Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  For all these reasons, I made an effort to sound pleasant. I said, “I know it’s been a while, but you remember how grueling the campaign trail is, don’t you? Long hours, bad sleep, unhealthy food? And there are people called journalists, whose job it is to record everything you say and to wait for one throwaway comment that comes out a little wrong and lead the news with it. Then at the next event, they’re shocked that you’re not happy to see them.”

  Bill’s tone was as congenial as mine. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think you were trying to intimidate me.”

  “I doubt that’s possible. These are just friendly reminders. The journalist creatures also like to dwell on the past. They have very long memories.”

  “You might find it hard to believe,” he said, “but I miss campaigning. I remember everything you’re saying, but there’s the fun, too. The camaraderie, the handshaking, the stories from all those real people. I’m sure we can agree that that side of things always came more naturally to me.”

  I ignored the slight. “It seems like you’re in a good place in your life,” I said. “I’m surprised you’d want to trade that away.”

  “Is it nice to enjoy the fruits of my labors? You bet it is. But there’s more to life than corporate boardrooms and protein smoothies. And you and I are no youngsters. It’s now or never.”

  “Obviously, you’ve always been drawn to service,” I said. “I don’t think you’ve ever really left it behind.” Of course I thought he’d left it behind, but I knew from Silicon Valley fundraisers that there was little a tech billionaire found more pleasing than the pretense that his innovations made life more equitable and meaningful. I added, “And that’s why I’d love to offer you a position in my administration. An ambassadorship, a cabinet role—you’d be a natural as secretary of education or HUD.”

  “Oh, Hillary.” He chuckled. “How very magnanimous of you.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Skip the drudgery, enjoy the perks. I’m in Davenport, Iowa, at this very moment. For dinner, I ate a cold burrito.”

  “You really do think I’ve become a princess, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure I have a handle on who you’ve become,” I said. “Because this nonsense about robust competition—do I need to remind you that that’s the perfect way to get Jeb Bush elected? Or Mitt Romney?” Though neither of them had yet announced, these were the expected Republican front-runners. “If you actually care about your legacy, help put the first woman president in office. Do it for Alexis and for 155 million other girls and women in this country. Don’t stand in my way.”

  “Says the woman who started her political career by cock-blocking Carol Moseley Braun.” His tone was still unruffled. “You know what?” he said. “You and I are going to have a lot of fun, and so are the American people. I always loved our discussions, and now the whole country will get to watch them in real time.”

  You asshole, I thought. You fucking asshole. Aloud, I said, “In that case, best of luck to you.”

  1998

  Eight months after I was sworn in as a senator, in January 1993, a letter from Barbara Overholt had arrived at my apartment in Chicago. It isn’t public yet, she’d written, but Bill and Sarah Grace have separated and will be divorced within the year. I received this letter during a weekend I was in Chicago, and it agitated me because what I wanted to think was Who cares? And what I thought instead was, Wait, Bill’s single? But I did nothing other than write back, Thank you for the update. I wish that I were attending the Women’s Law Conference with you this year and we could catch up over a drink at a very cheesy hotel bar next to some plastic ferns. I’d been touched that Barbara and Ned had each donated a thousand dollars—the maximum then—to my Senate campaign.

  A few months after exchanging letters with Barbara, while reading The Wall Street Journal, I learned that Bill had moved to Silicon Valley to be the CEO and eighth employee of an early web services provider—a hire made, obviously, not for his coding expertise but for his ability to work a room and inspire confidence in others. The web services provider had a silly-sounding name that seemed a bit less silly on the day of its IPO, in 1996, when shares opened at twenty-four dollars and closed at forty-two dollars. From that point on, as far as I could tell, Bill was harvesting money. As so many implausible outcomes do, his status as a tech tycoon also took on the retroactive sheen of inevitability.

  It was in 1997 that I learned, in a one-sentence aside in an article about Bill’s guidance of the company that ran in the business section of The New York Times, that he was engaged to a woman named Evangeline Cole. Despite the best efforts of Bill’s own company, the Internet in 1997 was not the comprehensive and speedily accessed labyrinth it’s since become. Thus, sheepishly but with faith in her discretion vis-à-vis other staff members, I asked my personal aide, Joanna, who had a plucky college student intern named Theresa, to determine exactly who Evangeline Cole was. The answer: the thirty-eight-year-old daughter of a legendary Los Angeles music producer and executive, which was to say an heiress still probably young enough to have children. She’d graduated from Harvard, had never been married, and had never really held a job, though she’d participated in job-adjacent activities, such as underwriting a documentary about elephant poaching in Chad.

  A year later, I was on a plane from Denver to Jackson Hole to appear on a panel at a progressive think tank’s summer conference. A few hundred presenters—people active not just in politics but in academia, public health, technology, and the arts—would be joined by an audience of very rich donors. I was accompanied by Theresa, who had graduated from Temple University and whom I’d promoted from intern to personal aide, and by my fundraising consultant Delaney Smith. During this scenic and bumpy plane flight, I looked at a briefing book Delaney had prepared that featured the photos and truncated biographies of the conference donors whom Delaney planned to nudge me toward in the hope that they might wish to support the work of a defiantly dowdy and flat-voweled Democratic centrist. When I turned a page to see separate side-by-side yearbook-style photos of Bill and Evangeline Clinton, I gasped.

  Though ’98 was an election year for me, it wasn’t an accident that I hadn’t sought out Bill to ask for money, not recently and not ever. As our plane began its descent, I explained to Delaney that I knew Bill, but some requests were simply too fraught to make.

  It turned out Bill and I were on separate panels at the same time the next morning, as I realized after checking in to the resort and reading the conference program. His panel was on the digital divide, and mine was on early public education. I was relieved that the simultaneity precluded my attendance, or even making a decision about my attendance, at his. But I blurted out to Theresa, in a blushing way that made me feel a bit like I was in seventh grade, that it was very weird Bill was there.

  “He was sort of the love of my life,” I said. I was attempting to decrease the awkwardness, and probably managing the opposite, when I said, “Do you have a boyfriend?” Theresa was twenty-two then, and I was fifty-one.

  “Yes,” she said. “Bryan. But he still lives in Philly.”

  “Is he in grad school?”

  “He’s on his brother’s construction crew. We went to high school together, and he started at community college but he decided to work instead.” Though the way she said this was not with embarrassment, she clearly understood she was conveying slightly surprising information.

  I said, “Have the two of you dated since high school?”

  She laughed. “My mom wouldn’t let me date.” I already knew Theresa was the oldest of six sisters. “Bryan and I were friends, but we didn’t get involved till I was in college.”

  Theresa was so good at her job—so organized and calm and easy to be around—that I hadn’t realized until this moment, a year into knowing her, how pretty she was. She had delicate features and dark hair that she
wore in a bun.

  I said, “When he’s next in Washington, I look forward to meeting him.”

  That night in Jackson Hole, the dinner beneath a sprawling white tent in the yard of a massive chalet-style house was one of those events with a higher proportion of famous than non-famous guests. The Grand Tetons rose behind us, a jazz quartet played on a patio near a stream, servers passed bacon-wrapped dates and tuna tartare, and an unsurpassed quality of progressive schmoozing occurred.

  After making our way through the sumptuous buffet, Delaney, Theresa, and I took seats at one of the round tables for eight, joining the former ambassador to Ireland and his wife, and the CEO of a responsibly-made-athletic-clothing company and his wife; as per Delaney’s instructions, I sat next to the CEO. We’d been speaking for just a few minutes when a friendly, husky, Southern voice, said, “Got room here for two more?”

  “Oh my goodness, Bill,” I said. “Look at you.” I really was happy to see him, far less ambivalently than I’d have expected. When he’d dropped out of the presidential race in ’92, it seemed he’d paid a price for his various transgressions; because of the choices he’d made, he would not get to lead the life he’d most wanted. But when he’d turned around and immediately made millions in the private sector, the price had seemed rather low.

  I stood as he set down a heaping plate. Warmly, he said, “Madam Senator,” and I said, “Oh, please,” and he kissed my cheek. Then he cocked his head to take in the entirety of the tent and murmured so that only I could hear, “Now this is what I call an A-plus elitist clusterfuck.”

  Delaney moved so Bill could sit next to me, and I was describing to him the panel I’d be on when a tall, slim—and I mean slim even by the standards of wealthy mountain towns—woman with long brown hair appeared behind Bill. She wore an electric-blue cocktail dress. Before greeting anyone at the table, she gestured toward Bill’s plate, which included, among piles of green salad and orzo, two slabs of prime rib and some exceptionally gooey scalloped potatoes. In a tight voice, she said, “Bill, it’s a Thursday. You want to be eating fish.”

  Bill chuckled, gestured at me, and said, “Evangeline, this is Senator Hillary Rodham.”

  She regarded me coolly and simply said, “Hi.” Some people are nervous or intimidated to meet a senator; Evangeline was not one of them. If I hadn’t already known she’d grown up privileged, this would have been proof. When Theresa stood and gave her seat to Evangeline, Evangeline didn’t acknowledge her.

  But with Bill’s arrival, the conversation at the table took on an effortless quality; he asked us questions, collectively and individually; he pontificated, but entertainingly; he made knowledgeable references to the Irish economy and to the Licancabur volcano, in Bolivia, which the CEO had recently climbed, and to the Workforce Investment Act, which I was co-sponsoring. Through all of this, Evangeline sat in silence and picked at her food. Before dessert, the hostess whose enormous yard we sat in, who’d made her fortune in a frozen yogurt chain during the eighties and nineties, gave a toast congratulating all of us and herself on our magnificence. As soon as she finished, before the dissipation of the applause, Evangeline set her hand on Bill’s forearm and mouthed, Let’s go. It still took another fifteen minutes for them to depart because of Bill’s long goodbyes to us and those at nearby tables; to his credit, he even found Theresa at the next table, apologized for causing her to move, and inquired where she’d grown up and how long she’d worked with me.

  As soon as he and Evangeline were out of sight, I said to Theresa, “Wow.”

  “Well, it is Thursday,” Theresa said. “Which apparently is a fish day.”

  “That must be what he wants,” I said. “Because he’s always had plenty of women to choose from.”

  How strange that Bill had ended up married to a woman who clearly hated him! Granted, he was probably cheating on her and she probably knew it. But the intensity of her antipathy suggested that she’d never experienced an affection for him abundant enough to mitigate his flaws.

  Delaney, Theresa, and I stayed at the party for another hour. I chatted with a world-famous violinist and a geneticist who was also a professor at Princeton, and it was Delaney’s job to delicately interrupt, gesture a few feet to my left, and murmur, “That’s the shipping heir Karl Zinsser, and he’s obsessed with solar panels.”

  Then we boarded one of several shuttles departing from outside the front door of the chalet. It was a two-mile ride back to the resort, during which our driver pulled over twice because black bears were frolicking in the road. A playwright who had won the Pulitzer the previous spring was drunk enough that he attempted to exit the shuttle and introduce himself to the bears, but the driver talked him out of it, and I felt a peculiar lightness, a merriment even, at the many interesting places my life had taken me.

  Iowa

  April 27, 2015

  6:45 A.M.

  I had texted Diwata and asked her to stop by my suite, before my team met in the lobby but after my hair stylist, Veronica, finished blow-drying my hair; yelling over the hair dryer’s roar was not my favorite way to conduct a conversation.

  When Diwata appeared, I was sitting in the desk chair in the living room, reading news on my iPad while Veronica rubbed texture cream through my hair and Suzy, my makeup artist, sat on the love seat looking at her phone. Diwata greeted all of us and said, “Boss, are you feeling ethanol-ish?”

  “Well, always,” I said. “But especially today.” On my schedule for the next fourteen hours was a morning visit to an ethanol plant, an afternoon roundtable with community college students, and a stop-in at a yarn shop to discuss my proposed standard tax deduction for small businesses. How much, I wondered, would Bill’s entry into the race hijack the news cycle? I said to Diwata, “At our meeting last night, you made a reference to orgy parties, and I couldn’t tell if it was a joke. What did you mean?”

  Diwata looked as if she’d detected a bad odor, but she spoke matter-of-factly. “Supposedly, Bill Clinton attends Silicon Valley sex parties with other very rich men, and there are drugs and group sex.”

  “Good God,” I said. “Does everyone except me know about this?”

  “There was an article a few months ago that was, ah—vivid? It only mentioned Clinton in passing, but I’ll send it to you.”

  “Do you mean the men have sex with each other? Or are women there?”

  Diwata smirked. “There are definitely women there. Like young hotties is my impression.”

  In the mirror above the desk, I made eye contact with Veronica and said, “Have you heard of this?”

  “Not till now.” Veronica was in her forties, the lesbian mom of a teenage boy, and she lived in Chicago and sometimes did my hair there, too. Suzy, who would do my makeup when Veronica finished, was in her fifties, worked on film and TV sets around the world, and was a woman whose credibility was enhanced by the fact that her own skin glowed. Whenever our campaign plane touched down, before I emerged onto the tarmac, she’d spray mineral water on my face and also, for fun, on the faces of whoever else happened to be nearby. The extra time female politicians were expected to spend on our appearance, known as the pink tax, amounted to an hour a day for me, but I’d learned the hard way that it was necessary. In the past, whenever I didn’t have my hair and makeup professionally done, the media would speculate about whether I was ill or exhausted.

  “Suzy,” I said, and when she looked up from her phone, I said, “have you heard the sex party rumor?”

  She winced and said, “It actually does sound familiar.”

  I had the impulse to shake my head, but I didn’t want to mess up Veronica’s handiwork. I said, “You know when true equality will be achieved? When a woman with these kinds of skeletons in her closet has the nerve to run for office.”

  2004

  On August 9, 2003, at a rec center on Chicago’s South S
ide, surrounded by children of many ages and skin colors, I announced that I was running for president. I was not the first woman in recent years to do so—Pat Schroeder had run briefly in ’87 and Elizabeth Dole in 2000—and, if anything, I tried to treat my gender as peripheral rather than momentous. “People in this country are ready for change,” I said into the microphone on the podium. “For universal healthcare and better schools and lower taxes for the middle class. I’m a proud Midwesterner, and I’m bringing my can-do Midwestern spirit to running for president because I want to make life better for all Americans.”

  A few hundred supporters had turned out and were waving HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT signs. Already, my campaign had paid a consultant fifteen thousand dollars to tell us that my surname was too harsh-sounding, especially in tandem with my harsh professional record (in this instance, apparently “harsh” meant “in a male-dominated field”) but also that being called by my first name undermined my seriousness. Given that we were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t, we went with first name. Among the supporters was my mother, who, after I spoke, handed me a box of six energy bars and said, “Honey, just put these in your purse because I know you won’t always have time to eat when you’re on the go.”

  I soon discovered that running for president was more humbling than coasting along as a respected if not nationally known senator. At early events in Iowa and New Hampshire, at diners and bars and bowling alleys, I routinely spoke to groups of fewer than twenty people. The goal was to stay in the race until Super Tuesday; not coincidentally, dropping out by early March would still allow me to make the filing deadline for my third Senate run.

  Jerry Brown had indeed turned out to be a one-term president, beaten by John McCain in 2000. Though my secret brain trust revisited my 2004 run after 9/11—surely some people would speciously argue that it was unpatriotic or just foolhardy to challenge a veteran following the tragic attacks, and some did—I proceeded. And my long-term plan coalesced. It was increasingly plausible that a Democrat would win in ’08, solidifying my goal to ascend to the presidency via the side door of the vice presidency.