American Wife (61 page)

I push off the sheet and duvet and stand, wrapping my arms around Charlie and inhaling the scent of his neck and shoulders. “You smell very clean,” I say. I reach for the slim leather folder on his nightstand and open it. These folders—an identical one is on my nightstand—contain our schedules for the day. Before we go to bed, we each receive both our own and each other’s.

On his plate today: intelligence and FBI briefings, a late-morning speech at a conference for small-business leaders in Columbus, Ohio, a fund-raising luncheon in Buffalo, and a meeting with his economic advisers back in the Oval Office this afternoon, before and after which he’ll make calls on Ingrid Sanchez’s behalf. Tonight at eight o’clock there is a White House gala titled “Students and Teachers Salute Alice Blackwell,” which I find quite embarrassing. As Hank reminded me when he got me to agree to it in April, Charlie’s approval ratings have dipped to 32 percent, while mine rest at 83 percent; I am allegedly the second most admired woman in the United States, just behind Oprah Winfrey. (Ridiculous as it is, this ranking is hardly the most ridiculous aspect of my life.) “Reminding Americans how much they love you reminds them they love the president,” Hank told me. “You’ll be taking one for the team, and all you have to do is show up and pretend you have an ego like the rest of us.”

Charlie glances at his schedule, then pulls mine from beneath it. “You’re not traveling today, are you?”

I shake my head. “The breast-cancer panel is in Arlington.”

“A titty summit, huh?” Charlie grins. “Need any help performing a self-exam?”

“Get dressed.” I push him away and turn to make our bed, a habit I’ve been told the maids find hilarious, but one I can’t suppress. Prior to our arrival over six years ago, the sheets in the residence were changed daily, but I requested, so as not to waste water, that they be changed no more than once a week, even for Charlie and me.

He reappears a few minutes later in a white oxford shirt, a charcoal suit, and a red tie marked with tiny yellow dots. “You look nice,” I say.

“You excited to be the belle of the ball tonight?”

Dryly, I say, “I’m beside myself.”

“You’re not dreading it, are you? Lindy, you deserve to be recognized. People have no idea how much you’ve done not just for the administration but for the country.”

This is a way of talking I don’t care for, talking as you’d hope others might talk about you, believing your press, or what you wish were your press. Though in public, I try to graciously accept both compliments and criticism, in the privacy of my head, I avoid giving myself credit for vague achievements tied to my position—for being a role model, for showing leadership—and at the same time, I don’t blame myself for the broad general failures for which I am held responsible by my detractors. To others, I am a symbol; to myself, I have only ever been me.

I set my hands on Charlie’s shoulders, and we lean in and give each other a minty, toothpastey kiss. “Ella gets in around four, and I have to give a tour to a third-grade choir after that, but otherwise, I hope she and I will get to relax,” I say. (That our daughter is coming home for tonight’s gala is, in my opinion, its main benefit; though I try not to crowd her, I adore when she visits.) “If you want us to come and say hi, if you have a spare minute, have Michael call up.”

“Wyatt’s not coming with her?” Wyatt is Ella’s boyfriend of a year and a half. They both work as investment analysts at Goldman Sachs in Manhattan, and Charlie likes to play tennis with Wyatt because Wyatt is good enough to be challenging but not so good that Charlie can’t have the pleasure of beating a man half his age.

I say, “Well, Ella leaves again tomorrow, so it’s such a short visit. Will you have a good day today and be careful?” I say this to Charlie every morning. You would think—I would have thought—there would be an entirely different vocabulary that a president and a first lady would use, one that encompassed the constant possibility of national or international disaster, the weight of a country. And there’s White House jargon—FLOTUS and pool spray and “the football”—but it turns out that for the most part, we make do with the same words we’ve always used.

“I love you, Lindy,” Charlie says. It is six-twenty, and from here, he will go for breakfast in the Family Dining Room, where Hank and Debbie Bell, a senior adviser, will be waiting for him; they meet daily and call themselves the Oatmealers. From the dining room, Charlie will move on to the Oval Office for his briefings and then go directly to the South Lawn for the short ride on
Marine One
to Andrews Air Force Base and the longer plane flight to Columbus. (Punctuality has been a major point of pride with Charlie during both his administrations.)

He always reminds me in this early-morning moment of an actor going onstage, an insurance salesman, or perhaps the owner of the hardware store who landed the starring role in the community-theater production of
The Music Man.
Oh, how I want to protect him! Oh, the outlandishness of our lives, familiar now and routine, but still so deeply strange. “I love you, too,” I say.

____

THIS IS THE
part everyone already knows: that in the year 2000, Charlie won the presidential election by a narrower margin than any other candidate in U.S. history, that in fact his opponent received more popular votes while Charlie received more electoral ones; that the final decision was made by the Supreme Court, who voted 5–4 in Charlie’s favor; that at his inauguration in January 2001, he made a pledge to work in an inclusive, bipartisan fashion, a pledge I believe he intended to keep; that eight months later, terrorist attacks occurred in New York and Washington, D.C., killing close to three thousand Americans; that, first in October 2001 and again in March 2003, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of force against countries thought to be harboring terrorist leaders and weapons of mass destruction; that Charlie’s advisers and Charlie himself told the American people the war would be swift, that even as soon as six weeks after the March 2003 invasion, they assumed major combat operations were complete, as Charlie famously declared in a speech aboard a navy supercarrier, but that now, four years in, it is more bloody and chaotic than ever. Over three thousand American troops have died, the same number killed in the terrorist attacks, and close to twenty-five thousand have been wounded. As for foreign civilians, estimates range from seventy thousand deaths to ten times that. Every day, there are car bombs and suicide bombs, gun-men shooting police officers, mortar strikes on homes and schools, sniper fire outside mosques, decapitations at checkpoints. These days, Charlie and his defenders speak of freedom, of reshaping a region and shifting an ideology, of finishing what they started instead of cutting and running; his critics speak of quagmires and civil war. Some of those who were once his defenders have become his critics.

When we went to sleep at four
A.M.
on November 8, 2000, I didn’t think Charlie had won the election, and I was both sorry for him and relieved for us, for our family. I hadn’t wanted him to run for governor of Wisconsin in 1994, and I hadn’t wanted him to run for president. What we’d mostly lost already—the option of shopping at the grocery store, quietly eating dinner at a restaurant, going for a walk alone or with a friend, or just spending a Saturday reading and cleaning the house, without obligations—I knew we’d lose completely if Charlie became president. I did not want the exposure, the forfeiture of our privacy and our last ties to ordinary life.

When the election wasn’t decided for over a month, we laid low in the governor’s mansion in Madison; I read, went to friends’ houses for lunch, and attended a few gatherings for groups I’d become involved with as first lady of Wisconsin, while Charlie and Hank Ucker and various advisers and lawyers and relatives held urgent, secretive meetings and avoided the media. When, on December 12, after recounts and lawsuits, Charlie was declared president, I thought,
We will ride it out.
There would be risks, but we’d ride out the presidency as we’d ride out a tornado watch: Keep your head down, cross your arms over the crown of your skull. Not literally, of course—literally, what I’d do would be to comply with all that was public and obligatory, to show up when I was expected to show up—but that was how I’d think of it. For at least four years and likely for eight, I’d hold my breath, waiting for it to pass, and eventually, it would. A tornado is disruptive, but it never lasts.

But I hadn’t considered—how could I not have?—the circumstances under which Charlie and I had gotten engaged. In the middle of a storm, he had left his apartment and climbed into his car and driven through the lightning and hail, he had swooped down the basement steps of the house I lived in and proposed marriage. He’d defied the tornado that day, not run from it. And look—it had worked. Here we were, still happily married all these years later.

What I had projected onto Charlie at the beginning of his presidency was my own wish not to cause a stir, not to attract undue attention or assert myself, when Charlie
enjoyed
asserting himself. I know there are those who suggest he, or some shadow entity of his administration, planned the terrorist attacks, and I consider such an idea ludicrous, unworthy of discussion. But it is indisputable that he responded; he took on the challenge. Did he conflate the terrorist attacks with the separate and lesser threats coming from the country we invaded in March 2003, when the attacks and the threats were then unconnected, and did he encourage the public to conflate them as well? Was the invasion only for oil, Charlie’s vows to spread democracy mere lip service? Was he quicker to enter a war than he would have been if he’d had military experience himself instead of having spent the late sixties and early seventies working as a ski instructor? These are accusations his opponents level at him, and while they are fair questions, what I dislike most about the political conversation is its pretense that a correct answer exists for anything, that it’s not all murkiness and subjectivity. I didn’t know in the days leading up to the March 2003 invasion whether I thought invading was right or wrong, I didn’t know if I agreed with the hawks or the protestors holding candlelight vigils. As in college, when I had neither supported nor condemned the Vietnam War, my inactivity stemmed from uncertainty rather than indifference. But not knowing what I thought, I did not try to influence my husband. There were plenty of people advising him, men and women (though mostly men) who’d spent decades as foreign policy experts, who in earlier times had traveled to this very country, met with this very dictator.

Now over four years have passed since the invasion. That a war once supported by 70 percent of Americans has become divisive and unpopular has served only to make Charlie more resolute; in the circular fashion of such things, it is about being resolute that he is most resolute of all. The average American doesn’t have access to the intelligence Charlie does, he points out; the average American has become coddled and forgetful, unaccustomed to bloodshed or sacrifice. Think of the Revolutionary War, Charlie says, think of the Civil War, think of World War II. There is a price we must pay for democracy, and it has always been so. Nine months ago, in September 2006, Charlie said at a press conference, “To withdraw right now would be to surrender, and I wouldn’t surrender even if Alice and Snowflake were the only ones left supporting me.” (Snowflake is, of course, our cat; he was also my “co-author” on
First Pet: What I’ve Seen from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
an indignity either increased or lessened, I’ve never been sure which, by the fact that though we shared credit and all proceeds went to a national literacy program, I wrote no more of the book than Snowflake did.)

Since Charlie’s inauguration, I have made endless calculations: We are 10 percent finished with his time in office. We have 394 weeks left. We have five and a half years. From the beginning, I assumed his reelection not because I wanted it but the opposite. It is what we most desire that we’re afraid to count on; it’s always so much easier to believe in an eventuality you’d rather avoid.

The speeches Charlie gives, and my own as well, the fund-raisers and the funerals, the state visits and the balls, the ribbon cuttings and the receiving lines and the hundreds of letters that I write and receive every week—I am always checking them off a great list, counting down. It’s not that I don’t enjoy any of the responsibilities I bear as first lady. I do, and I feel grateful. I’ve met legends of art and literature, kings and queens and chieftains and an emperor, I’ve visited sixty-four countries, sampled beluga blinis on a ship on the Neva River, ridden a camel at the pyramids of Giza, waded in the waters of Pangkor Laut (I didn’t swim, because I didn’t wish to appear in a bathing suit before the cameras). At the airport in Asmara, Eritrea, where I had traveled without Charlie, local women threw popcorn at me as a welcoming gesture; at an orphanage in Bangalore, I donned a sari and read
The Giving Tree
to the children, accompanied by a Kannada translator; and in Helsinki, after a marvelous evening of conversation and a feast of crayfish, reindeer meat, and cloudberry layer cake, I committed a faux pas I could blame only on jet lag by saying, in a public toast to Finland’s president, that I would always remember the kindness of the Swedish people. I have had the surreal experience of holding the Bible upon which my husband was sworn in as president (I was very moved, and at the same time, inappropriately, the line from the old folk song “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” which Ella had learned as a child, kept replaying in my head: “Without my Uncle Rat’s consent, I wouldn’t marry the president . . . ”), and I have had the equally surreal experience of returning to Theodora Liess Elementary School, where I’d worked in Madison, for the school’s rededication as the Alice Blackwell School. (I hoped that Theodora, the nineteenth-century daughter of a director of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad and herself an outspoken advocate of educating Ojibwe girls, would forgive me; to decline the school’s honor seemed impolite.)