The First Affair (30 page)

Mud caked into my treads, making my feet feel weighted. Arriving at the tree line, I tried to kick the mud off on a fallen elm before stepping into the leaves. The trees were slippery and dark around me. I could see my breath in silvery puffs. As I climbed over rocks and pushed back extending branches, I began to panic. It had been decades; what if this didn’t work? What would it leave me to do? Sink into this mud and atrophy here? If this worked, what was I even planning to say?

That I had loved him. It may have come from some senseless place, but I had loved him. And that was real and mine and nothing could take that from me, not even the revelation of who he really was.

And that I hated him. It burned me from sleep and paralyzed my lungs, and I was so scared I would never be able to let it go.

Then I saw it—flat architectural planes among all that organic decay. I hurried over to the crude wood steps at the base of the tree. A few feet up there was a makeshift platform, overly nailed with rusting heads. And farther up, stretching out from the bare branches, a thick wire. I imagined him there, happy. Flying over the ground in summers that must have surrounded that white house with golden light and cicadas and whispering clouds.

I dropped to my knees, the dampness sinking through my jeans. I bent to reach under the steps, pulling out a clog of wet leaves to feel around in the freezing mud before my hand landed on a tin. I tugged it out and pried off the top. Most of its contents had been eroded by time; musty tear-outs from a
Playboy
, what remained of a crumbling pack of Marlboro Reds. But the small Coke bottle with its cut-down cork was intact. I carefully tapped out the rolled yellowed paper, tugging my pen from my pocket.

Greggy,

I’ll be on the bus when you find this. I put a lock on your door, so use it. Keep getting her to church, it seems to help. One way or another I can’t ever come back here. I wouldn’t do this to you if I didn’t
think you could handle it. I know you can. Be good. Get out however you can.

Love,

Sam.

I know you can handle it.

I imagined a boy’s hands clutching this note, the child left questioning if he could survive, the doubt itself shaming him—a paradox capable of strangling his windpipe to that day.

I stared over the brown earth as the legend of the doting mother who raised him all on her own mummified and blew away. Now I knew what had happened after Sam left. Greg was not her answer; he was her disappointment. So he was driven, as grandly and historically as he had worked in the opposite direction, to be all of ours. I finally knew his secret, too. And, thinking of his last words to me, there was only one thing to say.

“Goodbye.” I wrote it on a sheet of notepaper and then I signed my name, as I had done on my application, and his Christmas card, and my affidavit. I rolled it back into the bottle with his brother’s note. And I sat on that sloping child’s step, once the only means to flight, until I knew that a new day had begun.

Epilogue

I wasn’t the first young woman to have an affair with a President. And in the context of the scandals that have broken since—Strauss-Kahn, Berlusconi, Kennedy, Spitzer, Weiner, that senator who was soliciting gay sex in airport bathrooms, the congressional leader who was pressing his male pages for a grope—it all makes my story almost quaint. I know that.

And as sure as each election brings fresh opportunities for these media cycles, the talking heads will toss out my name as a shorthand, a universal stand-in for orally servicing a man in power. She gave him a McAlister. And now more frequently—he gave him a McAlister. More often than not, the picture of Greg hugging me on the rope line that stultifying July Fourth will flash on the screen, my lip gloss and haircut now almost back in style. The same photo always serves as filler in the tabloids when they have no images of the latest story to run. The same question is then always raised—where did I end up, anyway?

I apologize that in this whole long tale, my location is the one thing I’m going to withhold. Suffice it to say I found a nice community far enough off the beaten path that it would be a waste of a paparazzo’s day to come all this way just to shoot me running errands.

People in town were, of course, stunned to find me in their midst. But I was determined. I just kept going to the store, dropping off my dry cleaning, volunteering to help plant bulbs in the little meridian over on Main until people had, if not accepted, then gotten used to me.

The advantage of the virtual age is that I run my web design business
online from home. My clients have only ever heard my voice on the phone—the last name doesn’t ring any bells.

Before we go any further, I need to address this absurd idea that I cashed in when I collaborated with that biographer. Yes, I’m talking to you, Ann Coulter. I sit here at my West Elm desk and laugh that you could posit this all was an elaborate get-rich-quick scheme. I was confronted, at twenty-two, with a
seven-figure
debt and
I
was the only collateral. Rehash some already well-known facts or pose for
Playboy
—those were my choices. From Lena to Ashley to Brooke,
anyone
who was subpoenaed or deposed because of their relationship with me—I’ve repaid their legal fees. Every dime.

Of course that could never come close to wiping out the balance of what I owe my parents. Even if I could have bought their house back, they still would have left Naperville. My mom’s boss was kind and managed a transfer to Omaha. It’s cold and flat, and the locals are at a complete loss as to what to make of Dad’s Irish humor. But at least kids don’t spray “slut” across their front door.

They know Erica and I are ready to get them down to Florida when they say the word, but each time Mom reads about the Burmese python epidemic they put it off another year. “Nine hundred eggs
at a time
,” she shudders at us over Skype. “We know, Mom, we know.” It’s nice that Erica and I can laugh at Mom together now—at both of them—the things that once grated us shrunken to quirks, mostly endearing.

Peter covered Erica’s legal expenses, which she characterized—accurately, it sounded—as paying her to go away. It was amazing to hear about her transformation in those first few months: she moved to San Francisco and got certified to teach yoga while she figured out her next move. Then, in a you-can’t-outrun-your-fate kind of way, she met a ridiculously successful financier in AA. Now she lives in South America and has thrown herself into being the perfect expat wife and mother in a community just complicated enough for her to stay excited. She frequently says running carpool on the Upper East Side would have bored her back to drinking—but shuttling her kids to school in an
armored car
is an adventure. I never thought I’d see her with laugh lines. Or splattered in freckles. Or happy.

From what I’ve pieced together, Paul Hoff left Washington long ago, another expat. Apparently one of the journalists fruitlessly in pursuit of his story ended up taking him to a coffee that became a marriage, according to the
New York Times
Vows article. They had a ceremony at an inn in Vermont, and Paul looked so much brighter that at first I didn’t recognize him.

I thought about Paul a lot when I passed the age he was when this all went down. It’s getting harder to gauge what twenty-one-year-olds look like, to pick them out at the mall. I see girls I think are in grade school and it turns out they’re high schoolers. I can’t imagine how alone Paul must have felt, already heartbroken, trying to ballast against the sideswipe of Brianne compounded by my graceless entrance. I send him a Christmas card via his husband’s address at the London
Times
every year. “I’m sorry,” I write. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I don’t know if he gets them.

So it was Rachelle. Entirely Rachelle. Driven, I’ve come to see, by the same desperate fear that led me to follow Greg into that darkened warren in the first place. Fear fueled by the recent memory of imperfect childhoods, compounded by the dawning reality of having to navigate our lives in a world of people busy navigating their own. Would we ever get it right, be seen, be loved? It made us clumsy and desperate. Both of us. We thought life only gives you one “it.” So I went to a married man and she went to the OIC. I still don’t know the exact date, but it was shortly after election night. I’ve learned they coached her on how to encourage me to take steps that would escalate my situation from the immoral to the illegal.

Her book came and went. I never read it. But she got that reality show off it, or really the media around it. Remember? It was the one where she made over college seniors. I watched it once. She was certainly a girl you wanted to hang out with; that never changed.

Now you know her for her preternatural tan and ability to occasionally hold her own as Ryan Seacrest’s sidekick. She’s interchangeable with the other smiles hosting red-carpet shows and entertainment extras. Her boobs are no longer hers, but for the most part the rest is. I’d like to be able to say it doesn’t, but it hurts to come across her on TV, just for a second. Then I find myself staring at her bleached teeth
telling quick jokes, wondering if she outran the fear, if it was worth it, if she’s loved.

Disgusted by both parties, Gail left political fundraising after the whole ordeal and now she’s helping UCLA Medical Center expand its oncology department. She sold her apartment at three times what she paid for it and lives in L.A. full time so she can be on call for her grandkids. Their mother, now running her own boutique firm, will tell you with a smile that she knows every fucking thing there is to know about me and would love to forget half of it.

I have just hung up with her now, in fact. Lena, in the back of a town car inching through city traffic; me, standing at my kitchen counter. And yet she’s still my girl. It’s so silly, the things you think will matter at twenty-two. And so earth-shattering, the things you think won’t.

Which brings me to Greg. I read about him all the time, of course; I’d be lying to say otherwise. His hair never really did go gray, but retains a Robert Redford–like fullness and luster that has everyone convinced there’s a portrait in a closet somewhere of a bald, wizened ex-President. There he is at Davos. There he is addressing the DNC. On the board of this. Consulting that. He gets two hundred thousand dollars to speak for forty-five minutes. His thousand-page book, in which I warranted only a small paragraph that included the word “unfortunate” twice, brought him an eight-million-dollar advance and stayed at number one for weeks.

Susan is remarried to a retired obstetrician she and Greg went to college with. Her path not chosen. Adam is still working in a lab—which I always think is such a windowless existence for such a sunny person. Maybe he’s looking for the cure to something. Alison’s lesbian phase at college was cynically seen as a political move, but I imagine that would have been a welcome change from boys whose words seemed as fabricated as her father’s.

He never remarried.

I have had a lot of time to pore back over our every encounter, although the time between those intruding memories stretches for greater and greater lengths. And I have wondered—why me? Why was I worth risking so much for? I look at the old pictures and see
that while I was objectively nowhere near as lovely as Susan, I had a freshness. A naiveté. But I don’t think now that he wanted to be with me, ultimately, as much as he wanted to be twenty-one again himself. The pressure of his responsibilities and his crippling self-doubt made him want to create a space to hide—a zip line in the woods, a place to stash a letter in a soda bottle. I was a secret
and
a haven. His brother abandoned him to handle something he could never handle. In a way, he did the same to me.

I stare out the window at the dusting of snow on the backyard. It’s not that it’s unseasonal, just unusual for this region. Elsewhere, February means down coats. You will probably be surprised to know that those same back channels that tracked me down at Gail’s have served Greg faithfully. The first time he found me, the phone ringing out of the ether, I went numb.

The caller ID is always blocked. He says my name and then we both wait for the next word, but it doesn’t come. He breathes, waiting for me to speak. I’m always the first to hang up.

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Of Sam’s death, or his hearing of it. The phone has not rung, as it sometimes does on this date. But I knew it wouldn’t after the itinerary arrived in my mail a few weeks ago. There, mixed in with some bills and a Pottery Barn catalog, was a thick envelope from an elite travel agency in Manhattan. Inside, written in black and white, was his name beside mine, for the first time in nearly twenty years, in service of us alone.

A trip to Venice.

I don’t know if he just isn’t aware of anything about my life since, or if he’s willfully ignoring what and whom I’d have to juggle or hurt to join him. Or perhaps he doesn’t care. Avoiding collateral damage was never his priority. He assumes, hopes. Determined to have been right that last time we were together. Like his calls, the gesture was to speak for itself. I sense it is his final attempt.

As I stand here, hands on the counter, he sits in a first-class seat in an airport I would have made a connecting flight to by now. He stares at the open bulkhead door and anticipates.

The minutes pass on the oven clock behind me. I watch the flakes drift, cling to the grass. He wills my arrival, imagines my fingers entwined
in his when the plane lowers over the water, my wonder as we touch down on land where there shouldn’t, organically, be any. How he’ll burst with pride that he’s about to make good.

He is finally taking me, he thinks. That little place behind the Guggenheim.

In a few seconds the flight bridge will pull away.

He doesn’t know—will never know—that I’ve already been.