The First Affair (26 page)

“What?”

“Paul wasn’t with us.”

“But they were bugging the apartment—”

“We weren’t
in
the apartment—she was helping me pack and we ran out for cigarettes. Rachelle went on about my being brave and I just broke down, sobbing in CVS like a crazy person.” I thought of those hours in the Phoenix Park Hotel, sick at the thought of what the FBI must have done to her to press her to do this—what they must have threatened her with.

“I’m calling Elaine.” Erica reached for the landline.

I clicked over to
Morning Joe
to hear myself slur, “No one’s ever made me come like that, you know, that—hard. Like there’s no plateau—I just slam over the edge.”
If I live to be a thousand—if everyone on the planet dies—on that day I will be lifted up to abject humiliation from where I am now.

“Paul Hoff wants to see you,” Elaine said as she answered the phone.

I couldn’t even respond.

“He knows about the legal quarantine, right?” Erica verified.

“He knows he’s a fucking asshole who got the OIC to use Rachelle against me, right?” My voice was raspy with tears.

“He said he needs to talk to you—in person. Obviously it’s out of the question.”

“So, Rachelle?” Erica prompted Elaine.

“Yes,” she confirmed, “she’s officially cooperating with the special prosecutor.”

“How do I get a message to her?” I asked. “To apologize for dragging her into this.”

“You don’t.”

• • •

Erica started sleeping during the day and spending nights in the gym to avoid me. Sometimes I’d go up and watch as she moved through the circuit, running mile after mile, her eyes on the televisions, as if daring herself to sprint toward the onslaught.

I couldn’t go out on the balcony because everyone with a view into our apartment had rented their windows to paparazzi. I kept thinking if I could just pull back the drapes and stare, really stare at the curved edifice lit in the moonlight, then Greg would know that I was holding out, through the humiliation, the financial tsunami, the threat of jail—I was not wearing down.

Erica’s emails from her personal account went public first. Where she referred to clients as gullible morons. Her bank immediately distanced themselves from her and she learned she’d been fired from Anderson Cooper. I knew she must have been frantic to connect with Peter, but there was no way at that point for us to talk about it, or really to talk at all.

I don’t know how to convey to you what this period was like. As citizens, we turn on our TVs or Twitter to find out about what’s going on in the world—to keep informed so we can join in on the conversation. We don’t, in the course of a normal life—not that I will ever know firsthand what that is—hang on Wolf Blitzer’s every word because we’re waiting to see how our day will go. To find out if we have upended the life of one more person we love.

Lena. The girl I shared a bunk bed with—whose fingertips I could reach up and tap when one of us had an anxiety dream—was now a two-dimensional emblem of my shame presented in HD. Seeing her carried into the courthouse like pasta floating on a boiling surface made me loathe myself for ignoring her advice, for costing her so much money, and privacy, and things I wouldn’t even
know about for months to come. As our emails and texts were made public, I knew she must have lost her job. And I realized that, despite the bravado that had kept me from reaching out all these months, like a toddler with an exaggerated sense of independence pushing her parent away, I missed her so fucking much. I couldn’t believe she was somewhere there in the city and I couldn’t even get to her.

“What if I said I made the whole thing up?” I asked Elaine, desperate for a solution that would let everyone get back to what was left of their lives, without impeaching the President.
Impeaching the President.

By way of an answer, Elaine headed for the door. “Your parents will be here tomorrow.”

• • •

I woke to the doorman buzzing up. Everything I’d done to prepare myself for seeing them melted—they’d each easily lost twenty pounds, faces hollowed out like cored apples.

Mom enveloped me in her arms and started to sob. Dad walked right past us and turned on the TV. “Jim, shut that fucking thing off.”

Erica’s eyes met mine.

But he didn’t listen. He sat down and stared hard at the screen.

“There’s no new information since we boarded the plane,” Mom said, wiping her face.

“You don’t know that.”

“Have you heard from Peter?” Erica asked anxiously.

Mom shook her head. “He hasn’t returned our calls for a week or so. How are you?”

“Okay.”

I realized that, despite the hug, I hadn’t actually been asked the same.

“Can you get to a meeting?” She put a hand on Erica’s arm.

“Oh yeah, they love paparazzi at AA.”

“Honey, you do what you need to do to take care of yourself.”

“Um, how about change my name?”

“Has Elaine been keeping you guys up to date?” I asked.

“I have,” she said, arriving behind them.

“What’s the plan?” Dad watched the television as my friend Ashley entered the Justice Department building to be deposed.

“There’s no admissible proof,” I reminded them—and myself. “We just have to survive this, let it be our word against theirs.”

“Ours?” Dad asked.

“Mine and Greg’s.”

Erica snorted.

My father looked at me, incredulous. “Sean Hannity says you’re going to jail.”

Elaine stepped in. “We have to get the reins on public perception—get them to back down by making it look like they’re clubbing a baby seal. Now that you’re here,” she addressed Mom, “I want to remind America this is a wholesome girl from a wholesome family.” We all glanced at Dad, who had that sour, gray look he did when he was drinking. “I’ve made an appointment tonight at a salon in the Four Seasons. We’ll go out through the garage here, straight into their garage. I have a crisis management team waiting to make you over.”

• • •

After the weeks of confinement, the cold air whistling down into the garage felt like defibrillator paddles. We pulled above ground in our SUV and I didn’t make out the shape huddled in the darkness on the sidewalk until it rose like a Mummenschanz character. Our driver was blinded as the paparazzi ran forward, lenses clicking. We instinctively covered our faces.

“Jamie, Jamie!” They chased the car, hitting the back window, hurling questions. One rose clearly above the din, “Who’s the brunette?”

We turned to each other in the car. We had no idea.

• • •

The three of us sat dumbly in the row of beige leather swivel seats, like animals being shorn, while Elaine paced and made calls, trying to find out what the paparazzi were talking about. Was there someone else? Another intern?

My mother, sister, and I were, I suspected, thinking the same thing: it should have been fun. A makeover. A girls’ night out in the kind of place we never could have sprung for. Instead, we sat in queasy silence as the team asked each other how to make us seem “likeable,” as if it were an insurmountable challenge. The stylist held up the mint-green Lands’ End twin set she kept enthusiastically extolling would make me look “sexless.” Everything about the experience highlighted our collective abject misery.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly to my mother as they foiled her hair. “I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

“I know you are,” she replied flatly.

“You’re shitting me!” Elaine dropped her phone in her Birkin, covered her face, then said into her hands, “Can someone turn a TV to NBC?”

We spun our chairs to the flat screen as the colorist grabbed a remote.

“Tonight,” Brian Williams was saying, “Rachelle Rubin is breaking her silence. Many of you know her as Jamie McAlister’s best friend and confidante. In our exclusive interview she’ll explain why she breached that confidence and take us behind the scenes of Jamie McAlister’s alleged relationship with the President of the United States.” I reached across the space and clutched Mom’s cold hand. Over a series of pictures starting with her teen years, Brian introduced Rachelle, describing how she survived her parents’ bitter divorce, her father’s remarriage to the stripper he supported while still with Rachelle’s mom, his subsequent bankruptcy—so much she’d never shared with me. And I realized that during all our hours together, despite the confessional nature of her monologues, she was as skilled at selective disclosure as I’d been with Lena.

The montage ended with us holding up the Washington Monument. Then at once there she was, seated across from Brian Williams in some hotel suite, which was all beige silk and plumped pillows and bowls of tulips.

She looked amazing. First I felt a fleeting pang of missing her—then relief that this hadn’t broken and drained her as it had me. While the salon owner was figuring out if anything could be done for the
red web of broken capillaries from my lashes to my hairline, Rachelle looked—radiant. Her hair was pin-straight and shiny, and someone had changed the shape of her eyebrows.

“So, Rachelle,” Brian said, shifting to get comfortable as if he’d dropped into the seat seconds before. “I have to start by asking you the question America’s wondering—why did you do it?”

“Which part, Brian?”

“Why did you record your friend’s conversations?”

“To protect her. She couldn’t see clearly. She was in love. She was. And I didn’t know—I’m not saying the President, but those around him—I didn’t know what they were capable of. Someone needed to make a record.”

“This is good,” I said, on the edge of the chair. “She’s going to make this better.”
Thank God
, I thought.
Thank God for Rachelle.
She’d somehow found a way to defend me. She was so poised. Like she’d been having this conversation every Friday night of her life.

“That might be understandable,” Brian continued. “But then you went to the Office of the Independent Counsel of your own volition. You handed them these recordings—”

“She went to the OIC?” Mom gasped.

“Shh!” Erica hissed.

I remember feeling as though the lights of the salon had been turned all the way up to burn and there was no window to open. I had to close my eyes.

She sounded indignant. “He was getting away with it—”

“Getting away with what?”

I struggled to keep listening. Truthfully, what I’m about to recount I had to learn from rewatching online later. Much later.

“He took away her job at the White House. Her student loans had come due. And he wasn’t doing
anything
to help her and it was all his fault—”

“The President?”

“Yes, the President. We called him Greg.” That would become a Republican punch line. “Guys think they can just get away with making empty promises. I thought the OIC could help Jamie, protect her, make him do the right thing.” But anyone who had been in the
OIC’s presence would find that laughable. And then I knew, and wished that I didn’t, that this was not just her spin to the public, but to herself. I shakily stood and went up to the screen. She was as righteous as ever.

“In the blogosphere, people are saying this was a heinous violation of your friend’s trust.”

There was a half-beat of sadness before she regained her composure. “I know. And I hope she can forgive me someday. But I never imagined those recordings would
ever
be made public. We’re still not sure how they leaked. They’re not part of the formal investigation. They were just supposed to be her insurance policy. So he couldn’t hurt her.”

“So
he
couldn’t hurt me?” I breathed.

“Oh, Jamie,” my mother murmured.

“What do you say to the allegations from the White House that you both made this up?” For the first time, she looked thrown. “That you were just two young girls who fabricated those recordings to corroborate a fantasy,” he pressed her. “Aren’t you shopping a book deal?”

“How did you—no—well, yes,” she stuttered. Everything started to swerve.

“And talking to producers about selling your story for film?”

“But that’s not why I—no, I’m telling you the truth.”

“But you have no proof. Jamie McAlister is still refusing to testify under oath, the President
has
testified—”

“He’s a liar.”

“Excuse me?”

She was the only one, however fucked up her motives. She was the only one calling him on it. I needed her to keep going. I needed her to
shut up
.

“He lied about bringing her back to the White House. He strung her along. And she waited and was patient and did what she was told.”

“So you say.”

Her face flash-boiled. “He came on her coat. And she was so sweet and trusting she wanted to clean it, but I made sure she—” I didn’t
hear the rest of what she said, because Elaine sprung up and out in every direction like a cat thrown in water.

“Is she telling the truth?” Elaine demanded.

“Yes.”

“Jesus, Jamie!” Erica spat.

“Where is it?” Elaine was already dialing.

“The apartment,” I whispered. “In those unpacked boxes in my room. But they couldn’t—”

“They have the search warrant,” Elaine explained while it rang. “Yeah, it’s me. . . . Good. Don’t stop for red lights, and call me when you get it.”

“Dad’s there!” Erica rattled off his number.

“Can he destroy it? Is that legal?” I asked as Elaine dialed him.

“He might get a fine, but it’ll be better if you have a coat with a bleach spot than if they actually get their hands on—he isn’t answering.”

We left with hair half-cut, half-wet. Elaine tried Dad repeatedly as we raced back.

But the FBI was already parked outside the building.

We got off the elevator as Agent Cuellar was leaving with the coat in a plastic evidence bag, his hands still in blue latex gloves. We found Dad dazed and drunk in the vestibule, holding his phone in bewilderment.

I hated Rachelle. I hated her with every molecule.

• • •

Within an hour, CNN was reporting that a garment of mine had been taken into custody potentially with the President’s DNA on it. Testing forthcoming. Stay tuned.