A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing

by T Cooper

  Our literary editor, Albert Leibowitz, never one for the subtle touch, asked the obvious question that I never would have.

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “Of course I did,” Jesse said, so matter-of-factly that it was almost pathological.

  “Did she wear the blue dress?” asked another intern.

  “No blue dress that I can remember,” Jesse said.

  “You’ve got to write about this!” the intern said.

  After the meeting, I called Lisa Sherman, my trusted managing editor, into my office. She was somewhere between my age and Jesse’s, and could therefore look at the situation with a reasonable amount of objectivity. Also, unlike me, she’d actually had sex in the last ten years. She understood the evershifting tectonic plates of gender politics.

  “Do you think we should go with Jesse’s Lewinsky story?” I asked her.

  “It’s pretty damn juicy stuff,” she said. “And no one else is going to run something like that.”

  “But is it relevant?”

  She didn’t answer, because I was obviously asking myself.

  “Goddamn it,” I said then. “I got into journalism because of Watergate. We cared about things. All these kids care about are their cocks and their pussies and getting ahead.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  This was not a new rant.

  “Sex should be private,” I continued. “I hate this whole fucking scandal.”

  I couldn’t publish that piece. It didn’t matter to me that Lewinsky had blown the President, much less some twenty-two-year-old blank-slate Washington nobody. The culture had coarsened almost beyond my recognition. But there was no way this magazine was going to contribute to it on my watch.

  Jesse got the news. He was thoroughly gracious. That may have been because his summer job here was a week away from ending, but regardless, I appreciated his willingness to avoid direct conflict.

  “It’s been a pleasure learning from you,” he said, his hand extended. “Thank you so much for the incredible opportunity.”

  “Let me know if you need anything,” I said.

  I was sincere, but Jesse needed a lot more than what I could give him.

  Excerpted from “My Girlfriend, Monica Lewinsky” by Jesse Hecht, published September, 18, 1998, on Wink.com:

  “I love your cock,” she said to me, one rainy night after we’d eaten take-out Thai food and fooled around on the futon.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, wondering how, exactly, I was going to tell her that I didn’t want to hang out with her anymore.

  “You’re, like, the first rung on the ladder,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ladder that I’m going to fuck my way up.”

  I nearly spit out my Merlot. Monica’s conversation, up to that point, had been limited to the following topics: alcohol, shopping, how much reading she had to do for school, and Dawson’s Creek. There’d been talk about sex, of course, but never with ambition attached.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  She gave a merry laugh, and threw me the little heated look that the whole world would soon see in a photograph, from under a beret. It was definitely her best draw. I’d stayed around a couple of extra weeks just to see it again.

  “No, silly,” she said, “of course I’m not serious.”

  As if to prove her point, she planted her lips on mine. They parted; she moved her tongue inside my mouth slowly, deliberately. Monica was sexy.

  “You know who I’d like to fuck?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “The President,” she said. “He is so totally hot.”

  The thing that galled me the most about Jesse’s story was that it was later proven true. It’s not as though it added to or subtracted anything from the scandal. I may be the only person left who remembers the piece at all. But Lewinsky never denied anything, and Jesse Hecht never had to move forward in the world under a cloud of plagiarism or falsification like so many of his compatriots did. He told all, and because of that, his path was unimpeded.

  Eventually, I left The New Century to finish out my career in the Washington bureau of the New York Times. It was a depressing time to be a reporter, but no one could call it dull. The job ran seven days a week, which kept me from thinking too much about the fact that I was nearly sixty and hadn’t dated anyone more than twice since my divorce in 1984.

  One afternoon, I took a friend of mine, an old DNC hand named Webster Shoreham, out to lunch. As it usually did, the conversation turned to the moral hellbroth that had once been our polity.

  “I can’t believe how far it’s gone,” he said. “What we were pulling ten years ago was child’s play. Even when we were at our worst, we weren’t anywhere near what they are now.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Remember when we tried to buy out that guy who worked for you?”

  Now this was news.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “That kid. The one who fucked Lewinsky. Jason something.”

  “Jesse Hecht?”

  “Yeah, Jesse,” said Webb. “A real nothing kid. But when the White House was doing its own Lewinsky investigation, we found out they’d been an item. We paid him a shitload of money to write a tell-all.”

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “I told him you’d have too much integrity to print it, but he was certain you would,” said Webb. “Stupid bastard couldn’t get it printed anywhere but on some website that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  “That disgusts me,” I said. “How the hell could you do something like that?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a scold, Matthew,” Webb said. “These are dirty days.”

  Webb made me sick. Jesse made me sick. The whole goddamn city made me sick. We were living through the last days of the planet, and these people were still playing parlor games. I stood up.

  “If you’ve got so much fucking money,” I said, “you get the check.”

  I tried to go to the office, but I couldn’t sit still. Instead, I headed for the gym. Five miles walking, and maybe a steam, would at least be enough to get me through the rest of the day.

  VH1 was on in front of my treadmill and I couldn’t find the remote. Some loud show called Best Week Ever flashed in front of me. It was garish and current, and I had no idea what was going on. Then he came on the screen, billed as “Jesse Hecht, senior writer, Entertainment Weekly.” His hair was a little less thick, but his face still looked boyish and malleable. There were his eyes again, too, bright but utterly empty. Still, he didn’t look any less happy than the rest of us—maybe a little happier, even. A mind devoted to one purpose rarely stays troubled for long.

  Jesse didn’t talk a lot. They never let people talk on those shows. And I sure as hell don’t remember what he said. But what did it matter? He’d slept with the President’s mistress, and now he was on TV.

  2001

  APPREHENSIONS

  BY VALERIE MINER

  APPREHENSIONS

  Does he have to turn it up so loud, Mom?” Jay whined. Her plaintiveness expressed more about the evening’s stress than about her brother’s music, which was, after all, a regular household feature.

  “He’s chilling,” I said archly, hoping to raise a smile.

  She sat across from me in front of the darkened picture window, picking raisins from an oatmeal cookie.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She sighed heavily and stared at the empty fireplace.

  From the study, I could hear her father on the phone, listened to the anger and incomprehension in his voice.

  Just this morning I was complaining to Arjan about reliving Mom’s typical American life—settled back in the Seattle suburb where I grew up, raising my own girl and boy, married to a loving but slightly obsessed man. Did I really need to travel to India, work there for ten years, in order to wind up in the same place? Okay, not quite the same place; while Dad was obsessed with the family
budget, Arjan was obsessed by economic growth in South Asia. Still, there was an undeniable pattern. At least this morning, everything felt eerily familiar.

  The phone rang as I got home from afternoon class.

  “Mrs. Logan?” The man was brisk, edgy.

  A telemarketer, obviously, because there was no Mrs. Logan here. Oh, Arjan and I married—several times in several countries and religions—but I kept my family name. And I gave it to my daughter, Jay Logan, just as Arjan gave his name to Gobind, Gobind Singh. “Unusual at best,” is how his parents regarded the practice. And at times there was confusion. But I was never Mrs. Logan.

  Dr. Logan. Professor Logan. Ms. Logan.

  I guess you could say I married up. Construction worker’s daughter snags economist. Certainly Arjan’s family compound in Sunder Nager was classier than my childhood ranchette house on 82nd N.E. He was a third-generation academic from a distinguished Delhi family, and I was a second-generation American with two illiterate grandmothers from County Clare. How we wound up with teaching posts at Seattle University— a place I fled in favor of Berkeley and then graduate work in Bombay—how we raised two thoroughly American kids, can only be interpreted as ironic, or as Arjan’s mother would have it, karmic.

  “I’m afraid Mrs. Logan, my mother, doesn’t live here,” I snapped, lowering the receiver.

  “Alice Logan, mother of Gobin, uhmmm, Gobind Singh?” The tone was urgent.

  “Yes.” Blood drained from my face. “Is Gobind okay? Is this a hospital?” Please God, not a morgue.

  “Police, ma’am. Your son is fine. Perhaps you’d like to come down and pick him up?”

  The next few hours were thick, muddled. Springing Arjan from a department meeting. Racing to the station. Finding Gobind on a wooden bench, frightened, forlorn, flabbergasted.

  The speedy words of the desk sergeant: “Simple mistake … Security alert … Can’t be too careful … Apprehended for questioning … Regrettable confusion.”

  “The turban.” Gobind was shaking his head at his father and me. “They thought I was a Muslim terrorist because of the turban!”

  “My son is, as I am,” Arjan stood straighter, “a Sikh, sergeant …”

  “Yes, Professor Singh, yes, we ascertained that after some questioning. And we also discovered he is an honor student, was born in this country, is, of course, a citizen.”

  “Citizen?” Arjan retorted. “He’s a bloody Republican!”

  Hard to tell whether Arjan was angrier with his son or the cop.

  “We apologize for the inconvenience. No offense intended. But at this time in the history of our nation …”

  “The inconvenience?” Arjan exploded.

  Gobind reached for his father’s arm, but Arjan pulled away and Gobind found himself with a fist of blue wool from the Christmas sweater my mom had knitted for her beloved son-in-law.

  “You’ll understand inconvenience.” He removed Gobind’s hand gently, then glared at the impassive sergeant. “When our lawyer gets in touch!”

  Our lawyer? His squash partner, Michael, who worked for the ACLU, most likely. We’d never hired a lawyer in our lives. I hadn’t seen Arjan this angry since that bureaucrat in Delhi told him we would have to wait another month for the marriage license.

  Jay joined me on the overstuffed blue couch, resting her head on my shoulder. At fifteen she was rarely given to displays of family affection. The incident seemed to have traumatized her more than Gobind. Who knew? Who understood teenagers in normal circumstances, let alone during national-security alerts? Had they really thought that my hopelessly conventional, but loveable, CEO-in-training son was a terrorist?

  “Mom, what were you like as a girl?”

  “Why do you ask?” Mother-daughter bonding, I shouldn’t have complained.

  “Well, Grandma says you were ‘intense,’ so I know there was something interesting.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I grinned.

  “Come on.” She stretched her long legs out on the hassock we’d bought in Lucknow last summer.

  “Intense. Well, I became kind of a wild card in high school. But as a young girl, I was a worrier.” Yes, that was my métier, worrying.

  “What did you have to worry about?” She, who has only known one of her American grandparents, the sober, openminded knitter, was astonished.

  “Oh, I had a broad palate. I worried about sin. About the state of my immortal soul. The future of democracy. The Communist invasion.”

  “The Communist invasion?” She grinned with perfect teeth.

  “Those were different times. Well, in some ways. I worried about my parents’ fights. About my buck teeth. About Mr. Sakov.”

  “Who?”

  I drew a breath, for his name hadn’t surfaced in years. “Our neighbor, the father of my best friend, Debbie Sakov.”

  “You’ve never mentioned her. So many of your school friends are still around.”

  “Not dead yet, you mean?”

  “No, I mean get real. If she was your best friend,” she softened her tone, “well, where is she now?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “She moved away.”

  “Wow. Do you still think about her?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes quite a lot.”

  I leaned back into the couch. Each morning I sat in this very spot before the others awoke, sipping tea, summoning equanimity for my day. Equanimity seemed remote now as I pondered the unreliable partnership of conviction and fear. I recalled meeting Debbie Sakov in the side garden by the big rhododendron bush while my parents supervised the Mayflower movers.

  “Hi, I’m Debbie.” A pretty black-haired girl. Something different about her accent.

  I stare at her light blue eyes, then recover Mom’s good manners. “I’m Alice. We’re just moving in.”

  “I know. I was hoping there’d be a girl. What grade are you in?”

  “I’m starting fifth.”

  “Me too. Do you like dolls?”

  I nod, abashed by her enthusiastic embrace.

  “And bikes? I got this blue Schwinn for my birthday.”

  “Mine’s red. Still on the moving van.”

  “We’ll go on adventures, then. I know a back route to Lake Washington,” she laughs excitedly.

  I giggle, amazed that making friends is so easy, wanting nothing more than to please this girl, to grow up together, having “adventures,” meeting boys, double-dating, being each other’s bridesmaids. It’s not often that you recognize destiny, but that sunny July afternoon, I know Debbie Sakov is going to be pivotal in my life.

  A month later—a month of cycling and swimming and playing dress-ups and dolls—life is perfect when we discover we’re in the same class at Holy Cross Elementary School.

  “How nice that Alice has found a friend,” Mom says, settling into her place at the dining room table. “Someone in her own grade, right next door.”

  Dad is, as he often says, “dog tired” tonight. “Pass the spaghetti.”

  “Did you hear, Eddie? Alice has made friends with the girl from that nice Catholic family next door.”

  Baked spaghetti is a new item. Mom likes to invent in the kitchen. This dish contains last night’s vermicelli, saturated with ketchup, topped with Velveeta, and baked in the oven for half an hour.

  “Oh, yeah, good.” He stretches, looking satisfied from the pork chops and the novelty starch. “This move was expensive enough. I’m glad somebody’s benefiting from it.”

  “They’re not from here, though.” Patrick helps himself to the last slice of bread and slathers it thickly with margarine.

  I hold my breath. Has he discovered they’re Martians, this too-good-to-be-true family with the popular daughter who likes me?

  “Well, honey,” Mom frowns at what she calls Patrick’s critical nature, which seems to me a scale model of Dad’s explosive temper, “we’re new ourselves, you know, being as we’ve just moved out from Seattle.”

  “No, Mom, I mean, haven’t you heard their East Coas
t accents?”

  “Now that you mention it …” Mom is clearing the table. “Quite a change for them, picking up and coming all the way across the country.”

  I bring in the small bowls. Neapolitan ice cream tonight. There’s a way the chocolate slice tastes like a special treat here. You savor it more, in contrast to the vanilla and the strawberry.

  “Why do you go fancy on us, Betty?” Dad complains. “I’d rather have a big bowl of real chocolate.”

  “It’s good to try new things, to branch out.”

  I know she’s thinking about her successful baked spaghetti.

  “The neighbors,” Patrick sounds bored with food talk, “they’re from New York or New Jersey, one of those old ‘new’ states.”

  “A regular social butterfly,” Dad teases. “That Debbie is cute, but a little young for you, Buck.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Patrick rolls his eyes. “Mr. Sakov is my history teacher. He told us the family moved from back East three years ago. They visited Gettysburg on the way. We’re doing a whole month on Lincoln. It’s not too tedious, actually.”

  “Lincoln, yes. The Gettysburg Address, very moving.” Mom always tries to move dinner conversation to a higher plane.

  I like Mr. Sakov almost as much as I like Debbie. He’s friendly and fun and asks us about classes. I enjoy sitting at their sleek kitchen counter talking about the places they’ve visited: different National Parks every summer. On weekends we play Scrabble in the living room, which is lined with bookcases and furnished with streamline chairs. Danish Modern, Debbie tells me.

  What Debbie loves about our house is eating Mom’s gingerbread and watching My Little Margie, The Honeymooners, and especially this new show, American Bandstand. At home she’s only allowed to watch Meet the Press, See It Now, and the news. They read a lot. Novels. Books about wilderness.

  Debbie tells me, “Dad has never even heard of the Ames Brothers, Al Martino, Patty Page, or Frankie Lane.”

  “Never heard of Frankie Lane?” Dad asks in one of his jovial moods. He rarely speaks to me or my friends. “What kind of American is he?”