THE PRESIDENT 2 (33 page)

“Oh, so he supposedly hopped a plane to France and raped her there too?” LaLa asked.

“They all want in on the freak show, La, what can I say?”
 
Max said.
 

“And don’t forget all of those Congressional Hearings their scheduling as we speak,” Allison said.
 
“Every subcommittee known to man wants to drag the president’s cabinet before them to find out what did they know and when did they know it.
 
They’re treating this crap like some gotdamn Watergate!”

“This is so unfair!”

“You’re telling me?” Allison said.
 
“I have to call them out on their unfairness and they just laugh in my face.
 
They have this president exactly where they want him and they are not about to let him up because of anything as foreign to them as fairness.”

LaLa exhaled, she could just imagine what Dutch and Gina were going through.
 
“What can we do to stop the hemorrhaging?” she asked Allison.

“Absolutely nothing,” Allison replied.
 
“That’s the scary part.
 
It will take Divine intervention to turn this disaster around.”

LaLa, a true believer in Divine intervention, silently began to pray for exactly that.

***

Gina found Dutch out on the Truman Balcony later that next day.
 
He had spent half of the night huddling with his staff and legal advisors and when he ultimately retired to bed he opted to sleep, as Gina had expected, in the guest bedroom.
 
She started to give him his space, to allow him a chance to decompress without her having to see him worried to death over the burdens a president bore.
 
But she just couldn’t do it this time.
 
Because this was not a burden outside of himself.
 
This wasn’t about hostages or economic downturns or natural disasters.
 
This was about him and his character.
 
And that burden belonged to her.

That was why, last night, she went to the guest bedroom.
 
To her surprise, he was not even in bed, but was crotched down in a corner leaned against the wall, a drink in his hand, his head dropped down.
 
He was so spooked by the turn of events that he was not even aware that someone had entered the room.

Gina just stood there watching him.
 
Why do they always seek to destroy the good guys, she wondered, when the crooks and selfish pigs were allowed to operate with reckless abandon and nobody cared?
 
But a man like Dutch Harber, a man good to his core, gets raked over the coals like it was nobody’s business.
 
Day in and day out.
 
From one craziness to another craziness.
 
All in the name of challenging the government, of making sure the leaders did not get ahead of themselves and drunk with power.
 
And once they have him cowering in a corner, they’re happy.
 
Their work has been done.
 
And they can crawl back under the rocks they crawled out of and leave that broken man for her to put back together.
 

When they knew, like she knew, that a vessel forced to be glued back together was never the same.

She crotched down in front of him, her eyes now narrowed and showing that look of earnestness that he knew so well.
 
At this point she knew he knew she was there, but it took him a while to acknowledge that presence.
 
And when he did look up, the pain in his bewildered green eyes was palpable.

And when tears began to drain from those eyes, all of the words Gina had planned to speak, all of the reassurances she had planned to make, became caught in her throat.
 
And suddenly there was nothing, nothing at all, that she could say.

She, instead, moved over to him and pulled him into her arms.
 

That was last night.
 
But now, in the light of day, when she found him seated in a chair on the Truman Balcony, staring out across the peaceful South Lawn, he still had the look of a person in the throes of trauma.

She sat next to him in a flanking chair.

“Good morning,” she said.

He smiled at her, and it was a smile laced with pain, but she knew, under the circumstances, it was the best that he could do.
 
“Good morning.”

“I see your staff canceled all of your appearances too.”

“Yes, they did,” he said.
 
“I was supposed to address a local elementary school about our educational initiatives.
 
It was supposed to be the launch of our counter to the No Child Left Behind bill.
 
But given the circumstances, they didn’t think it would be appropriate.”
 

Dutch seemed to wince with pain after he said that, and he looked back out over the lawn.
 
The idea that they would think he was such a moral deviant that he couldn’t be around kids angered Gina.
 
But he didn’t need her negative energy too.

So they just sat there, quietly, for what seemed like hours, but was actually a matter of minutes.
 

“I had planned to take you to lunch today,” he finally said.
 
“Over at that new restaurant on Capitol Hill, but under the circumstances . . .”
 

“Is that the new normal for us, Dutch?
 
Our life will have to cease because everything we planned to do will fall within that
under the circumstances
or
because of the circumstances
or
given the circumstances
qualifier?”

“It does seem rather confining, doesn’t it?”

“It seems downright wrong,” Gina couldn’t help but say.

Dutch snorted.
 
“We have measured out our lives,” Dutch said, quoting T.S. Eliot, “in coffee spoons.”

“And in short,” Gina added, quoting Eliot too, “I was afraid.”

Dutch’s heart rammed against his chest and he looked at his wife.
 
He was so sorry that she had to go through this; so sorry that he didn’t drop out of that reelection race when he had the chance, and had let the hounds of hell have this.
 

Now she was afraid.

And so was he.

He took her hand.

“You know the one thing that perhaps hurt more than anything else?” he said.

There’s
one
thing, Gina thought, when there was so much to choose from?
 
“What?” she asked.

“The fact that my own mother orchestrated this whole thing because she wanted to break up my marriage.
 
And she played to the peanut gallery.
 
Played to the haters and doubters.
 
What self-respecting woman, was her logic, would remain with a man like me, an accused monster on videotape?
 
And she didn’t want our marriage to end because she didn’t think you were good enough for me.
 
That train of thought would have been too much like normal.
 
But no, she wanted to break us up because she didn’t think you were good enough for
her
.
 
And her precious, lily white-or so she chooses to believe, bloodline.
 
She wants our marriage to end before we give to her, before we put in her bloodline, a grandchild that could possibly be closer to your skin color than mine.”

“And she assumed you would wait, that you wouldn’t want to raise a child in this environment.”

“Right.”

Gina, however, wrinkled her brow.
 
“But I still don’t understand,” she said.
 
“If it’s all about race, why would she want you to be with Caroline?
 
I thought you said Caroline was rumored to be half-black herself.”

“Oh, she is half-black.
 
It was more than just rumor.
 
But that’s the madness of racism.
 
Because it isn’t about real truth.
 
It’s about perceived truth.
 
And my mother doesn’t believe for a second that a woman who looks as white as Caroline and carries herself the way she carries herself could possibly be anything but white.
 
She knows better, but she’s pretended so long that she doesn’t, until she really doesn’t.”

Dutch hesitated.
 
He used to idolize his mother for all of her wonderful, charitable work.
 
Now he had to fight not to hate her.
 
“My mother has spent her entire privileged life around poor, destitute blacks and black servants, and she felt good about herself because she was always the one on top, always the one in position to help the less fortunate among us.
 
When she runs into a smart, savvy, sharp African-American, she’s certain there’s something wrong with them too.
 
Because they don’t fit into the box.
 
Because they upset her manufactured truth.
 
Because her sense of superiority is challenged when she sees superior blacks too.
 
That’s why the least little thing you do, she pounces.
 
You wear an African-style outfit, or calls a reporter a fool, it all plays into her nice little narrative that says you aren’t one of us, you’re different, you’re that
other
.”

Dutch shook his head, disgusted.
 
“Thank God people like my mother are fast becoming a dying breed.”

Gina nodded, although they weren’t dying fast enough for her liking.
 
“So she champions a half-black woman like Caroline in order to stop an all-black woman like me?”

“Right, although nobody’s all-white, nobody’s all-black.
 
Nothing’s black and white, cut and dry like that anymore.
 
But it is in my mother’s mind.
 
So she sees Caroline as all-white because she has to see her that way.
 
And don’t misunderstand me, honey: Caroline was nowhere near her first choice for me.
 
She would have chosen somebody as white as the driven snow if she could have.
 
But she couldn’t.
 
Because she only had two choices.
 
She knew I’ve only wanted to marry two women in my entire life: you and Caroline.
 
Those were her choices.
 
You or Caroline.
 
Caroline reentered the picture, so she cast her lot with Caro.”

Gina shook her head.
 
“What a narrow way to view human beings,” she said.
 
“And you really believe your own mother could be that hateful and cruel?”

“Yes,” Dutch said.
 
“She’s that hateful and cruel.
 
No doubt about it.
 
I saw signs for years in the little comments she would make.
 
But I just dismissed them.
 
She was, at least I thought at that time, such a giving, caring woman.
 
But when she met you, and I saw that hatred deep within her eyes, it couldn’t be dismissed any longer.
 
I knew on that day, when we left Nantucket, that she was my enemy.
 
She was my mother, but she was my enemy.
 
But even I never dreamed she’d take it to this level.”

“She wants to destroy you now.”