Why, you ask? Why would anyone do that to themselves? Is anything worth that price? Power? Power by itself, you mean? Power as a concept, as the ability to make people do things? No. Fuck that. Fuck power as a concept. I’ve never been interested in power that way. But power to accomplish goals that would make America a better place to live? That would make this country a more compassionate, more sensitive, more human place? Yes, I plead guilty to a quest for that kind of power—in the name of children, women, black people, gay people, the elderly, the disabled, the ill. In the name of the millions of repressed, unempowered, disenfranchised—yes! A thousand times yes! That is worth the humiliation and pain and inner destruction I’ve sentenced myself to. A reality check to a nation to remind it of its own humanity . . . the way Terry and Palladino and the troopers had to remind the whores and sluts and bimbos of theirs.
Is there anything wrong with wanting to make this a better America? My pain is mine. I’ve decided to take it upon myself. I’m not causing you pain. My aim is to better your life. But if I’ve taken that upon myself, then why do you quibble with the means I’ve chosen—the means I’ve had to choose? To get into a position where I can better your life, do I lie?
Of course I lie. Could Bill have been elected and reelected if I had said, Yes, he turned the statehouse and the White House into a whorehouse? . . . Yes, I’ve seen him so stoned, he was incoherent? . . . Yes, he was Brer Rabbit, dodging the draft? . . . Yes, his greatest talent is to seduce, whether it’s a voter or a bimbo?
Could I have told the truth and said, I care about making this a better America; he cares about glory and victory and whores and doesn’t give a shit what position he takes in order to get all of those things? Could I have said, some of the good things that this administration has achieved have been achieved because he is afraid of me? Afraid to disagree with me? Afraid I’ll hit him? Afraid I’ll leave him and destroy whatever vestige of his presidency and his posterity is left?
Yes, I’ve learned to lie and I lie well. I’ve learned to con the media and the voters with the sort of uplifting, bathetic, soporific ideas that I know will soften my image as Saul Alinsky’s ill-begotten daughter. It Takes a Village and children’s rights and health care and Social Security and Medicare—how can you not love me for waving those good-hearted flags?
Yes, I lie about him, and when the going gets rough and his approval ratings are down, I lend myself in those moments—if I so choose—as his prop. I let him tell that story of how the maids barged in on us in the residence as we were in bed, letting him imply that we were sleeping together and having sex. Or the time, during his darkest hours, when I allowed a photograph to be “surreptitiously” taken showing the two of us embracing in our bathing suits. I even let the world see my big butt just to try to keep Bill Clinton in office.
What hurts me most isn’t what he does with his whores anymore; it’s what he says to them. He told Gennifer about how he dreamed he could take a walk with her on a sunny day down a leaf-strewn street. He told the intern he had nothing in his life except his work. He called me Hilla the Hun and the Warden. Even if he betrayed me sexually, he didn’t have to betray me that way. There’s nothing in his life except his work? My God, even if I don’t exist, even if he views me as his jailer, what about Chelsea? First he does his filth with a slut almost his daughter’s age and then he just about tells his slut that his daughter doesn’t exist in his life?
He has no right to be angry at me, but his actions show he is in a rage. I saved him countless times in Arkansas, I saved him on 60 Minutes in New Hampshire, and I saved him from being removed from office. Had I left during impeachment, the whole country would have been applauding and he would have had to check himself into some place like Menninger. I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that he has one use for a woman. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not a woman to him.
He has somehow desexed me in his own head, although I sometimes wonder if he ever really looked at me that way. He made me into his adviser/sister, his pol/buddy. Maybe I was wrong not to try to be more feminine in our Arkansas years, but maybe I was right not to shave or even shower that much—because I sensed that he wasn’t attracted to me intimately . . . and in revenge, I wanted him to feel revulsion. Maybe it horrified me that I was married to a drooling sexual pig and that’s why I was the way I was. Here he was . . . the enlightened, sensitive, empathetic New Man, the hero of the PTAs and the soccer moms, a candidate and a president who would empower women. And here I was . . . profoundly lonely, abandoned by him intimately, the woman he desexed, getting him out of trouble with women he’d used as living hand towels.
He rarely touched me that way, and even when he did, I questioned the dynamic, the underlying stimulus. One of the rare times I’m talking about took place in Arkansas. Vince and a young woman who was an associate and Bill and I went out to dinner and we all had too much to drink. We were walking outside afterward and Bill and the young woman started fooling around, kissing. And Vince started kissing me and holding me.
I could see Bill and her and he could see Vince and me. Our driver, a trooper, was nearby, watching all of us. Bill and I got back in the limo and he pulled the divider up and we had sex right in the backseat. He fucked me like he hadn’t fucked me in a long time. And all the time he was inside me, I thought, You prick! You phony bastard! You’re not fucking me; you’re fucking that young blonde! You’re not inside me; you’re inside her! You’re not squeezing my tits; you’re squeezing hers! But I’m the one who hurt afterward . . . not her.
Vince’s death was the final evidence to me that I had been right about all the humiliation I’d shouldered and the lies I had told. Because those motherfuckers at the Wall Street Journal killed Vince Foster as surely as if they had pulled the trigger. Those motherfucking, racist, Neanderthal, troglodyte, right-wing creeps who wrote their foul rag of an editorial page. When they wrote that scurrilous and false editorial about him, Vince took himself out of a politics he considered too dirty to be a part of. They assassinated his character, and it was like Vince said—“Fuck you! You want my character? I’ll give you my body! I will force you to see what you’ve done!” My lovely Vincenzo Fosterini, always there for me in any way I wanted. And now they’d taken him, the forces of darkness I had fought against for so long, the forces that had to be kept at bay, in the gothic wilderness, out of the White House—if the America I believed in with every ounce of my body was to survive.
When it was the same editorial page of the same Wall Street Journal that broke the story of Juanita Broaddrick’s alleged rape, I wasn’t surprised. It was almost morbidly funny; they were calling me the last Communist and it was the ultimate symbol of capitalism, the Wall Street Journal, that had wounded me the most, not just once but twice.
I don’t know what to tell you about Juanita Broaddrick. It’s very difficult, almost impossible, for me to talk about her. I knew back in Arkansas already what people were whispering, and he, as always, denied it. I think I kept myself from really confronting it until I saw the videotape of her on television. I threw up afterward. I felt like taking a shower, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I knew in my core that she was telling the truth. I sat alone in a room and thought about having had the same thing inside me that he had forced into her. And I had wanted it inside me and even remonstrated with him when he hadn’t put it there. And now it had been exposed to me on national television in a grotesque, ugly manifestation . . . an instrument of torture. Yet it was also the instrument that had fathered Chelsea.
I wondered how that could be. A piece of flesh that could cause both excruciating misery and the greatest joy, suffering and celebration. I knew I didn’t want it inside me anymore. No, that’s not right: I knew I would never allow it inside me anymore. It was a thought that I knew was moot and profoundly sad, too, because I knew he didn’t want to put it inside me anyway. This would relieve him of the painful obligation he felt once or twice a year. The pain I felt from what he had done t
o Juanita Broaddrick . . . the pain that would now cause the most intimate loathing I’d felt for any man . . . would probably be doing him a favor. He wouldn’t have to go through his yearly charade with me anymore.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to the boy at Yale whom I fell in love with. At other times, I wonder whether I simply misperceived him—maybe he was always that way and I just didn’t see it. I thought he had an inner life, a mental life that would deepen and root itself through the years. I didn’t know that even the words deepen and root itself would turn into a cheap, dirty joke for me, a cruelly exact double entendre. I don’t know how I didn’t see that the boy I met at Yale would turn into a man interested not in his mind but in his dick, who would spend free hours not with the classics but with phone sex, whose idea of enjoying nature was jumping into the bushes with some slut.
I remember the day he gave me Leaves of Grass and how we’d read stanzas to each other for weeks. And I remember the day I learned that he’d given Leaves of Grass to the intern, too. And in the years between giving me my cherished leather-bound volume and giving the intern hers, something inside my husband crashed and burned. I think. Or it was just a ploy on both occasions, a little something to make me . . . and her . . . feel good about him. Maybe when he gave me that book and when he gave it to her . . . he was doing nothing but responding to an internal poll taken by his ego: I’ll give them some poems; they’ll like that.
I don’t have a whole lot of people to talk to now that Vince is gone. My mother is too old and Chelsea too young to talk about most of these things. I’m hurling myself into the Senate race. Who knows? I may sit down in an intimate moment in my private study with a young intern one day and tell him or her that I have nothing in my life but work. I’ve been working out a lot and I finally feel good about my hair. It surely is about time, isn’t it? It’s fun being called “regal” and “glamorous” by the media and I liked being called “the First Lady of Miramax.” Hah! Hollywood was always supposed to have been his turf. In between the Senate race and his trips and mine, we certainly don’t see each other much, and we talk infrequently. What am I supposed to say to him—Hey, asshole, you been reading Leaves of Grass lately? I know what he’s doing because I know everything. He’s playing with himself—what did you think?
I talk to Eleanor a lot in my own way. She convinced me to run in her home state. All I’m doing is continuing the same struggle she began. God knows, I feel we have so many things in common, although I envy her the closeness of her relationship with Lorena. I don’t really have a Lorena in my life now, but maybe I will. Eleanor and I talk a lot about Bill and Franklin. It’s funny how the intern even referred to herself as Lucy Mercer in that note she sent Bill. And most people don’t know that Bill has always felt a real closeness to FDR, too, thanks mainly to his friendship with Jim McDougal, who idolized FDR and was always telling FDR stories. And, of course, there is yet another connection: Bill, bless his heart, told Gennifer I was a lesbian, and Eleanor really was one for much of her life. A lesbian with a philandering husband who used her to breed a gaggle of kids and then had nothing to do with her intimately. There you go, Bill Clinton’s role models, JFK and FDR. I’m surprised Bill didn’t come equipped with two dicks.
Eleanor was telling me a story up in the solarium the other day that really made her laugh. She confronted Franklin about Lucy, and Franklin promised to break it off. Then she discovered that they were meeting secretly. FDR had the Secret Service drive him across town in his limo each day. And Lucy would be waiting for him on some prearranged street corner. She’d jump in and do what he liked and then the Secret Service would drop her off on another street corner, where she’d wait for the bus and go home. I didn’t laugh much, though. I remembered Bill’s jogs around the statehouse in Little Rock and around the mall near the White House here.
I just thought of something. This does make me laugh. When Bill and I got married, the minister’s name was . . . the Reverend Nixon. I’m not kidding. With a thousand ministers to choose from, we picked Nixon to bless our marriage. Isn’t that funny? We took our vows before God and Nixon.
[14]
Willard Comes Clean
Billy doesn’t love Hilla the Hun. He never has. He loves me. He’s always loved me, from the time we were both little. When his parents were fighting and he ran into another room crying and all upset, I was the one who sat with him. He touched me and played with me. Only I could give him peace. Only I could self-soothe him and modulate his anxiety. Only I could make him feel good about himself. As we grew and he suddenly got fat, only I could convince him to lose his belly. He wanted to look down and see me and play with me. But he couldn’t see me because of his belly. Then he lost it, and I could look at him and he could look at me. We still play the same way now that we’ve grown so big! Before that 60 Minutes interview, before his grand jury appearance, before a State of the Union speech, Billy plays with me and I give him the same inner peace I gave him when we were little.
I was his friend when he had no others. He knows that, even today. He’s so proud of me sometimes, he overdoes it. Kathleen Willey, Dolly Kyle, Monica—he put their hands right on me. He said, “Kiss it!” minutes after he’d met Paula Jones. It’s good for my self-esteem, you know, not that I’ve ever had a lot of problems with my self-esteem sagging. Even when we were little together, Billy and I had a lot of fun with girls. Tinkerbelle. Snow White. Natasha in Bullwinkle. His cousin’s Barbie doll. Suzy the dolphin. All those slave girls in The Ten Commandments.
Billy’s worked me hard my whole life, but I’m not tired. I’ve never been inoperative. I’ve always had a lot of get-up-and-go. He’s never had to eat shark-fin soup or oysters or mandrake root or rhino horn. I’ve always taken care of his health. My activity has kept his prostate healthy, and the exercise I provide him helps diminish the toxic effect of all the saturated fats he regularly poisons himself with.
But still, the attention he pays me is nice. Nurturing. Enabling. Empowering. Reassuring. He reassures me in other ways, too. Did you ever notice how Billy keeps his hands in his pockets a lot? I’m his good-luck charm. His lucky penny. His rosary. His grasp of reality. He even hums me songs under his breath sometimes—“I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “You’re My Soul and Inspiration” and “Please Please Me” and “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack” is our favorite song. He treats me with sensitivity. He never tries to hem me in and lets me have my own space to breathe. No condoms. No tight bikini shorts—it’s mostly boxers. Billy can seduce a whole crowd, but he knows from experience that he’ll need me when we go home. When Hilla goes into the other room. When it’s just Billy and the K-Y jelly and me.
Billy and I have enjoyed life. A lot of my peers, I know, are exposed only to darkness. To toilets, urinals, bedsheets, underwear, or vaginas. I’ve seen a lot of the lighted world. I’ve seen the Oval Office, the private study, the photos of Billy on the walls of Nancy Hernreich’s office. I’ve seen the crashing surf at Malibu from a lot of different angles. I’ve seen almost all of the rooms of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, especially the basement. I’ve become a student of hotel decor and, thanks to vacations and out-of-town fund-raisers, Louis XIV nightstands in Beverly Hills, Bloomfield Hills, and the Hamptons. I’ve seen almost as much sunshine as Billy, especially around the Ozarks. I’m an overachiever who’s been externalized with an air of grandiosity.
I’ve enjoyed the perks of his success. But I was there, too, in the bad times. In adolescence, when I feared he and his friend Five Finger Mary were going to rip me out by the root. In Arkansas and Oxford, when I was sure I would die of overwork and overexposure. Billy and I were indiscriminate in those halcyon days. We closed our eyes and thought of pig farms. We put a flag over her head and did it for Betsy Ross. I kept thinking of what his mother had said when we were boys: “That little girl over there is so ugly, we have to tie a pork chop around her neck so the boys will play with her.”
The Oxfor
d years were our “We Shall Overcome” years. I kept saying, “Not a chance. Never.” We spent much of our time in our individual ways there protesting the war. McNamara was wrong about “progressively escalating pressure” defeating the Vietcong, but Billy used me to apply the principle to our mutual satisfaction. America’s entanglement in Vietnam led to a lot of our entanglements at Oxford. “Peace Now!” Billy kept nobly yelling, and those dumb, disarmed English girls misspelled or misheard the word. I radiated in those days as though I were wearing Day-Glo paint.
I was there in the other bad times, too. In the White House, when all Billy wanted to do was to let an age-inappropriate Monica lick me. She wanted to lick me with this goovno on her tongue to give me chills. I couldn’t ever convince Billy to let me empower myself inside Monica, to give her my unconditional, rubberless love. But he did finally allow me to act out an inappropriate, intrusive flow. That led to Monica’s feelings of codependence on me.
And that, unfortunately, led to the worst times of all, when Billy and I hit the front page and the evening news together. The whole world was talking not just about him but also about me. It should have been a time of triumph for me, finally publicly given my due. My ultimate empowerment! But it was the worst time because suddenly Billy was almost afraid to touch me. It was like when we were kids and he went through a stage of reading the Bible. Onan, he informed me, was put to death for spilling his seed on the ground. But he soon realized I was much more fun than Chapterand verse.
He was afraid again now, even when we were alone, even when I grew into his pocket. I knew he was overreacting to all the preachers and the soccer moms, but he was treating me as if I weren’t even there anymore, attached to him. I was afraid that he was afraid that Hilla was checking his sheets or his underwear for signs of my life, like his grandma had checked us when we were half-grown. Thank God for Carly Simon! The worst of times ended for me in the middle of our international crisis, when we hugged Carly Simon at the Martha’s Vineyard airport. Billy rediscovered me hours after that hug.
American Rhapsody Page 53