How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (35 page)

1988

Penelope on the Pond

Sometimes it helps if I think about all the women in world history who've been in my position, of Anne Boleyn waiting for her Henry, or what's-her-name waiting for Odysseus to come back from the Trojan War. (I've been reading a lot since I've been here, in case you can't tell, browsing through these paperbacks mildewing on the bookshelves here in the cabin.) Sometimes it feels like I've been here forever. But some mornings I wake up with a dreamy feeling of being outside of time, of being able to wait as long as he needs me to. And I think that's one of the things he loves about me—his own time's so regulated and regimented and subdivided into little pieces, while I can just go with the flow. I try to get him to see that it's all an illusion anyway, that we all have to live in the moment, and not get too attached to outcomes, but for now he has to do what he has to do. It's his karma; I understand. I can wait. This morning I woke up and found myself in that still, gray moment right between night and morning. The sun hadn't showed through the trees yet, but the clearing around the pond was visible and a beaver was carving a V into the silver surface of the water, and I realized this phase of my existence is as fleeting as the beaver's wake.

Now it's almost eleven o'clock and I'm wondering where he is and what he's doing. I mean, I know he's at some grange hall in Iowa, according to the schedule, but I wish I had a constant video feed so I could see him and hear him all day long, like I used to when I was working with him. As for the nights, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what I wish for then. I still can't believe how good it is. How good it was, I should say, since I haven't seen him in almost three weeks.

I should take up knitting or something. What do you call it? Needlepoint. Knit him a scarf, or a hat, or a pillow with a slutty slogan. Give me something to do with my hands besides texting him and touching myself. Last night I made myself come four times. I try to keep the texting to a minimum, though,‘cause it's risky. (The touching, on the other hand, is healthy.) And e-mail's out of the question. If I could, I'd send him naked pictures every few hours. But he calls me every day, sometimes more if he can slip away. And sometimes I get to see him on TV. Last week he was on
The View
, and he was so fucking cute, I almost died. I could tell the girls thought so, too, even that Republican blow-up doll Elisabeth Hasselbeck. She was ready to put her ideological differences aside, along with her panties. It's a good thing I'm not the jealous type. I love it when other women think he's hot. They're right: He is. If they only knew.

To clear my mind, I chant and meditate. Sometimes I get frustrated, though, being sidelined like this, not being able to share it with him and help him, or tell him who's totally full of shit and when he's full of shit himself. For three months we were together every day, and it was great. I was on staff as a “media consultant.” Of course, we had to be careful. We had separate hotel rooms and all, and PDAs were strictly prohibited, but we still managed to steal time alone together. Like I said, we tried to play it really safe. But once in a while we just couldn't help risking it all—the quickie out behind the restaurant in Des Moines, the blow job in the backseat of the taxi in D.C. I know it's crazy, but when the stakes are that high, the sex is unbelievable. Anybody who's ever been married can tell you what happens to the thrills when there's no risk.

It was one of those love-at-first-sight things. We locked eyes at a restaurant in New York. I thought he was incredibly good-looking and I could tell from the way people were fussing and coming over to his table that he was a big deal, but honestly, I didn't recognize him. Even so, looking into his eyes convinced me. It was only after I'd been picturing him naked for twenty minutes that my girlfriend turned around and said, “Oh my God, don't you know who that is?” What can I say—I don't spend my waking hours glued to C-SPAN, but of course it clicked as soon as she said it. I knew he looked familiar. He was still eating when we walked out, and I couldn't catch his eye—he told me later he'd deliberately not looked over when I was leaving, pretending to be all into what the people he was with were saying, even though he was totally distracted and had no idea. He waited till I was gone and then excused himself, supposedly to go to the men's room.

He caught up with me on the sidewalk a block away from the restaurant. He introduced himself and asked for my number, and I was really happy I hadn't just imagined it—our intense chemical connection, I mean—and an hour later he called me and, what can I say, I agreed to meet him at his hotel room. I mean, sure, it wasn't exactly subtle of me, going straight to his room for our first date, but I figured it might be a little weird for us to be seen sitting all tête-à-tête at the bar downstairs.

Later I couldn't help thinking how me and my girlfriend were supposed to go to Elio's that night, but when we got there, our table wasn't ready and there were about a thousand people crowded around the bar waiting for a table, and my friend said, “Let's try Elaine's; it's only a few blocks up,” and I said sure, what the hell, I hadn't been there in a couple of lifetimes. And that's where I met Tom. And later, when he came running after me down Second Avenue, I'd almost jumped in a cab that was waiting right outside—a homeless guy hoping for a tip was holding the door open—but at the last minute I decided to walk, get some air instead. And that's the only reason Tom caught up with me. Otherwise, I would have been long gone in the cab. I heard what sounded like a gunshot up the street, and when I turned around to look, there was Tom.

It's amazing, the connection we have. I think because I was so far outside of his world, I had a perspective on it that he really needed. Obviously, he's incredibly smart, but he's also been living inside this bubble for so long that he can't always see beyond it, and before that he was a small-town boy, which he still is, in a way. As smart and successful as he is, he's never gotten over being the son of a shit-kicking tobacco farmer, feeling like he had to go to the back door of the big house, and people sometimes think he's slow because of his accent, and even though I'm a lot younger, in some ways I'm way more sophisticated. I mean, I've lived in New York and Ibiza and Paris and I've dated actors and artists and rock stars—yeah, I know, big thrill, I'm so cool. The key to Tom is that he's really smart and knowledgeable and he's also, in his own mind, still a boy picking tobacco on his father's farm. It makes him insecure when he's having tea with some fucking aristocrat, but he also totally uses it. Like, check out his stump speech, where he basically makes it sound like he didn't have shoes till he got to Duke on scholarship.

I read about the Great Man theory, which is basically the idea that individuals can change history. But I have my own theory, call it the Little Man theory, which just basically says that if you want to understand any Big Swinging Dick, you just have to figure out who he was when he was a ten-year-old boy. Tom seems pretty honest about how his childhood made him who he is. In his mind, he's still wearing hand-me-down overalls. And I love that about him. But sometimes I worry that he needs constant reassurance as to his lovability and general wonderfulness, and what happens if I'm not there to give it to him?

Practically the first thing we did was jump into bed, and we've been jumping ever since. When I walked in the door of his hotel room, he said, “You're so hot,” and I said, “You're so hot,” and the next thing I know, we're ripping each other's clothes off. And God, it was good. It was even better the second time, an hour later, because we weren't in such a rush.

Afterward he looked in my eyes and said, “You're amazing,” and I said, “You're amazing.” I told him he was awake, and he said, “I feel like I'm dreaming, actually,” and I said, “No, I mean you're awake in the Buddhist sense. You're aware and you see yourself reflected in other people. You see beauty and the goodness in other people because you have it within yourself. I felt that about you the minute I looked across the restaurant. I could see you were awake. And it was like everybody else in the place wasn't.”

It wasn't really like I taught him anything he didn't already know: I just made him more aware of his own powers. Officially, I was listed as a media consultant, but really I was more like his spiritual adviser. Not in any formal sense, and of course he still goes to the Methodist church when he's home, the same one he grew up going to with his parents. But, like, the other day, I quoted him the sutra that says a person who doesn't aim for enlightenment is like a spoiled child who plays obsessively with a toy while the house is burning down around him. And that night he was on CNN, and the sound bite is Tom saying the president is like a child playing with his toys while the house is burning down around him.

I was on staff for almost three months, mostly on the road, before I met his wife, three months before the Iowa primary. She took one look at me and didn't like what she saw. Even though she doesn't really love him, that doesn't mean she wants to look like a fool. And there are the kids to consider. So that was it; I was off the bus. I understood, of course. I didn't like it, but I couldn't really see that he had much choice. If he hadn't loved me, that would have been the end of it; he would have had the perfect excuse to just dump me.

They haven't had a real marriage in years, and even in its heyday they weren't exactly setting the sheets on fire. I mean, this is the kind of southern girl who wore a surgical glove when she finally gave him a hand job. The last time they had sex was during the Clinton administration.

Twenty years ago it wouldn't have been possible to run for president under these circumstances, but I guess we've come a long way since Bill Clinton creamed on Monica's dress. Not that Tom or anybody on his staff thinks that we've come far enough to elect a president who's getting divorced and fucking a younger woman with—well, let's just say a colorful past. We're not living in France, dude. Which is why I'm here, in the cabin on the pond. Well, actually, I'm here because rumors started to spread, and reporters started coming around to my house. There was a story in the
Star
about Tom and an unnamed former female staffer. Lots of innuendo and a claim by an unnamed source—true, actually—that we'd been caught in the shower together. Basically it was decided that I better just drop out of sight for a while.

I try not to get attached to any particular outcome, but it's a struggle to stifle my desire. Once Tom's in office, I can come out of hiding and he can get a divorce. If he doesn't get elected, then everything's that much easier, really. Not that we allow ourselves to consider that possibility. Tom wants to be president more than he wants anything in the world, except for maybe me. That's what he said one night, and you won't hear me contradicting him. But it's hard being this far away and knowing that it will be months before we can really be together. Sometimes I get frustrated. Just now I tried to call him, but he's not picking up, so I call Rob, his right-hand guy, who's also not picking up, which is pretty weird.

The cabin belongs to a buddy of his, a big supporter. I don't know why they call it a cabin, because for all its down-home rustic pretensions, it's pretty damn luxe, the kind of place you see on a hillside in Aspen or Telluride, with that sort of Daniel Boone meets Frank Lloyd Wright look. A kind of contempo mission theme inside, with big leather club chairs, Navajo rugs, and lamps made out of antlers, paintings of English setters and ducks in flight on the walls.
Très
macho, but everything a girl could need is here, except for male companionship—a six-burner professional Viking range to boil water, fully equipped gym, spa and sauna, plasma screens in every room. The views are pretty great, taking in a ten-acre pond and, beyond that, a pasture spreading out to the base of a wooded ridge. I've been out walking every day, but yesterday Tom called and told me not to go in the woods 'cause it's deer season. And to wear orange if I take out the garbage or whatever, which I thought was sweet. When I told him I didn't look good in orange, he got all Big Daddy on me. “Alison, this is for your own protection,” he said in that voice he sometimes uses to lecture journalists. Any minute I expected to hear him say,
What the American people want is for Alison Poole to start wearing protective orange clothing during deer season
. “I'm kidding,” I said. “Joke.” Poor Tom was working on about two hours of sleep a night, plus yesterday this fucking political blog called Below the Beltway printed my name:
Who, exactly, is Alison Poole? And why doesn't the Phipps campaign want to talk about her?
Jerk-offs.

After two days of deer season, even yoga can't quite quell the restlessness. I'm getting a little stir-crazy, and I'm down to my last cup of yogurt, so I decide to go into town for groceries. It's almost a mile from the cabin out to the paved road. I have to stop short of the gate, get out, open the padlock and unchain the gate, get back in the car, drive through and lock it all up again. On the front of the gate is a big
PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING
sign. A really determined snoop could just climb over the fence and walk down to the cabin, but he'd be trespassing and I could call the local sheriff, who's been instructed by Skeet Jackson, the owner of the property, to keep an eye on me. From the gate, I drive the three miles into town, if that's the word for a grocery store, a post office, a firehouse and a BP station.

I wave to Cassie, the checkout lady at the Piggly Wiggly, who's my new best friend since last week. “Your boyfriend come by looking for you this morning,” she says, causing me to crash my shopping cart into a stack of rock-salt bags. For just a second I'm all excited, and then I think, Wait a minute. How does she know who my boyfriend is? If she does, she shouldn't. And why would he be looking for me, when he knows exactly where I am?

“Boyfriend? I don't have a boyfriend,” I say, trying to sound non chalant.

“Pretty girl like you? This fella was awful cute.”