The Chameleon

by Sugar Rautbord

  “This desk belonged to Eleanor, you know. Anna let me have it when I won. As a gift.”

  “Eleanor would have been proud of you.”

  “I like to think so.”

  “But not as proud as I am.”

  And Claire blushed, a ripened peach blush like the Claire of so many Washingtons ago.

  “May I take you to dinner, dear?”

  The word softened her. Claire glanced at her agenda. He was here for a presidential briefing. She was scheduled for three California reception “stop-ins” and a late dinner meeting with her staff.

  “Yes. I'm surprisingly free.”

  “Shall we be sentimentalists and have dinner at the Willard?”

  “Heavens no! It's home to hobos now.”

  “Nostalgia is a bitter pill sometimes, isn't it?”

  “Why not the Congressional Club?”

  “Done.” Even after they shook hands good-bye, she walked him out of her office past the starstruck staff and down the long hall to the elevator, her arm still on his sleeve.

  “I think I'll take the stairs.”

  “Of course. Until dinner, then.”

  And as she watched him briskly take the steps like she had watched him do a hundred times before, so many years ago, she realized she'd forgotten to ask about Starling.

  Anita was strangely silent when Claire breezed back in, her press secretary assessing her with unblinking fish eyes.

  Aide number one handed her the six urgent messages and told her of two personal calls that had come in during the last five minutes.

  “I'll take personal first. Sara and then Fenwick Granut.”

  Grant was leaving for the country, where he had thrown together a quick dinner at HurryUp—quick in Grant's lexicon meant news-breaking—for Kissinger, a well-known Chinese dissident, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, U.S. Week's foreign desk editor, and the captain of the U.S. Ping-Pong team. Would Claire be his hostess? It sounded intriguing, but thank you, no. Grant sounded miffed and hung up without ceremony. Over the last few months he had actually started referring to them as a couple, as in, “I guess we're becoming a power couple.” In his unsuccessful attempt to bed her, he had even suggested matrimony—the wolf's response to a bruised ego.

  Claire slipped away early to bathe and change from one tailored suit to another and be on time for Harrison. She smiled to herself in the mirror as she brushed her still-lustrous hair. As many times as she had reinvented herself, as many reincarnations of Claire as had attracted the critical attention of the world and its scrutiny, there were some things in life that never changed.

  They were ushered to a corner table in the club's green-leather-and-brass-tack dining room. Nothing had changed in the Old Guard decor in twenty-five years.

  There was so much to catch up on they had to take turns to keep from jumping into each other's news. They became happily alive in one another's company. Sara was expecting again, and the young English professor had turned out to be a kind soul and good husband and was willing to relocate to Georgetown. So Claire could see more of her “girls.” Harrison was going to spend time with his granddaughter at the end of the week before he returned to Italy. Claire was thrilled to learn that his three-volume tome on Franklin was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, but they both were puzzled by Harry and Minnie's decision at this stage of life to adopt a child.

  “I don't suppose they'll go through Eleanor House.” Claire sipped from her second glass of wine.

  “Why not? I don't think—”

  “Harrison. Really.”

  “No, dear. Time closes a lot of open wounds.” He touched her hand.

  The feel of his skin next to hers elicited a rush of past memories. All the other times. All the other touches.

  There was so much history between the two of them. Memories engraved on her heart, in which the love outweighed the disappointments. She felt so intimately connected to him that she could even commiserate when he told her about the rare form of amoebic enteritis that was wasting Starling's delicate constitution and often left her partially bedridden. She had picked it up on their trip down the Nile.

  “She's quite uncomplaining. She cheerfully does all her correspondence and runs the house from her bedroom and sitting room upstairs. And you know how beautiful the views are overlooking Lake Como.”

  Claire nodded, remembering.

  “It was my error to try to make a globe-trotting adventuress out of such a refined little bird. Before we married, her entire world had been Tuxedo Park, Palm Beach, and Newport. I had the audacity to drag her around to places like Damascus and Cairo on my trade missions.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “That she's more delicate than before but with a quiet routine she could have a good many years.”

  “I hope she can improve. She's so lovely.” Claire lowered her eyes and hoped he didn't notice the catch in her voice. She glanced at the same leather-strapped tank watch he'd always worn. Three hours had flown by as they had renewed a friendship and reignited familiar feelings.

  It was almost midnight when Harrison's car and driver took them back to the Watergate, but, reluctant to say goodbye, she asked him up for a brandy. He accepted.

  “Come look, Harrison.” She leaned her arms on the balustrade. “The same moon. The same Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial.” She pointed. “You can see all of our old Washington from my terrace. Come out It's not so chilly.”

  He stepped out onto the balcony into the crisp January air and stood behind her for a few moments before he brought his hands to her shoulders and they looked out at their Washington together. At this hour the city was so still it could have been 1942 again.

  “It's like it always was.” He wrapped one arm around her body, his elbow brushing against her breasts. “Those are probably Buicks and Hudsons down there and FDR's still at work in the Oval Office.” They both laughed.

  So many memories flooded every corner of her mind. When he turned her around to embrace her, she was surprised at the passion that traveled between them, like an electrical current passing through wires that had suddenly been reconnected.

  The kiss was the same kiss that had happened a hundred times before. Their familiar fragrances inviting the personal invasion of one another, long-dammed-up juices starting to flow freely. He took her in his arms and covered her mouth with his own hungry one, transporting her to a place she'd thought she would never see again.

  “Oh, Harrison. It's only ever been you.”

  A tear of his fell onto her cheek, commingled with one of her own, and traveled with it together down the slope of her face. She didn't know when her tender feelings for him had been so intense.

  She wanted him.

  Together again, they were the same Harrison and Claire.

  “I love you,” she whispered. But you're still unavailable, she thought. “It's Nixon in the Oval Office, not FDR, dear. The presidents may have changed, but the fact that you're married hasn't.” Her heart was racing like a young girl's.

  He held out his hand. “Stop filibustering and come to bed with me. We keep starting things and then letting others interfere.”

  “Others matter,” she said, but when he took her in his arms again, nothing mattered but the sound of his next breath and the next place on her body that his hands would touch.

  Already they were aroused as sensually as if she were his naked lover, waiting for him. He lifted her hair so he could caress the place on the back of her neck. Her shoulders shivered in the cold and he brought her close to warm her, her ivory satin slip exposing her hardened nipples through the soft folds of fabric. He pulled the slip down to her waist and brought his lips to her breasts, firm and round, just as he remembered. Remembered every sleepless night he had spent away from her.

  She let her head fall back and wrapped the cloth of his shirt around her knuckles as he traced moist circles across her breasts with his mouth. The moistness surged through her body like an ancient river.

 
We belong to each other, she thought.

  His fingers pressed into her rib cage with proprietary strength. As if his hands were aware that he owned her.

  “You're mine, Claire. You've always been mine.” And then he pushed her lace underthings away so she was entirely naked. Every part of her body wanted her lover, safely returned from the land of the Pyramids, from which her father had never returned.

  “Be mine now, Claire.” He put his virility into words as his fingers moved to the softness of her thighs.

  It took every rational cell and whatever threads of common sense still clung to the tangled fustian in her brain to push him away.

  “But you can't be mine. Harrison, when will you ever remember that you're… you're always married. I don't want to be the sick wife's substitute.” She brought her slip to her still smooth belly. “For heaven's sake, be mine or just go away. I won't love you in secret. Not anymore.” She took several steps back, putting a love seat between them.

  Harrison struggled to come to grips with his conflicting emotions. “Oh, Claire. I was free for you once, but I'm not now. Please. We can give each other love. But there are duties we need—”

  “Your duties.” She pulled the slip on in one movement. It was like a suit of armor against temptation.

  “I don't know where I was going. It only felt like it was right.” He was always the gentleman, even in lust.

  “I was going there too. But it isn't right. Harrison”—her violet eyes locked onto his—“you and I are the strong ones. We're not allowed to be weak.”

  “Yes.” Harrison's voice came out of a hollow runnel. “So many people depend on us.”

  “I love you, Harrison.” The words hung there in the silence. Claire had to break it somehow, and uttered softly, “Please go.”

  He turned to leave. Every mixed thought she was having rose like a cloud of confusion between them. Desire, duty, love, hurt, the exhilarated way this forbidden encounter made her feel.

  “Maybe I need more time.” Her eyes were misted with memory.

  “Time is the one thing we don't have anymore, dear.”

  And he leaned over to take the derby with the gray gloves lying inside from her outstretched arm, leaving a kiss on her naked shoulder.

  The congresswoman from California stood in her darkened living room in her bare feet, shifting her weight, trying to figure out what to do next. If she were voting for a ban on nuclear proliferation or for ending the war in Southeast Asia, it would be easy. But having to decide whether or not to follow her heart back to the unavailable man she loved, perhaps jeopardizing the eggshell path to recovery she had paved for her daughter, his granddaughter, plunging them all into some defenseless, damaging place, shattering the life Harrison had built with Starling, this was, all of this was too much for her to decide.

  She pulled on the leather boots in the foyer, wrapped a fur over her slip, and grabbed her handbag as she flew out the door, taking the elevator straight to the garage. She floored the pedal all the way to HurryUp, hoping the highway patrol from Virginia wouldn't stop the junior congresswoman for speeding.

  She switched on the radio to distract her and turned it off again when it couldn't. All of her important memories were intertwined with Harrison. But tonight she was determined to invent new ones. If she didn't find a new place to put her emotions, she'd be destined to dwell only in the vacant slots Harrison could offer her. She pulled off the highway at Middleburg and onto the blacktop road leading to HurryUp past the darkened barns and pitch-black meadows. She plowed the car past winterized oaks and boxwood protected with tarpaulins. She sped past the dirt intersection that would bring her to Willow Oaks, the country house that Pamela Churchill Hayward Harriman was negotiating to purchase for herself and Averell, her latest, oldest husband. She had married him a few months after he had been widowed, rekindling a thirty-year-old affair with her longtime married lover. Marriage was on Claire's mind. She brought her Lincoln to an abrupt stop in the gravel driveway, inches from Grant's Mercedes. She pounded on the door, rousing one of the servants and pushing past the surprised butler in his nightclothes. She wasn't sure where Grant's bedroom was, but using her woman's intuition, she walked right to it A pair of man's boxer shorts, one silk stocking, and a pair of dyed-to-match slingbacks on the floor impeded her progress. Focused as she was, she hurdled over the sartorial evidence of the evening's earlier diversions.

  “Grant.” All the unspent passion and sexual energy of the hours with Harrison underscored her greeting. “We must talk.”

  Her fur flew open as she put one hand on her waist, revealing her well-kept body beneath her skimpy slip. In one gesture, Grant switched on the lamp and sat upright. Anger, embarrassment, and amusement rippled through his expression.

  “Are you nuts, Claire? What's happened? China's invaded us while I was sleeping? What? What?”

  “I think we should get married.”

  “What?” There was still sleep to be rubbed out of his eyes. It was three o'clock in the morning.

  “Weren't you proposing last week when you said we were the perfect power couple?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Move over. I accept.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  HurryUp

  Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

  —Mary Catherine Bateson

  Overnight, Claire stopped being perceived as a sightseeing tourist and became a bona fide Beltway player. After two years of hard work legislating social reform and harder work opening the doors to Washington's all-boy inner sanctum, Claire's foray into politics was instantly legitimized with a pair of “I do”s. Claire was now one-half of this company town's hottest power couple, prominent enough to rate editorial page punditry. The Congressional Record depicted her in its political cartoons as a women's-libbing bulldog, while the Post's cartoonist had satirically drawn her as Grant's “pet poodle.”

  Claire and Grant laughed at the high-level gossip they sparked over the late fireside suppers they shared.

  “I'd understand all the curiosity if I were a cabinet member or spying for Russia.” She dropped two sugar lumps into his coffee. “But all this commotion just for being a lowly congresswoman? What is the fascination in two mature, ordinary people settling down together?”

  Grant grinned lopsidedly at his bride. “We're neither ordinary nor particularly mature. If I weren't sleeping with you, I'd be rooting through your garbage looking for gossip to print about you.” He leaned over to kiss the inside of her wrist, a grin as wide as the Potomac reshaping his mouth.

  Claire winced. Some of the past was just too raw to be reminded of.

  “No you wouldn't. You're a gentleman. And becoming quite a good husband.”

  “A rank amateur at it. I'm a newspaper fellow first. You just understand me so well. That's what's so terrific about you. You never sulk when I stand you up for Kissinger.” He winked at her, half closing a flirty eye. “I feel as if I just joined the most elite men's club in the world: the Husbands of Claire Club.”

  Claire put down her fork in mock protest. This man who possessed fistfuls of power and smarts could sometimes have the maturity level of a boastful teenager. Somehow, though, they were making it all work out very nicely. She raised her wrist to meet his lips.

  Amazing, Claire thought, how since she had taken not just her second congressional oath but her fourth marital vow, how much faster her phone calls got returned these days and how she suddenly rated a choicer hook in the Capitol cloakroom. All this in the bra-burning age of feminism. She sighed. Even old Senator Pines, the bigoted octogenarian who chaired the Committee on Child and Welfare Reforms, had stopped greeting her with a booming “Helloooo, Congresslady Hollywooood. Don't our gams look gooood today!”—at least to her face. As the Hollywood Widow she'd usually cringed whenever she found herself sharing the Russell Building's dinner mint-sized elevator with the southern senator and h
is vexing prejudices. “A hundred years behind the times,” she'd exclaimed to Grant. “He belongs in a curio shop, not Congress!” Pines and Claire had crossed sharp swords with unendearing regularity. But now she suddenly rated a hearty handshake—and a fair hearing on her Head Start and hot-lunch programs, one of which had just passed the Senate. And it was simply because Claire shared a pillow with the owner of the most influential paper in the senator's home state.

  Yes, marrying Grant had been the correct career move. Her union with the owner of the country's second most influential newspaper was a good one in her mind, even if with their busy schedules and her frequent trips to California to visit her constituents it wasn't always a toe-warmer. Being Harrison's mistress—a second time—well, that would have been unthinkable. Though those pretty thoughts still danced through her brain when she wasn't careful. Probably they always would. This husband she had was a handful. Dashingly handsome, self-absorbed, the one-man think tank sitting across from her each morning over orange juice and seven newspapers ground his teeth in his sleep and often awakened with a guilty look on his face. As if he, too, might have been dreaming about someone else.

  Will you never stop marrying men you don't love? Harrison had written to her on the stationery, which bore his name as a head, that accompanied her wedding gift. But the problem was, if it was love, it could be only Harrison. And if it couldn't be Harrison, it would always be somebody almost like him. In her matrimonial laundry list there was the boyish soldier with the same name, followed by the Italian pirate who shared Harrison's financial acumen, succeeded by the kind man who shared his insight, and now Fenwick Grant, who simply looked like him, all their shortcomings coming out in the wash. Claire was careful not to ascribe too many Harrison-like qualities to her cocky newspaperman husband. If she were back in Hollywood, she would never have cast him in the Harrison part.It would be like Cary Grant playing Moses. She giggled at the thought.