The First Affair (7 page)

I took the folder, reminding myself not to hang my head. I felt like an asshole. An asshole whose cheap, scratchy lace underwear had just chafed its way into a thorn crown of humiliation. I went upstairs to the appointed destination, two long hallways from the President, each urn and guard and grown-up I passed underscoring my naiveté. As soon as I made the delivery I went to the nearest ladies’ room, tugged
off the assaulting thong, and shoved it deep into the garbage. I was done.

“Jamie.” Gerry pointed me to Margaret’s door as soon as I returned to my desk. I looked at him questioningly, but he was back to his phone call.

“Oval Office.” She handed another file off. I stood there dumbly. “Jamie?”

“Yes, sorry. Yes.” I took it and turned back to the stairs, one heel in front of the other, my mind blasted quiet. I arrived at his secretary’s desk, the imposing everything around us making me feel like I had imagined that he had kissed me when I was just two rooms away. Had I? I mutely lifted the file to her.

She smiled over her bifocals. “You can go ahead in, dear.”

I managed a nod and walked past her to the open mahogany door. The midday sun was streaming through the windows. His desk chair was empty. “Ah, Margaret sent you.” I turned to see him coming from his washroom, his white sleeves rolled, the light catching the blond hairs on his forearms.

“Yes, I . . .” I raised the folder in front of my chest.

“Why don’t you have a seat? Save you a round trip.” He took it from me—inches away—and then leaned back against the edge of his desk, sliding on his glasses. It was impossible to reconcile that this man, at utter elegant ease here, had been hunched over and shaking. I perched on one of the two blue silk settees that faced each other. I was maybe five feet from him. He gazed at the documents. I crossed my legs, quickly wiped my palms on my skirt, and then clasped my hands.

I remember thinking that I should say something, but the First Dog spoke instead, growling to himself as he rolled over in his executive dog bed. “My cousin had a Portuguese water dog when we were kids.” My voice was too loud.

“Oh?”

“They have insane energy.”

“Yes.” He took off his glasses.

“Did you know—I’m sure you know, but trainers recommend they wear these weighted jackets and carry bricks or bags of flour when they go for walks in order to tire them out.” Maybe, given the
panic attack, he had blacked out the entire encounter. “I guess they’re bred to be seriously hardworking.” Maybe he didn’t even remember it. Maybe ferrying this folder was just a general request that happened to fall to me.

“Sadly, no fish to herd into nets here.”

“Isn’t that crazy? Herding fish into nets. How would that work, really? Do they bark at the water? It sounds like a synonym for a Sisyphean task.”
Why am I talking about this?

“I wanted to pass healthcare reform, but that would be like herding fish into nets!” he said gamely.

“See?”

He smiled. It was a specific, rope-line smile. I crossed my legs tighter.

“I’m going to be a few minutes.” He glanced at the open door to his secretary’s office.

“No problem—I mean, of course.”

“Do you want something while you wait?” His eyes held mine. My mouth went dry. He cleared his throat, laying the file on his desk. “Water, or a soda?”

“Yes, a Coke,” I managed. “Please.”

He walked behind my couch through the doorway to the room where we had kissed and I tightened one palm on the other as the grandfather clock ticked. The dog snored. It was taking a while, longer than it would take to go to a refrigerator and pull out a can. I turned and was totally unprepared to see him standing in the door frame, his expression serious, set on me. He took a beckoning step back, his fingers at his sides, twitching as if he wore a holstered gun.

I could see his secretary at her desk, but he remained intent, so I crossed the carpet. He stepped against the wall, indicating I should pass, and I realized what we had been in the last time was actually a short hallway with four doors—one to the Oval Office, one to the dining room, one to his study, and the last one, toward which he was directing me, to a dim, windowless powder room. Within a breath he was behind me. I could feel him standing there, his frame creating a shadow from the hall light. I started to turn but he said, “Please,” so simply that I froze. We stood like that for a few seconds, maybe longer.

“Are you okay?” I asked, not daring to move my head. “How have you been?”

“No.” His voice was low. He stepped closer. Right behind me, touching. And again, I felt surprised by the firmness of his frame, the flesh-and-bloodness of him. I didn’t lean back, didn’t move, didn’t know the extent of what his “please” was requesting. I thought I could feel his heart through my back—could feel him bend to my hair and the warmth of his breath as he inhaled me.

“I want you,” I heard myself tell both of us the truth, “I do.”

His forearm circled my waist and his mouth was on my neck as I felt myself tilted forward against the marble vanity. My palms braced on the cold stone as he pressed himself against the back of my legs, his hands roving down to the hem of my skirt, tugging it up. I tilted my head back, twisting to find his lips as he made contact with where I’d been waiting for days. At the discovery that there was no fabric to delay him he moaned into my mouth, slumping forward. I reached down to caress him through his trousers and he gripped my hair, a second from coming, I knew—but he pulled my hand away. Our eyes caught in the mirror as he slid one hand into my bra, the other inside me until I couldn’t not—not—his palm flew over my mouth as I shuddered. I dropped to my forearms from the relief.

I turned around to finish reciprocating, but he stopped my hand and shook his head, both of us panting, our foreheads dropping together as he gathered my face into the deepest kiss.

The bathroom door was still open beside us. Trembling, he tugged down my skirt and nodded me out. I stood in the shadows of the silent hall, my breath returning. I didn’t know where I was supposed to wait or for how long. There were pictures along the wall in gilded frames and I forced my dilated pupils to zero in on one. He was in shorts and a Nantucket T-shirt, sitting on a porch. And he was laughing. Really laughing. Susan, her tan dark against a pale yellow bathing suit, lay with her feet in his lap and he was tickling her, the space between them soft and familiar, not hard and panting. There was nothing about that captured moment—which, judging from Susan’s haircut, was not long ago—that I could convince myself looked remotely arranged. It looked real, like love.

Which meant this was . . . what?

The toilet flushed and he emerged, wiping his bangs back. He looked at me as if he knew me and pulled me into a tight hug, but my eyes were locked on the picture, trying to analyze which of these two embraces was real. He brushed the hair off my face before going to the small bar in his private study to get me a Coke. Weaving his fingers through mine, the feeling of his wedding band intruding between my knuckles, he led me out of the shadows and then released my hand as we stepped into the sun.

“Great, thanks for waiting.” He circled his desk for the manila folder, extending it for me to come and take.

“Okay, thank you.” I turned away with it; the dog stirred.

“Jamie.”

I pivoted.

“You can take your soda.” He motioned for me to flip the tab.

• • •

That night, Lena’s IMs pinged with the speed of Morse code as I pushed my toes against the sharp sisal rug, where I’d slid to charge my laptop in the nearby outlet.
“It’s bad, right?”
I typed, my hair almost dry from the shower I’d sat in trying to make sense of the afternoon.
“He’s really married.”

“And you don’t want to be the porn he can’t risk downloading,”
she typed back.

I dismissed it as a mischaracterization based on what I had shared, or rather not shared, about our first kiss. But if I was honest with myself about it, we hadn’t held each other or even really talked. This was undeniably—
“He’s really married.”
I gripped my forehead.

A moment later she responded.
“I’m choosing to take comfort in that, you know, as a citizen.”

“I just wish it had been bad. Or awkward. Or a letdown. It was so—there’s some connection here that is just, well, as you have identified, base. Which is why I will heretofore deliver papers in not just panties, but a snowsuit. Hemmed in razor wire.”

“So back up—they might offer you a job? Will you take it? I’m not saying pleasenopleasenopleaseno. Except that I am.”

“There’s no way it’s going to happen. The competition is beyond fierce. I mean even if it does—and it’s such a long shot—I don’t think I should stay here, do you?”

“Agreed. I think nude modeling might be the healthier choice.”

“Thanks, Mom.”
I hit Send and was startled by the sound of the landline in Gail’s room. My parents were the only ones I’d given the number to. I jogged down the hall.

“Jamie?” The voice hit me like cardiac paddles.

“Yes?”

“It’s Greg. Rutland,” he added his last name to clarify.

“Hi.” I glanced at the digital clock. Two fifteen in the morning. Was this a booty call? Did I care?

“Am I—I didn’t wake you?” he asked.

“No, no, I was just, um, chatting with a friend. How did you find this—”

“Getting your file took a level of strategizing that put my efforts in the Middle East to shame.”

“I don’t know how I should feel about that.”

“I was gunning for flattered.”

“Accomplished.” Smiling, I sunk down onto the crisp duvet, so far beyond flattered. Wooed. To put this in context: at Vassar, if a guy held the cafeteria door for you, he’d consider himself Lord Byron.

“I didn’t know if you’d answer, or this Gail—”

“No, she’s—I’m just using her apartment for the internship. I’m alone.”

“It isn’t Gail Robinson, the RNC fundraiser?”

I cringed. “She’s really a nice person.”

“She’s brilliant,” he conceded. “Partridge’s best asset.”

“Well, I kind of saved her daughter’s life, so she’s overlooking my politics,” I said quickly, trying to tacitly communicate that the thing we were tacitly not acknowledging was explicitly safe with me. “I mean, she’s never here. And that’s—she’s not here. So, um, yes.” I waited. Was it the right answer?

“Look.” I heard him blow out. “I’m sorry about today and also the, uh, other day. That’s why I called, to tell you that.”

“Oh. Okay.” Neither booty call nor flattery—I was, apparently, being triaged.

“I didn’t intend to—I wasn’t planning,” he continued.

“Okay.”

“I don’t seem to be able to think clearly around you.”

“Ditto.”

Then he laughed the same deep laugh he had that first night in the bullpen, and I realized that was something the public didn’t know about him—what he sounded like when he cracked up. “So what brought you to the White House?” I was unsure why he wanted to keep talking, but it felt like an opportunity.

“Tell me you’re not calling me to poll?”

He laughed again. “I want to know.”

“Well.” I shrugged as if he could see me. “I had a complex strategy my generation is really perfecting. First I applied for every job in America. Then I applied for every internship.”

“So it wasn’t me,” he joked.

I rested my other hand on my stomach. “You’ve been an unexpected bonus.”

“Funny, that’s just what the Majority Leader calls me.”

I laughed. “It’s really mind-boggling that anyone takes him seriously.” Through the opening in the closet door I saw the shelf of Gail’s wigs. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

I almost brought up the panic attacks, but I lost my nerve. “Do you ever just want to throw your hands up?”

“Go back to waiting tables?”

I smiled. “I mean, just lose it. How do you keep slogging through when everything you try to do is flat-out lied about? I mean, when Pence got up on the House floor and said that ninety percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget goes to abortions, how did you not immediately run to the Rose Garden to say, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ ”

“It’s tempting.”

“Or when Republicans now accuse you of being a socialist when
you’re just trying to keep the funding for the programs
they
started? Their selective memory is astonishing.”

“Yeah, well, those people have given me more than a few gray hairs.” He sidestepped the question. “I have advisors saying I should color it . . .”

“No.”

“You don’t think?”

I realized he genuinely wanted to know. “It’s undignified. Presidents go gray.”

“That’s me, Mr. Dignified.” He cleared his throat. I flashed to the picture of him tickling Susan like they were everyday people. I knew I should bring her up, remind us of her realness—if only so he could tell me what I was missing, what the public didn’t know that would somehow make this okay. Dignified.

I bought myself a second. “Even when eating pizza off a memo, hard to pull off.”

Running through every possible comment or question I could phrase, I realized that my broaching her was the equivalent of dousing the conversation with a fire hose. And, much as it shamed me, I couldn’t risk it. “Where are you right now?”

“In my study. On the couch with a million pages of briefs that need to be read before sunup.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Depends on your definition. And how much you like numbers.” Another sigh. “If an issue makes it to my desk it has no solution. I’m asked to make the shit calls where someone gets fucked.” It was the honest version of his stump speech.

“I’m so sorry. But you seem to be handling it—I mean you—”

“Right,” he said quietly.

“No one could breathe under that kind of pressure.”

“I sense you could handle it.” It felt like he’d just bestowed his strongest compliment.

“Well, thanks, but it’s understandable is all I’m saying.” I wanted to find an implicit way to reassure him.

“I doubt that. People don’t like to picture their leaders poleaxed.”