The First Affair (28 page)

“What did he mean?”

Elaine protested. The question was dropped. But I wanted us to go back; I wanted to ask everyone in the room.

“Where else did he put his hands?”

“On my stomach, my face. My, um, torso.” What
did
he mean?

“For how long?”

“I really don’t know.” What had he wanted?

“Do you need to take a few minutes to remember?”

“No.” What could he
possibly
have hoped for? “To be honest, I wasn’t counting.”

• • •

On the fifth day the questions no longer followed a timeline. Surrendering, I revealed every image that came to mind, admitting even to the shaving brush, which “manually masturbated me” as if it could have done so of its own volition. Rachelle’s ambition spared me nothing. I was blank, a talking vessel. Yes. No. My left breast. My right hip. His penis in my hand.
Hurt him. Get to him. Get over him. Hurt him. Get to him. Get over him . . .

“It’s still unclear how you came to be ‘alone’ with the President.” The prosecutor, flipping through one of his densely inked yellow pads, gave a slanting look of skepticism that occasionally appears in my dreams to this day. “Your testimony is that on the first occasion of your sexual contact he did not send for you. Please explain, then, how it occurred.” His eyebrows were badly in need of a trim, angled like two sides of a roof.

“He didn’t. Send for me, I mean.”

“You ‘ran into each other’ in the private dining room.” The hairy incline steepened.

“I was instructed to deliver urgent papers to Amar Singh. I was looking for him and instead found the President.”

“At which point he just—” The prosecutor cruelly flipped his hand at the implausibility, the cool kid’s taunt in front of the entire party—I thought of Brooke. “—kissed you.”

“Yes.”

“Did he proposition you first?”

“No.”

“Imply he could help you out?”

“No.”

“He made no mention of any potential career advancement,” he chided.

“No.”

“But he’s the President of the United States—it’s implied.”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“Withdrawn. So you propositioned him. You wanted this kiss?”

I’d wanted so many things. I didn’t expect someone to step out from the Macy’s window and
give
me the gown. “No, I didn’t proposition him. I didn’t invite it—explicitly—”

“Implicitly, then. You physically enticed him. You used your body to communicate nonverbally that you were available for—”

“It wasn’t like that. It was spontaneous. You’re making it sound like I—”

“You can’t expect us to believe the man holding the country’s highest office wasn’t at the very least
implying
he could offer—”

“He was in no position to offer me anything. He was losing it; he could barely breathe—”

“ ‘Losing it,’ ” the prosecutor repeated. Everyone in the room, drowsy from the radiators, was shifting to attention. “Granted the federal government was suspended, but presumably the President is accustomed to
breathing
under such circumstances. Tell us then, Jamie, why was the President
losing it
?”

Elaine bolted to cry conjecture, squinting for a half-second as she sat down, telegraphing this was bad—it was. An anemone of dark intention unfurled, prickling my numb abdomen. It was bad and it was finally,
finally
something I wielded.

The question was excitedly rephrased. “Ms. McAlister, what
exactly
did you observe about the state of the President in the minutes before he kissed you?”

“Like you said, it was the furlough. Greg was—” Disdain swept their faces. They’d managed to reconcile my fellating him, but my ease with his Christian name was palpably offensive. “The President was—”

Elaine shot up, making an excuse to extricate me. I was marched back to the break room. Elaine whipped around, holding the doorknob shut at her back. “What’ve we stepped in here, Jamie?”

“I’m just answering the question.”

“Volunteer your observations of him as a person or a President,
especially
where the two overlap, and we’ll be here for the rest of your life.”

“But that night he was—”

She halted me and then continued carefully. “They’re looking for
evidence of a sexual relationship, which you have given them.
That
is the extent of what we’ve agreed to. Don’t stray outside the lines.” There was a knock on the door and she cracked it open to my father. “Good.” He stepped inside. “Talk to her. Four more minutes of recess, less than sixty of testimony, and you can put this thing behind you.” She left us.

“This thing,” I muttered to the table, its Formica maple veneer cracked to reveal actual wood chips. I heard the rustling as Dad reached into his breast pocket. He slid a pack of gum to me as if there were a jail key inside. I waved it off. “No thanks.”

“Now I had to go to three newsstands to find the real thing, not that sugarless crap. Chew a piece of gum.”

I glanced at its school-bus-yellow wrapping, the same brand he carried when we were little. He’d chewed it ceaselessly while getting sober the first time. The second time it was spearmint Life Savers. We’d come across wispy foil strips as if our house was slowly, steadily shredding. What was getting him through now? “Greg’s terrified,” I told him.

“I’m sure.”

“I mean, that first night,
that’s
how we started. He was shaking with terror. He suffers panic attacks, severe ones.” Dad looked at me questioningly. “Even if most people say I made it up as retaliation, he still won’t be able to shake it. Republicans’ll have a field day. He’ll be second-guessed on
everything
.”

Dad nodded. But if I’d expected him to rally as he’d done countless times for his team, I got the opposite. He barely moved. “I mean, I’m not just going to take it—I’m supposed to fight.”

He fidgeted with the gum wrapper before slipping it in his pocket. “You know you have our support.” He fell back on that catchall with its conflicted undertone, as if describing other people he kind of hoped would take over.

“Thanks.” I was annoyed at myself for having expected anything different.

“Okay, then.” He nodded and turned to the door.

“That’s it?”

“Jamie,” he said tightly, his fingers on the handle. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know.” I lifted my hands. “ ‘Make the fucker sorry’?”

He looked over his shoulder at the table between us. “I’m the one who passed out and let them get the coat.”

“Dad.” I dropped my voice, aware that the coat was the least of what we were talking about. “It’s not that simple.”

“You deserved a hell of a lot stronger father than you got—is that what you’re after?” And there we were. Same as always. Dad flagellating himself, me expected to say something to exonerate him.
It’s okay. I’m okay.
But for the first time I couldn’t.

“I don’t care about what I deserved. I just want you to
be
with me without this—this
thing
sitting between us.” I knew what I had to say—what my mom somehow couldn’t and Erica didn’t in a way he could hear. “Dad, you have to get help. You have to.”

“I don’t deserve it,” he said miserably.

“So you’re just going to hate yourself.” He looked up. “Forever?” I could see the pain he was in, see his struggle to reach me through the darkness we’d coddled him in. “Ask yourself,
what
does that get us, Dad? The people who just fucking love you? What?”

He stared at me for the first time without a rejoinder.

Elaine rapped on the door. “You’re up.”

• • •

When I returned to take my place the bullet was weighing on my tongue, heavy and smooth. It was the last lap and the prosecutor’s entourage jockeyed to cement their careers, feeding him note after torn note while he relentlessly stabbed after my omissions. I was at last poised to show Greg what it felt like.

“So.” The prosecutor stared me down, brow glistening, out of yellow pages to flip. “
The reason
the President kissed you is that he was really upset about the furlough. That’s your testimony.”

My father dropped his head, closed his eyes. It was my turn to speak. To punish Greg for not being the man I deserved.

“My testimony . . .” I wanted saying it to solve—correct—
add up
to something—other than simply making me capable of being what Greg had exposed himself to be. At best, weak; at worst, cruel. I stared at my father’s bent head, his hair thinning at the crown. I’d
loved two men who mistakenly believed they didn’t deserve help, who locked themselves away when the fears became too strong. And I knew that whatever pain punched Greg so hard it knocked his breath out had to be worse than anything I could do to him then and there. “Is that I don’t believe reason was present. And that’s all I have to say.”

• • •

I remember that the juror with the vests waved goodbye as if we’d shared a harrowing plane ride. How violently Dad and I were jostled as we tried to make it down the courthouse stairs through the flashing cameras and shouting reporters, spittle flecking our faces. The possibility that we might trip and be trampled. And that for a moment, I prayed for my knees to buckle so it could happen and I wouldn’t have to face that my only window to free myself had closed.

• • •

That evening as we said goodbye in the foyer Dad confirmed he would call the sponsor Erica had hooked him up with. There was a softness in its infancy between Dad and us. But as soon as he left for the airport, the tense silence resumed. After being trapped for so many weeks by the law, Erica and I were now trapped by the paparazzi. We’d been eating, sleeping, and breathing this captivity for so long that we hadn’t the slightest idea what to do next. So Erica made sandwiches.

The silence was punctured by a knock.

“Don’t,” Erica said through a peanut-butter mouth as I got up.

“I’m only looking through the peephole.”

“Jamie,” she warned, at my heels.

I saw a young guy in an Urban Delivery T-shirt, the lobby cart behind him laden with grocery boxes. “Can I help you?” I called out.

“A friend sent me,” he said furtively. “To help you leave. I have a truck in the garage and I can sneak you out.”

I undid the lock and wedged the door open. “To where?”

“I can’t tell you any details. I’m sorry.” He looked really nervous and maybe all of seventeen. “In case we fail, this person can’t be associated with this.”

“Well,” Erica muttered. “That narrows it down to everyone.”

“Ma’am, these deliveries take about fifteen minutes and I just made one to a lady upstairs. If you want to leave, you need to get in a box now. Seriously, we need to go.”

Erica crossed her arms. “You can’t even be considering this. Nobody will know where we are. How stupid can you be?”

“Erica.” The apartment was filled with so much unresolved anguish it seemed to drip from the ceiling like stalactites. Anything had to feel better than there. “Here’s what we know. When the government comes for you they send ten men with guns—they don’t send Urban Delivery.” I let him roll the cart inside before running to my room to grab my bag. But what was there even to take? My perfectly cut suit? The makeup I wore to the witness box? I picked up my wallet and phone, tugged on my hooded sweater, and ran back. “Fuck,” Erica said when she saw that I meant it.

“How do we do this?” He lifted the top grocery-box flap to reveal that a stack of six boxes had been glued together and gutted to make the space for two people. Giving a perfunctory hug of Erica’s rigid frame, I climbed over and in with a pounding heart.

“Fuck, wait.” She ran for her bag. “I texted our attorney,” she threatened as she returned. “So if you’re thinking of killing us, don’t.” She climbed in beside me.

My knees in my chest, I stared out the dime-sized air holes cut into the cardboard. Then there was the tangy aroma of the garbage room as the cart was pulled into the service elevator and then under the blowing fans of the basement garage. We tilted up an incline and then, with a grunt, slid into a penetrating cold. “Once the truck is moving you can get out,” the kid whispered, followed by the rolling slam of the truck door enclosing us in darkness.

I listened to myself breathing, the air getting denser. The vehicle revved to life and the fluorescent bulb flickered on outside the holes. I inched open the top of our enclosure with shaking hands. We were surrounded by boxes of groceries yet to be delivered, errant salad
greens sticking to the floor. I climbed out, almost falling as the truck turned, and I sat hard on a plastic-wrapped stack of water bottles. Erica made her way to the door like a tightrope walker straining to stay steady and tried to lift it.

“It’s locked. We’re locked in!” She ballasted herself with the wall. “Can I leave this shit-mess with my heart still beating—could you maybe manage that?”

“I’m sorry! They’re trying to get us out of here.”

“They who!?”

“Maybe it’s Elaine? Did she text back?”

“Why wouldn’t she just tell us she was sending help? And out of here to
where
?
Where
do you think we’re going that this isn’t going to follow us? You fucked the President of the United States, which pretty much rules out, you know, fifty of them!”

“I asked for your help,” I leveled, gripping the bottles as the truck made another curve and picked up speed—on the highway? “Back in New York, on my birthday. I told you this was happening and you flat-out refused.”

“You know
I
have never asked
you
for anything,” she said with pent-up venom as she flailed over to the crate opposite.

“Well you could’ve! You’re my sister, for fuck’s sake!”

“As everyone now knows. Lucky fucking me.”

“Erica, why do you hate me so much?” I asked the question I’d never been brave enough to hear the answer to. “Now, I’ve given you every reason. But it’s always been like this and I just need to know: what did I do?”

“I don’t—” She went to dismiss me, and then her face went slack.