House Divided. Джек Марс

“We’re taking this meeting as a favor to the Vice President and nothing more. Let’s get it over with so we can get on with the rest of our day.”

      Kat went over to the large closed-circuit TV monitor hanging on the wall and turned it on. It was an eyesore, but it made a convenient way to communicate with her Vice President, Stephen Lief. It had been there since his inauguration more than a month ago. But since then, Susan had begun to think she and Stephen weren’t going to be doing all that much communicating after all. Only a short time in office, and he had immediately begun to overstep his bounds.

      Lief’s bespectacled face appeared on the giant screen, sitting in the upstairs study at the Naval Observatory. Susan’s study. Arrgh. That irritated her. The study was her favorite room in the best home she had ever had. He sat there like he owned the place.

      Stone!

      She could blame Luke Stone for Stephen Lief. Or she could blame herself for going along with it. Or she could blame human biology, and the love endorphins released by physical intimacy – they made your brain lose its reasoning ability.

      Susan had known Stephen a long time. In her Senate days, he was the loyal opposition across the aisle from her, a moderate conservative, unremarkable – pig-headed but not deranged. And he was a nice man.

      But he was also the wrong party, and she had taken a lot of heated criticism from liberal quarters for that. He was landed aristocracy, old money – a Mayflower person, the closest thing that America had to nobility. At one time, he had seemed to think that becoming President was his birthright. Not Susan’s type; entitled aristocrats tended to lack the common touch that helped you connect with the people you were supposedly there to serve.

      It was a measure of how deeply Luke Stone had gotten inside her skin that she considered Stephen Lief at all. He was Stone’s idea. She could remember the exact moment Stone brought it up to her. They were lying together in her big Presidential bed. She had been pondering out loud about possible Veep candidates, and then Stone said:

      “Why not Stephen Lief?”

      She had almost laughed. “Stone! Stephen Lief? Come on.”

      “No, I mean it,” he said.

      He was lying on his side. His nude body was thin but rock hard, chiseled, and covered with scars.

      “You’re beautiful, Stone. But maybe you better let me do the thinking. You can just recline there, looking pretty.”

      “I interviewed him at his farm down in Florida,” Stone said. “I was asking him what he knew about Jefferson Monroe and election fraud. He came clean to me very quickly. And he’s good with horses. Gentle. That has to count for something.”

      “I’ll keep that in mind,” Susan said. “The next time I’m looking for a ranch hand.”

      But she had chosen him after all. There was something about conservatives and liberals coming together and rebuilding trust in government. There was something about Stephen being able to work magic in Congress, and finally getting an infrastructure bill passed – something the country needed. But so far the reality of Stephen Lief had been altogether less impressive than the fantasy.

      An idea for Stephen Douglas Lief began to take shape in Susan’s mind. He was going to do a month or so traveling the western United States on a chili-tasting tour. He could start as far east as Ohio, sample some world-famous Cincinnati chili, best when smothering hot dogs to death, then move south and west to Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, and southern California.

      It was hardly a punishment assignment – these were pleasant places to be in winter. What’s more, he would get to develop an iron stomach, and Susan was sure that a man like Lief, a graduate of stuffy East Coast schools like Choate, Princeton, and Yale, would love to get out on the road and meet some regular folks for a change. Susan made a mental note of it – Kat would assign someone to start scheduling this important outreach tour as soon as this conversation was over.

      Sitting next to Lief on the TV screen was Lucy Pilgrim. She looked frail and older than her years – a far cry from the young beauty of her street activist days. In her mind’s eye, Susan caught a black-and-white newspaper image of a young Lucy shouting into a bullhorn at some rally or another – young, energetic, very pretty with long straight hair hanging down to her waist, in faded skintight blue jeans and a flower shirt. Time caught up with everybody sooner or later.

      “Hi, Susan,” Stephen Lief said. “I want to thank you for taking this meeting.”

      Susan shrugged. “Of course. I’m sure you both understand that it’s a difficult day and I’ll need to – ”

      Lief cut her off. “Of course we understand. Jack Butterfield was a friend of mine. I’m going to Texas in the morning, to be there when the body arrives.”

      “You should stay for the chili,” Susan almost said, but didn’t.

      Instead, she looked directly at Lucy Pilgrim. “Hi, Lucy, how are you?”

      “Susan, nice to see you. Thanks for chatting with me.”

      “Well, you’ve had a quite a champion there in the former Senator from Florida. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, as I understand it.”

      “Stephen and I go way back.”

      Susan just stared at the screen. She glanced at Kat, thought about introducing her, then thought better of it. Why prolong this with niceties?

      “Lucy, what can I help you with? I’m the President of the United States, as I think you probably know. I don’t make legislation. There’s really no sense in lobbying me.”

      Lucy shook her head. As she did so, Susan could see the effect that slight movement had on the woman’s body. It seemed like her entire frame followed along with the head shake, then continued for another second or more. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. And that was almost certainly while on medications that worked to control the tremors.

      Susan sighed. Life. It went like that. Money was very, very nice to have, but health was true wealth.

      “Susan, I just want to share with you what we’re doing, and see if there’s any point of intersection where we may be able to benefit each other.”

      “Lucy, you may or may not realize that I’m in the midst of an international crisis right now.”

      Lucy nodded. “And I think you’re handling it beautifully. I watched your remarks on the TV news a little while ago. I was struck as always by your ability to inject powerful emotions into your connection with the people. But like all crises, this one will pass. And our domestic problems will still be there. International crises don’t make domestic problems go away.”

      “Or vice versa,” Stephen Lief offered, somewhat awkwardly.

      “Exactly,” Lucy said.

      Susan almost smiled. This could very nearly be a skit on a late night comedy show.

      “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

      Lucy launched into it.

      “Susan, times have changed since when you, and especially I, were young women. You may not think about this on a daily basis because it doesn’t seem pressing to you, but we are sitting on a demographic and cultural time bomb. In each successive generation, white women of what we’ll call child-bearing age continue to delay the decision to have children. Women of the so-called Generation X represented a radical break with the past – one out of every six chose not to have children at all. This would be a remarkable development in itself, if it had been temporary. But so-called Millennial women are on pace to double that figure, and are even delaying marriage itself. It gets worse the further down we go. Young girls in high school, when polled about their desire to have children, place it very low on their list of priorities. Marriage is at the bottom of that list.”

      Susan stared into the TV screen.

      “We are not replacing ourselves, Susan. A society dwindles and dies when it doesn’t replace itself. Much more preferable is if a society continues to grow. A growing economy needs people to feed