The First Affair (13 page)

“Well, I had to get out of D.C.,” I said defensively, not bothering to remind her about my birthday. “Rachelle is fun, Erica, she’s not—”

She slapped her palm on the counter. “What do you want, Jamie?”

“The guy I’m seeing. He has a girlfriend.”

Her expression shifted, her surprise satisfying.

“And it’s all—it’s—I feel pretty gross about the whole thing.” I was prodding for the kind of pronouncement that was her forte and, on some level, aching for the judgment marbleized through it. “I mean, do you think it is?”

“Gross?” she said in a way that made me embarrassed for the word choice.

“Actually, he’s married.” She pivoted and walked away down the hall. “Please tell me what to do.” She returned with a set of bedding and snapped out a flat sheet, her expression impassive. “Please?”

“Fuck, Jamie, no.” She said it as if I’d tried to throw her a scorpion.

“Erica, I’m asking—I need help with this. It’s really big. I don’t know if I can handle—”

“No. Jamie, you can’t just push your way in here and—no.” She lifted her hands. “I can’t. I’m already dealing with Mom, and no. No.”

“You can’t,” I asked her, my voice thickening, “or won’t?”

“You don’t get to put this on me—”

We heard a sneeze and turned to see Rachelle dripping in her towel. She smiled as if this were all totally normal. “Did you say you had a hair dryer?”

• • •

Rachelle saved me. She got me out of there and into a speakeasy beneath a barber shop, or maybe it was a store with a barber’s pole in the window—either way, I remember it was on the Lower East Side. She deposited me on a banquette, worked the room to procure drinks, and then, once I had something muddled in each hand, ran out for snacks.

“The next time you say your sister won’t like something, let’s go with that.” She plopped back down to unwrap a cellophaned bagel and place it ceremoniously before me.

“What’s this?” I asked, whiskey and sugar defrosting the block of hurt in my stomach.

“In about . . .” She checked her phone, the glow momentarily illuminating her smoky eyes. “Two minutes, it’ll be your birthday.” She tore open a box of Shabbat candles and stuck one in the hole, lighting it with her Bic. I made my wish as instructed, exactly what you’d expect. The music got louder and we sipped yet another cocktail as she lolled her head to me on the worn velvet. “So . . . married?”

I nodded.

“Kids?” she asked.

“Two.”

“Holy wow.”

“Yeah.” I peered at her in the lantern shadows that shifted with the crowd. “I know, I feel like shit about it.”

“So that’s why the office hook-up. Does he come over? Is he going to leave her?”

“No. I don’t know. No.”

“Aw.” She squeezed my knee affectionately. “My very own other woman.”

“Uck.” I took another long draw. “There are two versions in my head: one where I’m meeting my soul mate under less-than-optimal circumstances that we will somehow rise above. And one where I’m evil.” I hoped that hearing it out loud would make it feel less corrosive, but it was the opposite. I hated myself.

“The whole soul mate thing is
supposed
to be messy. There’re a thousand stories where someone leaves the wrong person—Sky Hoppey—to meet the right one. Oh God, it’s not the guy with the ‘Don’t Frack with Me’ cuff links and the wedding picture on his desk where his wife is wearing a cape? At least tell me it’s not him.”

“Definitely not him.” Which kicked off an inquisition that I was determined, despite my prior lapses, would lead nowhere, except eventually (though the memory’s fuzzy), to dancing with a group of Polish—Scottish—tourists—construction workers? I quickly realized that my seeing a “married guy at work” was infinitely sexier in Rachelle’s world than the mundane detail of the guy’s actual identity. Given the less-than-virile workforce of my office, a name would have taken my story from fabulous to pedestrian and perhaps even tawdry, so she happily left him a mystery and called him my Mister Man.

Later, as we fought passing out on the dawn bus back to D.C., our arms looped precautionarily through our bag handles, Rachelle smiled at me with closing eyes. “You’re amazing.”

“I am?” I asked, the black thickness taking hold. “You mean disgusting?”

“I mean . . .” I heard her murmur with the brightening skyline looming above. “I have to get to New York. My life has to start here already. It just . . . does.” Her hand still holding mine, her grated breathing mixed with the traffic funneling us into the tunnel.

• • •

Squinting against the whiskey clamor in my skull and the maw of guilt in my stomach, I managed to find my way back to Gail’s and a ringing phone. Greg greeted me by very quietly singing in my new year. “I had to call,” he said softly.

Gripping the receiver to my shoulder, I clutched Gail’s keys. “I leave in nine days,” I leveled at him.

“You can’t go.” His anguish took me by surprise.

“I have to.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“You don’t?”

“Fuck, Jamie, I’m risking the world to sing you ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

The thoughts I’d been locked in with came bursting from their dehydrated compartments. “But I can’t—how can I—
keep
doing this? I’m not allowed to want it to go where it can’t. And I can’t make sense of—I need you to make sense of—more sense—”

“You can handle this, right? Jamie?” He shut me down.

Looking back, I realize that he was revealing what he believed: we didn’t deserve to ask for a solution to our situation, only for the capacity to withstand it. “Of course.”

“In three years, I won’t be running for anything ever again and no one can tell me what to do. I love you, Jamie.”

“You do?”

“Only when I’m with you does any of this feel like I thought it would. I’ve made so many mistakes. Mistakes that should have been undone a long time ago.” Did he mean Susan? “But then I chose a public life and those doors closed to me. I know I have a lot—everything—I know that.” There was a pause. I sensed him struggling for the words. “But somehow along the way, happiness became something I had to . . . trade in—until you.” We stayed on the line in silence. “Let me make a wish for us on your candle, too?” he asked tenderly.

“Yes.”

• • •

In an unprecedented turn of events, the essence of that birthday wish—however conflicted—was granted. I was so unaccustomed to getting what I asked for that Margaret had to repeat herself. “A full-time junior position.”

“Really?”

“You did a solid job prepping the college trip. Dana says you were like a robot. So you accept?”

I swiped my pass and jumped over Brooke’s foot, which I swore was extended to trip me. Texting Rachelle and then Lena, I took the stairs two at a time.

“Jamie, he’s—”

“Jean, I got a job!”

“Congratulations—”

“Junior staffer. I’m so excited! Is he in?”

“The President is in meetings all morning,” she said stiffly. I looked over my shoulder to find Amar Singh sitting by the door in his bow tie. He looked at me strangely.
Fuck
.

“Right. Margaret sent me up to ask—because she needed to schedule some time to review—to update the President—on the college trip. And of course I wanted to tell you the good news, so I offered to come up instead of calling because you’ve been so encouraging to me. So—thank you.”

“Well, you’re very welcome, dear. I’ll call down to schedule that review once we get an opening.”

“Which I’ll tell Margaret. Okay, then. Thank you!” I punched the air goofily, nodded at Singh, and left with a dry mouth.

• • •

The news of my promotion rapidly circulated throughout the department. But no congratulations were forthcoming. While she admitted it wasn’t fair, Lena still felt rejected. I kept reminding her that
technically
L.A. had rejected
me,
until I felt like I shouldn’t have had to keep saying that and she should have just been happy for me. Coupled with the poisonous nausea as I waited for Greg’s admonishment for rushing to his office unbidden, it was not at all how I’d imagined finally getting a job would feel.

Then, on nearly the last day of my internship, my desk phone rang.

“Department of Scheduling and Advance, Jamie speaking.”

“Meet me in the south hall on the way out to the chopper,” he instructed. “About ten after four.” And he hung up, leaving me suspended in adrenaline.

I used my lunch hour to case Wm. Fox & Co., looking at pocket squares and cuff links I couldn’t possibly afford. In addition to my note of apology, I hunted for something that might delight him enough to overlook my misstep. I passed my hand over the tie tables like I was spreading a freshly shuffled deck. And then I found it—royal blue with a quiet white pattern suggestive of the tiniest lightning bolts. And at 4:07, palms sweating, I walked the administrative carpet with it tucked discreetly into a manila envelope.

His security rounded the corner. And then it was him, in his black pinstripe suit. We both continued looking straight ahead as people chattered in their offices abutting the corridor. Phones rang and were answered.

“Oh, great.” He slowed, and his detail stopped. “Could you, uh, bring this to Margaret?” He tugged an Oval Office envelope from his bag.

“Yes, sir. She just asked for me to bring this up to you, actually, but I’m happy to bring it to Jean—”

“That’s fine.” He grabbed my envelope in return as he walked on. I held mine casually until I crossed the threshold of the ladies’ room, where I locked myself in a stall. I broke the seal and breathlessly tugged out a small orange box that looked like the ones Gail kept stacked in her closet. Hermès. I slipped off the ribbon to discover the most beautiful silver—ring? It was too big to be a ring. A thumb ring? I opened the diminutive brochure. A scarf ring. Fingering the equestrian links, I opened the card.
“To your future. Congratulations, G.”

And there was a book. J. D. Salinger. Leather bound, inscribed with,
“Many Happy Returns.”
I flipped to the page where he’d stuck a Post-it:

 . . . walking toward her quickly but with a slow face, reasoned to himself, with suppressed excitement, that he was the only one on
the platform who really knew Franny’s coat. He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself.

Wow. WowwowWOW.
A future. Of happy returns. I hugged the presents as if I were pulling him against me and floated out of the stall—into Brooke. She looked at the orange box at my chest and the Oval Office envelope, her eyes narrowing. I washed my hands, staring her down in the mirror. I grabbed a towel, collected my treasure from the counter, and walked out. Her last day could not come fast enough.

And neither could my first.

Part II

Chapter Six

August 15

I don’t remember how I got across town to the address where I’d been directed, numbly clutching that stupid cardboard box with the few possessions I’d accumulated at the White House rattling around. I kept thinking I should fucking stop at a deli and grab a plastic bag and dump this clichéd thing that made me look so—rejected. Instead I carried it in a fugue state until I found myself following a guy I’d been assigned to down several flights toward some sub-basement’s subbasement, my body, stomach, and will to live all sinking in tandem.

“The stairwell’s a little Gringotts,” he said, briefly touching his tented fingers to the raw concrete walls, and it took me a second to realize he meant Harry Potter’s underground bank. “But the bullpens are bright.” I trailed his narrow back down yet another flight. “And I’ve found a small vitamin D supplement keeps the suicidal tendencies at bay.”

Still reeling, I couldn’t compute what he was saying. I also wondered how he got away with just a V-neck over his oxford. Maybe this place was more casual than one would think?

“Here we are.” He held up the ID dangling from his red lanyard to the security panel and the door clicked. “See? Bright.” He had a bemused sardonic energy, implying he didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to have to say what he was about to say, and wished he could just narrate his life with thought bubbles.

“Yes. Yes, it is.” The fluorescents banked off the unbroken field of polished white linoleum, making it feel as though I’d be processing the recently deceased in an Albert Brooks film.

“You have Tabby’s old desk.” He led me across other people’s paths, everyone moving in focused silence as if weaving a tartan in a Vassar dance recital. “And voilà,” he said flatly, gesturing toward a battered metal desk surrounded by a field of the same. “Hot tip: make sure you clean your phone. After Nicaragua, Tabby didn’t like anyone meddling with her things, including janitors. Alrighty.” He bit the inside of his mouth as I set the box down. “I’m over there once you get yourself settled, and welcome to the Department of Homeland Security.”

There’d been a mistake. There had to have been a mistake.

“Just remind me to help you get your cafeteria pass.”

“Um, you know—sorry,” I prompted him.

“Paul,” he reintroduced himself. With his unlined face, blue eyes, thick black hair, and a cleft in his chin like a cartoon hero, I guessed he was only in his early thirties.

“Yes, Paul, I don’t think I’m going to be here that long.”

“Planning to get fired?” he asked dryly.

“No.” I blushed. “Help with the pass would be great, actually—yes, thank you.”

“I’ll come get you at one.”

Not if I’ve chained myself to the White House fence first.
“Perfect.”

“And I’ll give you your assignment as soon as your security clearance finishes processing.” He started to leave, but then pivoted back. “They usually have that done in advance—when you interview.”

“Right. I was—um—sent here.”

He graciously nodded, but it seemed to make as little sense to him as it did to me. “Okay, then.” He returned to his desk and I looked down at the coffee-stained blotter Tabby left behind—still torn down to December 2008. I couldn’t let myself sit, because then I’d be there. Really there. I picked up the phone, wiped the receiver across my thigh, and dialed.