Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  * * *

  —

  In my walk-in closet that doubled as a dressing room, Suzy and Veronica did my makeup and hair, Theresa and Kenya breezed in and out on their phones, and I asked Ebba to open two bottles of white wine for all of us. I deliberately didn’t read emails or news stories on my iPad, though it was almost physically difficult to refrain.

  Suzy and Veronica left, and I called Maureen. “The thing I’m confused about,” Maureen said, “is, does he see this as a real date or a fake date?”

  “That’s an excellent question.”

  “Maybe a fake date is preferable. All of the fun and none of the messiness.”

  I heard the security agents and Ebba let Albert in, and I said, “I feel more nervous right now than I did when I spoke at the Democratic Convention in ’08.”

  Maureen laughed. “Of course you do.”

  Theresa and Kenya stayed out of sight—they’d wait at the apartment to debrief on my return—and when I walked into my living room to see Albert in khaki pants, a blue blazer, and a blue-and-white-striped shirt, I felt a surge of surprising and genuine happiness. He looked very handsome. He stood, and we clasped hands and leaned forward to kiss each other’s cheeks.

  “You’re an awfully good sport,” I said, and he said, “It’s my pleasure.”

  I sat in a chair and he sat on the couch. Ebba had set out a dish of mixed nuts and a tray of cheese and crackers, neither of which we touched, and she brought him a glass of wine; I still had mine. I asked about Albert’s flight, and he described the book he’d been reading on the plane—nonfiction that had been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, by a writer whose articles I’d read, though I hadn’t read the book.

  “Did you end up going to John and Kate’s engagement party?” I asked. This was the son and future daughter-in-law of our mutual friend, Nancy, and the party had happened the previous weekend in New York.

  “I did,” he said. “Do you know how they got together?”

  “I don’t think I do.” (What a relief it was not to be pleading with an Iowan to caucus for me!)

  “Apparently, they connected on a dating website and decided to meet at a bar in Brooklyn. At the appointed time and place, they showed up, introduced themselves, began chatting, and hit it off. But twenty minutes into the conversation, they realized he was supposed to have met a different woman named Kate, and she was supposed to have met a different man named John. They assumed their counterparts must be elsewhere in the bar, so they all found one another and decided to make it a double date. But the die was cast. Our John and Kate were already smitten. At the party, they gave a very funny joint toast in which they admitted that, after they discovered the mix-up, they both considered suggesting sneaking out together to a different bar.”

  “That’s incredible,” I said.

  “It does make you wonder about fate, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you believe in fate?” Our eyes met, and I added, “Just a little lighthearted predinner banter.”

  He laughed. “Certainly there are coincidences that are otherwise difficult to explain.”

  “Although, I suspect you’re referring to happy coincidences. I’ve also met so many people in such difficult situations that to claim their struggles were determined by God seems callous. And not very Methodist, either. Do you go to church?”

  “Only on Christmas and Easter. I know you go regularly.” He made a sheepish expression. “We’re not on a level playing field, are we? In terms of the amount of information about you that’s out there.”

  I smiled. “I don’t know if you’ll find this unsettling or reassuring, but my research team has looked into you thoroughly.”

  “I hope it was worth the effort. I fear I’m a bit boring.”

  “You don’t seem that way to me.” To my own amazement, I felt the heightened feeling I’d had on Cape Cod, the astonishing hunch that there was between Albert and me a genuine connection. At this almost comically inopportune moment! I said, “Even as I resist the notion of predestination, I do sometimes wonder—this isn’t the sort of thing I can discuss in public, but if I’m elected, it’s certainly a consequence of choices I’ve made. But was my ability to make those choices a form of destiny? Starting with being born in the right place at the right time.”

  Albert said, “I’m trying to think how that squares with the sense most of us have that there are other lives out there we could have led, if circumstances were only slightly different. My Dartmouth roommate was from the Central Valley in California, and when we graduated, he tried to convince me to move to San Francisco with him. I was tempted, but I ended up taking the far more conventional route, living in Manhattan and working for Morgan Stanley. And that’s how I met Marjorie, who was what we then called a secretary.”

  “Was she your secretary?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t have one at Morgan. I stayed only two years before I went to Citicorp.”

  “In my alternate life, I would have been an astronaut,” I said. “I wrote to NASA when I was in eighth grade, and they wrote back saying the space program didn’t take women.”

  Albert smiled. “I suppose that would have been a different kind of trailblazing.”

  “Did your marriage feel fated? I hope that’s not intrusive to ask.”

  “Let me think about how to answer.” But he did not appear offended. “We had, on balance, a good and solid marriage. We were compatible in that daily way that makes life run smoothly. But I don’t think it’s disloyal to Marjorie to say that it didn’t seem as if only we could have made each other happy. I know some people talk about soulmates, but I don’t think she’d have claimed that for us.”

  “Ironically, I thought Bill Clinton and I were soulmates,” I said. “Not recently, but in my twenties.”

  “And now?”

  “Isn’t there a country song about thanking God for unanswered prayers?” We both laughed, and I said, “But this gets to my point about the tension between fate and free will. Is there a parallel universe where I married Bill, and if there is, did we stay married? If you’d gone out to San Francisco in 1969, would you have moved back east after a year and met Marjorie anyway? Or would you now be, I don’t know, running a winery in Sonoma County?”

  “Exactly. Though it does feel like my daughter, Carson, is the one predestined aspect of my life, that she was meant to be mine. I suppose that’s a function of the intensity of parental love. Did you ever want to have children?”

  “Absolutely. There are a few young women I think of as almost surrogate daughters”—Theresa, along with Kenya, was somewhere in my apartment, probably but not definitively out of earshot—“and having biological children was certainly part of what I originally pictured for my life. But I made peace with not taking that path. I don’t think other things would have been possible if I’d been a mother. For all that Americans are suspicious of a woman who doesn’t marry or have kids, I suspect that they also want or even need the first woman who’ll be elected president to seem different from other women.”

  “As penance for ambition or as proof of exceptionalism?”

  “Probably both.” I tried to sound casual as I said, “Have you used any of those dating websites like Kate and John did?”

  “Carson has tried to get me to, but the idea of meeting a stranger at a Starbucks—I fear this sounds pathetic, but I’d rather spend the evening with my golden retriever. I don’t suppose you could have given online dating a whirl whether or not you wanted to.”

  “Some of my staffers once showed me the apps on their phones, and I found them anthropologically fascinating, but I wasn’t jealous. It seems very stressful. What’s your dog’s name, by the way?”

  “Her name is Annabel. She’s excellent company, in my defense. She’s with a house sitter now.”

  “Do you and Annabel live in a house or an apartment?” />
  “The same house Marjorie and I bought in 1971. Carson has encouraged me to sell it, but I enjoy the space, the yard. Maybe I could show it to you sometime.”

  “I’d like that very much.” It was almost time for us to leave the apartment, to go on the public portion of the date, and I gestured around the living room—it was hard to say at what—and said, “Did you mention that you were doing this to Carson? Or your godson?”

  “Carson is very amused, and I’ll let Harris find out. But, Hillary, at the risk of sounding boastful, this won’t be my first fifteen minutes of fame. Years ago, before a blizzard, I was getting milk at the supermarket and a reporter from the Times interviewed me. I was quoted saying something profound, like, ‘I hope the power doesn’t go out.’ ” He leaned forward, set his wineglass on the table, and looked at me intently. “When I told you on the phone I thought going on this date sounded like a lark, I just—I want you to know that I assumed you were far too busy making history to go on a date with an ordinary man from Westchester County. Otherwise, I’d have asked you out right after we met in Truro.”

  How generous he was, and how lovely this was to hear. I said, “Well, in the same spirit of candor, for me, tonight isn’t a transaction pretending to be emotional. If anything, it’s something emotional pretending to be transactional.” Was this what dating was in your late sixties, the dispensing of subterfuge? Or was it Albert-specific? I nodded my head toward the front hall and said, “Shall we?”

  * * *

  —

  Between the presence of my security detail, the palpably self-conscious waitstaff, and the other patrons pseudodiscreetly using their phones to take our picture, being at the restaurant felt like being in a play. We stayed an hour and ten minutes, Albert ordered scotch and pan-seared salmon, and although I’m not sure other diners could hear us, we spoke as if they could—we spoke about food and travel and prestige television shows, none of which I’d seen. When we emerged from the restaurant onto the sidewalk, the flash of camera bulbs in the October darkness was blinding. Although we were ushered by my agents, Darryl and Phil, into the back of the waiting armored SUV, it wasn’t as if I could complain about the paparazzi; this was ostensibly the point of the date, and the photographers had been tipped off by members of my media team, though it was likely the date had also been live-tweeted by other patrons.

  When the doors were closed and the SUV was moving, I said, “Are you okay?”

  “That was…something.” He sounded a bit stunned.

  And then, at the same moment, I reached out to set my left hand on his right forearm, and he reached out with his right hand to take my left one. As we held hands, I felt, in spite of everything, a calmness and a comfort. Albert was speaking quietly—he might have felt constrained by the presence of the two agents in the front seat—as he said, “I’m not sure at what point either of us turns into a pumpkin, but if you’re interested, we could go to your apartment and watch one of those shows now. I have a Hulu account.” He added, “Obviously, by telling you that, I’m trying to impress you.”

  I laughed. “I’m very impressed. And I so wish we could do that. But believe it or not, I have a meeting tonight.” Forty-five minutes into dinner, my phone had exploded with texts, and when I’d apologetically checked it, I’d learned from my brothers that, in a playoff game against the Cardinals, the Cubs had scored five runs in the second inning and from Denise that a meeting had been scheduled for 9:30 at my apartment; obviously, the latter wasn’t a good sign. I said, “But what if, as soon as possible after the debate, we see each other again?”

  “That sounds perfect,” Albert said.

  “In the meantime, will you tell me the plot of your daughter’s favorite movie?”

  “Ah. It’s about a nerd who pays a beautiful cheerleader to pretend to be his girlfriend. Should I tell you what happens or not spoil it?”

  “You should definitely tell me.”

  “Under her tutelage, he becomes cool, and it goes to his head.”

  “Of course it does,” I said.

  “He starts behaving badly, so she gets even by revealing the deal they made to everyone at their school. But after the boy’s comeuppance, he remembers who he is, and they fall in love.” He paused. “If it isn’t abundantly clear,” he said, “I’m the nerd here.”

  “That’s chivalrous,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s true.”

  “Then maybe we’re both beautiful cheerleaders,” he said, and when I laughed, he leaned over and whispered in my ear, “If we were alone, I would try to kiss you now.”

  I turned my face toward his; I found his lips with mine. It was exhilarating—delicious!—to kiss this man. In the front seat, Darryl and Phil did not react at all.

  * * *

  —

  Denise had scheduled the meeting because Donald Trump wanted to officially endorse me; Donald wanted to do this at the Trump Las Vegas, before the debate, with me by his side. And, incredibly, most but not all of my senior staffers thought I should cooperate. A few minutes earlier, Theresa and Kenya had been waiting for me in the basement parking garage of my building when, still inside the SUV, I bade farewell to Albert. Darryl and I exited the car; Phil would drive Albert back to his hotel. When I entered my apartment, nine staffers were waiting around my dining room table.

  “The Interweb is beside itself with excitement about your date,” Aaron said. “That was genius.”

  “But focusing on Trump, here’s how the endorsement would work,” Greg said. “Instead of flying to Vegas on Tuesday morning, a few of us fly out Monday. Monday afternoon, you hold your nose and appear with Trump for ten minutes while he sings your praises. White working-class men in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania decide, Hey, what’s good enough for Donald Trump is good enough for me! You wash the Trump cooties off your hands, and on Tuesday, you kick Bill Clinton’s ass.”

  I said, “What could possibly go wrong?” Looking at Denise, I said, “You’re on board with this?”

  It was Aaron who answered. “The media loves an unlikely friendship, and if you and Trump make just one appearance together, I suspect that’ll get them through the primary.”

  “I want Obama’s endorsement,” I said.

  “Obama will endorse the nominee,” Greg said. “When you’re the nominee, he’ll endorse you. We’ll finesse the Trump stuff with him down the road.”

  I said, “This feels like some kind of hostage situation. The idea that Donald can back me into appearing with him, at his hotel no less—” I paused, and my political director, Ben, said, “I agree. It sets a dangerous precedent.”

  Denise cleared her throat and said, “Let’s bring Henry in for a second.”

  I had noticed that my top pollster, Henry Kinoshita, was at the table, which was slightly surprising; he wasn’t typically in the inner circle. “What the numbers boil down to is that the Trump effect is real,” Henry said. “Between June and September, your stats improved so significantly in categories like ‘willing to listen to opposing viewpoints,’ ‘can improve the economy,’ and ‘shows strong leadership’ that we ran another poll specifically asking about Trump, since those are his main talking points about you. This was 811 registered voters, 430 Democrats and 381 Republicans, with a 2.2 percent margin of error. For ‘Do Donald Trump’s tweets make you see Rodham in a more favorable or unfavorable light?’ 72 percent said favorable. For ‘A friendship between Hillary Rodham and Donald Trump is—’ then we supplied positive adjectives like funny and uplifting and negative ones like hypocritical and immoral, and the agree rate for the positive adjectives are through the roof. Like, 77 percent, 82 percent, et cetera. The numbers aren’t great for black voters and only a little better for Latinx, but for whites, they’re incredible.”

  Once again, I thought of Gwen Greenberger; I thought of what she’d think if she saw me standing next to Donald.

  �
�Here’s the thing,” Greg said. “We can spend hours pondering why American voters can be dipshits or we can take advantage of it. I’m not saying you don’t have a choice. We can convey to Trump that you’re thrilled he wants to endorse you, but your schedule doesn’t allow you to visit his hotel in person. Needless to say, what he does—or tweets—next is anyone’s guess. And if you ask me, you’d be shooting yourself in the foot. But it’s your call.”

  “Where does it end, though?” I said. “Aaron, you say I appear with Donald once, but what happens when he announces on Twitter that I’m doing a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago?”

  “We should be so lucky,” Denise said.

  “Fine, then what if he decides he wants to be my VP?”

  I hadn’t been joking, but everyone at the table laughed, even Theresa. Greg said, “Donald Trump would never agree to be your vice president.”

  * * *

  —

  Before I went to bed, I skimmed my brothers’ texts—We can do this! Goooo Jorge Soler!!! World Series here we come!!!!—and I almost missed the final one, which was from Tony and wasn’t baseball-related: Hillary do you have a boyfriend?

  I wrote back: Maybe?

  * * *

  —

  By Sunday morning, hundreds if not thousands of articles about my date were online. My favorite—one for which my communications team had, off the record, supplied details—ran on the website of a celebrity-and-human-interest publication with the largest circulation of any American magazine. “Five Facts to Know about Hillary Rodham’s Boyfriend,” read the headline, and the facts, each accompanied by a few sentences of explication, were:

  He supports Democrats!