American Rhapsody (55 page)

I remember the day he gave me
Leaves of Grass
and how we'd read stanzas to each other for weeks. And I remember the day I learned that he'd given
Leaves of Grass
to the intern, too. And in the years between giving me my cherished leather-bound volume and giving the intern hers, something inside my husband crashed and burned.
I think.
Or it was just a ploy on both occasions, a little something to make me . . . and her . . . feel good about him. Maybe when he gave me that book and when he gave it to her . . . he was doing nothing but responding to an internal poll taken by his ego: I'll give them some poems; they'll like that.

I don't have a whole lot of people to talk to now that Vince is gone. My mother is too old and Chelsea too young to talk about most of these things. I'm hurling myself into the Senate race. Who knows? I may sit down in an intimate moment in my private study with a young intern one day and tell him or her that I have nothing in my life but work. I've been working out a lot and I finally feel good about my hair. It surely is about time, isn't it? It's fun being called “regal” and “glamorous” by the media and I liked being called “the First Lady of Miramax.”
Hah!
Hollywood was always supposed to have been
his
turf. In between the Senate race and his trips and mine, we certainly don't see each other much, and we talk infrequently. What am I supposed to say to him—Hey, asshole, you been reading
Leaves of Grass
lately? I know what he's doing because I know everything. He's playing with himself—what did you think?

I talk to Eleanor a lot in my own way. She convinced me to run in her home state. All I'm doing is continuing the same struggle she began. God knows, I feel we have so many things in common, although I envy her the closeness of her relationship with Lorena. I don't really have a Lorena in my life now, but maybe I will. Eleanor and I talk a lot about Bill and Franklin. It's funny how the intern even referred to herself as Lucy Mercer in that note she sent Bill. And most people don't know that Bill has always felt a real closeness to FDR, too, thanks mainly to his friendship with Jim McDougal, who idolized FDR and was always telling FDR stories. And, of course, there is yet another connection: Bill, bless his heart, told Gennifer I was a lesbian, and Eleanor really was one for much of her life. A lesbian with a philandering husband who used her to breed a gaggle of kids and then had nothing to do with her intimately. There you go, Bill Clinton's role models, JFK and FDR. I'm surprised Bill didn't come equipped with two dicks.

Eleanor was telling me a story up in the solarium the other day that really made her laugh. She confronted Franklin about Lucy, and Franklin promised to break it off. Then she discovered that they were meeting secretly. FDR had the Secret Service drive him across town in his limo each day. And Lucy would be waiting for him on some prearranged street corner. She'd jump in and do what he liked and then the Secret Service would drop her off on another street corner, where she'd wait for the bus and go home. I didn't laugh much, though. I remembered Bill's jogs around the statehouse in Little Rock and around the mall near the White House here.

I just thought of something. This
does
make me laugh. When Bill and I got married, the minister's name was . . . the Reverend Nixon. I'm not kidding. With a thousand ministers to choose from, we picked Nixon to bless our marriage. Isn't that funny? We took our vows before God and Nixon.

[14]

Willard Comes Clean

B
illy doesn't love Hilla the Hun. He never has. He loves
me
. He's always loved me, from the time we were both little. When his parents were fighting and he ran into another room crying and all upset,
I
was the one who sat with him. He touched me and played with me. Only
I
could give him peace. Only
I
could self-soothe him and modulate his anxiety. Only
I
could make him feel good about himself. As we grew and he suddenly got fat, only
I
could convince him to lose his belly. He
wanted
to look down and see me and play with me. But he couldn't see me because of his belly. Then he lost it, and I could look at him and he could look at me. We still play the same way now that
we've
grown so
big!
Before that
60 Minutes
interview, before his grand jury appearance, before a State of the Union speech, Billy plays with
me
and
I
give him the same inner peace I gave him when we were little.

I was his friend when he had no others. He knows that, even today. He's so proud of me sometimes, he overdoes it. Kathleen Willey, Dolly Kyle, Monica—he put their hands right on me. He said, “Kiss it!” minutes after he'd met Paula Jones. It's good for my self-esteem, you know, not that I've ever had a lot of problems with my self-esteem sagging. Even when we were little together, Billy and I had a lot of fun with girls. Tinkerbelle. Snow White. Natasha in
Bullwinkle
. His cousin's Barbie doll. Suzy the dolphin. All those slave girls in
The Ten Commandments
.

Billy's worked me hard my whole life, but I'm not tired. I've never been inoperative. I've always had a lot of get-up-and-go. He's never had to eat shark-fin soup or oysters or mandrake root or rhino horn. I've always taken care of his health. My activity has kept his prostate healthy, and the exercise I provide him helps diminish the toxic effect of all the saturated fats he regularly poisons himself with.

But still, the attention he pays me is nice. Nurturing. Enabling. Empowering. Reassuring. He reassures me in other ways, too. Did you ever notice how Billy keeps his hands in his pockets a lot? I'm his good-luck charm. His lucky penny. His rosary. His grasp of reality. He even hums me songs under his breath sometimes—“I Can't Stop Loving You” and “You're My Soul and Inspiration” and “Please Please Me” and “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” Billy Joel's “Captain Jack” is our favorite song. He treats me with sensitivity. He never tries to hem me in and lets me have my own space to breathe. No condoms. No tight bikini shorts—it's mostly boxers. Billy can seduce a whole crowd, but he knows from experience that he'll need me when we go home. When Hilla goes into the other room. When it's just Billy and the K-Y jelly and me.

Billy and I have enjoyed life. A lot of my peers, I know, are exposed only to darkness. To toilets, urinals, bedsheets, underwear, or vaginas. I've seen a lot of the lighted world. I've seen the Oval Office, the private study, the photos of Billy on the walls of Nancy Hernreich's office. I've seen the crashing surf at Malibu from a lot of different angles. I've seen almost all of the rooms of the governor's mansion in Little Rock, especially the basement. I've become a student of hotel decor and, thanks to vacations and out-of-town fund-raisers, Louis XIV nightstands in Beverly Hills, Bloomfield Hills, and the Hamptons. I've seen almost as much sunshine as Billy, especially around the Ozarks. I'm an overachiever who's been externalized with an air of grandiosity.

I've enjoyed the perks of his success. But I was there, too, in the bad times. In adolescence, when I feared he and his friend Five Finger Mary were going to rip me out by the root. In Arkansas and Oxford, when I was sure I would die of overwork and overexposure. Billy and I were indiscriminate in those halcyon days. We closed our eyes and thought of pig farms. We put a flag over her head and did it for Betsy Ross. I kept thinking of what his mother had said when we were boys: “That little girl over there is so ugly, we have to tie a pork chop around her neck so the boys will play with her.”

The Oxford years were our “We Shall Overcome” years. I kept saying, “Not a chance. Never.” We spent much of our time in our individual ways there protesting the war. McNamara was wrong about “progressively escalating pressure” defeating the Vietcong, but Billy used me to apply the principle to our mutual satisfaction. America's entanglement in Vietnam led to a lot of our entanglements at Oxford. “Peace Now!” Billy kept nobly yelling, and those dumb, disarmed English girls misspelled or misheard the word. I radiated in those days as though I were wearing Day-Glo paint.

I was there in the other bad times, too. In the White House, when all Billy wanted to do was to let an age-inappropriate Monica lick me. She wanted to lick me with this goovno on her tongue to give me chills. I couldn't ever convince Billy to let me empower myself inside Monica, to give her my unconditional, rubberless love. But he did finally allow me to act out an inappropriate, intrusive flow. That led to Monica's feelings of codependence on me.

And that, unfortunately, led to the worst times of all, when Billy and I hit the front page and the evening news together. The whole world was talking not just about him but also about me. It should have been a time of triumph for me, finally publicly given my due. My ultimate empowerment! But it was the worst time because suddenly Billy was almost afraid to touch me. It was like when we were kids and he went through a stage of reading the Bible. Onan, he informed me, was put to death for spilling his seed on the ground. But he soon realized I was much more fun than Chapterand verse.

He was afraid again now, even when we were alone, even when I grew into his pocket. I knew he was overreacting to all the preachers and the soccer moms, but he was treating me as if I weren't even there anymore, attached to him. I was afraid that he was afraid that Hilla was checking his sheets or his underwear for signs of my life, like his grandma had checked us when we were half-grown. Thank God for Carly Simon! The worst of times ended for me in the middle of our international crisis, when we hugged Carly Simon at the Martha's Vineyard airport. Billy rediscovered me hours after that hug.

I know, too, that I've been exceedingly fortunate with what Billy has chosen to do for a living. He's a people person who seduces other people for their votes. If I get something out of it, too, well, he still gets the vote, doesn't he? He decided he wanted to be president, thankfully, instead of, say, a football star. He doesn't go out there every weekend and let me get beaten up. Cup or no cup, it still hurts. He prefers to watch others get theirs beaten up on TV. I don't mind seeing that. Billy and I agree. A bed is much better than a football field. I score. He groans. She yips.
We
win. And go off together into our Disney World.

I've been exposed to a lot of precious people. I like the word precious very much. It's what Gennifer called her internalized
me
, her buried little honey pot, her hidden feelings. Truth to tell, Pookie was the most precious I've met. Pookie wanted to eat me alive. Billy would buy lingerie with her and I'd start to feel instinctively grandiose.

We've always been suckers for clothes. Thongs. String bikinis. Monokinis. Hot pants. Leotards. Body stockings. Wet T-shirts. Armholes. Chunky zippers. Dog collars. He'd have Pookie move around in bed wearing her white nightie with the garter belt. All the time she did that, he was holding on to me like I were a snake on meth. Then he turned me intrusively loose inside her precious and I felt obsessively, compulsively grandiose.

The things that happened between her precious and me constituted a monumental impropriety. Don't just take my word for it; look at what happened to Pookie after me and Billy. Pookie went on to have a total body experience with a
world-champion rodeo rider
, Larry Mahan, who sure knew a great ride when he saw one. That was
after
she left riding partner Evel Knievel, who was used to jet-engine Harley hogs under his loins. Then she married a man named Finis Shellnut—I'm not kidding, really—whose willard she calls “Big Tex.”

But Pookie hurt my feelings when she went public. She talked about Billy's “overheated eye contact” and how she liked Billy's lips, especially “the way that bottom lip kind of turned to the side as he spoke.”
Spoke
? With Pookie, Billy, and me, it wasn't about “speaking.” It wasn't about lips. It wasn't about Pookie and Billy. It was about
me
.

It was about the overheated one-eye contact I was having with her precious. To hear her tell it, it was about the lace teddy she was wearing and the scented candles in the room. It wasn't about that. It was about
me, me, me
and Pookie's precious. I loved Pookie's precious! I couldn't get enough of Pookie's precious! Pookie's precious was paradise! Now, alas, paradise lost.

Billy frightened me with Hilla for a while, but I quickly learned he meant to have the Hun for himself, not me. Even when he was engaged to her, we were cheating with someone else's precious and we were cheating on that someone else's precious with a third precious, living a precious life . . . . I didn't mind that he kept Hilla mostly away from me. I knew in my capillaries that Hilla didn't like me. She was full of hostility toward me. I had zero interest in doing inner therapy with her. I thought she viewed me as some kind of necessary and traumatic self-punishment.

I just didn't feel I belonged in there. It was a dry and cold place. I sensed she always had another hidden agenda, and I wasn't interested in probing her underlying issues. I kept worrying she'd hurt me somehow. But Billy seemed to sense this, too, and didn't call on me more than two or three times a year. Maybe, to be frank, the problem is that Hilla's precious has a self-worth as big as mine. Maybe Hilla's precious wants exactly the same attention that Billy has gotten me so used to during the years. Maybe Hilla's precious wants to be me with people kneeling at
her
feet.

Then there was Monica. I think, had it all turned out differently, I could've had a lot of fun with her. Beverly Hills girl, you know. Orange ice wigs. Silk scarves. Handcuffs. Mirrors. Poppers. Altoids. Dirty jokes. All of that. Pookie in training maybe. Get rid of the baby fat, the helmet, and I had visions of sugarplums, ice, and hot candle wax dancing in my head. She was a young woman with great interpersonal, inappropriate potential. I liked Monica, standing there stark naked in boots. I liked her fleshpot lips. And Billy, no surprise, liked her hooters.

Billy and his thing for balloon-bread ba-ba-zoom hooters! When we were kids, peaches, tomatoes, cantaloupes, and eggplant turned us on. Going to the grocery store meant a change of underwear. A melon patch was an orgy. In those days, of course, he'd notice something,
anything
, and I'd try to jump out of his pants. A big juicy tomato. A rare steak. The smell of fresh catfish. The curves on a Cadillac car. The carburetor in a Cadillac car. Courtesans on their way to church in Hot Springs. The minister's daughter in Hot Springs. The minister's wife in Hot Springs. The smell of rain in Hot Springs.
Anything
. Anything at all, and Billy and I would be off to play. Good days. Fun times. Lots of laughs. Lots of showers. Lots of underwear.

Not like now, when they're trashing me everywhere and for the first time in my life I'm worried about sags in my self-esteem. They say I'm too small and point out that Marla Maples calls the Donald's “Trump Tower.” Well, I'm not too small. I'm not a seven-footer carried around by Shinto priests or one of those Jamaican purple creepers or Long Dong Silver. But from what Truman Capote said, I'm probably bigger than Jack's or Bobby's . . . not as big as LBJ's, who called his “Jumbo.” They whisper slanderously about pimples and warts and God knows what pus-filled whatnots. They make me sound like some sort of Frankenpenis hunched to the side or humpbacked.

I have to hear about my supposed afflictions on talk radio. Can you imagine being
me
and hearing about myself on talk radio? (I've never wanted fame—to be displayed at the Smithsonian like John Dillinger's; to be kept in a bottle and sold like Napoléon's.) They accuse me of wearing a Winnie the Pooh tattoo like Michael Jackson or being imbedded with a pump like that big action-movie star. Dirty-minded lies. The politics of personal destruction taken to a new high or low (depending on my mood).

Please! I'm healthy and all-American! I've always been user-friendly, equal-opportunity, global, and all-inclusive. I'm from Arkansas, for Jiminy's sake! I know Billy sometimes acts like I'm from Missouri, the Show Me State. But I'm not. I don't have any pimples or warts. I don't wear any Disney tattoos. I don't have any pumps. Billy doesn't have to moan “Squeeze me! Squeeze me!” to get me to stand up on my own two . . . I've been traumatized by all this. Maybe Billy needs to find me a warm and friendly (and moist) support group to help me.

He's hurt me, too. No, not
that
way—I'm used to his touch; I've grown accustomed to his pace. But with his words and with that one single, unforgettable intrusive action. Why did he have to talk about me as a worn-out old organ, able only to pee twenty times a day? (Even that wouldn't be my fault; it's not fun being hostage to your prostate.) Why did he have to humiliate me by putting that cigar where I so badly wanted to go? Why did he allow his cigar and not me to be total with Monica's totality?

I was unzipped, externalized, watching when he did that. Why didn't he keep me zipped, instead of making me so undignifiedly drool at the sight of the cigar inside the object of my turgid emotions? Why did he force me to watch him put the cigar there, as he later forced Monica to watch as he projected me over that rudely inappropriate sperm bank of a sink? What an awful, hurtful thing to do to your dearest and oldest friend, who's never let you down, who's risen to every occasion, even in those challenging Oxford years, when I was sleep-deprived but grandly functioning
all the time
.