Victoria Passionately had not slept well. The previous night she'd had a glass of fruity chardonnay and a Tylenol PM, but still she hadn't fallen asleep till 3, and she'd been up since 6 a.m., when she'd needed to get up to drain the wine from her bladder. After that, getting back to sleep was impossible, her head following a dozen different paths, all of them leading to and away from the event this afternoon, when she would push the entire presidential campaign and American history in a new direction, would send J. Junior Inferior back to his home state, licking his wounds and ruing the day Victoria Passionately was born.
It was Sept. 11, 1980. Livermore, Calif. Her parents were set designers for Play It Again!, the town's struggling but brave repertory company, best known for setting its production of "True West" in Flatbush, with an all-Hasidic cast. Victoria's conception had been a surprise for her mother and father, Portia and Paul; they were both in their mid-40s, having given up, a decade before, on having their own children. When she was born, they'd been watching "Dallas," a show they appreciated greatly, for Paul, who as a child had gone to summer camp with Larry Hagman and who each week sent him notes on his performance. He had not yet heard back from his old bunkmate, but he felt he was helping how he could.
As a child, Victoria Passionately was precocious, outgoing and profoundly moralistic. Like a young Lincoln, she lectured classmates on their vices, of which she had none. She graduated from the public high school and matriculated at Swarthmore, where she studied Asian art and French, and had for the last three years been formulating her plans for the future while working at an watercolor-supply store called Tony's, run by a man named Tony.
This morning, Victoria Passionately had a plan. She no longer had a job -- she'd quit before her trip to New Hampshire, for she didn't know where she'd be after her plan ran its course: jail, Congress, posing for a monument to her courage -- she just didn't know. She was in Nashua, sleeping in a Motel 6, ready to change the course of American history. She would take the president down in a way that no one else had had the guts and brains to do. If she were the only person in a nation of 270 million courageous enough to take it straight to the man, to get him between the eyes, then she would accept that responsibility. Her friends in college had called her Joan d'Arc, after all, when she crusaded against the college's reluctance to give full credit for AP art history courses taken and passed in high school by students like and including herself. She'd lost that battle, but her spirit lived on at Swarthmore. A few of her professors remembered her when she visited the college two years after graduating, and that was reward enough.
On this morning in New Hampshire, she got dressed and ate a large bowl of Grape-Nuts while reading her e-mail, from which she received most of her news. Suspicious of newspapers, she subscribed instead to a dozen newsletters, among them TRUTH, THE TRUTH, TRUTHTELLER, and TRUTH! All of them told it like it is.
Victoria Passionately on this morning was wearing a bright red jacket and skirt outfit she'd chosen in hopes that it would make her seem neat and conservative, professional but altogether unthreatening. She had to be invisible, even friendly-seeming, until the moment of truth.
The event at which history would be made was a rare diplomatic meeting in the middle of the campaign. The president, J. Junior Inferior, wasn't able to get back to D.C. in time, so would be meeting with Javiar Johnson-Marias, the Spanish premier, in Nashua, to talk about Spain's hope that more movies would be filmed there. Why should Romania be the new Toronto? This is what they wanted to know.
Victoria Passionately had finagled a press pass from a shaggy-haired correspondent named Stephen she'd met, apparently a stringer for a web site. She'd bought a tape recorder and a notebook that looked like those used by reporters on television. Hers even said on its beige cover: Reporter's Notebook, which seemed to her perfectly verisimilitudinous. She also had a pencil. She was set.
