The Cave Dwellers by Christina McDowell (readict books TXT) 📕

I. Denise Goolsby, “No Room for Fourth Bust on Suffragette Statue?” Desert Sun, September 19, 2016, https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/nation/2016/09/19/suffrage-movement-susan-b-anthony-portrait-monument-us-capitol-hillary-clinton/88317362/.

II. Lorraine Boissoneault, “The Suffragist Statue Trapped in a Broom Closet for 75 Years,” Smithsonian, May 12, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/suffragist-statue-trapped-broom-closet-75-years-180963274/.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Doug sits at his desk googling himself after everyone has left the office. “Senator Wallace,” “Doug Wallace,” “Senator Doug Wallace”—all of the different ways someone other than himself might be thinking about him. His increased self-obsession is due to an uptick in voter popularity, not just in North Carolina but across the United States. Cate’s words on Fox struck a chord across party lines in the handling of the White House’s domestic violence scandal. And given its timeliness, Doug thanks God again and again for the day he made amends with college classmate Lisa Greenberg. He squeezes his erection under his suit pants when he thinks about it.

It was a few years after Doug’s graduation from the University of North Carolina that he had his epiphany about entering politics. This made it imperative he track down Lisa Greenberg. Doug had been calculating enough to sense that whenever they bumped into each other on campus, her behavior suggested she felt overwhelmed and awkward. He’d intuited that it was because the night they had sex, she’d kept changing her mind about whether or not he could enter her until he decided she meant yes instead of no, when really it was no instead of yes. He’d humped her until he came, then left and never called her again. Lisa was so difficult.

It never quite dawned on Doug that he had raped her, only that she didn’t like him, and he felt he needed to smooth things over for his future political career. Doug had tracked Lisa down one day at her favorite bookstore in Raleigh, cornering her in the New Fiction section near the front window. Startled by his aggressive presence, Lisa had blushed from embarrassment at having ignored all of his calls; she had an understandably incessant need to get away from him. Nevertheless, Doug had persisted: Hey, can I talk to you for a sec? he asked. I’m just waiting for someone, she replied. Listen, I’m going into politics and I’ve been reflecting on my past, and I am sorry if I ever made you feel—Doug paused in order to find the right word—uncomfortable… you know, the night we had sex. I felt like things got weird after that. Lisa froze with shame and left her body and said, It’s okay, because that was the polite thing to say in public, and Doug said, Okay, cool, so we’re good, and she said, Yes, and they never spoke again.

Doug leans back in his swivel chair and squeezes his erection harder, eyes glazed over the computer screen thinking about Lisa Greenberg; he has the overwhelming urge to masturbate. He pleads with himself, Not at the office. In North Carolina, after he stopped screwing the producer at the local Fox affiliate, he began compulsively masturbating in the bathroom at work, and had made a promise when he moved to Washington that he would stop. But growing up in the Wallace home, promises held no merit. Doug heads for the bathroom door, unzips his pants, leans forward with his hand against the wall, and goes and goes as fast as he can.

Women all over America seem to adore Doug’s message of conservative masculine redemption. As his paranoia and his adoration for himself increase, so do his sexual urges—and he no longer accepts Cate as the answer. In fact, as of late he has gone from being addicted to her to being repulsed by her ambition. It was her assertiveness that flipped the switch, the realization that she is after something greater than him and he is the road to attaining it.

Cate reaches the center of the Capitol Rotunda below the Apotheosis, the radiant portrait of George Washington sitting in the heavens surrounded by “goddesses,” not dissimilar to a portrait of Hugh Hefner surrounded by a semicircle of Playboy bunnies, when she realizes she “forgot” her laptop. She forgot her laptop knowing Doug will be working late on the new amendment to the domestic violence bill and she’s anxious as to why he hasn’t called or texted during out-of-office hours.

Cate tiptoes into the office. “Hello?” she says softly, but only hears the sound of quiet screaming. There is a similar memory moving through her body as she approaches Doug’s office door; to reach it she must pass the office bathroom, the door slightly ajar, where she discovers the screaming is coming from Doug’s cell phone resting on the ledge above the toilet, his back to her, his head turned to the phone as he finishes, with no inkling that Cate is standing in the hallway behind him. Watching.

If she breathes, Cate feels like she might get fired. She tiptoes backward, her mouth agape, still not breathing, heart pulsating, then closes her eyes hard and reopens them and stands at her desk staring at her open laptop. The toilet flushes, creating a ripple effect of thumping pipes through the walls, this fucking infrastructure. Cate grabs her computer and turns around to see Doug standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” he asks her, surprised. He wipes sweat with the back of his forearm.

“Oh! You’re still here—I forgot my computer.” Cate shoves it in her bag, runs her hand through her blond locks.

Doug approaches her like he might kiss her, stops just in front of her desk.

“Do you wanna crack my back?” he asks.

“Right now?” Cate looks around the room almost as if she never even saw him masturbating to porn in the bathroom just sixty seconds ago. Was he masturbating because he missed me? she wonders.

“Yeah.” Doug sprawls out on his stomach on the floor in front of her.

Cate can’t help but crack a smile, seduced but still skeptical. She kicks off her