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attractive furniture, went to friendly parties, and even raised several pleasant and appreciative children. She herself was childless, and the husband in her videos went unseen, but millions were grateful for the apparently fulfilled life they vicariously experienced from her tapes. Her greatestseller was a video in which she lived in a peaceful small town called Verdant Park, and everyone in it had a sweetheart and a job. People now referred to her as Our Carlotta, since it was hip to know her real name, and besides, it was more comforting than Charlotte.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
DARING DAYLIGHT DESTINY
    Julienne appeared at the White House late one afternoon, sunken-eyed and weirdly dressed for a formal ball, with a huge handwritten manuscript that she wheeled in unwrapped on a dolly. When Carlotta came to her, Julienne confided too loudly that Culvert had committed suicide the day before. Depressed by his sickness, for starters, he had thrown himself from the highest finial of his father’s unfinished folly, Vertigo Park, the haunted palace of storm windows. Julienne had then decided she was finished with her biography and headed for Washington. It was called
Carlotta Made
, and she presented it to her sister with shaking hands. It bore no relation to reality, however, beyond its vaguely pornographic title, and though illegible, would have read more like a hack’s misremembrance of the Book of Revelation than like Carlotta’s actual rags-to-riches story. It seemed to presume that Carlotta, sometimes called Charlotte, was the cause of the sunrise and of springtime, ofsnowfall and rebirth. The text dwelled on a serpent called Horizon, and had no clear-cut beginning or ending, since the pages were unnumbered and Julienne seemed unconcerned about those pages that blew away when she moved the dolly from place to place. She announced that she was Carlotta, that Cliff was her husband, and that they were going away together forever.
    Carlotta was anxious, but invited Julienne to rest there for the night. Julienne spent it sleeplessly calling out her own name, which was difficult to call a good sign. Cliff, who was in residence at the time, and Carlotta could hear her cries even from their room, and though Cliff dismissed Julienne as self-chopped mincemeat, he was shaken, and for the first time in his experience, was sexually impotent. Carlotta was sympathetic, from which he recoiled, because it made him feel weak. She secretly hoped that this, his first unluckiness, might be a breakthrough to fuller humanity for him.
    Julienne came to breakfast late, still in her formal dress, and declared that her name was now Fury, which she hoped didn’t sound too much like a horse. She then produced a small handgun, which Cliff had insisted be provided in every guest bedroom, and rushed into the Rose Garden, where he was negotiating with Romulus and Remus Portonovo, the wealthy Italian realtors, for the sale of Rome as a movable theme park. She shot Cliff in the heart, and then herself, warning the Italians they would be next. Apparently she had been driven mad not just fromjealousy but from the Fatal Urogenital Carnal Kinesis that had incubated in her since her performance in
Will Wanda Never Cease?
    Aides screamed, and Romulus and Remus wailed Latinate expressions of horror. Carlotta rushed to cradle the dying Cliff, who shuddered with surprise. He had never felt pain before. He faintly joked that once the dick goes, so do the reflexes, and with his index finger tenderly, for once, tracing the scar on her cheek, he expired. Carlotta stiffened with confusion, and at this moment Shep Woodhead appeared, fresh out of Lilly Willow, and asked if there were any job openings.
EPILOG
 
    As dazed as grieved, Carlotta and her attendant Congress tried to figure out what to do. Cliff had not named another vice-president after Nestor’s death, claiming it would be defeatist, and the public had lost its will to endorse anyone. August Woodhead offered to