As Time Goes By: A BWWM Interracial Romance (6 page)

He stared at her keenly. She was beginning to sound like she
would become a real asset to him, although he had no illusions that campaigns
were sometimes not so much won or lost not on bread and butter issues, but
rather on matters of perception. Who, for example, could be the most
politically correct? Who could tap into an issue that would steal the hearts
and minds of lethargic, uncaring voters? And most important of all, who could
master the art of giving fifteen second sound bites to news outlets that could
make or break a campaign as they aired those sound bites to a million municipal
voters. Campaign slogans could also be of tantamount importance, but they had
to be able to weather storms and last the length of any campaign. What might
have sounded catchy and uplifting during the first few weeks of a campaign,
might sound tired, old and too stale to support by the time the end of a
campaign rolled around. Politicians had to be savvy from the very beginning.
You didn’t always get to roll with the punches. Campaign signs with such
slogans were printed before campaigns began, and could rarely be changed later
on. Advertising space with those same slogans being said and shown could not be
altered once sent in to the advertisers. Often times it was a case of get it
right in the beginning, or sink and don’t swim at the end.

“What would you do if you were me?” he asked.

“First of all, I would start by recognizing that a lot of
unemployed men have moved out of Detroit looking for other work. Over sixty
percent of the remaining voters are women and they are facing some real hard
challenges. I would focus my campaign on women’s issues. That is kind of what
David, your opponent is doing, except he is cheating, trying to burn the candle
at both ends. By using the theme of family values, he is speaking to the male
white voter as well as the white suburban female voter, then hoping blacks will
all pile on because he is, after all, black himself.”

“Any ideas on possible campaign slogans?”

“I think a good campaign slogan for your campaign would be ‘women
matter.’ What do you think about that?”

He sighed and shook his head from side to side. “You think
it would be wise for me, as a white middle aged, middle class male to lecture
poorer, younger, black women on what should matter to them?”

 “Normally no. But as your campaign manager, I could be your
PR lady. And I could push it for you. Most mayors have PR reps that do a lot of
press work while their candidates are out shaking hands and kissing babies. In
other words, you meet the people and I’ll meet the press. That way, what
viewers and voters will see on the media is not just a white guy, but a black
girl as well.”

“Interesting, although if it backfires, we could be looking
at not being able to recover, especially if our advertising budget is small.”

“Fund raising will be of tantamount importance,” she said,
agreeing with his assessment. “It will play nicely to a lot of contributors the
fact you have chosen a woman to run your campaign, and as well, a black. If
someone thinks you are savvy and have a good chance of winning, they are more
likely to write you a check. And you know how important it will be to raise a
ton of money.”

“Absolutely. Without money for hard hitting, effective ads,
we would be sailing upstream at best, or merely dead in the water at worst.”

She paused for a moment as she studied his face. He was very
cute and extremely gorgeous. She was also definitely deeply in love with him, far
too deeply for her own good. She had taken the plunge and was now in over her
head.She was desperate to cling to his words that they would make a great
married couple. They both knew that they complimented each other so well, were
both sexy, attractive and wildly quick witted. They seemed to think so much
alike that it was almost scary. Still, it irked her that he had so summarily
dismissed her notion that they get married if only for appearances sake to help
his campaign. He had thrown up a brick wall at that idea. She hadn’t really
expected him to buy into the idea per se, especially since they had only met
weeks ago, although they did have a professional history extending well beyond
that time frame. The speed and tenacity with which he vetoed the thought was
somewhat worrisome. Her younger sister had warned her about the dangers of
getting in far too deep far too early, and yet, that was exactly what she had
done, tossed herself into his lap as though he were the last man on earth. She
sighed. It was therefore not surprising that he might be taking her for
granted. She felt she needed to push the envelope.

“About us,” she suddenly blurted out, unable to stop the
words from tumbling from her mouth like so many jagged boulders, rolling down a
cliff. She would now have no control over the mess they were bound to make.

He eyed her keenly. He was enamored with every damn thing
about her, and loved how it felt to be with her. She was sharp witted,
exciting, fun, provocative, savvy, sultry and a real knockout. She also had
amazing breasts and a figure that was to die for. But he now realized she was
not afraid to admit she was in really deep, and seeking comfort over just where
their relationship might be finally headed. He recognized that she had probably
been burnt by men so many times in the past. He also recognized that she had
allowed her once finicky heart to become enraptured with him in every way.
There would be no going back for her. It was either end up having a trip to the
altar or a trip to the looney bin. He prayed he wasn’t going to let her down.
Still, her overwhelmed heart had backed them both into a corner from which
there could be no reprieve.

XXX

The next four weeks were absolute chaos, with reporters
buzzing around Arnold and Marg like they were a fine gourmet meal. Their main
rival, the incumbent mayor David Dodds, seemed to be developing an acute case
of foot in mouth disease. Instead of ignoring Arnold, and focusing on his main
rival, Nevil, who was the shifty ‘jobs for everyone’ candidate, David had
decided to attack newcomer Arnold with a gusto and fervor that was as dirty as
it was expensive.

 The massive, ill-advised, month long campaign against Arnold
was making David’s campaign manager, Howard Reading, extremely angry and
frustrated. Howard quickly resigned, and was on public record as saying that
David’s stupid ads were merely giving Arnold a lot of free publicity he
wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. As the saying goes, bad publicity can be good
publicity in that it shines a spotlight on the one you are trashing. As a
result, reporters were dangling microphones and recorders in Marg and Arnolds
faces all day long, and the more they did, was the more that Arnold and Marg
began articulating their campaign platform and repudiating David’s ill-fated
lies against them. As a stroke of sheer genius, Marg then persuaded the
disenchanted and disenfranchised Howard to join their camp, a move that was as
embarrassing to the incumbent mayor as it was devastating.

Marg listened to the phone ring five times. Once more and it
would go into voice mail. The voice of Arnold suddenly greeted her.

“Hi hon.”

 “Hi right back at you. We’re up almost a full twenty-five
points since the beginning of the campaign when you first tossed your hat into
the ring over a month ago.”

“A full twenty-five points? How is that possible?” Arnold asked,
trying to hide the escalating jubilation in his excited voice.

“Well, with David running off at the mouth, spouting his
lies about you and inconsistencies about his own platform, a lot of voters are
starting to listen to our campaign slogans.”

“That is great news, although, I may have gotten us into
some hot water with some ill-advised vocal bloopers of my own.”

She listened to his confession apprehensively. They had
agreed that he would stick strictly to their campaign platform on helping
create more facilities for women, such as subsidized daycare, and more abuse
shelters, not to mention their five point plan to try to revitalize downtown
and attract new businesses to the city. She had also come up with the brilliant
plan to recruit hundreds of animal lovers as dog catching volunteers. It had
also been agreed that she would do the heavy lifting where interviewing the
press was concerned.

“Just what did you say and to whom?” she asked, unable to
stop herself from trembling.

“Well, that Scottie fellow from the Detroit Herald. He asked
about you and I.”

Marg’s ears were suddenly primed and at full attention,
attentive to every syllable that should from henceforth leave his trembling
lips. “You and I?”

“Yes, you and I. He wanted to know if it were true that you
and I were actually lovers.”

Marg cringed. They had worked so diligently to keep their
private life out of the campaign. Someway, somehow, some nosy reporter was catching
on to the fact that they were mixing business with pleasure on the side.

“Sounds as though someone told him about you and I. We’ve
been very careful. He would have never have guessed that on his own,” she
surmised.

“I agree, and I was just about to tell him that we were not
an item, when I suddenly bit my tongue and asked him where he had heard such a
rumor. That is when he shocked me by saying your mother insisted that we were
actually engaged to be married.”

Marg was flabbergasted. All her life her mother had been
pushing her nose into her business, trying to influence which boy should take
her to the prom or which man she should dump or continue with as time went by. Only
now she was going too far, sneaking up to the press and trying to solidify
their arrangement by sticking her damn nose where it didn’t belong. She had no
right blurting out the details of her private life to some snooping reporter.
It surely was going to complicate the campaign.

“I have to go,” Marg suddenly blurted out angrily.

“You’re going to phone your mother and read her the riot
act, aren’t you? Try not to be too hard on her. She meant well.”

“I suppose she did, only now David will be exploiting this
news to suggest that you are a hustler and a player by humping your campaign
manager and that if elected, you will be giving important posts to family and
friends. He is bound to paint you as some womanizer and then turn our women’s
campaign into a farce, claiming the only thing you want to do for the women of
Detroit is to sleep with them.”

“He wouldn’t dare stoop so low.”

“If he thought he was going to lose the election? He would
say anything and do anything. You were a very popular councilman in your day.
People remember the good things you did and how you worked so tirelessly on
their behalf. That might all be water under the bridge now with mother’s
super-sized mouth. Besides, it puts us both on the spot in other ways.”

“Other ways?”

“Of course. For example, you and I had better be on the same
page. Mother is obviously hoping that I will get married soon. Most mothers
want that for their daughters. She probably thinks you and I make a very good
couple. Still, we have no idea of all the things she might have told this
reporter. If anything you say doesn’t match up, he could call you a liar.”

“Precisely my sentiments, which is why I agreed with him.”

“With what?”

 “I told him that yes, you and I are engaged to be married.”

Arnold’s words slammed into her mind like a torpedo. Winning
some election was one thing, but becoming married to the man of her dreams and
to the one she loved so desperately, was an even bigger prize. Getting rid of
her once he became mayor would be easy for him, but not if she was wearing his
ring. The voting public hated men that welched on their promises to women.

“And are we?”

“Are we what?”

“Engaged to be married?”

He eyed her carefully. His declaration to the reporter had
been to merely derail the subject and to nullify her mother’s unauthorized
rantings.

“I couldn’t tell him anything different than what your
mother was saying, because that would have made one of us out to be a liar, and
David would have used that against me, claiming I was the one that lied, and
therefore was untrustworthy.”

“So you did in fact lie by saying we were engaged when we
are not?”

He felt backed into a corner. For the first time he could
really see the extent of her desperation. Where he was concerned, her heart,
mind and soul was all in. It was either sink or swim.

She took his pause to symbolize an authorized rejection of
her. “You know,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I seem to do this to myself
every time, hook up with a man who leads me on and paints such a rosy picture
of our future together, only there never is a future, and I am always left to
pick up the pieces when he finally does manage to move on to someone else.”

“You’re not being fair, there is no one else.”

“Maybe not now, but there is definitely not an ‘us,’ because
you keep tap dancing around it and playing fast and loose with my emotions.
Either we’re a couple or we are not.”

“We are a couple.”

“And either we are engaged to be married or we’re not.”

“I never proposed to you officially, and we both know that.”

“And yet you told the reporter that you had.”

“What do you want me to say? Your mother was spreading
gossip and putting my campaign in danger.”

“So now I’m a danger to your campaign, is that it?”

“You’re twisting words, and saying I said things I never
did.”

“I’m sure I’ll soon read on the front page of some local
paper that you are insisting that you and I are engaged to be married. But what
you’re saying is that you and I are nothing.”

 He opened his mouth to respond, but then felt better of it.
He now understood that it wasn’t really Marg talking. It was really her
bitterness saying the words. At age thirty-three, she was angry over fifteen
years of futile dating, and understandably so. Years of loving men had not
produced a husband, and years of hoping at least one of those men would have
chosen her as his future bride, was also not seemingly in the works. He was
adamant that she not read anything into his public declaration that they would
be getting married come hell or high water. He had not meant to stir the pot,
nor awaken her bitterness, and yet he had managed to do both.