By the time Bill and I were arranging our dinner, another four years had passed during which I hadn’t had sex. What if, as with circling a globe, Bill and I had gone so far in opposite directions that we could meet again in mutually congenial circumstances? Was this a preposterous notion or was it reasonable? The night before Theresa and I were to fly from Washington to San Francisco, the wisdom of procuring not only lubricant but also condoms occurred to me; getting chlamydia from Bill Clinton was not part of my plans. Another single female senator whose state included a famously liberal city had once told me that, as casually—even festively—as possible, she collected condoms at gay pride parades. Given that my dinner with Bill was imminent, this wasn’t an option. I could have run into a drugstore myself, and there was a 98 percent chance I wouldn’t be recognized. But that other 2 percent, especially after my cookie comments debacle—it would be humiliating if it became a gossip item in a newspaper.
Already, in our years together, Theresa had purchased Pepto-Bismol on my behalf and had instructed me that I needed to clear a nostril before I went onstage. In our hotel in San Francisco, after we returned to the city from my afternoon speech at Stanford followed by a fundraising reception at a private home in Menlo Park, she handed me a Walgreens bag containing two different brands of condoms and a five-ounce container of K-Y jelly with as little fanfare as she would handing me Purell. My dinner with Bill was the next evening, and as I turned out the light to go to sleep, I thought about arriving in Berkeley with him in May 1971, thirty-four years prior: his orange station wagon and our rental apartment in the stucco building on the hill; how much I had loved living with him and exploring the Bay Area; how devastated I’d been the day I’d found him kissing my boss’s daughter. We’d been so young then, and there had been so much neither of us knew. I wondered if unbidden memories from that summer had played out in his mind when he’d moved to California. If so, surely in the last decade the details of his present life had replaced them, or diminished their potency.
The next day, I ate breakfast at my hotel with two entrepreneurs who wanted to discuss common carrier regulations, and then I spent the rest of the morning in the hotel room calling prospective donors. At lunch, when Theresa got takeout salads for both of us, I told her to hold the raw onion on mine, and also requested that she purchase a bottle of white wine. At four, I walked on the hotel treadmill then showered, brushed my teeth with extra vigor, and used mouthwash. The idea of kissing someone, kissing Bill, felt almost as momentous as the idea of having sex. Would my mouth really touch Bill’s, or was it all in my head? Before showering, I’d laid my best lingerie, a blue lacy matching bra and underwear set, and my nicest pantsuit and shell blouse on the made bed, on top of the white duvet. I applied makeup while still in my robe. As I dressed, I intermittently caught sight of my reflection in the mirror: There was more flesh than I wished for around my upper arms and between my bra straps and my armpits. Though I refused to use the word cellulite because it was a pseudoscientific term created by the cosmetics industry, I wished for a little more smoothness in my thighs. Would I, in the next few hours, end up naked in a bed with Bill? As I pulled on my pants, I noted that I still had a nice waist and my hair had never been more artfully cut or golden in color. Also, though my neck, particularly just under my chin, had a crepey quality no dermatologist could fix, thanks to the Botox injections that I and just about every woman in the public eye underwent every four months, the skin on my face was smoother than I had any right to expect. And several years before, I had undergone thorough, painful laser hair removal, so at least I was prepared on that front. I didn’t mistake myself for beautiful, but, all things considered, I thought I looked attractive.
At six-thirty, Theresa sent me a message on my BlackBerry: Your car is outside.
I replied, Leaving room now.
Have fun, she wrote back.
Sitting in the backseat of the town car, I could, to my surprise, feel the feeling, that charge familiar from other important moments in my life: the anticipation and focus, the elimination of all other obligations and ephemera, the reduction to just this moment, looking out the window at the sunny September evening, riding away from Union Square and toward whatever it was that was about to happen. On the sidewalk at the corner of Grant and Pine, a dark-haired woman in exercise clothes pushed a stroller containing a child I couldn’t see except from the knees down, in the form of a small pair of jeans and two little calves sticking out, the feet clad in brown leather slippers. The woman spoke animatedly to the child, and I thought of the minutiae and specificity of all our lives, how tightly fixed we are within the present moment even as the moment passes.
Bill’s apartment was a penthouse in Nob Hill. When I stepped off the dedicated elevator, which itself was large enough to include a bench and fancy enough to include a chandelier, I was in a vast open space that led on the left to a kitchen and on the right to a living room. Straight in front of me were floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the financial district, including the Transamerica Building, and beyond it, the San Francisco Bay, the Bay Bridge, and Oakland.
“You made it!” Bill approached from the kitchen wearing a royal-blue apron over a dress shirt and jeans. He really was incredibly handsome: tall and slim and white-haired, with that familiar smile. I set my purse next to a red porcelain lamp on an ornate wooden table and, as I held the bottle of wine Theresa had selected, he leaned in to hug me and kissed the top of my head. Upbeat classical music played in the background, no doubt on a state-of-the-art sound system, and the sweet smell of something baking filled the air.
As I passed him the wine, I said, “Quite a view you’ve got.”
He grinned. “Not bad for a boy from Hope, Arkansas, huh?”
I grinned back at him. “Does that country boy shtick still work for you?”
“Better than ever. But not with everyone, apparently. You look great, by the way.”
“You look great, too. California must agree with you.”
He opened a bottle of his own wine, a red, saying, “It’s one of my favorites, very velvety but structured.” When we made eye contact, he added, “Does saying that make me sound sophisticated or like an asshole?”
“Why choose?” I said, and he laughed. “I’m teasing,” I said. “You don’t sound like an asshole, and I’d love a glass of something velvety and structured.”
After he’d poured, we clinked our glasses together. “To the past and the present,” he said, and I said, “Hear, hear.”
I sat on a barstool at the granite island while he stood facing me with the bay behind him, dicing an onion on a cutting board. Barstools are dreadful onstage, even worse than director’s chairs and even if you favor pantsuits—you need to hoist yourself backward onto them and keep your legs crossed, and after twenty minutes, my legs often start shaking. But in Bill’s kitchen, I could lean my forearms against the counter, and I was comfortable and content. Various appetizers were laid out: a small bowl of olives, a bowl of pretzels, two pastel dips that I guessed to be some variation on hummus. The sun setting over the water became almost unbearably beautiful.
After Bill poured olive oil into a saucepan, he set the saucepan on a burner on the granite island; a minute later, using the knife, he swept the diced onion into the pan and it sizzled a little. The next vegetables he cut were eggplant, zucchini, and red pepper.
“When did you learn to cook?” I asked.
“After my second divorce, I decided not to be one of those bachelors with nothing but a six-pack and a jar of mustard in the fridge. Turns out cooking is kind of fun.”
“I’ll bet I haven’t touched a stove in a decade.”
“Would you like for tonight to be the night?”
Yes, I thought, but not with the stove. “You look like you’ve got things under control. What are you making, anyway?”
“You ever had a ratatouille tart?”
I shook my head.
“You’re about to.”
“It sounds fantastic.”
“Full disclosure, the crust that’s in the oven as we speak was made earlier today by my housekeeper, Elena. I still want you to be impressed by my slicing and dicing, though.”
“I’m very impressed,” I said.
“I assume this is rare, but if it’s just you at home, what do you have for dinner?”
“If I’m feeling really lazy, cottage cheese. If I’m feeling only moderately lazy, toast and peanut butter, with a side of baby carrots. If I’m not mistaken, that covers most of the food groups.”
“And it’s vegan to boot.”
“That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Do you still sit in your nest at night?”
Something inside me clenched. So often, people let you down; so often, situations turn out disappointingly. But occasionally someone recognizes, acknowledges, your private and truest self.
“The short answer is yes,” I said.
“What’s the long answer?”
“Well, there are briefing books involved. And electronic devices. It’s less pure than it once was.”
He chuckled. “Aren’t we all?”
The smell of the baking crust competed pleasantly with the savory scent of the simmering vegetables. I was hungry but too keyed up to eat the olives and pretzels in front of me; also, of course, I didn’t want to be full if we had sex. I took another sip of wine and said, “If there was ever a time when you were pure, Bill, I think it was long before we met.” He looked a little hurt, and I added, “But I’ve come to think purity is overrated. Do you know what I was just reminded of? Do you remember when you told me about going home with Kirby Hadey for Thanksgiving your first year at Yale? You were very impressed that his parents’ penthouse had its own elevator, and look at you now.”
“It’s funny,” he said, “because I don’t think I ever ride up here without recalling that.” He looked at me intently. “What you and I had,” he said, “I never found that with anyone else. I mourned it for so many years.”
“I did, too.”
“And it seems like it should be weird as hell to be standing across from you right now, but it feels totally natural.”
“I agree,” I said. The intensity of his expression made it difficult to maintain eye contact, and with feigned casualness, I said, “Tell me about a day in the life of Bill Clinton circa 2005.”
“I bet it’s a heck of a lot less interesting than a day in the life of Hillary Rodham.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Start with when you wake up.”
“I’ve got a yoga instructor who comes here three mornings a week at seven. Mostly Vinyasa, a little Kundalini. Is this too much detail?”
I shook my head. “Although I won’t pretend to know which style of yoga is which.”
“Vinyasa is more athletic, Kundalini is more spiritual. But Kundalini still gives you a workout. You’ve never tried yoga? It really is fantastic.”
“I’ve taken a few classes over the years, but I always feel bored and uncomfortable. Do you remember my friend Maureen? She’s gotten me into Pilates, which seems close enough.”
“You know that finding yoga boring and uncomfortable means you should be doing more of it, right? You should be sitting with your boredom and discomfort.”
I laughed. “Should I politely pretend that I’ll follow your advice?”
“That’s all right.” He was laughing, too.
“Back to your schedule, then—”
“It takes an hour or so to get to Menlo Park in the morning, so I arrive in the office at nine-thirty or ten. I’ve got a driver.” His smile was sheepish. “I confess I feel self-conscious around you with regard to some of this. But a lot of our dreams came true, didn’t they? That’s part of why it’s nice to see you, because it reminds me how lucky we both got.”
“Or is it that—” I paused before saying, “I like the sentiment you’re expressing. But am I parsing it too much if I argue that it’s more complicated than that? It’s like the dreams we didn’t even know to dream came true. I’m not disagreeing about the lucky part.”
“That’s what I meant, that we’ve both risen to the highest level of our fields. Or you’re damn near it. My God, I know it didn’t happen in ’04, but if you do become president, Hillary, it’ll be the greatest fucking thing. You’ll be so good at it, and just think of making history like that. I can’t pretend I won’t be envious.”
“Honestly, I try not to think too much in those terms. It makes me feel as if everything that comes out of my mouth should be written in calligraphy, with a quill pen, which is immobilizing. I’m not, you know, George Washington.”
“Not even Georgia Washington?” Bill grinned.
“Is that George’s sister?”
“Or him when he lets his wig down?”
We both were smiling, and I said, “Almost all my advisers recommend downplaying anything about gender or firsts.”
“But symbolism is what inspires people,” Bill said. “Sure, you’ve got the folks who won’t vote for a woman unless hell freezes over. And you’ve got the folks who need to be cajoled. But you’ve also got folks for whom you’re a dream come true.”
“Unfortunately, polls indicate that the thrilled group is only seventeen or eighteen percent of the population. What you’re saying is accurate, but the middle group is closer to thirty percent. And cajolery was always something you were better at than I am.”
Fondly, he said, “I was good at it, wasn’t I?” He was opening a can of crushed tomatoes, and he dumped it into the saucepan over the vegetables.
“Do you know the number one predictor of whether a woman approves of the idea of a female president?” I said.
“A college degree?”
“That’s a factor, but it’s not the biggest. It’s whether she’s married, and there’s an inverse correlation. Married women vote with their husbands.” I watched as Bill shook some oregano into his palm and dropped it into the mixture. “Back to your schedule,” I said. “It’s nine-thirty or ten and you get to the office. Then what?”
“Then meetings. Meetings and meetings and more meetings.”
“These are with people pitching start-up ideas they want you to fund?”
“Or we’ve already funded them and they’re updating us on their progress, or they’re trying to go from their seed round to series A.”
“Are the meetings interesting?”
“Some of the entrepreneurs are brilliant. And it’s exciting getting sneak peeks at the technology everyone will be using eighteen or thirty-six months from now. Other times, you know ten seconds into a pitch that nothing will come of it, and you still need to sit there for twenty minutes.”
“It’s a very male world, isn’t it? Numbers-wise?”
“It is, and we’ve got to do better. There’s really a pipeline problem, where only about a quarter of computer science majors are women. Then there’s the leaky pipe problem, which is retention.”
“Because women quit when they have kids?”
“Or because they aren’t the right fit with a company’s culture. The ping-pong tables and whatnot. Hey, I hear that Tara and Pete Fourgeaud held a fundraiser for you at their house last night.”
“News travels fast.”
“The Fourgeauds are terrific. I was invited, but I had a conflict, and I thought, hell, I get you all to myself for dinner tonight.”
There was a happiness I felt in this moment, a pure, warm, unambivalent animal happiness; I just really, really enjoyed being in Bill Clinton’s company.
And then, sitting there on his barstool, listening to his classical music, I thought, What if I didn’t run for president again? What if I didn’t even run for Senate again after this term? Let some other woman make
history while having her clothes and voice and intellect and voting record picked apart. Let me have great sex and stimulating conversations; let me travel to foreign countries not to meet with dignitaries and eat chicken in ballrooms but to swim in fancy pools at expensive hotels and read novels while lying on enormous mattresses. Let me be a well-paid lawyer or consultant or lobbyist, let me be Bill Clinton’s girlfriend again, let me finally be Bill Clinton’s wife.
Aloud, I said, “That’s true. You do get me all to yourself tonight.”
This is when he said, “I have a story that I think you’ll appreciate.” He reached for the wine bottle and refilled my glass. “You may have heard that I’ve started a foundation. We’re still getting our sea legs, but we’re focusing on all the big issues. Climate change, poverty, biomedical research. Eighteen months ago, I hired a woman named Kira Duncan to run the foundation. She has a stellar record, went to Stanford for undergrad and business school. After B-school, she worked for a gay rights advocacy group so I assume she’s a lesbian even though she’s gorgeous. Long red hair, milky white skin, very slender.”
Really? I thought. Long red hair, milky white skin, very slender? Now? Wryly, I said, “I’ve heard that it’s possible for a woman to be gorgeous and gay at the same time.”
He laughed. “Just wait. Now, I’m not usually in the foundation office, but Kira and I talk five, six times a week. She’s very on the ball, always prepared, a tireless worker. In a lot of ways, she reminds me of you. And she’s pretty buttoned-up about her personal life, but bits and pieces emerge. She does indeed have a female partner, a gal named Louise. We—Kira and I—go to Haiti together to meet with Dan Jacobs, who runs Global Health Mission. Do you know Dan?”
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