The First Affair (3 page)

“I just think you should . . .” She turned her wrist, her thin Cartier bracelets staggered on her arm hairs. “Be beige.”

“Beige.”

She nodded as though she’d cleared her conscience and continued across the street. I took a long drag of my straw.
What?
“Sorry, just to clarify.”

“Yes?”

“Beige is . . . ?”

She let out a how-do-we-solve-a-problem-like-Maria sigh as we arrived back at security. She unrolled her sleeves and closed her ninety-dollar button. “Being
charming
,” she said the word derisively, “doesn’t inspire confidence. We just thought you should know, okay?” She gave me a flat smile and went through the screener.
We?
I stood there with my face beating. I did not get that place. At all. I tugged out my phone as she walked off, willing it to beam me out of there—I
just
needed that job to come through.

• • •

For the remainder of that afternoon I still didn’t get any word, but I did manage to book multiple hotel-room blocks, schedule a magnitude of press-corps bus charters, and locate the largest dining room in
Skokie that had a “homey feel” while seating nine hundred some-odd people. And furtively search everything about the adorable Josh Wright all the way back to his fourth-grade intramural soccer photo. Here’s what I knew: (A) always adorable, (B) possessed over a thousand Facebook friends, including the handful we had in common, and (C) was from—wait for it—
Los Angeles.

• • •

Finally I was there, having the kind of night I thought life after college was going to be full of. I was a girl working for free right in the heart of it all, reclining on the grass as the waning sun streaked the sky orange. “If the intern program needed a brochure, the cover should be a picture of us here, now,” I said to Josh as I took another sip of wine he had the class to bring to the concert with two plastic cups.

“I don’t think they’re pitching a lifestyle.” He smiled and leaned back on his elbows.

“Come on, hovering-with-the-hope-of-getting-chosen is totally a lifestyle.”

“In L.A., too,” he said. “My dad once got handed a head shot while having his teeth cleaned.”

“Sorry, I meant to say homely hovering.”

“We have homely. Despite the mayor’s best efforts, we even have old people and the disabled.” He tipped his head to my shoulder. “So I’m sure I can find some homely for you when you come out.” I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t checked my email since I ran out to meet him. I sat forward to root in my bag and realized I’d left my phone in my desk.

He slid his from his pocket. “It’s a little after nine.”

“When’s end of business out there?”

“Now-ish. This doesn’t have to end. Come on.” He grinned. “I’ll walk you back.”

We strolled beneath the magnolias as he told me about Wesleyan. We compared if-I-don’t-get-off-campus-I’ll-shoot-someone trips into the city. We laughed about his roommate’s obese pet rabbit who hated him and waited every night for him to get into bed before leaping onto his head. We lamented over job searches—his
just passing the one-year mark. “Well,” I said, slowing as we approached the guard booth. “You can wait here—I’ll text you if I get stuck—”

“I’ll come in with you.”

“Yeah, right.” I grinned.

“But you work there.”

“Not really. I mean, I definitely don’t have clearance to bring anyone in—I could meet you at a bar. Or if anyone needs me to do anything and it takes me more than twenty minutes, we could meet up near your hotel?”

He tipped back on his heels. “Okay. I was kinda thinking . . . I don’t really have a hotel, actually, not in the budget—Dad’s getting a little uptight with the bankrolling at this point. My flight’s first thing. I was just gonna wander, but, wow, it’s so humid—and the mosquitoes. How about I wait at your place?” He leaned in to kiss me.

I stepped back. “Um . . .”

“Come on, Jamie.”

“I’m staying at a friend’s mom’s place, so I can’t—”

“Oh. I get it. Well, maybe we can meet up later,” he said, looking up and down the block, so abruptly over me. “Which way is the Metro?”

I pointed, suddenly not feeling like an object of desire so much as an easy mark. Like Homeaway.com crossed with Nerve.

He didn’t even wave as he walked away.

Inside, the vapors of wine turning rancid in my mouth, I strode quickly to my desk, where my phone was vibrating in the drawer.

“Mom?” I answered, voice loud in the near-empty office.

“Hey, you have to resend me that email about visiting you for the Fourth.” She sounded distracted. I pictured her at the old computer in the living room, the phone clamped to her shoulder as she slit the day’s mail from its envelopes, heels slipped off and knee-highs soon to follow.

“Okay.” I put in my headphones so I could check for the job offer while talking.
Please let this day be erased by this email
, I thought.
Save me, save me, save me . . .

“The thing is, we weren’t sure how Erica was going to get to you from the airport.”

“She can take the Metro, it’s super easy. Or there’re buses. And there’s always a cab.” Gmail downloaded.

“It might not be a good weekend for her to get away, with her work.”

“You two could always come without her.” I knew the answer to that one.

“We’d like to see her, too,” she reminded me.

“Of course, great.” And there it was. From the City of Los Angeles, as if the whole population had weighed in on me. I clicked it open, my eyes darting to read that they were reluctant to inform me . . . at this time . . . they would keep my application on file . . . if.

If.

“Everything good with you, bug?”

“Yes, great. You guys okay?”

“Yup, all good,” she said, and then I heard the soundtrack of whatever my dad was watching recede. “So get this,” she continued in a hushed voice, and I knew she’d stepped onto the top of the basement stairs. “Baker announced he’s retiring this fall.”

“So that’s good, right?”

“Good?” Her voice rose, and I could see her dropping her head against the phone the way she does when she’s reached the day’s end.

“Because he’ll finally be gone,” I reasoned. Ten years ago Chip Baker, coach of Chicago U’s football team, fired Dad when he tumbled off the wagon in the preseason.

“Well, sure. But first he’ll be everywhere. You know how this town feels about him. Your father hurled the remote at the screen. Oh, there’s Erica calling me back. So, if she’s a go we’ll see you on the third?”

“Can’t wait. And let me know if there’s anything special you guys want to do while you’re—”

“Great. Love you.” She hung up. I sat at my desk, now hoping I would be spotted and pulled in to do something—urgently—that I could accomplish—brilliantly—and reclaim this incredibly crappy day.

I was brought back by a text from Erica responding to my shirt question, hours later.
“No.”

An empty apartment waited. The anesthetizing whir of its appliances. Too many more days with Brooke and her “people.” Followed by Chili’s. And my parents.

A headache from the cheap wine building, I tugged my ponytail out of its elastic band and walked quickly down the empty carpeted hall, shaking out my hair. I dropped my head back, letting out a breath to the dentil molding high above.
Fuck. Fuck!
This was so not how this was supposed to go. I should have applied to more places, sucked it up and moved home, saved the money that could have put me closer to escape than defeat, been more beige. Suddenly two Secret Service men emerged from the opposite office, passing swiftly. And then, just like that, there was the President, so much taller than me, the solid warmth of a muscular arm grazing me as he strode past in a white dress shirt. His sandy-blond hair glinting in the lamplight, a hint of spiced deodorant in his wake. The magnitude of it spun me around.

Between two ficus trees potted in Ming bowls, twisting to gaze over his shoulder, this happened and I know it with absolute certainty. At that jet lag of an age, in that drought of a time, on a day when being called inconsequential would have been a promotion, the most powerful man in the world gave me The Look.

And I was the only one who saw it.

Chapter Two

June 14

You often hear newly engaged people say with a bemused, grateful look on their faces: if I hadn’t missed my usual bus, if I hadn’t gotten the address of the bar wrong, if I hadn’t gone to that party I
really
didn’t want to go to, then I never would have . . . But for that second encounter to occur, the universe didn’t just manifest a measly spilled drink or stalled subway.

Sometime after midnight, a text came in from Margaret confirming what CNN was already saying. No last-minute budget compromise had been arrived at. The U.S. government was shut down. I clicked around the channels, seeing the same banner passing beneath every sitcom rerun:
All non-essential federal employees are required to stay home
. Meaning all
non
-employees would be essential.

The next morning, I stepped out into a rushless rush hour. In the schoolyards, parents dressed in sweats were milling instead of dashing off. There was no line at Starbucks. But the drugstore was already completely out of laundry detergent, which tells you all you need to know. Washington standard is to work seven days a week until you have an embolism, but for once the salons were going to be packed. And the vets. And the mechanics. Long-overdue thank-you notes would be written
and
mailed.

I rounded the corner to Pennsylvania and, even with a few blocks to go, could already see the news vans. The correspondents were trying to summarize the situation for the treadmill crowd: the President wasn’t backing down and the Senate Majority Leader was being a dick, more focused on breeding miniature Pomeranians—his honest-
to-God hobby—than on bipartisan resolution. He had a tiny one the size of a furry clementine, named Ronald, that he carried to work with him, like Elle Woods. While voting aggressively against gay marriage. So there was that.

The interns filed inside the eerily empty building, half buzzing with conjecture about what might happen to or for us, the other half struck apprehensively silent as if this had all been an elaborate plot to harvest our organs for aging congressmen.

Brooke, nostrils flared, strode in with what I’d call a Jonestown level of purpose. Headband unprecedentedly left home, she was letting the river run.

“Okay, guys.” Margaret emerged from her office, clapping. Everyone was instantly rapt. “Triage time. For the duration of the furlough, all interns are going to be moved . . .” She paused, and we all visibly leaned in. “Upstairs.” She dropped the last word like the Christmas stocking full of bearer bonds she knew it was.

We had been given a hasty tour through the executive offices the first day, mostly, it seemed, so we’d know the fire exits. A hand had been tossed in the direction of the Oval Office. But now we were going
upstairs
.

Brooke turned to me as we all scrambled to grab our possessions. “I am going to kill this.”

I believed her.

• • •

The interns were pooled into one very determined, inappropriately euphoric, workforce of people who wanted to kill it. But what became quickly apparent is that few had the clerical skills to do so. While they could prepare an opinion for a senator or make Graydon Carter a dinner reservation, they were lost when it came to anything that could be farmed out to a highly trained hamster. And I was suddenly grateful for every vacation I ended up monotonously filing by my mother’s side at her insurance firm while my friends were candle dipping. And these guys were learning semaphore.

We were set up in the pen down the long corridor from the Oval Office, where the President was on the phone trying to use back
channels to get the Senate Majority Leader and his little dog to return to budget negotiations. It wasn’t going well. We knew this because every time the door opened we could hear distinct—and gratifying—swearing. If you’ve ever sat around calling your elected representatives fucking assholes, imagine hearing the President do it.

At noon a few of the interns were dispatched to get subs, then at seven they ran out again for pizzas. We took turns keeping the coffee fresh and the water cooler full. By eleven, Margaret said anyone who wanted to leave, could. No one did.

Around midnight I hung up with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who had given me twenty-step instructions to a two-step task he obviously would have preferred just doing himself. It was like explaining putting on pants to an alien. I scrolled through the late-edition headlines, trying to get some sense of where this was going and paused on a small article, a human-interest link from the
Chicago Tribune.
A patron had commissioned a bronze statue of Baker that would be placed in Lincoln Park on my dad’s jogging route. I reached for my phone.

“Good morning,” he greeted me brightly, as he always did when I called home after midnight. I love his voice, the hint of an Irish accent from his childhood before his family moved to the South Side. I had always liked talking to him when Mom and Erica were in bed because he seemed to appreciate the company. The only time he slept well, Mom says, was when he drank. “What are you doing?”

“Still at work,” I answered quietly.

“Ma says they called you guys in.”

“Yep. I’m down the hall from the Oval Office. Not too shabby.” I tilted my head down as Todd glanced over, his nostrils dancing disdainfully.

“Eh, Rutland picks and flicks like the rest of us.”

“You don’t know that,” I said, smiling. “Bluebirds might bring him a silk handkerchief, or North Korean children—we don’t know what secrets this guy keeps.”

Dad laughed.

“I just saw about the statue,” I said.

He paused for a second, probably taking a swig from his O’Doul’s.
“You know, Jamie, it may just be my age, enlarged prostate or whatnot, but I can’t get through my run anymore without needing to take a big piss. I’d not been sure where to go—the men’s rooms are a little sketchy at that hour and the woods can be buggy. So they’ve just done me a favor.”