The First Affair (22 page)

Paul tugged me into a hug as a trio of suits from the next office passed, pressing my face into his chest to muffle my questions. “You cannot do this here,” he said sternly. As their footsteps grew faint, he took the envelope from my shaking hand and put it into my bag. “Go home.”

My knees started to cave. “What do I—”

“Get in a cab.” He took out his wallet, tugged out twenty dollars, and put it in my hand. “That’s all I can do.”

• • •

Lewis Franklin was the one to get back to me. The phone rang within minutes of my incoherent call to Jean. He told me to meet him at the Hay-Adams the next afternoon.

After a sleepless night on Rachelle’s futon, I wove on unsteady feet between the empty tables to where he half-stood to greet me. “Do you want anything?” he asked, about to signal the bartender, who was stocking nuts for the imminent cocktail crowd.

“No, thank you. I need to keep my mind clear.”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry to be seeing you under these circumstances,” I said earnestly. “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to working—”

“Can you make that louder?” he asked the bartender, interrupting me.

The bartender nodded and pointed a remote at the screen. I waited for Lewis to catch whatever he needed on C-SPAN, but instead he leaned in. “Somebody has gone out of their way to put you on the OIC’s radar. We think it was Gail Robinson.”

I was stunned. “No, that’s not possible,” I said more forcefully than I had a right to. “I know she’s with the RNC, but I’m close to her family. I saved her daughter’s life.” The truth suddenly sounded absurdly dramatic.

“Could she know about your friendship with the President?”

“Yes, but—”

“Did you tell her, or did she figure it out?”

“Jean called—on Gail’s landline—on New Year’s Day.”

This paused him, checking his obvious desire for the blame to fall entirely on me. He drummed his fingers on the side of his glass before asking, “So who else could it be?”

“The Chief of Staff. He didn’t like me.”

He shook his head emphatically. “Singh wouldn’t do that to him.”

“Would he have a choice? If they asked him if there were any other . . . friendships. He saw me once outside the Oval—the day I got the job in the scheduling department, I ran up to tell the President and he overheard me. Greg said he was the one who suggested I be moved out of the building.”

“Out of D.C. would’ve been more productive,” he muttered. “Look,
a list of items has been requested by the prosecutor. It includes a receipt and corresponding explanation for an unaccounted-for Hermès purchase in August. The President did not disclose this purchase to anyone.” My stomach turned to worms.
Brooke.
It
was
all my fault. She had seen it because I couldn’t wait to get it home. And now Greg thought I couldn’t be trusted.

“It was a birthday present.”

“I really don’t need the details.” He glanced at a couple of men in cashmere overcoats walking to the bar.

“It was one of the other interns. She saw me coming out of the ladies’ room where I opened it. I’m so sorry. But she doesn’t know anything for certain. There’s no other corroborating—” But I realized it wasn’t true. She was there the first night, outside the President’s dining room.

“I’m not saying this as a future employer or in any professional regard. I’m saying this as a friend. I have a lawyer I advise you to see.” He didn’t lean forward, continuing as if about to recommend a golf pro. “Wallace Whitborn, excellent guy.”

“That would be amazing—”

“It is his opinion that you should file a preemptive affidavit. Not expose yourself to the myriad variables created by a deposition. It will be with your doorman within the hour. You should get it to him by nine a.m. tomorrow morning so that it can be filed.” His focus went back to the door, where people were trickling in. “And then you should get your things together and take a noon train to New York. Call my assistant when you arrive.”

“So a preemptive affidavit would . . .”

“State that your interaction with the Oval Office was on a professional level. All interactions that occurred in the White House were on the up-and-up.”

I stared at him.

“That’s the scope of this,” he stated, waiting expectantly for my confirmation.

“Yes. That is all that happened.”

He rotated a cuff link. “Greg is adamant that you’re trustworthy. It’s not my place to doubt him. But it’s necessary to ask—if there is anyone
else who could have gotten a mistaken impression about your friendship, you need to tell us.”

“Of course.” But I was afraid and embarrassed, and I stupidly prayed that no one would ever have to know how I had slipped.

“And you’ll call Gail and correct her misperceptions.”

“Yes,” I answered, though I had no earthly idea how to do that to one of the shrewdest women I’d ever met.

Then he lifted his folded paper and tapped it on the table before standing. “I have a benefit at the Met tonight.”

“How will you get back so fast?” I asked.

“Chopper.”

“Right.” The option that wouldn’t have occurred to me. But then everything that was happening now was the option that hadn’t occurred to me. “I promise this will be the last you hear about anything like this. I feel like I have so much to offer your—”

“Do what you have to do to get this behind us. Onward and upward.” His voice returned to a normal pitch as he walked me out. “Say hi to your aunt for me. Sweet of you to stop by for her.” He patted me on the back and we parted ways.

• • •

No sooner had I left the bar than Jean called to ask that I bring any “mementoes of my internship” to her house for safekeeping. Like I’d taken a pen and those red, white, and blue M&M’s.

“Fucking Brooke,” Rachelle fumed over the phone as I dragged out the box from under my bed an hour later. We agreed it
had
to be Brooke. That Gail couldn’t possibly have done this. And yet she did ask me to stay just as the Supreme Court decision came down—at a moment, according to the fears Lena had voiced months prior, she should have wanted me gone more than ever. “I can’t believe that monogrammed washcloth would have the chutzpah.”

“I can’t believe that monogrammed washcloth could hate me this much.” I emptied the box’s contents into Gail’s Families for America tote, the tile distorting the canvas. “She had to go out and
find
somebody to tell.” I climbed back to my feet, overheating in my parka. “She obviously wasn’t on the subpoena list.” I grabbed the glass by
my bed and chugged the mouthful of water that was left. “I have to talk to her, find out exactly what she said.”

“Unless she’s going to make
more
of a story out of your talking to her,” Rachelle said fearfully. “Oh my God, would she? Like, blog about it or something? Is she even still in D.C.? I don’t know, Jamie. I don’t know if you should throw gas on her fire.”

I looked longingly into the bag. “I’ll just keep the book, okay?”

“That’s it. I’m coming over.”

“No! I can’t show up at Jean’s with you.” I flicked off the light. “I have to go alone.”

“Then I’m tracking down the beige bitch. We’ll garrote her with pearls. Call me as soon as you unload the goods.”

“And what do I do about this affidavit they’ve drafted?” I asked, opening the front door.

“Read it to me.”

“It’s not here yet. I was thinking of calling Paul—he’s going through this—he could tell me—”

“He
sent you home
.”

“But he’d know—”

“That you signed a false affidavit,” she said pointedly.

“I haven’t signed it yet.”

“You will. He’s jealous and drunk half the time and being so, so weird. You cannot trust him. Full stop.”

The buzzer rang and the doorman informed me that an envelope from the lawyer’s office had arrived. I stood in the vestibule.

“Jamie?” Rachelle’s concerned voice eeked from my speakerphone.

“Yes?”

“Go.”

• • •

It was dark as I hurried along the suburban Maryland block, gripping the bag. I saw Greg picking each item out for me, the consideration, the intention to please. On my shoulder, the one-page document smoldered through my purse. I had started to read it on the train, then had to stuff it back in its innocuous manila folder, given the magnitude of the lie. A description of a relationship that would see
me still working at the White House, maybe in a share with Rachelle, Donkey as my boyfriend—an alternate path in which I never wrapped my thighs around the wrist of a man whose political calling made divorce, and therefore us, impossible.

I passed glowing living-room lights, caught glimpses of dinners being prepared, homework being slogged through. I heard piano being practiced. I tried to convince myself to call Gail and lie to her. I knew Lena must have fully told her, but I couldn’t conceive of what Lewis said Gail had done with that information.

I suddenly remembered an early spring night outside a Poughkeepsie bar with Lena, our friend Angie, and Angie’s shit boyfriend, Justin, a local who owned the sub shop. They were so much drunker than we were. One minute we were stumbling back to campus talking about pizza bagels and the next Angie was on the sidewalk, holding her bleeding face.

Justin ran off. Angie locked herself in her room. I remember feeling like we were playing at being grown-ups and that any second some guidance counselor was going to call “scene.” Instead, Lena and I huddled on the dorm roof, working our way through a pack of Marlboros and every possible course of action. Something had to be done, there was no maybe about it. We had seen it and it could not be explained away, much as Angie would try. By dawn, sitting shoulder to shoulder under Lena’s purple duvet, fervently wishing we could go back to before it happened, it felt as if we were the only two people alive.

If Gail had done what Lewis said she had, that would be the real end of us. But what can you do about facts or the magical wish that they aren’t? It would be like trying to get Angie to report Justin. Only I would be Angie, swearing I had tripped and that what Lena saw, she didn’t see. In the final steps to Jean’s door, I actually longed for the affidavit to be true.

“It’s beautiful out here,” I said as I stepped inside her toile entryway.

“Yes, I love that green is never altogether gone in this region.” She clutched the top of her cardigan closed as she pulled the door shut behind me.

“Smells delicious.”

“Just roasting a chicken.”

“I didn’t get the impression you were ever allowed home long enough to enjoy a whole chicken.” I mimicked Rachelle’s social ease while debating asking for Jean’s guidance. Between us were the assignations she’d scheduled. The times I’d departed by way of her desk, kissed into a flushed frenzy. Her accepting nods at my full cans of soda concluding the ritual we were now conspiring to conceal. And I sensed that beyond legal constraints, she might actually be incapable of speaking about Greg as he really was.

“I’d love to ask you to stay,” she said, less with regret than with insistence, her only acknowledgment that this was already a sort of trespassing.

“So, um, here it is.” I reluctantly lifted the bag to my chest and realized I was giving it a little hug. She reached for it. For a second I still felt the weight, and then my arm was lighter as I registered the start of a knot in my neck, my eyes wetting. “Thanks for being so kind to me. I wish this wasn’t happening like this. Or, you know, at all.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, dear.” She offered me a tissue. Then I was back out in the cold.

• • •

As the train back into the city rumbled above the streetlamps, a stream of texts came in from Rachelle.

“Brooke now working for aunt’s real estate company in Boston.”

“Living with boyfriend in family apartment. Beacon Hill.”

“Adopting Boxer puppy from Texas breeder.”

“Naming it Farrell.”

“Poor Farrell.”

What Columbo could have achieved with Facebook.

The train barreled into the tunnel. Hunkered in a corner seat, I stared at the affidavit:

I did not have a sexual relationship with the President. He did not offer me employment or any other benefits in exchange for a sexual relationship. After I left my employment at the White House, I only saw him at formal political functions in relation to
my job and other people were always present in the room. I declare under the penalty of perjury that the aforementioned is true and correct.

When the doors slid open, I was the first person out.

• • •

It took three long presses of Paul’s bell for him to crack his door. “Jamie.” Two syllables carried to me on a plume of scotch fumes.

“Please,” I begged as I shivered, the cul-de-sac of town homes doing nothing to block the wind off the Potomac. “Please let me in.”

“This isn’t a good idea.”

“We’re so far past that.
Please
, Paul.”

“Jesus.” He tugged me inside and locked the door behind us.

“They’ve prepared an affidavit for me—”

“ ‘They’?”

“Lewis got me a lawyer.” I reached into my bag for the envelope and he reluctantly pointed me into a once-elegant living room that was now glaringly missing half its furnishings—a packed bookshelf stood next to one starkly empty, side tables sat beside spaces where chairs once held the people who might have put down a drink. In all these months he’d made no effort to encroach on Tom’s absence.

He returned with a glass in his hand and a bottle under his arm. I put the envelope on the coffee table as he poured me a generous portion, then refilled his own glass. “They want me to sign it tonight.”

“I’m sure
they
want you to do all kinds of things.” He pushed my glass toward me.

“Please read it. It says there was no relationship.”

“How do they know about you?” he asked, standing back by the fading embers of the fireplace. “Have they told you that?”

“This girl I interned with.”