American Wife

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Charlie sounds upbeat when he says, “Once the mudslinging starts, remember that I’m never running for anything again, so you don’t need to feel guilty on my account.”

  I look out the window; the captain’s chair I am seated in faces sideways, perpendicular to the walled-off cockpit, so I can see the blue sky outside. This jet, which I prefer to the Boeing 757s I must use when accompanied by larger groups, seats sixteen, and the fabric covering all the chairs is white leather, the carpet cream; the decor has always reminded me a bit of a tacky person’s idea of heaven. I say, “Sweetheart, I appreciate your support, but before we start calling my abortion a sin—doesn’t that imply you wish I hadn’t had it? And we’d never have married, would we, if I were the mother of a thirteen-year-old when we met?” He’s quiet, and I say, “It’s not uncomplicated. That’s all I’m trying to point out. And I hope this is a story that blows over, but my fear is that Ingrid Sanchez’s nomination will keep it in the news.”

  “You’re not suggesting I give her the boot?”

  “No, but I wouldn’t underestimate how much the press will relish the irony.”

  “What really chaps my ass,” Charlie says, “is the idea of this bitter witch doctor deciding she’s going to expose you, and everyone rolls over and plays dead. Could there be a clearer case of blackmail?”

  “She’s a hundred and four, Charlie.”

  “Yeah, so everyone keeps saying. Kept alive by good old-fashioned liberal rage, huh?” He chuckles. “Hey, if that’s all it takes, you might outlast me yet.”

  We both are silent; outside the cabin of the plane, the engines hum. Jessica sits a few feet away in her own white leather seat, eating a sandwich prepared for her by one of the two flight attendants; Cal and José are chatting in the plane’s rear while Walter reads a thriller. I try to keep my voice low as I say, “I don’t agree with Dr. Wycomb’s methods, but you do remember that I’m pro-choice, don’t you?”

  “See, that’s what makes America great—room for all kinds of opposing viewpoints.” I can tell Charlie’s grinning, then I hear an unmistakable noise, a bubbly blurt of sound, and I know he’s just broken wind. Though I’ve told him it’s inconsiderate, I think he does it as much as possible in front of his agents. He’ll say, “They think it’s hilarious when the leader of the free world toots his own horn!”

  “I heard that,” I say.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Before ending the call, he adds, “Give my regards to the divorcée.”

  IF A REPORTER or stranger asks what in my life I never imagined I’d find myself doing, I say, “Giving speeches!” Invariably, it’s an answer that elicits laughter. If friends ask, I say, “Having a cat.” That was Hank’s doing—a poll he commissioned in the early nineties revealed that the voters of Wisconsin would have a more favorable idea of our family if we owned a pet, ideally a dog. I protested because of Ella’s allergies, and this is how we came to own Snowflake, our allegedly hypoallergenic Russian Blue.

  That our cat is standoffish is, as far as I’m concerned, all the better; I have shed no tears over her apparent aversion to sitting on our laps or even anywhere near us. Charlie sometimes lifts her up and smashes his face against her ribs, rubbing his nose in her fur, saying, “You’re the only one who really loves me, aren’t you, Snowflake? Yes, you are, you good Republican cat.” Maids feed Snowflake and change her litter box, and a vet makes house calls for her annual checkup; if she has her way with birds or mice on the White House grounds, I’m not privy to it. My dislike of cats, cemented when I was scratched on the cheek by one as a five-year-old, isn’t public (with something like seventy million cat owners in this country, Charlie joked, I could have sabotaged the election with that admission alone), but the fact that it isn’t public is why, when I am called upon by friends to share some morsel of my private life, I can trot it out. It is, of course, a fake revelation, a pseudo-intimacy, which is a trick I’ve learned from White House press secretaries; on a regular basis, they dispense pieces of information about us that are true but absurdly trivial, that masquerade as sharing—these are humanizing, they tell us. Charlie Blackwell loves the movie Anchorman. Alice Blackwell gave the president a digital camera and a biking jersey for Christmas. Ella Blackwell’s favorite food is fajitas.

  The real answer to the question of what in my life I never imagined I’d find myself doing is this: having a face-lift. And though there has been plenty of media speculation on the topic, it will never be confirmed either by me or by any staff members, in part because few of them know for certain. Charlie had decided as early as 1997, before his gubernatorial reelection, that he’d run for president in 2000. In 1998, at a Super Bowl party we were hosting at the governor’s mansion for staff and close friends, I was standing with Debbie Bell; Hank’s wife, Brenda; and Kathleen Hicken. Debbie, who was at that point Charlie’s director of communications, said, “Between us girls, have any of you ever considered plastic surgery? I was in Ann Taylor the other day, and those dressing-room mirrors are not forgiving.”

  “Debbie, you’re young still!” I said. She was about a decade behind Charlie and me—this would have meant she was then in her early forties—so I wanted to think this.

  “See, but I keep hearing how easy the procedures are these days,” Debbie said. “I’m not talking about, you know, implants or a nose job, just—” She held her hands up on either side of her face and pulled back. “Eliminate a few wrinkles,” she said. She turned to me. “Would you do it?” (I should have known—oh, I was a terrible dupe, but I didn’t get it.)

  “Doesn’t a face-lift take months to recover from?” Kathleen said.

  Debbie shook her head. “Maybe it used to be like that, but doctors have made a ton of advances. If I schedule an appointment, Alice, will you come with me for moral support?” This struck me as an odd request, because I wasn’t close to Debbie. We knew each other well, she was part of Charlie’s inner circle, but she and I never spent time together one-on-one.

  “I think I’ll pass, but I’ll be curious to hear what the doctor tells you,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything he turns you away for being far too youthful.”

  That, it turned out, was Phase One. Phase Two was Jadey calling and saying, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but Hank wants you to get a face-lift, so I’m supposed to suggest we go to Florida and get them together, like it’s my own idea, but then I thought about it, and I’m kind of intrigued.”

  “Hank wants me to get a face-lift?”

  “I know it’s real manipulative—”

  “And he called you?”

  “Debbie called me.”

  “I’ll call you back in a second,” I said, and when I’d hung up, I dialed the direct line to Charlie’s office. His secretary Marsha answered, saying, “He’s meeting with the Board of Regents right now, but I’d be happy to—”

  “Please tell him it’s urgent,” I said.

  When Charlie picked up, he said in a breathless voice, “Ella—” and I said, “No, she’s fine, nothing bad happened, except apparently, Hank is going around telling people I need a face-lift.”

  “I warned him you wouldn’t like this.”

  “You knew?”

  “It’s for TV, Lindy, that’s all. You know I think you’re beautiful, but he has the idea that when we’re on more of a national stage—”

  “Are you planning to have a face-lift?”

  “I don’t have to tell you there’s a double standard. Listen, they should have been more straightforward with you—”

  “They?”

  “We—we should have. Hank’s logic is that if you want to do it, do it now. You can’t have that kind of surgery in the middle of a campaign.”

  “Where is this coming from? Did Hank run a poll on my appearance?”

  Charlie hesitated, and I said, “Is he there with you now?”

  “He’s in with the Regents, which is where I should be. It’s your decision, Lindy. I’m sorry if you’re offended. You�
��re still the prettiest of all my wives.”

  “This is incredibly insulting.”

  “When I get home tonight, I’ll show you how attractive I find you. Now I’ve gotta go before I get a woody just thinking about it.”

  I suppose I was offended not only because the thought of Charlie’s staff discussing my appearance—and finding it lacking—was humiliating but also because the suggestion reinforced my own self-doubt. Although I’d never been insecure about my looks, it hadn’t escaped my attention that the lines at the corners of my mouth and across my forehead were deeper, that the skin on my neck was not as smooth as it had once been, and that when I appeared on television, these flaws were more obvious than in person. Still, I hadn’t thought the situation required more than some experimenting with makeup.

  For three days I fumed, on the fourth day I had my assistant Cheryl go buy a book about plastic surgery, and on the fifth day I went to see a doctor. He was not the one who performed the procedure; a month later, Jadey and I did go to a clinic in Naples, Florida, to a surgeon reputed to be the best in the field, and afterward, we stayed for two weeks at a secluded house overlooking a canal. Unfortunately, the setting was wasted on us because we weren’t supposed to swim or expose ourselves to the sun; Cheryl, who was thirty, had accompanied us, and we encouraged her to drive to the beach and even snorkel one afternoon. Meanwhile, Jadey and I lay around reading, watching television, complaining, and making fun of ourselves. We’d been instructed to keep our heads elevated—Jadey was more bandaged than I was, though we were both simultaneously numb and tender, and my face became quite puffy—and six days after the procedure, we went to have the stitches removed from the incisions at our hairlines (before the operation, a nurse had complimented me on how beautifully my haircut would hide any mild scarring). Jadey and I made a pact to never tell anyone—our husbands knew, and Cheryl, but we’d say nothing to our other sisters-in-law or to Priscilla or our children. It was thinking of Ella, actually, that gave me pause: What a negative role model I would be if she knew, how vain and unaccepting of the aging process. Conveniently, however, she was away at Princeton, and the story we told everyone else in Madison and Milwaukee was that we were taking a painting class, an intensive study of watercolor. (“What do we do when they ask to see our work?” I said, and Jadey said, “We say it’s being shipped back.” As it turned out, no one ever asked.)

  Especially in the first few days after our twin surgeries, Jadey and I looked so banged up that we questioned, out loud and at regular intervals, whether we’d made a mistake, and it crossed my mind (this part I did not express aloud) that we were like characters in a fairy tale, narcissistic hags grasping at our lost youth. But we weren’t, in the end, punished for overreaching; even a week after the surgery, the bruising had faded, the swelling had shrunk, and on the night before our return to Wisconsin, we joined Cheryl for dinner at a wonderful and very festive Mexican restaurant; we weren’t supposed to drink, but Jadey sneaked a few sips of Cheryl’s margarita. Upon our arrival home, we kept calling each other to compare notes on how many compliments we’d received, how rested people said we looked from the fresh sea air. Of all the unfortunate facts about plastic surgery, perhaps the hardest to accept is this: If it’s done well, it works. Once you’ve had it, you realize how many other people must have also, and while there are plenty of inept examples where the surgery is obvious, there are many more women and men, especially in the public eye, about whom we haven’t a clue, even as we admire their healthy and youthful glow.

  I had learned in the book I’d read that the benefits of a rhytidectomy, as it is formally called, tend to last for five to ten years, at which point a repeat performance is recommended. That means that even by the most optimistic calculation, my face-lift has expired. I don’t plan to have another, not because my vanity has disappeared but because now Jadey and I prefer Botox treatments, an option that didn’t exist in the late nineties. Every three months, she flies to Washington, and Charlie’s private physician, Dr. Subramanium, performs the treatments on us in the privacy of his White House office; the procedure takes ten minutes and involves no anesthesia. I would like to think that part of the reason I stick so assiduously to this routine is that it’s a source of bonding for Jadey and me, a way for us to maintain our closeness, but this is only partly true. I also do it because I don’t want bloggers and late-night talk-show hosts to make fun of the way I look. That I routinely submit to having poisonous bacterium injected into my face is flabbergasting to me, but no more flabbergasting than my marriage to the president of the United States, my residence in the White House, my ridiculous title of first lady. As far as I know, Debbie Bell has never had plastic surgery of any kind.

  Back in 1998, after I returned to Madison from Naples, Ella came home for spring break a few weeks later, and I went to pick her up at the airport; though I had security detail as Wisconsin’s first lady, I still occasionally drove. Ella’s spring break was two weeks long, and she and a bunch of friends had spent the first half in Turks and Caicos, at the vacation home of a classmate named Alessandra Caterina Laroche de Fournier (she went by Alex). The trip had become a little boring by the end, Ella said; she’d felt self-indulgent, and this week, she wanted to drop by the soup kitchen where she had volunteered during high school. I’d cleared my schedule in anticipation of her being home, and I told her that if she wanted to see any movies, or if she needed to shop for clothes, especially for her upcoming summer internship at Microsoft, I was flexible. In a neutral tone, she said, “Yeah, maybe.”

  We were back at the mansion, and I’d parked when she said, “Mom, by the way?”

  I turned to look at her.

  “Nice face-lift,” she said.

  THEY LIVE ON the first floor of a house on Adelphia Street. With my heart thudding against my chest, I climb the porch steps and knock on the door, though knocking is a bit of a formality given that both their apartment and the one above it, accessed through a door next to theirs, have already been inspected by the Secret Service agents. An airconditioned coolness, infused with cigarette smoke, comes out to meet me from inside when Dena appears behind her screen door. She is a lean woman with a stringy neck and thin lips, her face lined, her once light brown hair now blondish-gray and dry-looking, still wavy but clipped just beneath her ears. She is old, Dena’s old, but she’s also unmistakably herself, and I begin to cry. She opens the door, an amused look creeping onto her face, and she says, “Well, you don’t need to be a drama queen about it.” When we embrace, I cling to her.

  We step into the living room, which holds a black leather couch and matching chair as well as a low coffee table, all facing an entertainment system—a triptych of shelves whose centerpiece is an enormous television set, flanked on one side by a stereo, speakers, and CD and DVD cases, and on the other side by several rows of propped-up collector plates featuring either horses (they gallop against the backdrop of western landscapes, their bodies at sharp sideways angles, their manes and tails blown fiercely by the wind) or else American Indians (a chieftain gripping a tomahawk with an eagle perched on his shoulder, a woman in long black braids and a fringed leather dress kneeling devotedly over a papoose). Has Dena’s taste changed, has mine, or have the times? Perhaps some combination. The walls of the living room are covered in wood paneling, the carpet is mauve, and a doorway leads to an overcast narrow hall at the end of which another doorway opens onto, from my vantage point, a strip of a sunny room with a black-and-white checker-board floor—the kitchen, I assume. The television is on, set to Dr. Phil.

  “You thirsty?” Dena asks. “I’d offer you a real drink, but we quit years ago, so about the most interesting thing we have is Diet Coke.”

  “That sounds perfect.” When she starts down the hall, I look around for tissue—there’s a box on an end table—and blow my nose. On the coffee table is a bowl of rose potpourri, an issue of People magazine, and a pack of Merit cigarettes. From the kitchen, I hear water running, and as Dena returns to t
he living room, she talks to someone in one of the rooms along the way, but I can’t make out the words over the television. It must be Pete; I know from my agents that I am now sitting in the same apartment as Pete Imhof. Outside, through the front window, I see José, one of the agents, standing on the porch with his arms folded, surveying the street.

  Dena carries two glasses, one with dark, fizzy liquid in it and one with water; she passes the Diet Coke to me, turns off the TV, sits in the chair, and gestures for me to sit on the couch. “I’ve gotta say, when the girl from your office called to announce you were on your way, I thought someone was playing a joke.” Dena’s tone is neither cold nor fawning but simply normal; for the second time today, I am not Alice Blackwell but Alice Lindgren. Or I am both, because she says, “So what’s it like being married to the president?”

  In what I hope is a light voice, I say, “It depends on the day.”

  Dena crosses one leg over the other. She’s wearing jeans and a sleeveless black V-necked shirt that shows her cleavage to such flattering effect, I can’t help wondering if she’s either wearing a padded bra or has had implants. She also wears dangly silver earrings, a silver chain necklace, and two silver rings, neither on the ring finger of her left hand: One, with a moonstone affixed to it, is on her left middle finger, and the other, a band imprinted with tiny peace signs, is on her right thumb. The peace signs give an extra weight to what she says next, or maybe it’s my imagination. She says, “I never knew you were a Republican.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yeah?” She smiles. “How’s that worked out?”