American Rhapsody (4 page)

She saw him up close a week later when the interns received permission to watch a presidential departure. He came down a roped-off path, shaking hands, smiling. When he got to her, she felt like air. She felt like a tree or a plant. He barely glanced at her.

A little more than another week later, on August 9, she went to another departure. She wore a tightly fitting sage green dress her mother had recently bought for her at J. Crew. Here he came again, walking down the rope line. He was talking to another intern's father as she stood nearby, and he suddenly glanced at her . . . and held her gaze as he continued talking to the others. He was smiling at her . . . and then he came over to her and shook her hand. His smile was gone now. He looked deeply into her eyes. She felt she was alone with him. She felt he was undressing her. He moved down the line, and, dazed, she bumped into a friend. She caught his glance again as he moved farther down the line. He was looking at her.

At work the next day, still reeling from what had happened to her on the rope line, she learned that the interns had been invited at the last minute to attend a surprise birthday party for the president that day. He was forty-nine. She was twenty-two. She drove home quickly to put her tight-fitting sage green J. Crew dress on.

It was a Wild West party. Vice President Gore arrived in an old woody station wagon. Some of the president's aides came in on horseback. And, finally, here
he
came, down the line again, smiling at her as he approached. When he shook her hand, immersing himself into her eyes again, she said, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” repeating the Marilyn Monroe imitation she had tried out on Andy Bleiler. Everything was in slow motion and freeze-frame again . . . and as he moved away, his arm casually brushed her breast. She watched as he walked down the line. He glanced at her at the end of the line and headed back inside the White House; then he stopped suddenly, turned, and looked at her. She blew him a kiss. He threw his head back and laughed.

When she got home, she told her mother and her aunt Debra what had happened. Her mother laughed and said she was getting a crush on the president of the United States. Aunt Debra said, “Maybe he's interested in you or attracted to you or something.”

She went out to a bookstore that was still open and bought a copy of Gennifer Flowers's book and spent the night reading it. Gennifer said that Bill Clinton called her “Pookie.” Monica read that he liked women who were “ripe peaches,” and she thought of herself in her sage green dress. She read Gennifer's account of “overheated eye contact” and “psychological foreplay” and thought about how he had looked at her on the rope line.

She was excited to see Pookie describe him as “a natural born lover man . . . with more sexual libido” than Pookie had ever seen. Monica noted how much he liked sexy lingerie—lace and garters, tiny black teddies, little white nighties. She couldn't believe how kinky he was—dripping ice on Pookie's body, asking Pookie to drip candle wax on him, dripping honey on her body, asking her to tie him to the bed, to use a dildo on him.

Everything that Gennifer wrote about him turned Monica on. “His stamina amazed me,” Monica read; “we made love over and over that night, and he never seemed to run out of energy . . . . He proved he could go on all night.” Bill, according to Pookie, was a wild man who kept dope in his pockets and casually lighted up, who liked Pookie to meet him at a hotel wearing nothing but a fur coat, who loved phone sex—“Bill loved to talk dirty and to have me say things back to him”—who liked pouring catsup and milk all over her body and licking it off, who liked oral sex. “With Bill, oral sex seemed like the natural thing to do.” Pookie also made Monica wonder about his relationship with Hillary, whose friendship with Walter Kaye had gotten Monica her job. “Bill said he had known for a long time that Hillary was attracted to women,” Gennifer wrote, “and it didn't really bother him anymore. His first clue came from her lack of enjoyment of sex with him. He said Hillary was cold and not playful at all in bed. Hillary didn't like to experiment and insisted on the missionary position and nothing else. Because she wasn't enjoying herself, neither was he. Sex with Hillary became a duty, nothing more.” Bill told Gennifer, “She's eaten more pussy than I have.”

Monica laughed when she read that he called his penis “Willard.” Willard?
Willard!
What an odd name for a penis. Wasn't there an old movie called
Willard
? About a boy and his rat? But she liked his explanation to Gennifer of why he called it Willard: “It's longer than Willie.”

She was off from work the next day, but she never left the apartment. She was sure she was going to get a call from the Secret Service telling her the president wanted to see her. She had heard that that was what the Secret Service had done for JFK. The phone rang a lot that day—she felt her heartbeat race each time—but it was never him.

Her six-week internship was nearly over and she went to her supervisor and asked to re-up for a second six weeks. She was, her supervisor felt, conscientious and enthusiastic, and so her second internship was approved.

She started reading everything she could find about him. Her heart broke for him. To have had to grow up in that awful racist state, where black people had been lynched as recently as the 1920s! To have had to be brought up by his grandparents for two years because his mom could only find work in another city! She could just see his mom as he had: kneeling on the ground and sobbing after a visit with him. And her heart broke for herself, too.
He
was the fat
boy
. The only pair of jeans that fit him in the waist were so long that he had to roll them halfway to his knees. He had a cute little Hopalong Cassidy outfit and the other kids made him jump rope in his cowboy boots—
he couldn't jump rope, either!
—and they pulled the rope out from under him. He broke his leg and the other kids yelled at him as he lay on the ground: “Sissy! Sissy! You're a sissy!” And he, too, had cowered alone in his room as his parents yelled at each other.

She remembered how, in grade school, she had said she was going to be the president of the United States, and she smiled when she read that when he was in grade school, a teacher said that he was going to be the president of the United States . . . and now he was.

The moment of his life that touched her the most took place when he was a little boy and he was singing “Frog Went A-Courtin' ” with his music teacher.

He sang, “Miss Mousy will you marry me, uh-huh! uh-huh! Miss Mousy will you marry me, uh-huh! uh-huh!”

His music teacher sang, “Without my Uncle Rat's consent, uh-uh! uh-uh! Without my Uncle Rat's consent, I wouldn't marry the President, uh-uh! uh-uh!”

She held the image in her mind: a clumsy little fat boy with a crew cut, his jeans rolled up, his tummy sticking out, singing, “Miss Mousy will you marry me, uh-huh! uh-huh!” It made her feel close to him.
S-o-o-o
close to him.

She went to another departure ceremony in August with a group of interns, and when he stopped and chatted with the group, she introduced herself and made sure to say that she was staying for a second internship term. He smiled and nodded. A week or so later, she was in the basement lobby of the West Wing, talking to a member of the Secret Service, when he came by with two women guests. He turned away from the two other women and turned to her.

“Hi, Mr. President. I'm Monica Lewinsky,” she said.

“I know.” He grinned, looking her up and down, undressing her with his eyes again. She sucked in her tummy. She was happy she was wearing black.

She went to her supervisor and applied for a paid White House job after her second internship was up. She didn't see him then for more than two months, but she thought about him all the time and told her girlfriends about him, too, describing the way the president of the United States had undressed her with his eyes. Her friends were wary. One of them, who worked at the White House, even warned her there were rumors he was leaving the White House late at night to meet someone at the Marriott downtown.

As she was telling her friends about the crush she had on the president, she flew across the country, back to Portland, to see Andy Bleiler again. He sneaked away from his wife to spend a few hours in bed with her, but then he told her once again that it was over, that he was feeling too guilty about cheating on his wife.

She was crushed and hysterical. She had flown all the way across America just to make love to him . . . and now he was giving her the same old awful, hurtful, duplicitous song and dance. She sobbed her way back to Washington.

She got good news the morning she got back. There was a job opening in Legislative Affairs at the White House. She interviewed with senior officials and she got the job!

There was, though, a temporary glitch. Newt Gingrich and his Republicans were causing a budgetary impasse and there was going to be a government shutdown. It meant that senior staff were forced to go home, that the 430-person White House staff would be cut down to 90 while the impasse lasted.

But it also meant that interns, who were unpaid, could work and would have additional responsibilities. Since she had not officially begun her Legislative Affairs job, she would work during the shutdown—technically, still as an intern.

On her first day of work during the shutdown, she wore a navy blue pantsuit. She was working in Chief of Staff Leon Panetta's office, answering the phones, which kept ringing off the hook because Rush Limbaugh had given Leon's phone number to the dittoheads who wanted to complain about the shutdown.

She saw “Handsome” as he walked past her office in the hallway. She mouthed Hi at him while she was on the phone. He said, “Hi,” smiled, and kept going.

Later that day, there was an informal birthday party for another aide, and he unexpectedly showed up, smiling and looking at her as she kept dealing with the loony-tunes on the phone.

He went into Leon's inner office, and she got up from her desk and waited for him to come out. When he did, she turned her back to him and lifted the back of her jacket with her thumbs, letting him see the thong underwear showing above her waistline. From reading Gennifer's book, she knew how much he loved underwear and other lingerie. As he passed her, he looked at her and smiled.

Throughout the course of the evening, he kept coming back to Leon's office as she worked at her desk, looking at her every time, claiming he was trying to find aides who he knew weren't there. Going to get something to drink, she passed George Stephanopoulos's office and saw Handsome sitting there . . . all alone.

“Come on in here for a second,” he said.

She went in.

“Where did you go to school?”

“You know,” she replied, “I have a really big crush on you.”

He laughed and looked at her for a long moment, staring at her breasts. “Come into the back office,” he said.

In George's inner office, he put his arms around her and held her tightly. His eyes were “soul searching, tender, very needing, very wanting, very loving.” She also thought there was a sadness about him she hadn't expected.

“You're so beautiful,” he said. “Your energy just lights up a room.” And he asked, “Can I kiss you?”

He kissed her—“softly, deeply, romantically.” He stroked her hair and her face.

“I've done this before, you know,” she said. “It's okay.” She was talking about her affair with Andy Bleiler, a married man. She wanted to put Handsome at ease.

“I knew when I saw you on the line out there that I'd kiss you,” he said. He looked at her a long moment, smiled, looked at his watch, then said he had to get back to work.

She was sitting alone in Leon's outer office three hours later, around ten o'clock at night, when he came in. She was expecting him. She had written her name and phone number on a piece of paper, and when he came in, she handed it to him.

He smiled and said, “If you'd like to meet me in George's office in five or ten minutes, you can.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “I would like to do that.”

She waited ten minutes and then walked down to George's office. She went into the outer office, where the lights were on, and he wasn't there. Then the door to the inner office opened and he was standing there in the darkness, aiming that slow, sexy smile at her. He gestured for her to come in.

He kissed her as soon as she stepped into the inner office. She unbuttoned her jacket and he touched her breasts, her bra still on. He lifted her bra up and he felt her breasts and he kissed them. He explored her body with his hands and moved a hand under her panties. A telephone rang. He picked it up and started to talk to a congressman about Bosnia while he kept moving his hand between her legs. She had an orgasm as he talked, and she knelt down in front of him. She tried to unbutton his pants, but, used to zippers and not buttons, she was having trouble doing it. He unbuttoned his fly for her, still talking on the phone. Willard was suddenly there. She began nurturing Willard with kisses while he was still on the phone, still talking about Bosnia. When he finally hung up, he stopped her.

“Please,” she said. “I want to make you come.”

“I don't know you well enough,” he said. “I don't trust you for that.”

He pulled on the pink intern pass around her neck and said, “This could be a problem.” She told him that she had just been hired as a legislative aide and would soon have the blue pass, which would give her access anywhere in the White House.

“That's great.” He smiled.

He looked at her and then he said, “Well, I've got to go, kiddo.”

She said, “Okay,” and he was gone. She felt that she had found her “sexual soul mate.” When she got home, she woke both her mother and her aunt Debra and told them the president had kissed her. She didn't say anything about Willard.