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terrorists’ studio, but people admired his sneering good luck. Beyond his own mortification, Van also sensed Carlotta’s electric response to Cliff, and, despite her pleas, he resigned and entered a monastery, renouncing worldly things. Haplessly, with his typical waffling, he reappeared a few days later to try to resume his office, an attempted reverse dive the Congress declared inadmissible. Carlotta was torn by Van’s torture and her own unresolved passion for Cliff, who had been installed as a guest of the White House by popular demand. Wanting to be strong for Van, trying to avoid encountering Cliff, she nonetheless found herself gasping and dizzy, as if spinning on an amusement park rotary ride, where the floor drops away but one hangs motionless, pinned to the wall by air. She and Van spent a night together weeping as proof of their love, but then he vanished definitively, supposedly to Sri Lanka, thoughno one was ever quite sure. There were later reports of a blue-eyed penitent there who had taken a vow of silence, and so could not explain himself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 
A WOLF IN DOG’S CLOTHING
    Nestor Haze, like the sentimental painters drawn to plagued frontier towns, traveled to Washington to appropriate what seemed an epic tale to him. He offered to write dialog for Cliff during the Senate hearings on the violent rescue of the First Lady. Surprisingly, Cliff accepted, and the two proved well matched. Cliff was the perfect terse loner to speak for blabbermouth, clubby America’s wishful image of itself, and Nestor’s niblets of corn sounded pithy in Cliff’s monotone.
    Since Van had trimmed the vice-presidency as needless fat, an immediate election was called for on a write-in basis, out of necessity and as a token of electoral reform; besides, the country was virtually broke. August Dodd Woodhead ran on an I Told You So platform, but this time his son Win decided to run against his father himself, despite the presumption that his acidic manner was unelectable. The family conflict was a sensation, but it made the public tired of Dodd and alienated by Win’s witticisms and his tawdry revelations about his childhood spankings. Natural momentum put Cliff in the race, running without any party’s support but with the defense thathe owed nothing to any machine. His slogan, crafted by Nestor, was Be Proud—He Is. Nestor was also his vice-presidential choice, since Cliff didn’t want to meet any strange men in suits and pick one to work with. Also, Shep Woodhead emerged briefly from Lilly Willow, not to endorse his father or his brother, but to reminisce about what good care Cliff had taken of him, and what a good job he’d done running the farm. In Shep’s anesthetized mind, it had been a farm.
    The public hoped against hope that Cliff and Carlotta would get together romantically, especially since they were high school sweethearts who had dated briefly later. Tabloids urged her to hear his plea, though as always he seemed to desire her without any particular neediness. She resolved to resist him, and announced she could not keep falling under his spell, only to be abandoned. He grinned and shrugged.
    The next day Cliff called a press conference and announced he was marrying Carlotta, that her husband had been declared not only dead but already dead for several years, so she was free to wed without criticism. Carlotta was half thrilled and half affronted, since although this was her dream come true, he hadn’t asked her first. The country went wild for it, and as it had been with Van, the luster of others’ approval burnished Cliff to a husbandly hue. Besides, he seemed to be civilizing his Dodge City heart, thanks to Nestor’s gulch-brown banalities and his own taste for authority. Anyway, she reasoned, the system of checks and balances would keep him, if not in line,then at least on hand. They were married in the Rose Garden, and Cliff wore a suit. Julienne was invited to the wedding, but she claimed she