TV drama, the Ex-President's wife thought, was after-all little more than a day-time soap with better production values. Jean-Anne seemed to be in shock. Jim had expected shock. Yet, her response to his question wasn't what he'd expected. The question, itself, had been straight-forward and, perhaps, a bit too simple. How are you feeling? he'd asked.
Jean-Anne hadn't been immediately aware that she'd answered in voice what her mind had spoken. But, no sooner than she had, she'd resolved to henceforward pride herself on speaking her mind. Doing so had left Jim visibly puzzled. This is good! she remarked the more mindfully to herself alone. Puzzlement was a face that Jim had pulled only, anymore, at tax-time. It once had been hers and hers only long ago, as he struggled to learn how to make her laugh. Jean-Anne recalled telling her mother about his "curious George" face sometime into their early courtship. Her mother, relieved to gather that this wasn't a mother-daughter conversation about you-know-what, the birds and the bees she might have said, or, your wedding night as her mother before her would have said. . . . Well, her mother told her, a young man should learn to make a young woman laugh. Jean-Anne was at once comforted with thoughts of her mother, but torn apart by that thought that Jim had stopped learning to make her laugh. Heck, she thought, now that it was his hour of need, about me at all! She'd never ask anything of him at all. She chided herself. Maybe now was the time to change all that.
Altogether, this moment or two or thought felt as though it had been passed in an eternity. Memory has its way about it, her mother used to say. This, no doubt, was a day that she and Jim would remember forever. It was the day, Jim's career as University President took a nose dive.
Her response to his question caused his face to wrinkle up. Better explain, she instructed herself, before it rolls up into a ball. One of her favorite evening TV dramas was a British show about an intelligence agency. Spooks! Jean-Ann said. She knew that the one word would signal that she wasn't out in space, though it would momentarily position her in left field waiting for a pop-up ball to fall. What? he asked, reeling through his mind, hoping to snare the reference. It was like catching your partner's bait fish. He didn't want, particularly, to eat it. Jim could never watch the program. He claimed to be busy when it was broadcast. In fact, because America had been painted too frequently in a rather jaundiced light, he felt he couldn't watch it. He didn't want to feel that Britons were ungrateful for America's WW2 blood and treasure at a time when America needed what Britain had in the War Against Terrorism. Jean-Ann knew how Jim felt, but a good metaphor's a good metaphor she told herself.
At least once a season, one of the good guys would get killed. That kind of thing didn't happen in American TV drama. James Arness played Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke clear through, from 1955 through 1975. Twenty years was longer than many marriages these days. And, not one of the main characters bit the dust. It seemed fitting, to Jean-Anne, that in real-life situations, characters could really die. She was aware, still aggrieved that her husband had stopped puzzling her through, that explaining this to Jim was taking the long way round. Still, she pressed on. In your average soap-opera, a character could be expected to depart the show after a long and confounded illness. She was trying to tell Jim that "Sometimes bad things happen to good people." She was trying to tell him that he was a good person, and, that this had come upon him quickly. — But, she wasn't sure either that he'd heard her, or, needed her confirmation.
