Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“The more attention my campaign gets, the greater chance there is that you’ll hear from the media. You know, portrait of the candidate as a young law student and professor. I know I wasn’t a perfect boyfriend, but we always had real respect for each other, and if you’re game to talk about me fondly, and about just how long I’ve been committed to making the American dream a reality for everyone, someone as articulate and successful as you is someone voters will listen to.”

  “I’d need to think about it,” I said. “That sounds kind of—well, personal. I’ve heard from journalists before about you. This is going back awhile, but there was a reporter from the Gazette and a few years later from the Democrat. I told them no comment.”

  “I’ll bet it was Danny Griffith from the Gazette,” he said. “Journalists can be real sons of bitches. Some of them are smart, but Jesus God do they like to roll around in the dirt.”

  I didn’t remember the name of either reporter—one had reached out in 1980, a few months after Bill had been sworn in as governor, and another a few years later—but the first had explained that he was working on a piece about Bill, his family, and his personal relationships. When I’d said Bill and I hadn’t been in touch for five years, the reporter had said fair enough, but it was his understanding that I was for Bill the one who got away. The reporter had said this in an upbeat way, without regard for how it might crack apart my heart. In any case, I’d wondered if an article about Bill’s “family and personal relationships” was an investigation into infidelity. The topic wasn’t written about as frankly in 1980 as it would be later—the implosion of Gary Hart’s 1988 campaign seemed to mark the real sea change—but the press didn’t entirely look the other way, even then.

  “I know what you mean about discussing personal subjects,” Bill was saying. “But don’t underestimate the impact you could have, especially with other working women. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how impressed I was by your involvement in Harold Washington’s election.”

  How many people did Bill interact with every day, speaking by phone or shaking their hands or making eye contact as they sat in an audience? Did he feel happy with his life? Did he miss me at all? Was there enough time or space in the days of a governor planning a presidential run, enough repose, to miss a girlfriend from sixteen years earlier?

  He added, “If you ever find yourself in my neck of the woods, it’d be an honor to give you a tour of the governor’s mansion.”

  What if I had known when we were a couple that someday, when we were both in our forties, Bill would say over the phone that it’d be an honor to give me a tour of the governor’s mansion? Would it have devastated me or made me laugh?

  “Thanks,” I said. “And good luck in your quest to become leader of the free world.”

  He chuckled. “Some people might say you’ve got to be either stupid or crazy. You don’t have to weigh in on which. I’m off now to deliver a speech to a hog farmers association, but if you have thoughts or questions, don’t hesitate to be in touch. If you want to bounce ideas off someone before talking to a reporter, I’m sure you remember Nick Chess from Yale, right? He’s my media guy now.” I hadn’t seen Nick for longer than I hadn’t seen Bill, but I’d heard through the grapevine that he’d gone to work for Bill.

  I said, “I have a pretty clear idea of what to say and not say to reporters.”

  “No, of course. You’ve always had great horse sense. Hey, speaking of Yale, did you know Clarence Thomas? I think I met him a time or two.”

  “I have no memory of him, but Gwen thinks he’s awful.”

  “There’s no doubt he could do some serious damage. You’re still in touch with the Greenbergers?”

  “I just stayed with them in Washington.”

  “Gwen never liked me, did she?” If this was possible, Bill sounded both amused and sad. But the truth was that he did not seem haunted by me, by us. And that of course had been the other reason he might have been calling, the first one that had occurred to me upon hearing his voice on my answering machine: that he’d realized I was the love of his life. That even though we were now middle-aged and he’d married someone else and had children with her, I was the person he’d never stopped thinking about. To be told instead that I had great horse sense—I can’t pretend that it was any consolation.

  * * *

  —

  I lived in the Streeterville neighborhood, on East Lake Shore Drive, and I could see Lake Michigan from my living room and bedroom. I’d bought the apartment the year after getting tenure, and when I’d shown it to my parents, my father had said, “Someone certainly thinks she deserves the finer things.” When my call with Bill ended, I walked from the kitchen to the living room, looked out at the vastness of the lake, and felt resentful.

  With the Fourth of July behind me and eight weeks before the school year began, I had planned to renew my focus this morning on the casebook I was writing with a friend at Cornell; I wanted to finish a draft by the end of the summer. Now I felt distracted and injured. From the moment I’d stepped into my apartment and heard his message the night before, Bill Clinton had defined my mood, and I had let him. And good God, what if he was elected president? I’d see him in the news every day, watching as he was sworn in on a Bible, as Air Force One touched down on runways in Tokyo and Brussels, as he spoke from behind a podium in the Rose Garden. As he, Bill Clinton, the man who’d broken my heart and endlessly delighted me and once given me an orgasm on an Arkansas highway, was addressed as “Mr. President.”

  Surely, if he was elected, some form of exposure therapy would occur in which I began to perceive him as the national leader rather than my ex-boyfriend. But I no longer felt what I had at Yale or in Arkansas, which had been not just a belief in his talents but an investment in that belief. It was far from clear to me that I hoped he’d succeed. Back when we’d been a couple, I’d thought he was wonderful and brilliant, and I’d loved thinking so. Yet, was he wonderful and brilliant? Was he now, had he ever been? Had he changed in the last decade and a half, and if so, how? I was confident, based on our conversation, that he’d still be good company to sit next to at a dinner party, especially if he was trying to extract a favor. But as president, would he be ethically casual, irresponsibly magnanimous, vulnerable to his enemies due to weaknesses that he erroneously believed he could conceal or at least be forgiven for? Besides that, did he have any shot at unseating George Bush, whose approval ratings were around 70 percent? I had heard that other Democrats who might run included Bill Bradley, Al Gore, and Mario Cuomo, but the only person who’d declared so far was the former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas.

  No more than a minute or two had passed since I’d hung up the phone. I returned to the kitchen, lifted the receiver, and called Maureen. When she answered, I said, “Is this a bad time?”

  “I’m standing in my mudroom watching my kids fight over an inflatable raft in the pool.”

  “Do you need to go outside?”

  “Maybe. What are you doing?”

  “Bill Clinton just called to say he’s running for president and he wants me to tell reporters how great he is.”

  “Wait, really?” Maureen said. “Oh, geez. Are you okay?”

  “Those weren’t the words he used.”

  “I know everyone thought it was his destiny, but it’s wild that he’s actually running. Can he win?”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  “Do you wish you were married to him?”

  I hesitated. “No?” I added, “Although sometimes I wish I were married to someone.”

  “Well, there are plenty of someones who wish they were married to you. I’m sure if you wanted a mediocre marriage like the rest of us, you could have it.” After eighteen years together, Maureen often complained that Steve didn’t appreciate her or everything she did to take care of their children and make their household function. At the same time, she was can
did, at least with me, about how she liked being able to send the kids to private school and to ski in Colorado over spring break—though she hadn’t worked as a nurse since becoming a mother, Steve had risen through the ranks at LaSalle Bank. Now her youngest, Meredith, was seven, Johnny was fourteen, and Stevie was sixteen.

  I said, “I’m really grateful for everything I have.” I thought of my students, my positions on the boards of the League of Women Voters and a Chicago organization that provided services to young adults in foster care, my Election Day work. “Things are good almost all of the time,” I continued. “But every so often this gaping hole of loneliness opens up.”

  “Sometimes a gaping hole of loneliness opens up while I’m in the same room with my husband and children,” Maureen said. “Sometimes it opens up while Meredith is literally sitting on me.” Then she yelled, “Johnny, I can see you! Do you know that I can see you? Leave your sister alone.” Talking to me again, she said, “Sorry, where were we? Oh, right, gaping loneliness. So should I vote for Bill or not?”

  “He has the primary to get through before we need to worry about that. If you were me, would you say nice things about him to reporters?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” I was surprised by her certainty.

  “Why would you?”

  “I think if he could have controlled his behavior, he would have.”

  “Do people ever say that when a woman does the things he did?”

  I sighed. “If I make myself work for a few hours, can I come over around five with a bottle of wine?”

  I could hear Maureen smiling through the phone. She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

  * * *

  —

  In February 1976, eight months after I’d left Fayetteville, a letter from Barbara Overholt had arrived at my apartment in Chicago. Bill has been dating a woman named Sarah Grace Hebert, and I think he’ll propose to her soon, Barbara had written. I wanted you to hear this from someone who cares about both of you.

  I was living then in an apartment in Lincoln Park, with a roommate who was a friend of Maureen’s. That night, as soon as I’d made my nest, I began a reply to Barbara, but in the act of writing, I realized that I couldn’t commit to paper any of the questions I wanted to ask; whether this reluctance stemmed from my training as a lawyer or from the questions’ patheticness was hard to say. The first was What’s she like? The second was Does it seem like he loves her as much as he loved me? and the third was Is he faithful to her?

  After leaving Arkansas, I had, of course, been heartbroken. As I’d driven north, I had wondered what to tell people when they asked why Bill and I had broken up—surely I couldn’t say it was because he’d cheated, let alone because he may have sexually assaulted someone—and it was in western Ohio that I’d realized I was wondering why we’d broken up. Had it been the woman’s accusation, or Bill’s warning? If I believed that the woman and Bill had had some kind of physical encounter, did I believe that it had been against her will? On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I understood suddenly that I was freed from deciding what I believed. If I was no longer his girlfriend, and never his wife, I was not responsible for his behavior, not even by extension. This absolution was my reward for losing him; in the years to come, it sometimes seemed like the only reward. As it happened, nobody ever asked me why Bill and I had broken up, even the people who expressed sympathy.

  Thirty-six hours after I’d departed from Fayetteville, I arrived at Gwen and Richard’s house in New Haven. I stayed for a week on their third floor, sleeping in a single bed and walking down steep steps to the second floor to use the twins’ bathroom, where both the toilet and the tiles were splattered with their little-boy urine. I spent several days in bed, weeping and shocked, and when she got home from the hospital in the late afternoon, Gwen would rub my back and say, “This is the best decision you’ve ever made. Now your life belongs to you again.”

  I’d had the idea that I’d either resume working for Gwen or get a job in Washington. But I quickly understood that New Haven was haunted, filled with places and people who reminded me of Bill. Though Washington would be less so, I’d still constantly see people who knew both of us, and, as Bill continued to run for elections, he’d visit often and possibly move there. When I reached out to the impeachment inquiry colleague who’d mentioned that law schools were recruiting female professors, he’d referred me to his sister, who’d referred me to her contact at the Association of American Law Schools. I quickly interviewed at Harvard, Penn, and Northwestern. When I accepted the job at Northwestern, it wasn’t because it was close to my family, although there was a certain poignance to its being the place my mother hadn’t been allowed to attend; but really, it was because I hadn’t been offered the positions at Harvard or Penn.

  I’d settled in Chicago by late August, started teaching in September, and soon developed a pattern of seeing my parents and Maureen’s family on the weekends. I took up jogging and joined both the local League of Women Voters chapter and a Bible study group at the Methodist church in my neighborhood. I was conscious that fall of forcing myself, going through the motions; routinely, something that was only moderately sad would bring me to tears, and I’d have to hide in an empty hallway or a bathroom stall.

  Sometimes I thought of Bill with sincere distaste, believing I’d dodged a bullet. Other times, I felt sympathy for both of us, for our almost-compatibility. Surely we had both done our best and tried our hardest. And at yet other times, and this emotion felt the truest and the rawest, I just missed him desperately. If he had shown up in my office or knocked on the door of my apartment, I’d have tossed aside all principle and logic for his smile and his voice, his hands, his smell, his complicated, unpredictable intelligence, and the way his body felt against mine. If I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t, why not keep having sex with him, even if I was sharing him with other women? I was certain that Tennyson was wrong about it being better to have loved and lost, because now I knew what I was missing. Perhaps, after all, I should have attended Harvard Law.

  Because we had talked about everything, everything reminded me of him: Linda Ronstadt’s new album and my roommate’s recipe for savory crêpes and the colleague who told me family law was a second-rate area of study and President Ford’s decision to posthumously restore Robert E. Lee’s citizenship. Even in his absence, Bill remained the most interesting person with whom to discuss any book or breaking news or small moment of absurd behavior on the part of a friend, acquaintance, family member, or stranger.

  And then, on Christmas Eve, as I drove my Buick from Lincoln Park to my parents’ house to attend church with them, I became aware that I hadn’t thought of Bill in a few days. This had to be a double achievement in light of the fact that I’d once believed I’d spend all my future Christmases with him.

  On that February night when I received Barbara’s letter, by the time it occurred to me to call her, it was 9:35, which seemed on the cusp of but not actually too late. I kept my address book in the drawer of a desk in my bedroom, and I rose from my nest to retrieve it.

  It was oddly heartening to hear her voice; it reminded me how much I liked her. We chatted a little—she said she was traveling over spring break to see her sister—before she said, “I take it you got my letter.”

  “I did. Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t mean to put you in an awkward position.”

  “I’ll answer any questions you have. I didn’t know how much you’d want to know.”

  I took a deep breath. “What’s she like?”

  “She’s soft-spoken. Sweet. She grew up in Texarkana, and she’s a second-grade teacher. I wouldn’t say she’s the most worldly person.”

  “How old is she?”

  “I think twenty-three or twenty-four.”

  At the time we were having this conversa
tion, I was twenty-eight.

  “I’d say she looks up to Bill,” Barbara continued. “I suspect he’s the first person she’s met with political ambition.”

  No doubt it would have been more upsetting if he’d found another woman with a law degree, or a woman who’d graduated from Vassar or Mount Holyoke.

  “What does she look like?” I laughed self-consciously and said, “Just to be really shallow.”

  “She has light-red hair and I’d say she’s not gorgeous but attractive. She’s petite.”

  “Meaning short or thin or both? Is this too stupid for you to answer?”

  “It’s not too stupid. And both—short and thin. She’s small, and he’s so tall that she looks tiny next to him.”

  “How did they meet?”

  “They were at a new pizzeria by campus one night last fall. My impression is that she was there with her parents.”

  On the one hand, didn’t this mean that Bill had thought she was very pretty, as opposed to just ordinarily pretty? On the other hand, did a woman need to be very pretty to catch Bill’s eye? And, though some men might have been reluctant to hit on a woman whose parents were present, Bill probably wasn’t one of them.

  I said, “And you think he’s going to propose, which must mean—they must be serious.”

  Barbara’s tone was infinitely sympathetic as she said, “Hillary, they’re engaged already. It happened the same day I mailed the letter.”

  How could I have been surprised, how could I receive this news as a fresh blow, when it was the very reason we were speaking? But I was, I did—right away, I felt worse. Quietly, I said, “Wow.”

  “I do think he’s fond of her,” Barbara said. “I imagine he also wants to get things squared away before he announces he’s running for AG. And there’s more.” Barbara paused. “She’s pregnant. I’ll bet he would have proposed anyway, but this gave him extra incentive.”

  The ample evidence of his ability to continue without me—oh, how it stung.