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: : : CLARK'S AT A MEETING WITH the other members of the activist group. The particular purpose of this meeting is for the group to make a formal decision about where they should focus their energies between now and November—whether they should spend time and finances helping out the Kerry campaign, as part of a greater strategy to Get Bush Out, or whether they should basically ignore the election, and concentrate on other activities instead. Everybody in the group pretty much feels equally opposed to Kerry's bland centrism and so it seems kind of perverse to be thinking about expending much effort to get him into office, but no one has much zeal about circulating petitions or organizing letter-writing campaigns when the current administration seems so determined to turn a deaf ear to all protest. So short of deciding to take up arms and engage in violent overthrow of the government—which is what really gets Clark's vote—the best solution seems to be to sit around and fret, which is a lot of what's been going on tonight. She doesn't have much of an interest in hearing herself talk in this context, so she's been spending most of the meeting sullenly listening to everybody else interrupting one another.
Oliver's here; he's sitting across the table from her. Back in the spring when they were talking on the phone a lot they spent time gossiping about other people in the group and so now they share secret allegiances; they know they hold common distastes. Every once in a while someone starts talking and Oliver looks over and rolls his eyes. It's kind of a nasty game but it's nice to have an ally.
If she can really even count him as an ally anymore. It's been a month now since she told him that she wanted to talk about what happened back in May—they still haven't had that conversation and everything has been pretty awkward ever since. But here he is making faces at her across the table and she's smiling shyly and looking down at the doodles on her pad and everything seems kind of normal again.
Maybe things are easier between her and Oliver at the moment because she hasn't been thinking about him all that much lately. Instead she's been thinking a lot about Fletcher. Which is just—weird. She's known Fletcher for a long time now and has never really thought about what he'd be like as a sexual partner and now all at once she finds herself thinking about it, trying to envision it. She can't say that it's exactly an appealing picture but there's something about it that feels comforting. She does love him, after all, when she gets right down to it she has to admit that, and it's been a long time since she slept with someone who she loves. Not Janine. Not Eliot before that. Maybe you'd have to go all the way back to David, who she guesses she loved, in that insensible, fierce way that people can love when they're young. She leaves Oliver out of the question.
She frowns. It's really dumb for her to be thinking about Fletcher because of his relationship with Cassandra—the two of them really seem to be getting along, he's practically a dad to her kid for Christ's sake, she doesn't want to get in the way of that. She doesn't know if she could get in the way of that even if she wanted to. Maybe Fletcher was only kidding. He's always making jokes. And yet she usually is pretty good at seeing through his jokes and knowing when he's trying to tell her something. And she feels like maybe he was trying to tell her something—
She feels attention on her; looks up. Oliver's looking at her with a quizzical face. She shakes her head no and looks back down at her pad. Draws a triangle and crosses it out.
The meeting eventually wends its way to a vote; they vote 11-1 to organize two bus trips out to Michigan, a swing state, to work with activists there who are campaigning for Kerry. Afterwards they have cups of coffee and break up into small knots of conversation.
—You seemed kind of gone in there, Oliver says to her.
—Yeah, says Clark. —I guess. I've got a lot on my mind these days.
—You want to go—grab a drink and talk about it?
Clark regards him with slight suspicion. But he's just standing there, looking affable, harmless really, and she remembers why she liked talking to him in the first place.
—Sure, she says.
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