The First Affair (16 page)

“The Bill, whose name is Bill,” she filled in for Paul’s benefit, “is meeting us here and this is the one, I can feel it—how cute is that to meet on Halloween?” She slipped an arm through each of ours and led us to the entrance.

Upstairs it seemed to me the median age of the guests was definitely more on the side of a hundred than twelve. A few were pregnant, but most were starting to bald. Rachelle gamely asked everyone where they worked, what their core campaign issue was, and if they needed her to refresh their drinks. She was so perfect for PR.

The apartment was a duplex in the top two floors of a brownstone, hyper-modern and spare, with just one spiky aloe plant on the windowsill. The studied emptiness made it the perfect place to throw a party—that and the three TVs mounted beside each other. “Whose place is this?” I asked Paul.

“Carl Duggan. A friend of Tom’s from K Street. Shmancy power circles. When he invited me tonight I thought he was making this
grand gesture—turned out he just didn’t know about our breakup yet. I’m pretty much here because I know Carl doesn’t want me to be and I called his bluff.” We pounded our second vodkas.

On the wall of screens the states turned color as they were called by the networks, waves of cheer or sick hush passing through the room each time. I felt crushed by conflicting desires. I wanted Greg to win because he wanted to win. And because the world would be a better place. I wanted Greg to lose so we could have a real chance. I believed we could have a real chance. I wanted him to choke on his burger and—if not die—then at least see his life flash and realize I wasn’t porn. I wanted him to call and tell me he loved me. I wanted to get a grip.

If you’re trying not to think about someone, standing in front of a bank of televisions repeating that person’s name does not help. My phone buzzed with a text—from Mike.
“In the heart of it all, huh, James?”

It was a volley from the wrong guy, but I’d been standing primed in Center Court for so many months that I reflexively lobbed it back.
“You voted, RIGHT?!”

He texted back,
“For Partridge. Hahaha.”

“Not funny.”
I stared at the exchange with an agitated, uncomfortable twinge, then cleared the conversation. This made three times. Would it be the start of something? Would the texts grow more frequent, then get flirtatious? Would he want to see me? Would I want to see him?

I went to pour myself a third drink. I knew I should try to eat something, but the energy field across the nation seemed to warp around this room. Paul was letting himself be chatted up by a guy on the other side of the kitchen, but he didn’t seem interested—he kept inching back to the brick.

I checked Facebook. Everyone had their virtual fingers crossed. Then a text from Rachelle. One word.
“Upstairs.”

I climbed the steps to the lofted home office. Over the TVs below I could hear soft sobbing. She was curled up in a nook between a bookcase and the wall. “I-I’m so p-pissed at myself,” she said, and I knelt down. “He has a girlfriend.”

“Bill?”

She nodded, rubbing her face, her mascara streaking across her cheek like rain in a painting. “We texted all week, he fucking asked about my childhood.” She showed me the text that had just come in saying he hoped he hadn’t given her the wrong impression. “Yeah, um, somewhere around when you put your penis in me I got the wrong impression.”

“Rachelle, I’m so sorry.”

“But he said he’d still be into ‘meeting up’ if I was ever interested.”

“Are you?”

“
No.
How do you do it?” she asked aggressively.

“What?”

“Hang in being number two? I just want to be special enough that someone will
come
for me. Doesn’t it kill you that he won’t come for you? That he doesn’t care enough to knock down your door, take a risk? Show that you’re important to him? Don’t you feel demeaned? Like you’re a fucking nobody?”

“It’s the President.” Five syllables. Out of my mouth. The circle breaking open.

To her credit she didn’t ask
what
was the President, or say
really
a million insulting times. She didn’t get weird like Lena. She just held my hand, silently respecting the enormity of it as her tears dried.

“I’m never speechless,” she finally said, and we laughed. “You have to get back down there. See if he wins.”

“Not without you.”

“I’m going to use the bathroom, sneak out, go home, and be disgustingly sorry for myself.” She tugged me into her for a wet hug, whispering in my hair as I rested my chin on her shoulder, “You’re so brave.”

Downstairs, Paul appeared. “You
have
to see this view.” He pulled me over to the windows that looked out at a sliver of what Gail’s place faced. “They just called Pennsylania.”

“Do you miss it?” I asked, making small talk as it queasily sunk in that, for the second time, I’d done what I’d promised Greg I would never do.

“Harrisburg? God, no.” He considered for a second. “I thought there’d be more camaraderie. I thought join the government, join the
campaign, share a common vision, a cause.” He picked lint off his slim-cut cords. “But people suck everywhere, I guess.”

A guy tried to squeeze past us to the sushi. “Hey,” he said to me, smiling.

I stared at his face, the hazel eyes. “Donkey?” It came to me from Halloween.

“Guilty. Had it left over from going as Shrek with a group one year. Can I buy you a free drink?”

I looked to Paul.

“I’m good.” He waved me off without a smile, but I followed my impromptu date anyway, being a bad friend because really I was anything but brave. Brave would have been having the strength to remain certain, to hold Greg’s promise in my heart like a sea captain’s wife. But it had been so long, I was depleted. And the despair had made me negligent.

We found a spot between the wall and a column and traded stories about college Halloweens, glancing periodically at the screens. Blitzer reported, “Our exit polling in Ohio is confirming that the Majority Leader’s mishandling of the budget standoff created this thin margin for the Democrats. It’s going to make a second term even more contentious than the first—if that’s possible.”

Possible.
Inebriated, I got stuck on the word and how I couldn’t access its lift anymore. I realized Donkey was leaning in to kiss me and I let him. His lips were sweet and curious. But they weren’t Greg’s.

The room screamed. Rooms all around us screamed. Boos echoed off the street below. Across the country, a chain of jubilation and dismay.

“And with Ohio’s fifteen electoral votes going to Rutland we’re ready to call it!” Rachel Maddow was elated.

Some minutes later, long enough for Partridge to concede, Donkey pulled back, his eyes warm. He slipped his hand into mine. We turned to the screens as Rutland bounded to the podium to address us.

Wearing my tie.

A jolt like wet skin in a socket.

“Victory!” he shouted, touching the blue silk.

We all know that now. How during his acceptance speech he touched the tie I gave him. How he never did that. How he had a carefully choreographed vocabulary of podium movements—and tie touching was not one of them.

“Victory!” he said again. The applause died down. He looked into the camera, staring into me, speaking slowly and deliberately. “This was a challenging campaign—and we made sacrifices.
You
made sacrifices.” It was. I had. “But I promise you it was worth it. Because I stand here before you tonight pledging to serve you.” I felt his roving lips devouring my thigh as he fell to his knees. “Pledging to rise to your challenges, to be worthy of the faith you have placed in me, to meet—and exceed—your expectations.”

He touched it again, the tiny lightning bolts creasing beneath his fingertips.

I pulled my hand free.

Chapter Seven

November 22

It had been fifteen days since the election. Rachelle had parked herself on my couch every night, waiting vigil beside me for his summon, the job offer—the together part. The phone had not rung once, but she never wavered in her belief that I was telling the truth, and I couldn’t even put my gratitude into words.

It was still early—she reassured me it was. And there were those back-to-back hurricanes on the Southern coast. But we didn’t know when to decide it was late. How would I know? And what would I do?

I was lying awake, staring through the gap in the eyelet curtains at the snow-dusted branches of the elm in my parents’ front yard. Which I once called the elm in my front yard, the one with the old tire swing long rotted and Erica’s initials gouged in the trunk. For years, I thought F.U. was her boyfriend.

The Hello Kitty clock ticked on aggressively. 8:35 a.m. I should have been downstairs already, cutting, peeling, making jokes while Erica camped on the den couch watching the parade and griping. Hung over. Then, in the last few years, because she
wasn’t
hung over. But I didn’t want to go to the game. I didn’t want to have dinner at three o’clock with Dad’s drunk relatives, didn’t want to listen to my uncles ribbing him, yet again, about his sobriety, about his wife and her education, her “shmancy desk job,” our “snooty” neighborhood.

It was our little house that pissed them off. The front and back yards. That Erica and I each had a bedroom. When the fighting started I always wished we could do the meal at one of their apartments,
but their wives were embarrassed, I think. My aunts always said, “Oh, no, Betsy,
you
have the space.” And then Mom and I looked around at the square feet between the couch and the fireplace, the air between the hutch and the dining table, and
we
felt embarrassed. Not by what we had, but by the luxury of the emptiness around it.

My phone vibrated somewhere near my hip and I dug around in the bedspread to find it.
“Been up since 5. Family holiday=oxymoron.”
Mike. Thinking of me. While I hid in the same bed in which I’d once conjured a future for us.
“PS. Coming to DC Jan 23.”

I stared at the sentence, feeling something. Like paper cuts.

“4 a conference,”
he added.
“Want to grab a drink? We can do that now, right?”

I erased the questions and rolled over twice until I’d pinned myself in the blanket. In a cold flush of surprise, I realized I didn’t want to see him. “Greg,” I said into my pillow to drown out the unsettling feeling. Conjuring his fingertips touching the lightning bolts, I said it again and then again, focusing on the click of the second “g” at the top of my throat.

“Fuck!” I heard Dad shout from his room as he headed out. “Fuck, fuck,
fuck
it all to hell.” And then the front door slammed. A minute later the Honda started, making that horrible grinding sound it always did, as he peeled out.

I waited.

“Jamie!” Mom called up the stairs brightly. “Let’s get going! I’ve got to get the turkey in the oven!” Which was step one in a hundred of what had to happen next.

• • •

Three hours later, Mom, Erica, and I sat shivering in the bleachers of Stagg Field, a fleece blanket wrapped around the shoulders of our down coats. Mom had hustled us into the car, insisting we had to “be supportive,” but now none of us were watching the game. I distracted myself by wondering who the White House entertains at Thanksgiving—heads of state, probably. I indulged in imagining myself at the other end of the table, my hair in a French twist that picked up the red of the dried maple leaves in the centerpiece—
Greg would smile at me before he said grace, before he asked God to bless us. And I know as I share this what it sounds like. It’s hard to explain, but in retrospect my fantasies never existed in a world
after
Susan and the kids. Instead they ran childishly parallel, as if one reality could occur without disturbing the other. Like on
Sister Wives.

“I’m really proud of Dad,” I interrupted myself. “He obviously really doesn’t want to be here, but he’s getting through it.” I thought I could relate.

Mom looked questioningly to Erica.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Snow flurries started to kick up, the wind circulating in the stadium creating the illusion that the flakes were rising from the turf.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

“She thinks he’s drinking again,” Erica answered, and I had a momentary sensation of the bleachers collapsing.

Mom studied my face, hers suddenly so sad and drawn, resigned, whether it was to his behavior or actually telling me I’m not sure. “He’s been lying. Says he’s stuck at work, but he’s left. Gets home late, says he’s with Joe, but Joe just called—dumb stuff, but it got me worried. I just—it’s a horrible thing when you suddenly have to figure out if you can trust someone again.”

The icy wind gathered speed off the lake as I flashed to the last time, how far away from each other it had felt like we all were, even under that small roof. Four people getting through the days and nights—passing bowls of peas, kitchen towels, the remote. It was too much to think about losing whatever ground of normalcy we’d gained in these intervening years. Her statement was unapproachable as a daughter—but not as a girl. Since Greg’s first kiss I had been struggling with faith. Understood, I realized in that moment, with trust. I’d rewatched his acceptance speech almost a hundred times on YouTube. Were his reassurances all in my head? “I asked Erica to keep an eye on him this weekend.”

On the field, the members of the Junior Athletic League sports teams were lining up to present Baker his honorary trophy that was practically as big as one of the players. As I tried to spot Dad, Erica
put her arm around Mom, and I realized Mom hadn’t been checking up on Erica, but consulting her, letting her inside something I hadn’t even been aware of. How long had it been this way?

Each team’s coach hung back as his kids marched forward in formation to pass by Baker and salute. It was a sweet tribute, nicely choreographed, nothing you would guess could literally drive a man to drink. But when it was his team’s turn, Dad stayed abreast of the line, accompanying his boys right past Baker. It was a strange blunder that did not go unnoticed in the stands.