At dinner the following Sunday, Babs brought out a picture of Matt in third grade, dressed as Ronald Reagan for Famous Person Day at school. “He brought the house down,” she said. I’d heard the story before—how Matt insisted on dressing up as the president, how he gave a speech to the class telling them how he loved Jelly Bellys and got to fly around in his own plane. He handed out little packets of jelly beans and yelled, “Vote for me!”
I glanced at Patrick as Babs told this story. If I’d heard it a dozen times, he’d no doubt heard it hundreds. I wondered if he ever felt like standing up and walking out during a family dinner. Babs said, “That’s when I knew! I just knew this little boy would grow up to be a politician, that one day he’d be the one running for office.” As Babs kept talking, it occurred to me that she wasn’t a good mother. She wasn’t a good mother at all.
Of course I had my own issues with her—how she still had a picture of Matt’s old girlfriend hanging in the house, or how she always managed to make me feel like my opinion didn’t matter—but that wasn’t all. Babs never seemed satisfied with her children, she pointed out their weaknesses whenever possible. She was always pushing them to be more successful, to do something fantastic, as if their accomplishments were nothing but a reflection on her.
Why did Matt want to run for office? Because it was something he really wanted to do, or because he knew it would make his mom proud? Was it because she’d whispered in his ear all through his childhood how special he was, how he was meant for something great? Was it because she brought out this stupid picture of him dressed as the president and told the same story over and over again?
I’m sure people would say that my feelings were normal, that of course I thought my parents were better parents than Matt’s, simply because they were mine. But I disagree. My parents thought that I was smart and talented—they believed it with all their hearts. They just didn’t need me to be the most special person out there. If I’d stayed in Wisconsin my whole life and become a kindergarten teacher and married another teacher, they would have thought that was great. They would’ve been proud of me. They would have reacted the same way they did when I brought them to my office at Vanity Fair, with wide eyes and smiles. They wanted me to be happy and healthy—wasn’t that enough? They weren’t selfish people, they didn’t want more than their fair share. No, they were practical, and knew that life could be hard sometimes, and thought that if you just wanted a little, if you hoped for a reasonable amount, you might just end up being satisfied.
I may not be right all the time, and maybe I’ve misjudged people in my life, but I do know this one thing for sure—my own mother would never compare me to a pancake.
Chapter 4
I’d known Matt only a few weeks when he first told me he wanted to run for office. We were lying in his bed on a Sunday afternoon (which is how we spent most of our time those days) and we’d just returned from getting omelets at the diner below his apartment. Our relationship was brand new, and we were so obsessed with each other we couldn’t see straight—all we did during that time was have sex and then talk until it was time to have sex again. He was telling me about his job that day, I think, my head on his chest, our hands playing with each other, intertwining our fingers over and over again. I’d never felt this way about another person before, like no matter how close I was to him, no matter how many parts of our bodies were touching, it wasn’t enough. I always wanted more of him.
“I like being a lawyer,” he said to me. “But my real passion is politics. What I’ve always wanted to do is run for office one day.”
I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at him, feeling giddy. “Really?” I asked. Everything about him was proving to be so different, so much more interesting than anyone I’d ever been with and this was one more thing to add to my list of Amazing Things About Matt. (Of course, to be fair, everything about him delighted me at that point—he could’ve told me he wanted to be a clown and I would’ve found it charming.)
“What office?” I asked him.
“It depends. Maybe I’d run for Congress, or a state senate seat, and then who knows? It’s something I’ve always wanted. I just feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “I think you’d be so great at that.”
The thing is, as I said that to him, I didn’t really think it would ever happen. Even when he told me later that he’d never smoked pot (Never! Not once!) because he didn’t want it to be something that could come back to hurt him or that he’d bought the domain names for MatthewKelly.com and MattforMaryland.com, I still didn’t fully believe it was something he intended to do.