looked like dollhouse food. There was a pitcher of sweet tea and two glasses with big solid chunks of pristine ice in them. The ice hadn’t even begun to melt, and I realized that they must have materialized just seconds before we’d entered the room.
“Do you remember that day we first met?” Madison asked.
“Of course I do,” I said. It hadn’t been that long ago. Had it been a long time ago to her? “You had a dress with goldfish on it.”
“My dad had that dress made for me by a dressmaker in Atlanta. I hated it. Goldfish? He was clueless.”
“Wait, is he dead?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.
“No, he’s still alive,” she said.
“Oh, good,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. It just came out. “Good,” I added, just in case.
“I remember that maybe you hadn’t even brushed your hair,” she said.
“No, I’d definitely brushed my hair,” I told her.
“I remember when you walked into the room, like a lightning bolt, I knew that I was going to love you.”
I wondered where her husband was. I felt like we were about to make out. I felt like maybe the job was to be her secret lover. My pulse was racing, as it always did in her presence.