The First Affair (6 page)

On the TV overhead, Mrs. Rutland was doing jumping jacks with a group of elementary school students—throwing herself into it until she was flushed and perspiring, with seemingly no consideration to vanity, which only made her more beautiful. A boy who had lost fifty pounds on her Fit for Life program beamed, leaning against her as she put her arm around him.

My face dropped to my Tretorns as awkwardness settled over us. “I mean, not that it matters,” I said quietly as the broadcast moved on, “because this would
never
happen again in a million years, but maybe they have an arrangement?”

“You’re part of an arrangement?” she repeated.

“No, Lena, I’m not
part
of anything.”

“I always think how many wives would be surprised to find out they’re in
arrangements
.” The same sourness permeated her that did whenever she referenced her father.

“Lena, this isn’t—I’m not going to break up a—I’m not going to
marry
him. Jesus.”

“So that’s that, then?” She sought confirmation.

“Look, the planets aligned and a rock star grabbed me for five minutes in heaven—two minutes! It’s not like we’re having a thing. I couldn’t even make a thing happen if I wanted to,” I tried to reassure her, despite the fact that, in total honesty, I wanted to. “Nobody can get to that man who isn’t supposed to. I mean, unless he takes to wandering the basement or hanging in the staff ladies’ room.”

“So if he was, you’d do it again?”

I stared at her. “This is a pointless conversation.” I stood up, wishing I were wearing pants. “And I’m sure you have to go.”

Lena pulled out her driver’s license, looking down longer than necessary, and I feared my disclosure had stained something between us. “In the morning now I walk out to the kitchen and it’s my mom and I’m like, ‘You’re not my friend. Where’d my friends go?’ I’m a total bitch, but I can’t help myself, I just miss you so fucking much.”

“Me, too,” I said over the swelling in my throat, as I was gripped by What Ifs. What if I got stuck on the East Coast or, worse, back home, and couldn’t afford to visit her? What if her job took off and she got even busier, if that were possible, and made all new friends, and our lives diverged into the high-flying money manager and the barista? Was this just—it?

“
Something
will come through.” We hugged as I struggled against tears and she told me there was no one else like me.

“You, neither.” I forced myself to let her go.

Back on the metro, so palpably without her, I tried to pull myself together but couldn’t. Memories tumbled, making me alternately smile and tear up. The time Lena called a dorm meeting because someone had taken a shit in the middle of the student lounge and she grilled us like Hercule Poirot. The time she put my grandmother’s silk scarf over the lamp for hook-up ambience and burned a hole right through it. The Ferragamo one she bought me couldn’t really replace the sentimental value, but I never told her. I knew she felt awful. Then I was thinking about my grandmother and family—and suddenly I remembered Mike’s text.

Given what you know about him, it’s probably impossible for you to understand why I responded. But I can only tell you the story as it happened, and with Lena’s plane taking her farther from me by the minute, I felt a desperate need for unvarnished connection. Mike had always known what to say to calm my panic. In fact, he’d been the one to help me through my first attack. It was a summer weekend after sixth grade. The firehouse carnival. The plan had been to “run into each other” and do one ride together. Instead, Erica had shown up with a tongue pierce. More than a few beers down Dad had gone ballistic, and as soon as Mike saw the state I was in he turned in a way that encouraged me to follow. There behind the tents he squeezed my palm and told me to breathe through my nose. The colored lights were blurred by the hazy heat and the thumping house music amplified my heart. I remember that he finally started dancing goofily until I was laughing. He looked so relieved, and it was only then that I realized how much I must have scared him.

“Hey there. I just graduated, actually. Interning at the White House. Glad
to hear all is well. Take care. JM.”
Feeling the phantom flutter in my pained chest, I stared at my phone and wondered, would that be it?

“Which house is that?”
pinged right back. Followed by,
“Really proud of you, James. Not surprised at all.”

I smiled and wiped my cheeks.
“Just dropped my best friend at the airport,”
I replied.
“Lonely.”

“In a room full of people,”
he responded as the clouds shifted outside the curved glass.
“I’m lonely, too.”

I managed to leave it at that.

• • •

I was pulling my ticket out to exit the station when I discovered Rachelle’s card in my bag and sent her a text at the first glimpse of sky. She texted back,
“Drinks, pronto,”
and sent me the address of a restaurant by the water where she knew the bartender. When I arrived, an older crowd was finishing a late brunch, and I apologized for my appearance.

“Please.” She dismissed me, looping her thin arm through mine to weave me around the umbrellaed tables. Rachelle, looking like an MTV stylist had dressed her to deejay a military lunch, was wearing a khaki romper with gold buttons and matching platform espadrilles. “I’m so happy to be out of my apartment I could scream,” she said conspiratorially. “My roommate, who, like, subsists on spray margarine, is doing her calorie splurge tonight and won’t stop talking about what she’s going to order in. It’s disgusting.”

I commented that this explained her wealth of knowledge about sticky buns.

“Oh, no. Everyone knows that.” She looked genuinely concerned. “Don’t they?”

“I didn’t,” I admitted as I hopped on a bar stool.

“My first job was at Cinnabon at the Tucson mall. I smelled like cinnamon for the entire summer.” I loved how she talked, like she was gargling her words at the back of her throat. “Which is a turn-on for guys, that’s a fact. Not that I wanted to turn on a single one of my customers.” She shuddered before trotting to the other end of the bar where the waitresses were placing their orders. It felt so good to have
somewhere to be. She returned with two glasses of something orange. “Sex on the Beach. I know it’s cheesy, but I have to order that when it’s summer and I am nowhere near sex or a beach.”

“Oh God, I thought it was just me.” I sipped from the stirrer straw. “I imagined the program would be packed with cute smart guys.”

“Oh honey, Josh Lyman is a myth. I’m sure there is some cute lurking here somewhere, but it’s like a treasure hunt.” She pulled the potato chips over to us. “It’s so good to talk about something other than how many points are in pad Thai, you have no idea.”

We covered what brought us there, our impressions of it, and how not there we wanted to be. “I keep wondering if I had more than five dollars a day to spend if I’d be experiencing a whole different city,” I mused. “If I wasn’t one trip to the library away from being asked out by Artie with the candy-cane-striped walker—”

“You wouldn’t, I can tell you.” She waved her short red nails. “This August marks year five for me. Jewish is Georgetown’s idea of diversity. I cannot
believe
I haven’t gotten a job in New York yet—when I graduated I was so convinced, I actually put a deposit down on a place in Greenpoint. Everyone cool from boarding school and college is there. I see the parties on Facebook and the nights out and I’m still going to the same lame bars—only I’m not, because I have no one to go with—it’s like I totally got left behind. I thought I’d meet people at work, but they’re old and they suck.”

“Yeah, your boss is—”

“The love child of Kim Jong Il and Leona Helmsley. He’s imperious and condescending and there’s just no winning with him. And political PR is just lame.” She finished her drink. “I wanted to be in entertainment. I grew up near Canyon Ranch. All those celebrities coming and going, the private planes, the limos with the tinted windows.”

“It sounds glamorous.”

She snorted. “It was glamorous-adjacent.”

We shared our first impressions of each other. “You seemed very, um . . .”

“Un-D.C.?” she offered hopefully.

I put my finger to my nose.

“Lucy, that’s the nicest thing you could say to me. Okay, so what’s with that Brooke girl? We hate her. And we need another round. Don’t move.”

A bomb couldn’t have moved me. After the discomfort that had tinged my weekend, it was delicious to be seen with fresh eyes. When she returned, Rachelle told me with great intensity, “Rachensity” as I would come to call it, about her soul mate in the form of Matt McGeehan. “Matt was a year ahead of me at the school my parents shipped me off to so they could finish their lovely divorce without worrying about accidentally decapitating me with a flying plate or something. He was just—
it
. He was in
Godspell
—I think he had, like, one line, but he opened his mouth and I was just done for.” The planets had shifted because he’d recently friended Rachelle and they’d begun a flirtation. “And . . . he’s moving to New York. It’s going to happen, right?”

I wanted nothing more than for that to be true for her. “Emphatically
yes
.”

Her hands crossed over her chest before clenching mine. “You’ll totally find a job, too. No doubt. Just take it on like a rattlesnake on fire.”

• • •

The next morning I emerged from Gail’s apartment with my eye sockets aching from the night’s snake-on-fire LinkedIn/Monster/craigslist binge. In the light of day, nude modeling probably didn’t require a pros-and-cons spreadsheet.

Margaret had left a Post-it on my desk,
“See me,”
and I immediately freaked, running through all the tasks I’d been assigned the previous week. I had quadruple-checked the hotel reservations, emailed the confirmation numbers, gotten kosher meals arranged for the
Hasidic Times
reporters—

“So, Jamie . . .” Margaret looked up from behind her buried desk.

“Yes!”

She nodded as if trying to remember what I was doing there. At least my offense or oversight wasn’t blinding. “Yes,” she repeated, lifting a finger in the air to detain me while she jogged her memory.
“For you.” She swiped a laminated ID from her stack of folders. “To ferry communications. Requested by the Oval Office.”

I looked down at the words “Full Access” and heard my pulse swoosh in my ears.
Why, how?!

She repositioned her mouse. “Okay?” she asked the screen.

“Yes.”

“Oh, Jamie,” she said sharply.

I turned back in the doorway, a cold heat breaking—did she know? “Yes?”

“We may have a position opening up and I wanted to gauge your interest in staying on after.”

“A paying position?” I asked stupidly, dumbfounded.

“Until the revolution.”

“Um, yes. Of course. Yes!”

“Great.” She returned to her email. “We’ll talk more. I have this fire to put out.”

Back at my desk, the plastic card clutched between my sweating hands, I felt like an invisible chorus was hitting its high note. A job. An actual
job
. Okay, not in urban development, and not in L.A., with Lena. But still, a
job
. And in a year—or maybe two—I could be positioned to really move to L.A. properly. Get a used car and a mattress filled with more than air. I had to get it, I
had
to.

I stared at the pass—he’d requested this? He’d requested
me
? The sparkler ignited—the heat of his grip, his fingers spreading across my back—
waitwaitWAIT
. I was misreading it. I had to be. An intern in each department must be given a pass to make deliveries. This was totally standard and I was getting all worked up over—

“What. Is. That?” Brooke looked down with crossed arms.

“It’s a—”

“I know what it is. Why do you have it?” She snatched it.

“What does she have?” Todd bounded over with an exuberance not usually seen in anyone past puberty. “We get all-access? Hey, John?” Todd leaned over John’s computer. “Sorry, man. But we get all-access now?”

John thought for a moment as we all waited breathlessly. “Grab me a Coke, Todd.” Dismissing him, he pulled two dollars from his wallet.

Brooke slung the pass back to me. “This is fucking bullshit,” she muttered. Ignoring her sucked-in cheeks, I looked toward Margaret’s office, expecting her to emerge momentarily with an errand.

Nothing.

I went to the ladies’ room and gave my armpits a splash-down with paper towels and industrial pink hand soap. I chewed gum, pushing it over every tooth. I looked around the tiled room as if there might be a round brush and hairspray hiding somewhere.

For the rest of the day I whipped my head up every time Margaret came out, the other interns whipping theirs to me in turn. I typed things, scheduled things, emailed things. At eight o’clock, I raced home. I waxed things, bleached things, polished things. I tried on every combination of everything I’d brought to D.C. My finger hung suspended over a billion dollars in lingerie charges. I managed not to succumb, if only because it would cost another billion dollars in shipping. I woke up an hour early to blow out my hair.

And then I waited. For three straight days, I was Saturday-night-ready for twelve hours at a stretch.

And here’s what I learned about a suit that Fits You Perfectly: what at first zip feels like a reassuring sense of having your curves hugged morphs, on day four, into the suffocating feeling that you’re rolling in on yourself. I was no longer marveling at how this skirt showed my thighs so much as staving off grabbing a plastic knife from the kitchenette and hacking at the center seam until I popped open like a pack of Pillsbury crescent rolls.

And I was hungry—from being too nervous waiting for the pending nothing to eat. And tired—from levitating over my mattress waiting for the pending nothing to sleep. And then Margaret sent me on a delivery!!! “To the WHC office to get an approval form stamped.” (Opposite of exclamation marks.)