“The hope diamond.” He chuckled.
“Because you’re always hoping. I get it,” she said. “You know, I’m quite a collector, too, Senator Crimm.”
“You don’t say?”
“Oh yes. I happen to know a lot about magnifying glasses.” She continued to impress him. “Why, they go all the way back to the caves of Crete and there was once a Chinese emperor who used a topaz to look at the stars. That was thousands of years before the Baby Jesus was born, can you imagine? And I bet you didn’t know that Nero himself used to peer through an emerald when he watched the gladiators kill each other. I suppose so the sun didn’t hurt his eyes. So I think it’s very appropriate that you should have very special optic glasses, too, since you’re such an important, powerful man.”
“Why don’t we slip off to the men’s room and introduce ourselves to each other?” Crimm suggested.
“I could never!” Maude’s no was a yes, but Crimm would find out soon after their marriage that even a yes would be no when she was preoccupied with crown molding and cobwebs.
“The ladies’ room, then,” Crimm tried again.
Beautiful women had always ignored him before he
went into politics. Now it was amazingly easy, and he felt he had been given a second chance. Having been born terribly short and homely with deteriorating eyes no longer mattered. Even the size of his diamond made little difference. It wasn’t like the old days at the Commonwealth Club, where all the up-and-coming males would sit around the swimming pool naked, making political decisions and discussing unfriendly take-overs.
“Not even half a carat,” Crimm remembered one of them whispering. Of course, voices carry across the water, and Crimm, who was sitting on the diving board, heard the tasteless remark.
“It’s the quality, not the size,” he replied. “And how hard it is.”
“All diamonds are hard,” said another man, who ran a Fortune 500 company that later relocated to Charlotte.
Crimm discovered in the ladies’ room that all diamonds are not hard. Maude’s birthmark had caused a bad result. Her bottom looked like she had sat in a puddle of ink. It was hideously stained, and Crimm was afraid to touch it.
“What happened?” he asked as he recoiled and tucked his diamond back into his trousers.
“Nothing happened,” Maude said from her position flat against the cold tile wall. “If the lights are out, you can’t even see it. Some people find it attractive.”
Maude flipped off the light and kissed him hungrily. She mined for his diamond until she could find it again. “Talk vulgar to me,” she whispered in the dark restroom. “No one ever has, and I’ve always wanted to hear lurid things about what people, especially men, want to do to me. Be careful, the wall is hard when you bang me up against it like that. No, don’t pull me down on the hard filthy floor instead. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this in here. I’m going to have bruises.”
“We could go into one of the stalls.” Crimm could scarcely speak. “Then if people walk in, they won’t see us. If we make noise, we can cover it up by flushing the toilet repeatedly.”
Those amorous days had ended after the wedding. Bedford’s eyesight had continually disintegrated, and he had not laid a finger on Maude since Regina was conceived, despite the First Lady’s relentless efforts to look desirable, which was for the purpose of teasing and frustrating and camouflaging her true intention of no. Maude hadn’t fantasized about yes in a very long time, and as she thought about Andy Brazil, it entered her mind that maybe she should try yes again and mean it. After all, her husband was being so unfair about the trivets, and she spent all of her time these days relocating them throughout the mansion.
Maybe she should give the governor something important to worry about and keep that gorgeous Brazil boy for herself, she resentfully thought. The hell with her daughters. Maybe if Maude seduced Andy, she would feel better about herself and become sufficiently distracted to cut back on her shopping. She applied another coat of thick black mascara to enhance her violently violet eyes. She slashed vivid red lipstick around her mouth, patted on more blush, and frowned, to see how her Botox was holding up.