She remembered the night that she met Rex. Pierre, her gay model/escort agent, had nabbed her an invitation to a VIP reception for Funck’s international beauty pageant at the Funck International Hotel on the Champs-Élysées. “Rex Funck is a sac de sleaze, but he has un appétit for Slavic women,” Pierre said. “He married three. Jouez bien tous les cartes,” which she knew from the French she had learned since moving to Paris meant, “play your cards right, and he’ll marry you!”
Natalia was sick in bed with a bad cold the day of the reception. She called Ingrid for some motherly sympathy. “Get out of bed right now and get your Slovak zadok to that party!” she shouted over the phone. “And stick it in Rex Funck’s face!”
Natalia forced herself to follow her mother’s advice. She wore a form-clinging, black-sequined gown that Pierre borrowed from Dolce and Gabbana, promising the boutique a photo in the newspapers of Natalia wearing it with Rex Funck at her side. When Pierre escorted her into the hotel ballroom, Rex was greeting guests with his arm possessively around a sultry Brazilian wearing the beauty-pageant crown. Within minutes, his arm was around Natalia instead of the Brazilian “Miss Whatever.” Their picture ended up in Le Monde.
Natalia tried to visualize what Rex looked like back then. He had a lot more hair and he was semi-naturally blond. He was trim and relatively fit. No flabby gut to hide under baggy suits with pants so large, that they flapped in the wind when he walked. Back then he didn’t have that “I don’t trust anyone but myself” look that pinched his face now, or that thrust-out jaw that jutted out even more when he nervously ground his teeth. He even smiled occasionally. Natalia couldn’t remember the last time she saw her husband smile, except for the camera.
In the back of the Escalade, the iPhone lit up: 30 percent charged. Natalia placed the glass of Perrier on the tray and positioned her index finger over the iPhone keyboard, focusing on what she hoped was still her mother’s password: “Haluski1724.” She flexed her right index finger to tap in the letters; she found finger-tapping more accurate than thumb-tapping. Besides, thumb-tapping was a Rex thing. She pictured him at his worst: cursing as he thumb-tapped a vicious, hurtful, and lie-filled tweet. Natalia despised him for calling people names in his tweets: “crooked,” “phony,” “crazy,” “cheatin’,” “stupid,” “hypocrite,” “sleazy.” They sounded like evil dwarves in a fairytale. She wondered if it ever occurred to him that the labels he used most were words that best described himself.
She shook her head, scolding herself for getting so angry thinking about Rex. It had made her forget her mother’s possible iPhone password. She took a deep yoga breath, concentrated, and it came back to her. She tapped in: “Haluski1724.” She counted: “One one thousand, two one thousand…”
A message flashed on-screen: “Forget Password? Change Password.”
“Hovno!”
The SUV veered onto the highway skirting the East River, its waves gilded in the sunset. In a few minutes, they would arrive at the East River Heliport.
Frantic, she typed in “1724Haluski.”
“Forget Password? Change Password.”
Put yourself in Mamina’s head, she told herself. Maybe she changed her password to something she loves in her life now, in America. From what she had observed today, Ingrid was nuts for her incessantly yipping toy Pomeranian. Vladimir.
As for numbers, Natalia guessed that Ingrid used the address of the faux Mediterranean villa that Rex had bought her and Papa in Palm Beach, near Beau Rivage: 20045 Coconut Palm Drive. She remembered how surprised Ingrid had been at Rex’s generosity when he handed her the keys. “First you get us green cards. Now this mansion,” she said, tears in her eyes. “A husband who treasures his in-laws is a great man!” Natalia guessed that Rex had shelled out $5 million for her parents’ house for another reason than treasuring his in-laws. He knew that Ingrid would do anything to keep her daughter from leaving him, no matter how many times, or ways, he broke their wedding vows.
She tapped in “Vladimir20045.”
One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thou…
The iPhone home screen lit up.
“Yesss!” She typed in “www.google.sk.”
Before the Slovak website could open, FACETIME bleeped on. Her mother’s bruised and bandaged face filled the iPhone screen.
“Suka!” Ingrid hissed.
“Mamina!”
“You stole my—”
“I borrowed—”
“I emailed Gretchen that you stole my phone!”
“You what?”
“I gave the First Daughter my phone number!”
“How could you?”
“If you use my phone to google any hovno, Gretchen will monitor it! She will know every search and every call you make on my phone!”
Natalia gasped. Flushing with anger at her mother’s betrayal, she plunged the iPhone into the glass of Perrier. The lighted screen fizzled out.
She sank back against the soft leather seat of the Escalade, on the verge of tears. She had been so close…
She forced herself to take deep, calming yoga breaths. There had to be a way to locate the man she had hoped to find today on Google. Since being pumped with female hormones, his face had been appearing to her in dreams, erotic dreams: her one true love and the father of the only child she ever had.
Vaclav Szabo.
The image of fifteen-year-old Vaclav sharpened into focus in her mind. His brown hair was long and shaggy; he was always brushing it out of his eyes. And his eyes… His eyes were so dark that they were almost black, fringed with long dark eyelashes. In Slovak Cosmo, she had read that such eyes were considered sexy and called “bedroom eyes.” She remembered how, soon after her fourteenth birthday, she selected Vaclav for her first kiss. Not just because she and her girlfriends considered him the hottest boy in their school. Now that she had grown to nearly six feet tall, he was the only boy who was taller than she was.
She thought back to the first time Vaclav kissed her. To be fair, she thought, I was the one who kissed him. It was after he led the school basketball team to victory in the regional finals. She had read in Slovak Cosmo how to kiss a boy: to teasingly probe the tip of your tongue between his lips. In the sweltering gymnasium, she ran over to Vaclav, threw her arms around his sweaty neck, and did what Cosmo said.
She wasn’t prepared for his response: He shoved his tongue down her throat. Gagging, she pulled away from him. For a moment, the two of them stared at each other; then she turned and ran. She couldn’t get the image of him out of her mind: standing there, a look of surprise on his face, an erection straining against his sweat-soaked basketball shorts.
Vaclav followed her home from school the next day. She started to run, but he caught up with her. “I love you!” he blurted out. “I’ve loved you forever!” She admitted that she loved him too, except for one thing: “If you ever stick your tongue down my throat again, we’re finished!”
In the weeks that followed, after school they would meet in the equipment shed behind the school soccer field. Despite the cold, they pulled off their heavy jackets, but there wasn’t room enough in the cramped space for anything more than embracing while leaning against the rotting wooden wall that gave them splinters. Both of them were virgins, too insecure about what to do to have real sex.
In the Escalade, Natalia smiled, remembering the day in the shed when they rubbed against each other, doing what she’d read in Slovak Cosmo was called “dry humping.” She was suddenly anything but dry. She unzipped Vaclav’s fly, begging him to make love to her. Too late. He came in his pants.
After church the following Sunday, Natalia’s parents planned to take her to babika’s farm for supper. During Mass, she prayed to the Virgin Mary to forgive her for losing her virginity later that day. “Please make it not hurt,” she whispered. Suddenly, she bent over, dramatically clutched her stomach and groaned. Sitting beside her in the church pew, her mother grabbed her arm. “Haluski? What’s wrong?”
&nb
sp; “My period!” she said. “I’m bleeding to death! Papa, Mamina, let me go home!”
People were staring.
“Go!” her father said.
Natalia hustled out of the church and raced back to their apartment, excited yet nervous. She didn’t worry that her twelve-year-old brother Franc would spoil the afternoon alone with Vaclav that she had planned. She knew Franc spent his Sundays smoking dope with his friends on the riverbank near the Váh River railroad bridge.
In the back of the Escalade, Natalia felt her body growing warm. She remembered how as she waited for Vaclav to arrive that afternoon, she took off her bra and rolled over the waistband of her gray school-uniform skirt to pull the hem up to mid-thigh. Then she cut the arms off of her tightest black T-shirt and pinched her nipples until they pressed against the cotton from inside, like mini erections. But her white panties were a sickly gray from too many washings, the elastic around the leg holes so worn that they drooped down and flapped against her thighs. She slipped into her parents’ bedroom and rummaged in her mother’s drawers. Underneath a pile of white underpants, even grayer and droopier than her own, she discovered black panties with a patch of black mesh in the shape of a valentine over the crotch. Just as the doorbell rang, she put them on.
She remembered feeling disappointed that Vaclav showed up in a threadbare Batman T-shirt and the torn Levis he wore to school every day. He smelled like the gym locker room. But within minutes she found his sweat smell intoxicating, more dizzying than the Fanta-and-wine “Mish Mash” drink he had brought along for them to sip after sex, instead of smoking a cigarette.
In her darkened bedroom, they pulled off their clothes and explored each other’s bodies. He had remarkably big hands and long fingers, she remembered. Perfect for tossing a basketball, playing guitar, and making her body tingle. Rex was taller than Vaclav, but his fingers were short, like pencil stubs. Despite Rex’s boasts to the press, every woman in America knew that for a man with short fingers, another part of his anatomy was short, too.
Vaclav had a long, beautiful vták. One look at her naked body that day and it grew rigid, its smooth pink head jutting upward. And when it slid into her body, as if her prayers had been answered, she felt no pain. Only pleasure.
Lingering on the memory in the back seat of the Escalade, she twisted the 15-karat diamond ring on her swollen finger. It was on so tight, that her finger throbbed as she maneuvered it around until the diamond was on the palm side of her hand. She thrust her hand through an opening between the buttons of her mink coat, then pressed the hard stone against what she called her pubičné mound and rubbed. At least this monster ring is good for something, she thought.
Tap, tap.
Her eyes popped open. She glimpsed Ken’s linebacker body through the smoked Escalade window, heard the whirring of the White House helicopter blades. She subtly withdrew her hand from inside her fur coat and sighed. It is definitely time to pray to the Virgin Mary to bring Vaclav back into my life, she thought.
Part II
Two Weeks Later
(Continuous with Prologue)
Chapter 5
The White House
December 16, 12:25 a.m.
Natalia tied the belt of her white-silk Prada bathrobe, walked out of Rex’s bedroom, and closed the door behind her. Thank God that’s over, she thought.
From inside the bedroom, she heard Rex applauding over: “Mr. Speaker; Mr. Vice President; my good friends in Congress; the beautiful First Lady of the United States; and my fabulous fellow Americans…”
She realized that he had restarted the DVR of the State of the Union Address he watched while having sex with her tonight. She wondered if Rex obsessively replayed his speech to reassure himself that he was still President.
“Thank you for making me your leader in the biggest, huuuugest landslide of any Presidential election in American history…”
Tuning out what she knew was a lie, she grabbed her mink coat from where she had dropped it on a chair and draped it over her bathrobe. Special Agent Pricker, who was stationed nearby, hunched over his laptop, didn’t even blink.
She hustled down the back stairs of the White House. It had taken her weeks to learn her way around the vast building. After she moved in, Sally-Ann had given her a White House tour in the Alabama drawl that she since had come to loathe. She suspected that Sally-Ann secretly taped all of her conversations in the First Lady’s bedroom and played them back for the First Daughter.
On the tour, Sally-Ann spouted off facts about the White House: “There are 132 rooms, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, eight staircases, and three elevators spread across six floors, plus two hidden mezzanine levels, all tucked within what appears to be only a three-story building.” The information went into one ear and out the other. If Natalia had her way, she would stay put in her private bedroom.
She stepped out of the stairwell on the main floor. In the daytime, these stately halls lined with Presidential portraits were bustling with White House staff. During visiting hours, people from all over the world waited in line for hours to take tours. Natalia remembered the first week she lived in the White House, she mistakenly stepped into this hall and stumbled upon a group of Chinese tourists. They screamed her name and rushed her, snapping selfies. She was proud of herself for calmly smiling for their cameras. She loathed being surrounded by staring strangers.
An antique grandfather clock chimed one o’clock. At this time of night, she was relieved to see only a few Uniformed Division Officers as she swept down the hall in her slippers. Not one of the U.D. guards glanced at her. They had been instructed to give her privacy, something she begged Rex for, when she made a middle-of-the-night pilgrimage to the one room in the White House that she considered sacred.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had been in a Catholic church or gone to confession. She missed it. Rex paid lip service to religion, but she knew he didn’t take it seriously. “Jewish, Christian, Muslim; it’s all bullshit,” he had said to her after a photo op in the National Cathedral on Inauguration Day.
She stepped into the Vermeil Room, its arched windows draped with olive-and-gold-striped panels, their sashes trimmed in tassels. Sally-Ann had explained that the room was named for its collection of nineteenth-century English and French silver-gilt tableware. She glanced at the ornate gilded bowls and serving utensils that gleamed in velvet-lined vitrines, but she had not come here tonight to see the vermeil collection.
The walls were hung with half-a-dozen portraits of First Ladies, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, and Nancy Reagan. She walked across the Turkish carpet, the ancient floorboards creaking, toward a rose-and-gold damask sofa. Above it hung a full-length portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy. She gazed up at the oil painting. Sally-Ann had mentioned that Jackie’s official First Lady portrait was controversial. “Some critics said that Jackie’s filmy peach gown and the brown background make her look unreal and downright eerie.”
Natalia studied the portrait of Jackie. She thought the former First Lady looked angelic, even saintly. Long sleeves covered her arms, a ruffled collar hid her neck, and a spray of white flowers formed a halo behind her head. Natalia sought solace here with Jackie whenever she felt troubled, as she did tonight.
She knelt down, as if she were in a church, and clasped her hands together. Just as she had once prayed to the Virgin Mary, she closed her eyes and pictured Jackie’s serene, beatific face. “Please help me, Jackie,” she murmured. “I have a dreadful sin from my youth to atone for. I have wicked thoughts about my husband. Please help me make the right choice and do the right thing.” She crossed herself. “And please help me find Vaclav.” She crossed herself again. She stared up at Jackie’s face in the portrait and held her breath, waiting for a sign. All she heard was the faint ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the hall.
Chapter 6
The White House
December 16, 7:00 a.m.
Aboard Air Force One, Natalia could hear t
he final brass chords of “Hail to the Chief” from the Marine Corps band on the tarmac at Pearl Harbor–Hickam Air Force Base, then applause. She gazed at her image in the mirror: Hair and makeup. Check. Blue Dior dress. Check. Red stiletto-heeled Ferragamo sandals. Check.
Sally-Ann stuck her head into the First Lady’s cabin. “Ma’am, the President has arrived.”
“I can’t wait to see him!” Her husband had been away for two weeks, way too long. She missed him while he was on state visits to China, Japan, and Korea. She was glad that the First Daughter had come up with the idea of Natalia joining him for a romantic weekend in Honolulu before he returned to Washington. “We want the world to see you’re a happily married couple,” Gretchen said. “That you are very much in love.” Natalia was happy to give Gretchen and the world what they wanted.
Sally-Ann led Natalia down the aisle of the plane and then stepped aside. Natalia knew that a horde of photographers on the tarmac was waiting to get the perfect shot: the First Lady walking gracefully down the jet stairs and into the embrace of the President.
She paused at the top of the jet stairs, scanning the crowd. A line of traditional Hawaiian hula dancers swayed to the music of ukulele players that she couldn’t hear over the roar of the applause. The usual U.S. dignitaries wore muumuus and Aloha shirts, rather than suits, she noted. But where was the President?
“Ma’am?” Sally-Ann nodded toward the jet stairs. “They’re waiting for you.”
Natalia spotted a man making his way through the throng below. The crowd parted for him, applauding as he broke into a run toward the aircraft.
The First Lady Escapes Page 4