The First Affair (2 page)

“Don’t you have to pee?” I whispered to Brooke.

She shot me another disapproving look. In retrospect, it would have taken more than a sticky bun to win over Brooke. Maybe if I’d spiked it with something—Xanax? Celexa? What’s the one that makes you a nice person?

I chewed the inside of my mouth and shifted my attention from the web of abdominal pain to the job offer I’d been waiting on from the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, an email that could already have been on the phone I had to leave at my desk. It was possible,
as I stood there, that I already possessed an actual job with health insurance and everything. Which meant a place with Lena in L.A. And a paycheck. I was going to kiss that check and make a copy, frame that, and then cash the check and buy myself a proper bottle of wine.

Gail’s pied-à-terre, which I was staying in, with its White House view and uniformed doormen, was full of proper bottles of wine. The kind sommeliers study. I perpetually felt like I was failing it when I sat on its custom carpet and played omgpop or reheated a frozen burrito in its chef-grade oven. Weeks prior, I could have thrown back my shower curtain to find seriously anything—a hook-up, a moonshine contraption, a performance art rehearsal. Now I knew what awaited me—a wall of showerheads I couldn’t figure out and a shelf of Chanel products for the rare occasions when Gail swung through. I should explain that Gail still credits me with saving Lena’s life when Health Services misdiagnosed her appendicitis sophomore year. Lena’s never been entirely sure whether Gail was more thankful that I got her to St. Francis in time or that I took notes for all her classes.

Margaret threw her hands up. “We’re now just repeating options we ruled out an hour ago.” No one denied it. “Okay, lunch break.” I attempted the most dignified version of scrambling over everyone I could muster.

Peeing crossed off, I swung by the kitchen to reheat my goodwill tour. “Pecan bun?” I pimped, and a passing staffer nabbed one. “Thanks,” he said, blowing the heat off as he chewed. I held one out to Brooke, but she looked as if I’d taken it to the bathroom with me.

“Allergic to nuts?” I determinedly offered her the opportunity to soften her rudeness.

“No.” She covered the papers she’d just started to work from as if I might have wanted to filch her tedious assignment over my own tedious assignment.

“Oh my God, I’m so hungry I could eat your brain zombie-style. Seriously, cut your head open with this pen so I can eat it.” A slight brunette appeared, arms full, carrying a massive patent-leather tote she could easily have climbed inside of. She dropped her iPad and
binder on Brooke’s desk to grab a bun as I took in her statement bangs, python-print wrap dress, and open-toed wedges. Definitely not one of ours. “It’s just wrong that these things have, like, a stick of butter in them.”

“A stick?” I asked. “No. Maybe half.” She wasn’t much older than us.

“Two halves,” she said as a man in a tight suit approached us and she scooped up her things with her forearms, licking a caramel string off her finger.

“Rachelle.” He literally snapped for her.

“Thank you,” she said to me. “You’re a genius. An evil genius.” I watched her leave, feeling like I’d just missed the last van pulling out for senior week.

Brooke picked up her brown leather bag. “Do you want to come?” she asked with a resignation that implied I was clinging to her ankles.

But maybe this was the moment. Maybe a friendship was about to form. Maybe outside this building Brooke became someone else entirely. “Uh, sure.”

I followed her brisk stride while I fruitlessly checked emails on my phone. I told myself it was okay. It was barely past ten on the West Coast; plenty of day left there to hire me.

I asked Brooke if she knew who Rachelle was here with.

“Some PR group getting footage for the campaign,” she answered as she walked.

“Funny, the thing she said about eating my brain,” I offered.

“I can see why you’d think so.”

Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me
 . . . “So, where are we going?”

“To buy lunch.”

“I have a peanut butter sandwich in my purse.”

She didn’t respond as we exited into the flattening heat. Everyone had initially assumed from Gail’s address that I was a fellow trust-funder, but the logo on my dad’s polo was definitely
not
a pony. As I was unable to share a favorite Hampton, memories of trips to Europe, or any opinion on my mother’s personal shopper’s taste, it became rapidly apparent we wouldn’t be exchanging friendship bracelets.

“Gross,” Brooke muttered, pulling her starched blouse away from her chest. I realized she was wearing The Shirt. It had an extra button between the cleavage and collar, designed for D.C. women to achieve neutral modesty on the four-inch drop from uptight to whore. I’d been debating sucking it up and buying one.

Brooke informed me that she had to get cash and, letting go of any hopes of banter, I followed her into the ATM while composing a text to my similarly inaccessible sister asking her advice about the purchase. Erica, whose Titian hair magically stays pin straight while the curl of mine is more reliable than a barometer. Whose nose is the thinner, perkier version. Who’s an inch taller, a size four to my six, and whose pores, even through adolescence, were never visible. She grabbed all the good genes and I got the leftovers. Four years older, Erica lived in Manhattan, where she continued to evade my lifelong attempts at preemptive consultation. Her opinions about my choices
after
the fact, however, flew like sniper fire. At our grandmother’s suggestion, around fourth grade, I was signed up for an Irish clog-dancing class, which I loved. The pageantry, hair ribbons, and rhythms were a revelation. But I was all of five minutes into rehearsing in our bedroom when Erica decreed that either the clogs went or I did. I gave it my best, slapping my bunny socks on the hardwood, but Saturday’s practice always found me queasily unsure of what I would produce once wearing the actual shoes. Needless to say, I quickly retired and was back to watching Nickelodeon with the sound down.

I imagined her reading my inquiry between stock trades, or whatever it was she actually did as an analyst. I’m certain that my missive was two sentences and three exclamation marks too many, that I reread it twice, and added a “you rock!” before hitting Send.

“Drugstore.” Brooke’s bag hit my arm as she pushed out the door on what was passing for our lunch date. Three weeks earlier, I had not had to trail people.

I texted Lena while I waited.
“Nostalgic for shower vomit this morning.”

“Nostalgic for finals—3 term papers in 48 hrs—didn’t know how easy I had it.”
She bemoaned the brutal pace of her new position at a wealth management firm in Beverly Hills.

Brooke signaled from the long line that I should go next door to the deli and start on that long line.

“When you get a minute (hahaha),”
I typed as I walked,
“find out how I can turn the AC down from your mom?”

“That shit is set at freeze. Menopause, bitch.”

“Aw, menopause—we DO have things to look forward to!”

“Don’t believe you,”
she responded as I went inside the deli.
“Am going to die at this conference table.”

“No word on job yet. Getting worried.”

The phone went quiet and I knew she had to jump.

I glazed over at the TV above the beer fridge—in D.C. even the delis are tuned to CNN. The blandly attractive face of Brianne Rice came onscreen. I was a freshman when she’d come forward claiming that the President had made “sexual overtures” at her when he was the junior senator from Pennsylvania. Her accusations drove what was pretty universally considered to be one of those Swift Boat smear campaigns that inevitably come up during an election.

Lena and I had debated the veracity and relevance of that claim over French toast sticks. I remember wondering if Brianne was telling the truth, and then being fairly sure she wasn’t, and then it didn’t matter. While it was hard to imagine that our President, whom
People
had dubbed “Dreamy-in-Chief,” would make a rebuffed pass at anyone, more germane to everyone was that his wife was beloved. While public opinion of him vehemently split the country, it was universally agreed that Susan Rutland was a First Lady who, in her spirit and style, elevated us. It was inconceivable that she didn’t captivate his heart as she did the world’s.

I tried to hear what was happening as I watched footage of the Supreme Court, which is never very exciting footage. Rutland’s legal team had kept the case at bay by claiming that, as a sitting President, he couldn’t be sued. In breaking news, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear their argument, which made the heads of those in line tilt up.

But suddenly someone else pulled my attention. “This place is packed,” a boy with both the tan and air of one who’d just hopped down from a lifeguard chair addressed me. “What’s the deal? Are their Doritos a particularly good vintage?”

“It’s a convenience thing,” I answered, lifting my restricted intern pass, which I wore on a lanyard as if it granted me backstage access to Adam Levine, though all it really allowed me was to follow a tight route from security to my desk. “Like the restaurants on the turnpike.”

“Sorry, but if that’s a dig at Arby’s we might have to take this outside.”

“Sir.” I put a hand to my heart. “What girl wouldn’t pay a toll to get a meal from under a heat lamp?”

He grinned. I guessed he was on vacation or en route to one. Perhaps down to the Carolina beaches. I’d heard some people our age were actually doing these things. Backpacking around Europe, sitting on docks, drinking at lunch. The door opened again and Brooke pushed in with a blast of the summer I’d never have again. “Why’s everyone here?” she asked with annoyance, cutting in front of us.

“Sorry,” I mouthed to him as she grabbed a diet something from the case.

His warm breath was unexpectedly at my ear. “I just heard about this jazz thing in the park tonight. You know about it?”

I nodded. “I’m not let out of my cage very often, but yes, I do.”

The harried lady at the register beckoned and I stepped up to get an iced coffee while Brooke curated her chopped salad. When I glanced back, my eyes met the boy’s as they telegraphed his interest. I had no idea how to parlay this into anything. On a small campus, parlaying had been unnecessary. An awkward coffeehouse introduction could be followed by a mailbox run-in followed by the eventual beer-goggled hook-up. Restricted geography was on my side. But now I realized I’d have only one-shot chances with people, and the prospect that I might end up living alone with cats seemed very real. He finished paying and, to my total surprise, handed me the ripped-off top of his résumé.
Oh, so
that’s
what we do now.

I surreptitiously read his scrawl as Brooke positioned her salad in her tote.
“Concert starts @ 7. Meet me at the south entrance?”
I flipped it over to see his name, Josh Wright, cell phone, and email in a sturdy, masculine font.

As we stepped outside, I smiled down the straw into my iced coffee,
thinking of Josh. Jazz in the park with Josh. “You don’t have a boyfriend,” Brooke stated as she slid her Wayfarers down off headband duty.

“No, no I do not.” Brooke mentioned
her
boyfriend with a frequency that rivaled our fellow intern Todd’s ability to work having been a Senate page into any conversation. The boyfriend’s name was Bentley. Bentley was doing some business thing in London. Bentley was playing some sport thing in a league. I imagined Bentley wearing The Shirt and pearls, his big feet stretching the elasticized backs of Brooke’s Tory Burches.

I took a long slurp, thinking of the intermittent string of discarded flannel shirts on the floor of my dorm room. “Nothing serious. Not since high school.” The guys at Vassar had been so repulsively tentative: perpetually half-high, too in love with their film projects—their
vision
—to really come for anyone in a grand romantic gesture kind of way.

Not like my first boyfriend. In junior high I’d started studying every afternoon at the Naperville town library to avoid Erica, and I had a crush on Mike Harnet from the first time I saw him in the stacks. He had moved with his family to New Orleans from Norway because his dad was a musician. I loved how he spoke—his English was pretty perfect, but his inflection was highly formal, and it made me think of Tolkien and wizards and fairies. He had a mop of short black hair, a still-pink scar on his temple from dueling a playground slide, a braces-free smile, and a declared mission to determine a favorite book in every single section. One rainy day when I got up from my spot, I returned to find a Post-it left on my science textbook. He’d written, “
?
” When I looked up, he was watching me from between the stacks. We stared at each other like that for a moment, suspended. Then I marched down the deserted aisle and thrust the square of yellow paper at him, feigning annoyance. Mike lifted his finger, then slowly circled it as if about to land anywhere on me. A foreign heat popped open in my chest and radiated downward.
Oh my God,
I thought.
Oh my God.
He leaned in very slowly until the warmth of his chapped lips landed on mine.

That was our first kiss.

So I worried. In the years that followed, I worried that I was incapable of feeling something for someone who didn’t know how to initiate.

We followed the shade of the awnings, passing the frame store with that ubiquitous dorm-room poster of the woman applying lipstick while the shirtless guy watches. “I miss that.” I gestured with the tip of my straw.

“What?”

“You know, The Look.”

“What?”

“How he looks at her. Appraises her. That thing where you can see it in their eyes—they’re in.”

“Right. Okay, Jamie.” I did not picture Bentley giving Brooke The Look. “Can I offer you feedback?”

“Sure!” I said automatically as if she’d offered me ice cream.