“So, equality is only a distraction? Overturning antimiscegenation laws was only a distraction?”

The dinner forgotten, the argument escalates so swiftly that Bill is blindsided. How could he suggest that gay marriages and interracial marriages are not exactly equivalent? She flings quotes at him from landmark Supreme Court decisions—Sharp v. Perez, Loving v. Virginia—she’s evidently read up on them. She accuses Obama of hypocrisy and expediency: “He wouldn’t even be here today if it had been illegal in his state for his parents to marry.”

When he defends Obama’s stance as pragmatic, she tears into Obama with a fury he’s never seen before, in all their quarrels of four years or all her tirades against Bush and Cheney and America. Obama, too, is a lying politician. A conservative in progressive clothing. A White man in a Black body. Obama would betray everyone hoping for change. Consider the way he threw his Black pastor under the bus. Consider all the money he’s accepting from the rich. Consider the inner circle of White staff and advisors he’s surrounded himself with. Obama is too beholden to his White supporters to risk angering them. Obama is too infatuated with his image of uniter to fight for his people. Obama is too cowardly to force big changes. Obama is a smoke screen erected by the rich and privileged to maintain the status quo. Obama is a con man peddling empty hope to the rest.

It’s a fury Bill has never experienced before. He’s dumbfounded, as he watches Seema, a stranger now, her voice and features and form almost unrecognizable. He can do nothing but let her rave, the tumult within him pinning him to his chair, as he swills down the bitter champagne to fill some hole that’s opened up in him.

He feels anger at her words, of course, but it’s buried under everything else churning through him. There’s shock at witnessing a side of Seema he’s never seen before. There’s bafflement at the cause for its emergence now. There’s hope that Seema doesn’t mean what she’s saying. There’s fear that she does. There’s anguish that this could be the beginning of the end of everything between them.

She’s spent as suddenly as she’d erupted. “So you’ve nothing to say?”

“We made a promise,” he says. “Now this gay marriage issue has become more important to you than getting Obama elected—”

He picks at the congealed meat on his plate. He can feel the sting of her eyes on him. His heart thuds as she pushes her chair back, picks up her plate, and dumps it in the sink before leaving the dining room.

He tracks her up the stairs to their bedroom and down the stairs again to the garage; the garage door grinds open, the car throbs out. He clears the table while drinking the remaining champagne directly from the bottle. As always, her presence continues to vibrate in the air, an aroused agitated thrumming this time.