The First Affair (5 page)

Unable to see, I heard it first. His breathing. Tight and irregular. A wheeze—like dying. “Sir?” I don’t know how I knew that the form standing in the shadow outside the sliver of light was him, and not Singh, but I did.

“Shut the door,” he spoke on the inhale.

“It’s Jamie, the intern from Scheduling, and—”

“I know.”

“Do you need me to call someone?”

“Shut the door.”

I did, stepping in, and not out as he maybe—probably—meant, confining us in the windowless black. I had no idea what room we were in. “Do you need an inhaler?” I asked. I felt the darkness move and moved toward it. “Sir?”

“No.”

I took another step. I could smell him now, the vestiges of cologne, a faint sweat. I felt a hand brush my leg and dropped the papers. I reached out and he clasped it, hard enough to hurt.

“Sir? Are you having a panic attack?” I knew what that was. “Sir?”

“Greg.”

“Greg.” The syllable. Technically a correction. But also an invitation, one he would explain months later, that allowed me to say, “Breathe. Through your nose.” I felt him buck. “I know. It feels like you’ll die. Like you won’t be able to draw enough air in, but it’ll actually force everything to calm. Trust me.” I took an exaggerated breath through my nostrils, adding my other hand to his. “Greg?” I heard him try, his fingers crushing mine. “That’s good,” I whispered.
“That’s good. You’re doing good.” His grip relaxed, his breathing slowed.

It took me a few moments of us standing like that—in the perfect darkness—to realize he was crying.

“It’s okay,” I said, like I would to a little boy, though I didn’t really know that it was. Or probably knew that we weren’t anywhere in the vicinity. “It’s okay.”

His hand pulled slowly into himself, not letting mine go. I took a step, permitting my body to make contact with his.

Then, sensing a second tacit invitation, I allowed my head to tip, coming to rest against his chest, the worn cotton of his shirt damp from his perspiration. We stood like that, breathing in tandem, the world outside on pause. His other arm wrapped around me. I knew his face was tilting down and I let mine tilt up. When his lips contacted mine they were wet and salty.

I was so outside myself. I wanted to tell him to stop so I could catch up enough to actually be there in his kiss, but I also knew once he stopped that this moment—this astonishing moment—would become a strange shard in my past.

“Fruity.” He pulled away to murmur his first word in the after of whatever this was.

“TUMS.”

“The Binaca of Washington.”

“My grandfather used Binaca,” I said, immediately cringing.

We heard the phone ring on the other side of the wall. “Shit.” He abruptly stepped back, leaving me off-balance, a chair-rail molding hitting my hip. “I have to . . .”

“Of course.”

He opened the other door, and I could see a slice of the eagle’s wing in the Oval Office carpet. We squinted. “You can . . .” He indicated the door I had come in.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He nodded, and then it was dark once more.

I didn’t linger. I returned straight to his private dining room, glancing briefly in a sterling candelabra to smooth my hair before shutting the light off. Then, instead of barreling back into Singh’s office, I took
the door that opened onto the public hallway that ran parallel to the private rooms I’d just invaded.

Brooke was approaching, her arms piled with briefs.

We both froze. Her expression was inscrutable.

Stalled subways, spilled drinks, a few extra seconds fixing my hair—what would it have taken?

The papers.
“Shit,” I said out loud.

Suddenly I heard footsteps pounding behind us in the hallway. Rutland overtook us, striding a few feet on to Singh’s returned assistant, tossing the binder with the red rubber band inside—“Have him sign off on these and get ’em to Margaret ASAP.” He pivoted and walked right past as if I were invisible.

I watched Brooke look from his departing back to me, the way something in a terrarium snaps down its furry meal, as she processed that the President was finishing the errand I’d been tasked.

I found control of my feet and walked back to the pen.

That night none of us went home.

I kept my face away from Brooke’s, glued to numbers I couldn’t make sense of, names that blurred, my mind stuck as I found myself gripping my own hand under the desk to understand the pressure of his fingers. Trying to pinpoint where his terror had led him to kiss me like I was a sip of water in sun-blasted sand. I felt the nuclear sensation of, if only for a few heartbeats, being the answer for the man to whom the world looked for answers. As I sat there, the very high of his need was key-cutting into my brain.

Just past dawn I was taking another swig of tepid coffee as someone called at the TV, “Turn that up!” It would be the clip eventually viewed over seventy million times on YouTube, but that was the first time anyone saw it: the Majority Leader giving that impromptu interview to a fan with a cell phone. Unlike Rutland, he looked like he’d just strolled off the fairway. “It doesn’t surprise me that he’s made us wait a week,” he blustered, even though
he
was the one refusing to come to the table, buoyed by the rising tide of popular sentiment. “And he should be forced to wait
another
week,” he said in a hairpin turn of logic toward the truth of his own inaction. “It would serve him right. He’s inconsiderate. He once forced me to leave Air Force
One by the back door. We never got a thank-you note for that copy of
Moby-Dick
we gave his son, and he has
never
invited me to Camp David. He’s just rude.”

We all know what happened next. Public opinion whiplashed so fast even Fox couldn’t spin it. And to this day you can’t Google him without getting a picture of his head on a baby’s body.

I snuck out so I could be at Ann Taylor when they opened. I charged one perfectly cut suit and a blouse with darts. I vowed to get a really great haircut and new makeup. Because I was following the evaporating trail of a cigarette down the street that I wanted to inhale again.

I walked back through security, thinking I looked like a high-powered attorney, my old suit and Gail’s blouse balled in my bag.

“There she is,” Brooke said flatly.

“Here I am,” I replied brightly. “I had a job interview,” I added to explain my makeover.

“So you didn’t hear?” she asked as I realized she was clearing the administrative drifts on her desk into a box.

“Hear what?”

“All right then,” Margaret said, making her way through the room, collecting the all-access passes from the interns. “Back to the basement.”

I looked up at CNN’s confirming ticker—and just like that, it was over.

Chapter Three

June 24

I wasn’t going to tell. Ever. I had decided minutes after the furlough ended, when I abruptly knew for certain that this was a contained experience, that I was going to keep an unmade promise to an absent man. There was no way for me to let him know that he didn’t need to be afraid of my telling, but he didn’t. Because I couldn’t imagine disrespecting the searing memory of his lips searching out mine that lit something deep inside me every time I replayed it. Each day my silence would build his trust. Then years from now he would pause somewhere, reading in a beach chair or rising in a ski lift, and think,
wow, that Jamie, I could really rely on her. I wish I’d let her in more. I needed her and she was perfect.

And I felt important.

But then Lena came to visit a week later and I grossly underestimated the friendship deprivation tank that I’d been living in. Add the lubrication of a split bottle of white at the Indian place and, well—it popped out while we were standing in the midst of a throng of Adams Morgan bar-hoppers. Her frozen yogurt dripped onto her knuckles as she just stood there, slack-jawed. We stared at each other with wide, inebriated eyes. “Holy shit.” She dropped her voice while the suited revelers parted to pass us on the sidewalk. “You’re being serious right now.”

I wiped my napkin across her fingers, wishing I could suck the last few seconds back. “Let’s ditch these and see if we can get one of those guys to buy us a drink?” I proposed, a technique I’d used in the past to move the conversation off things I suddenly regretted bringing up, like my dad punching a wall parents’ weekend.

“Nuh-uh.” Lena withdrew her hand. “No way are we just returning to our evening.” Spotting a garbage can, she grabbed my cone and tossed it along with hers while I flashed to coming upon Greg, the sound of his labored breath. She turned back to me. “How?”

I shook my head as the mental sparkler I’d burned to the point of dust reignited. “I don’t even know.” The strip was at full throttle. It was the last place to be having this conversation that I never should have started. Girls burst from the bar behind us on the pulse of a throbbing bass. Giggling, they attempted to ballast each other.

“You did—
that
—and you didn’t tell me for a
week
?” Lena crossed her arms while I rubbed my sticky skin with sticky napkins. “I’ve been talking so much about my middle-school crush’s best friend hugging me at a bar that I’m actually
hoarse
and you’ve been sitting on
this
.”

“I’m sorry!”

“I feel like we’re going to be all face-lifted in our rocking chairs and you’re going to, I don’t know, slip in that you had a kid I never heard about.”

“God.” I shuddered. “No. I only want the kids you will hear about.”

“I’m being serious.”

“Lena.”

“No, you do this all the time. I tell you everything, every fucking thing.”

“I tell—”

“No, you talk and you’re the one with all the funny stories and everyone thinks you put it all out there, but then there are certain things where you do this weird look-over-here—when it comes to family—guys—and I’ve been thinking about it—”

“You’ve been thinking about it?”

“Don’t you trust me?” Her brown eyes searched mine. This was the last thing I wanted. It was, in retrospect, an unfortunate moment for Lena to hit her wall. I told her that I did trust her, because I did—because she was my most important person—and then I had to prove it.

“We ended up in the private hallway that connects the Oval Office to his dining room and he kissed me.”

“Holy. Shit.” She lifted her hands to her cheeks.

“Yeah.”

“Holy. Shit.”

I nodded, the wine swinging my head into a deeper dip.

“We need to—I don’t know what—get more drinks. And candy.”

I pulled her in for a hug and begged her to just come live with me and follow me around everywhere. “Please? We’re rent-free, and I’ll pay you in cheap Indian food.”

“One, nothing is free when it comes to my mother, and, b, stop stalling.” She weaved her arm though mine to direct us toward the nearest liquor store, our flip-flops flapping in unison.

• • •

The next morning we were too hung over to venture out and made do pillaging Gail’s frozen flax waffles while I helped Lena play through whether this was the right moment to quit smoking. (It wasn’t.) We camped with the balcony doors open, the frigid and humid air canceling each other out. “You know this makes us bad people, right?” Lena called from the kitchen.

I reminded her that I’d once embarrassingly insisted we not only compost in our dorm room, but use one roll of toilet paper for a week. “I think our carbon footprint can sustain a little wasted AC.”

“Jamie?” She came to the doorway, finishing off a spoonful of peanut butter.

“Yeah?” I asked from the couch.

“You hooked up with the President of the United States.”

“Kissed. ‘Hooked up’ is an exaggeration.”

“The President of the United States knows that you taste—”

“Don’t.”

“Fruity.”

“Ugh.” I dropped my face into my magazine until I heard her resume foraging in the fridge. This was the only detail I had given her beyond the kiss, and while I didn’t love myself for it, I felt I had told her only the part of what transpired that was mine. Nonetheless, I was relieved to hear her phone from the bedroom. “Is that Kelly Clarkson? Someone’s calling you!”

“
Shitshitshit
.” She careened past me and answered in the grown-up register previously reserved for professors.

“What? Oh my God, what’s wrong?” I asked when she reappeared.

“The Tuesday client meeting got bumped up and they want me to come in right fucking now.”

“ ‘They’?”

“
She
wants me to come in.”

“Does your boss know you’re on the other side of the country?”

Lena shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But we had the rest of the day!” I felt a childish sense of panic.

“Jamie, seriously?”

“What? I’m just—”

“This is my job.” She crossed her arms.

“I know.”

“I mean—”

“What?” I said quickly, but we both knew the thoughts that hung between us. That I didn’t have a job being the kindest. That I made out with my boss’s boss’s boss, the harshest.

“Nothing, just—I need to check flights. I’m sorry.”

• • •

I tagged along to National because my revised plan of reading
Gone Girl
and changing toenail polish could accommodate the scheduling addition. Slithering her suitcase at full speed around the dawdlers, dressed in the Escada suit she’d wear directly from the airport to the office, Lena looked like she’d fly the plane herself if they let her. Jogging alongside her, dressed in the sweater hoodie and cutoffs that I would wear directly back to an empty apartment, I looked like her assistant. At best.

With a few minutes to spare before she passed through security, we found chairs across from the monitors. I sipped from my water bottle and we reminisced about when we had everything we needed within a two-block radius—food, post office, library. How an ID swipe granted us access to all of it.

She pointed to where my phone lit up beside me with a text from Mike’s number. As this was the last moment I wanted to finally tell her
about him, I dropped it in my bag. It had been over between us for so long by college that I’d never mentioned him and as I sat there, I acknowledged to myself that Lena was right. When people talked about high school, about firsts, I’d found it was easier to say nothing at all.