“Shit. OK, go with dancing.”
Gaby looked even more alarmed.
“I am not a complete rhythmically challenged imbecile, Gaby,” Cleo bleated. “My mom was a professional ballerina. It’s in me somewhere!”
“OK, OK, we’ll go with that.” Gaby smoothed out her sweater, grabbed a lipstick (Veronica Kaye Fire Engine Red!), and puckered up. “Here.” She thrust it toward Cleo. “You need more help than this, but it won’t hurt.”
Veronica Kaye swooped in and smelled, frankly, heavenly. It was the first thing Cleo noticed: her scent. Not just that the tones were perfect, some magical blend of vanilla bean and gardenia and perhaps a touch of grapefruit, but she also reeked of power. Cleo sized her up and genuinely thought she was the most intoxicating, most impressive woman she’d ever seen. And Cleo had met heads of state, ambassadors, prime ministers, and, of course, other senators (there were seventeen total, to the eighty-three men). Gaby was nearly salivating. It was hard to quantify who was more stupefied, but together their collective awe spoke to the way that Veronica Kaye commanded a room.
Of course, she was also beautiful, though neither Cleo nor Gaby would have led with that. Praising a woman for her beauty was so retro that it was uncouth. But still, she was. Stunning. As the CEO of the largest cosmetics company in the world, she needed to be, but she sold her products on more than prettiness; she sold them to encourage women to know their worth, to feel comfortable in their skin, to own who they were. Veronica had emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a young girl, and her face was still dotted with freckles from the Caribbean sun. Her caramel skin was flawless without makeup, despite her being somewhere in her fifties. Her eggplant-hued dress was immaculately tailored, her gold watch and jewelry just the right amount of heft on her wrist.
Cleo stood behind her desk and wondered if she weren’t a little bit in love.
“Senator McDougal,” Veronica said, thrusting out her hand and shaking with the exact measure of firmness that Cleo would expect from such a goddess. A thin blond man in his thirties trailed her, and she turned and said, “I’m fine, Topher; can you please get me a cup of coffee?”
Topher nodded and was dismissed, and Cleo knew that she was more than just a little bit in love.
“Cleo, please call me Cleo, Ms. Kaye.”
“And you call me Veronica.” She laughed. “Ms. Kaye is my slightly overbearing mother-in-law, who, God bless, I love, but we really don’t have much in common.” She laughed again. “I guess we both love her son—she maybe even more than I do.” She pointed toward the door. “That was Topher. He’s one of my VPs—I suppose we have to hire at least one man or risk a lawsuit, no? But he won’t be sitting in for this. This is just us women.”
Gaby swallowed, her eyes wide with reverence. “We can’t thank you enough for coming in,” she said. “But I didn’t think . . .”
Veronica sat in the chair opposite Cleo’s desk, so Cleo sat too; then Gaby followed.
“I was up on the Hill today. I know this is a surprise. But I find that sometimes surprising people can work in your favor.” She assessed Cleo, then Gaby. “Sometimes, it’s best to catch people off guard to get a sense of what you’re really getting into.”
“Well,” Gaby said, spreading her arms wide. “What you see with us is what you get.”
Veronica narrowed her eyes toward Cleo. “I’m intrigued by what you did in Seattle.” She paused. “Obviously, it is not going quite as you expected, but that doesn’t worry me.”
Cleo glanced down at the open newspaper on her desk and subtly tried to fold it, but you can’t subtly try to fold a newspaper. They all waited until she finished, Cleo’s cheeks turning a deeper shade of pink as each second croaked by.
“What I liked about it was the gumption,” Veronica said. “The end result is often less important than the passion behind it, at least for voters on the national stage. Running a presidential campaign is quite different from running a senatorial campaign, where your voters already know what they want to know.”
“That’s exactly what I told her!” Gaby said, which Veronica ignored, and Gaby clamped her mouth shut.
“What I mean,” Veronica said, “is that I’m intrigued. And you’re on my radar. And if I see more gumption, wherever this notion came from . . .”
Cleo started to interrupt, though she wasn’t sure with what—she didn’t want to tell her about the list, which she worried would sound like a weakness, but perhaps if it were framed, as Gaby once said, as a way of growth, of looking more human—but she got no further than a stutter before Veronica cut her off.
“I don’t need the details,” Veronica said. “I don’t even want to know them right now. Surprise me. That’s what I like out of a candidate.”
She stood, her time here already coming to an end. “But keep that up and you’ll have my endorsement. And this time out, my endorsement can probably make you president.” Then she barked, “Topher? Where’s my coffee?” And then she was gone.
After Veronica’s visit, Gaby’s plan to publicize Cleo’s regrets sped into hyperdrive.
“Dancing,” she screeched the next morning after their staff meeting. “We are going to make you a dancing queen! And I took a look at the others,” she continued, talking too quickly, like she’d had four espressos by ten a.m., which she may have. “While I work on the dancing, I want you to get back on that bill—”
“The free housing bill?”
“Bingo,” Gaby said, pointing her finger at Cleo. “That was a smart move—putting it on the list.”
“Well, I mean, I should have supported it in the first place. I caved when it became a political stink bomb.” Cleo didn’t often wilt in the face of political pressure but occasionally, yes. She never liked it, was never proud of it, but polling mattered, plain and simple. The only way you ensured that you got to stand up and fight for your constituents was knowing that from time to time, you had to take a seat to preserve your job.
“But now you can look like a champion, at least in the eyes of Veronica Kaye.”
The free housing bill was a controversial proposal that Cleo had been asked to cosponsor the year prior. It recommended sweeping new legislation for lower-income families who, if they could demonstrate five years of steady employment, at least one child elementary-school age or older, and a clean criminal record, could apply for either a free home renovation or a free home, period. It had its detractors, of course: cries that giving away things for free was not the American Way!, and further cries that housing was a temporary Band-Aid for larger, systemic problems in poorer neighborhoods. But Cleo had disagreed. She’d read the research and thought that stability started with a solid roof over someone’s head, with a rodent-free kitchen, with water that didn’t turn brown from the pipes. Still, her staff had polled her voters, and it was a disaster—positive numbers in the low thirties, and even though Cleo knew it was probably the right thing to do, she demurred when asked to sign on.
“I’ll reach out to Senator Jackman and see if we can revive it,” Cleo said.