The First Affair (27 page)

Deniability was over.

The President would have to come forward, apologize to the American people, and beg forgiveness for his weakness. I imagined him saying it just like that because the implication—that I made him weak—still thrilled that stunted part of me. It would be done—I wouldn’t have to take the stand against him, and someday we still could be . . . I know. It’s cringe-inducing. But I’d been alone for
weeks with nothing but a television amplifying every terrible thought I’d ever had about myself. There was a paucity of perspective.

And so I waited for his statement.

By the next night every comedian in America—and probably around the world—was guessing how his semen got on the coat. Did I try to swallow—and fail? Did I spit? Was I just bad at it? Here’s who’d made jokes at my expense by that point: Gretchen Carlson, Joe Scarborough, Sarah Palin, Bill Maher, David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart (those ones still sting—doesn’t he have a daughter?), and Michael Moore. I was “hippy.” I was “flaunting my breasts in his face.” Yet also “flat-chested” (Ann Coulter). Jay Leno compared my hair to tumbleweeds. One of the housewives did a whole bit with Andy Cohen about introducing me to the man of my dreams, John Frieda. I wanted to take the mike just to tell people that my hair was soft and D.C. was humid.

I sat next to my parents on the couch and watched, none of us able to pull ourselves away, needing to stand by the side of the road and watch our own car burn to a charred husk. As though we could somehow control it if we just knew
every
single horrible thing people were saying. Or, better, finally found the thing that actually killed me, took the pain and humiliation to a place that ended this. So maybe we manifested what happened next.

• • •

The following evening, at Mom’s insistence, we changed the channel to a sitcom. But none of us were really paying attention until the show was interrupted for a live press conference. I stood up. “Here we go. He’s going to apologize,” I said, expecting to see Greg at the podium in front of the blue curtain.

“I don’t understand,” Mom said, equally baffled. “Why’s that guy from the library on TV? Is he going to say something nice? It’s about time somebody defended Jamie. Why is his wife with him?”

He did that little coughing thing he does when he’s nervous, a split-level house floodlit behind them. “Hi. My name is Mike Harnet and this is my wife, Patty. I’m coming forward now because I feel it’s my duty and responsibility to tell the American people I knew Jamie
McAlister a few years ago. She pursued me just like she pursued the President. She’s an unstable girl, a predator who stalked me with no respect for—”

“Off!” Dad shouted.

Erica fumbled with the remote.

“—her aggressive agenda and she told me she was going to the White House for one reason only—”

“Turn it off!”
He flung his foot forward, smashing the flat screen back on its console, the glass shattering.

We were frozen in the loud silence that followed, tiny droplets of blood starting to drip from his ankle. “Jamie, what was he saying?” Mom finally asked through gulping tears. “That’s crazy—why would he do this? You were a kid when you knew him.”

Being his girlfriend doesn’t make you a grown-up—it makes him a child.
Worse than a child.

“A predator,” Dad breathed.

“Why, how?” Mom’s voice came in little rasps.

Erica’s eyes were dropped, her face awash in something I couldn’t place. No one rushed to comfort me.

I thought for a long minute, finally landing at the truth of it. “Because he paid attention to me.” I got up and walked to my room, shutting the door. On the other side, I heard my father throw up. I would have given anything,
anything
, to talk to Greg at that moment. I wanted to fling open the window and scream
I need you!
Only he would understand.

I lay on the bed, pressing the pillows around me until I could pretend it was Greg holding me, his arms strong and reassuring. The safest place in the world.

• • •

Elaine arrived in the morning with her iPad loaded to the tabloid sites. All of which were covering the story of Mike Harnet, the innocent librarian who stoically suffered my relentless advances. And they seemed to have been talking to the same “White House insider” saying that I was a contender for a
Fatal Attraction
remake.

“The OIC got their evidence—they want her to testify—how does making her seem crazy help their case?” Mom asked. Dad was still in bed.

“It doesn’t. That’s the White House’s strategy,” Elaine retorted.

“Greg would
never
allow it,” I said, pushing the tablet’s crocodile case away.

Elaine flipped it shut. “Who do you think plucked Mike Harnet out of obscurity?”

I shook my head against the preposterousness. “Mike came forward because he’s—he’s jealous and just—I don’t know—a fucked-up person.”

“Jamie.” She leaned forward, her fingertips tented on the dining table. “I spoke to my contacts at ABC this morning. Mike is repped by a powerful D.C. publicist. Who found
him
. Somebody put them on the trail and is footing the bill. Did Rachelle know about Mike?”

“No.”

I’d only ever told one person about Mike. One.

Part IV

Chapter Twelve

March 3

Conjure your worst breakup, the devastation, the rejection, the abandonment. As a rule it’s followed by a graceless time period, over which one would just as soon cast an obscuring veil. But if forced to take a sustained glance, it
isn’t
one long slog; recovery actually cleaves into two distinct phases: Hope and After Hope. In Hope, he’s left a gaping hole in your everything. Get him back or you’re lost like an astronaut whose tether has snapped. Your world is a zebra and all you see are the black stripes of his absence.

Then, either your suffering reaches its saturation point or a shoeful of shit drops that’s so egregious it’s irrefutable. The switch occurs and the white stripes of
who he really is
come to the foreground. Until this second you’ve been living, as Carrie Fisher so perfectly put it, on a feast of bread crumbs—which transform before your eyes into fetid garbage.

After Hope is a fucking bitch.

The humiliation alone could slay you. You can’t even glimpse the fantasy you’d heretofore been relentlessly inflating with your sore lips. It’s time to start clawing your way back. The song playing the first time he undressed you—turned off. That commercial you and he shared an inside joke about—channel changed. The orange juice conjuring the citrus top-note of that perfume he loved—down the sink. A humane blackout descends. It is, only relative to what came prior, a manageably numb state so long as you kick all evidence of the relationship far from view.

Or.

Or you could spend five eight-hour days reliving it in second-by-
second detail before twenty-three strangers whose official role is to cast their judgment on behalf of the nation. Not on whether the relationship was wrong—it was. Or immoral—the definition of. But its very veracity.

Given the volume of emails, texts, photos, and other reminders that amass between the participants of a normal love affair, I should have considered myself perversely lucky there was so little for me to have to let go of. The book, tile, and scarf ring had been seized from Jean. My computer, phone, and anything in the apartment I’d so much as doodled on now belonged to the State. My coat, or what was left of it, was being analyzed by the top DNA experts in the world. The only unearthed evidence of what had passed between us now lived between my ears.

It took them two weeks to assemble the jury. Mom headed home to deal with the house sale. Dad just sort of shut down, but refused to leave, so Erica kept an eye on him as he sat on the couch with a book in his lap, never actually turning the pages.

It’s a blur, honestly. I remember Erica looking at me strangely as I paced, but being beyond the point of trying to make her comfortable. She’d occasionally hand off a sandwich or water as I’d pass until, exhausted, I’d drop on my bed to attempt sleep. It wouldn’t take long for my subconscious to seduce me down the blue carpet, past Jean’s mahogany desk. Greg would turn, his eyes lighting up. His warm palm would slip behind my neck and I’d kick as if from the ocean floor, pushing up, up,
up
to wake at the punishing surface. And once again commence walking, my thoughts ricocheting through the paradoxes: I had an insatiable primal hunger to wound him as he had me, but there was no getting to him, and if there was no getting to him there would be no getting over him.

When the day arrived, I was restrained in an elevator, then under a seat belt, then back in an elevator, and finally locked into the witness box. It was polished to a gleam and came up to just above my waist. The whole room was pine-paneled, regal, classic. Beautiful, really. A place I would have been trotted through on a grade-school field trip or watched on TV, wrapped in an afghan while putting off writing a paper. I should have been holding a lace handkerchief or
peering up through the veil of a rimmed hat. There should have been rich rays of sun slanting across the room as lawyers made grand speeches. But there were no speeches. There was a flat gray March light, all but gone by the time we broke each day. And I was sitting in my once perfect suit, which now hung off me, my fingernails searching out a spot of remaining sensation in the callusing flesh of my palms.

I was not pleading for anything. I was merely a means to an end, present so I could prove the President had lied in his deposition when he said he did not have a sexual relationship with me. More specifically, that he did not touch me with the “intent to arouse or gratify.” I felt like that delinquent tied to the chair in
A Clockwork Orange
with his eyes pinned open before the traumatizing footage—only I was also the footage.

“How?”

“How did he kiss me?”

“Answer the question, please.”

“He . . . leaned down and put his mouth on mine.”

“For how long?”

“Um, a couple of seconds?” How does one know?

“Did he use his tongue?”

“Yes.” I wanted to take off my shoes, shuffle my feet. I kept searching for a mental automatic pilot that would allow me to slip back to the part of my mind frenetic for solutions—how to wound him, get to him, unlock this so I could get out—but the prosecutor kept forcing me into the past.

“And where were his hands?”

“Um, on my blouse?” The jurors looked at me as if I were the ceaseless television in a waiting room, some programs calling their interest more than others. I focused on the variation in their listening expressions. At one end of the box was a woman with a predilection for jaunty vests who smiled a little too broadly, as if afraid. On the other, an elderly man whose mouth moved as if he was mimicking what I was saying, but on a two-second delay.

“His hands were on your blouse or inside?”

“On top and then inside.”

“Were they rubbing you?”

“They were still.” Warm. Curious.

“Were they making contact with your nipples?”

“Yes.”

“And did he put his hands on your vagina or buttocks?”

“No.” Not that time. The prosecutor would get to that time when my father was in the courtroom. He slipped in on the third day and sat in the back row in his one blazer, hands clasped, staring into the middle distance the way he did at church.

“How long was his hand on your breast?”

“I don’t know.”

“Longer or shorter than five minutes?”

“I don’t know, shorter. The same amount of time he was kissing me, I guess.”

“Was he visibly aroused?”

Dad was pale but expressionless. “No.” I was trying to come to terms with the fact that the technical execution of our affair would be foisted on everyone. I thought about Greg’s children. Where would they be when this information intruded? Beside a friend who could help them by cursing me? I hoped they wouldn’t be as alone as my dad looked, that the friend would be vicious and equipped with a relieving sense of humor. That they wouldn’t be in the halls, attempting a normal day, backpacks over their shoulders, only to see it trending on Twitter.

“Did you feel that he had an erection?”

“Yes.” And I thought about Susan. Susan, whose pain I will never be able to bear fully examining. I’d seen her on television the night before, standing beside him, her face a mask of anguish. He stepped aside for her to reaffirm her commitment to him and ask us to do the same. But when she leaned toward the mike, the words stuck, and she only heaved with sobs until she was escorted off the stage by Abigail. I had made myself watch to confront the humiliation and disappointment I’d enabled, only to be stunned that what I witnessed was simply heartbreak. Acute and final.

“Did you make contact with it?”

“Sorry?”

“Did you make contact with his erection?”

“No, not directly, no.”

“Indirectly, then.”

I slid my nail along my cuticle, slicing into it. “I guess.”

“With your vagina?”

“No.”

“With your hands?”

“I just, um, felt it.”

“His erection was making contact with your body.”

“Yes.”

“Please point to where.”

I did. There was no feeling where my hand landed on my abdomen. And I wondered if that had been true for Susan as well—after Brianne. If it hadn’t been safe to be present with him anymore, like she was an animal hibernating from the risk that he would do it again. If she had left the surface of herself.

“Did he attempt to penetrate you?”

“No.” Not then.

“And what did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything.” They wouldn’t ask me about the over seventy times he called until later, as if it were an afterthought. That he had kept me on the phone for two-to-three-hour conversations was incidental to their mission. They weren’t interested in a courtship.

“So the last thing he said was . . . ‘please’?”

“Yes.”