by Kerry Clare
When the work term started that May, Derek was in a relationship with a girlfriend back home, a woman called Miranda who was nearly as old as he was, which made it easy for Brooke to forget the rumors about his personal life. And then, when Miranda suddenly broke up with him at the beginning of July, it was Brooke he turned to for support. Miranda ran a water-ski school and had fallen for another instructor, and Derek was devastated, the extent of which he revealed to Brooke only—although he also kept his sense of humor about the whole thing. He said, “Maybe the problem was that I don’t have a boat.”
It had been a pivotal moment in the evolution of their friendship, Brooke supposed, her first real glimpse of his vulnerability. And afterwards, she’d wonder if they would have developed a friendship at all were its foundation not built upon a few weeks of the illusion that Derek had the personal life of someone who wasn’t a frat boy. Would she have felt as comfortable alone in his office late at night, after everyone else had left for the day? That evening he had her going over a speech that had been written for him, because, he said, Brooke had a way with words. Confessing, when she’d noted that he seemed unusually nervous about this routine address—he gave speeches all the time—about his breakup the night before.
“And it was on Skype,” he said. “I know. That’s bad enough, but then the screen froze and there she was with her face in this bizarre contortion, because she’d been in the middle of a sentence about how this water-ski guy could give her all the things I never could, and I honestly thought she was joking, because that was ridiculous, and why was her face like that? And then the connection came back and she didn’t even know I’d missed what she’d said. She kept saying, ‘So we’re good now?’ But how can we be good after she broke up with me? I just don’t understand it.”
He’d been blindsided, he said, left wondering if he had any instincts at all, and his confidence was thrown. He wasn’t sure he was capable now of getting up in front of hundreds of people and giving a speech, so he made Brooke watch while he practiced faking it, over and over. It really was the first time she had been there for him as a human being, a friend, rather than just an employee.
“You’re doing great,” she told him, after he’d run through the presentation for the fifth time, and he still didn’t believe her, convinced that everyone could see right through him, even though he sounded just as assured and convincing as he ever did.
She would talk about the experience afterwards with Anjali, not sharing every detail, because some of it was personal. This was a continuation of a conversation the girls had been having all summer as they tried to figure out who Derek Murdoch was, what made him tick.
“I think he really just needs someone he can lean on,” she said to Anjali. “Everybody leans on him, but who’s he got to turn to?”
“Oh, but I’d say he’s doing okay,” Anjali answered. “Because he’s been turning to Kelly and Eliza all summer long.” Then she made a panicked face and said, “Don’t tell them I told you. No one is supposed to know. They don’t even know about each other, but they told me, and I can’t believe I’ve kept my mouth shut until now.”
They were out in the park, just the two of them, and Brooke didn’t want to believe it. It was impossible—lies and gossip—because wouldn’t she have realized that something was going on? Plus he’d never tried anything with her. But then she began to consider all the reasons it might not be impossible—the awkward moments among the group that summer, strange silences, weird behavior, and rumors from years before—and then there was the truth staring her right in the face.
By mid-August, Eliza had quit the internship (or maybe she’d been asked to leave, no one would say), and now Kelly didn’t come for lunch in the park anymore. Nobody else seemed particularly bothered by what had transpired, so Brooke tried to play along, act like it was no big deal, even though she felt like an idiot, and had a hard time acting natural around Derek. It was like she was the one who’d been betrayed, even if it was just that she had these old-fashioned ideas about relationships and monogamy, without any real experience of either.
Derek could tell that something was up, though, and he wanted to know. She mattered that much to him. He called her into his office to find out what was going on, why she had been giving him the cold shoulder.
She said, “It’s nothing.” It would feel dumb and childish to admit how much Derek had disappointed her, and she had learned a lesson from the whole experience, which was to not infer promises that nobody had ever made to her.
He said, “Something’s wrong. I can see it.” He asked her, “Is this about the drama with Kelly?”
She cracked. “The whole thing makes me feel like such a fool.” All that time she’d spent sitting in this very chair trying to soothe his heartbreak about Miranda, and he’d been getting it on with her colleagues.
He said, “But none of that has anything to do with you. And yeah, I’ve been careless—it’s a fact. It’s been a tough summer, and you know that better than anyone. I’m not proud of myself, but this doesn’t change things, especially between you and me. Surely you know that.” You and me, he’d said, magic words that made the drama with Kelly feel like something that could be easily tossed aside.
And even his carelessness Brooke could construe as noble. Because of course, with all the focus on the big picture and pressing issues, the rest of his life had been neglected and was kind of a mess. His mother still bought his clothes, delivering shirts to the office in big shopping bags on her trips to the city. Unless someone delivered lunch to his desk, Derek never thought about eating. The parameters of his job meant that he just didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on those details, things like clothes, or meals, or being part of a meaningful relationship.
Plus, he was charming—smart and funny, just self-deprecating enough to put everyone at ease—so it was understandable that women responded as they did, and it wasn’t as though Kelly and Eliza hadn’t known what they were getting into. What had happened was all just part of the vibe, the charged atmosphere, late nights, the drinking. The rules were different in the political sphere. It was just the way things were.
But not everybody agreed. “He’s thirty-five years old,” said Anjali.
“He doesn’t act it,” said Brooke.
Anjali said, “Well, that’s the problem.”
Except Brooke wasn’t sure. From where she stood, acting like a thirty-five-year-old seemed overrated. It required shutting down possibilities, committing to the status quo, and going to bed early. To get older but not grow old seemed like the best of both worlds, and she wanted to be like that.
“You’re never going to be like that,” said Anjali. “You’d never get away with it, because you’re a woman.”
By this point, Brooke was firmly on Team Derek. Sure, he liked to have fun, and his choices weren’t always responsible. It might be all right for a college student to drink too much and end up on the dance floor at Slappin’ Nellie’s with some girl who wasn’t wearing much more than underwear, but it wasn’t exactly distinguished behavior for an elected official in his mid-thirties, particularly when the girl was almost half his age.
But—as everybody always said when the potential problem of Derek’s partying was broached, because it often was—at the end of the day, he needed an outlet. And is it fair to hold it against a person that he just happens to be an unmarried heterosexual male? It’s not like the crowd at Slappin’ Nellie’s was the type to turn their noses up at his behavior. Sometimes someone would show up with a camera, or a member of the press would try to get in for an exposé, but Derek’s best friend Brent was always able to put a stop to that. A big guy who towered over Derek and everybody else, Brent had been watching out for him for years, since elementary school, when other kids had made fun of Derek’s scars and taunted him with the nickname “Fire Boy.”
So in terms of PR, they got off lucky in Derek’s office. Many of his
older colleagues in government had worse records of sexual impropriety and entitlement, and their staff had the extra trick of having to keep it all from their wives. With Derek, it was different—everybody liked him, it was all consensual. There were rumors about his reputation, but nothing substantiated, and none of it unethical or illegal—he wasn’t a liar, he wasn’t a cheater. He was also open about his personal life, and would end up confessing over beers, when it was just him and Brooke, that he was tired of it all.
“Plus, you’re making me feel guilty,” he said. “There it is. Right there. That look. Like you’re judging.” He’d got together with a volunteer the weekend before at the party convention. The summer was over by then, and Brooke was back at school, but she was still working in the office part time, and she’d been at the convention too. The volunteer had been a vapid idiot, the kind who wasn’t interested in politics at all beyond the opportunity to prey on guys like Derek. The kind of girl who would lower herself to saying anything just to get a bit closer to power.
“I’m not judging,” said Brooke, and she wasn’t. Or at least she wasn’t judging Derek, because she understood now. He could be careless. He needed outlets. “Besides, why does it matter what I think anyway?”
“Of course it matters,” he said. “But I was just having a little fun. It always seems like such a good idea at the time.”
“As long as you’re both on the same page,” she said.
He said, “See, that’s what I love about you—you get it. Honestly, what would I do without you, Brooke?” With his puppy eyes, and those scars that had never managed to completely fade, he’d make her feel like she’d won a prize or something, in being the one who could help him hurt a little less. Derek gave so much to everyone that giving this one thing back to him—her understanding—seemed like the least that she could do.
“Why is everyone who works in this office a woman, though?” people would ask, people who’d heard the rumors and didn’t like what Derek was all about. (And what Derek was all about, by the way, was equality, eradication of poverty, giving a voice to marginalized people, and giving everyone the tools to lift themselves up—and those people usually didn’t like that, either.)
Brooke would have to emphasize the importance of giving women opportunities to enter politics, an arena from which they’d traditionally been excluded. It was an old boy’s club, yes, pretty much everywhere, but not in Derek Murdoch’s office—and who would have the nerve to criticize that?
“Okay then, why are all the women under twenty-five?” A valid question, but one that ignored the realities of politics, where pretty much everybody was under twenty-five, because everyone older than that was burnt out and could no longer afford to live on the paltry salaries. Derek surrounded himself with women because he respected and valued them, and not because he didn’t.
Brooke would end up working for Derek for four years, as a part-timer during school breaks, and then full time after she graduated, and while he certainly had his flaws, he was always good to her; the closer their friendship became, the clearer it was he was one of the most honorable people she knew. Always striving to be a better man—he’d been trying to cut down on his drinking, because another election was on the horizon, and he had to be in peak physical form for that. He started running again in the mornings, and some days she’d join him because her place wasn’t too far from his condo, and she only liked to run with company. But that didn’t last long, because it was hard to keep up with Derek. Brooke didn’t have his drive—nobody did. Which must have made it lonely out there, she thought, so many mornings where there was nobody but him.
She had a boyfriend at the time, which made things simpler. He also worked for the party, and it’s true that Brooke’s universe had become a bubble—everything was about politics, and even at school she’d joined the campus political clubs, losing touch with the friends she’d met in residence in her first year because they just didn’t get it, how politics was like a game you had to always be playing. “There’s more to life,” she was repeatedly reminded by those friends, but these were people who didn’t know how politics really is life—life-or-death in some circumstances—and how, as part of Derek’s team, she was doing things that really mattered, so far beyond the stakes of, say, taking up knitting or badminton. Why would anyone opt to sit on the sidelines?
They were all in it together, and that’s why it didn’t matter that Derek mainly hired women to work in the office, or that he was older than she was. Lots of people were older than she was, and for the first time Brooke was being taken seriously, and it was because of her youth and perspective. Derek was interested in what she had to say and, unlike most people who were older, he wasn’t afraid to shift his opinions, to learn from other people, to change his mind. “It’s called being progressive,” he used to say, “but what a lot of people forget is that ‘progress’ is supposed to be a verb. You’ve got to demonstrate it.”
But it was always going to happen, Derek and Brooke. He even said that once, that he’d known it right down the line, and she’d felt it too. And, strangely, the longer it didn’t happen, the more certain it seemed that eventually it would. She’d never met anybody who looked at her the way he did, who made her feel like the kind of person she’d always wanted to be. Even knowing everything she would come to know, she probably would have stood in line for a chance to be with him. And in certain framings of the situation, she supposed, this is exactly what she did.
Wednesday Afternoon
She had the late shift that day at the library, so she didn’t have to hurry out of bed in the morning, and the newspapers were already strung up and on display when she came in to work at noon. MURDOCH ALLEGATIONS ROCK PARTY, headlines screamed, still in all-caps. Below was a photo of Slappin’ Nellie’s in poor light, dark and sordid. Small-town bar where the hookups happened, said the caption.
Lindsay came up behind Brooke. “That whole place is a trash heap,” she said. “You see the girls lined up outside, crop tops in the freezing cold. They’re all trying so hard. It’s depressing.”
Brooke glanced at her, but said nothing, and then Lindsay reached around to pick up the paper and open its pages. There was Derek on page A2, looking assured and confident, back when he was on top of the world. “I used to know him,” she said. “Or kind of. I’d just gone into high school, but one of my friends babysat his sisters. His brother too. I think his mom was away and he was in the hospital—I remember that. It was in all the newspapers. At Christmas, we all gave donations to the charity fund.”
“He got better,” said Brooke.
Lindsay said, “He did.” And Brooke was irritated that Lindsay figured she knew Derek better than Brooke did because her friend had babysat his sisters thirty years ago. “They’re saying he’ll be resigning today.”
“They?” Could he really do it? Would he? It would upend the world, if this happened—or at least Brooke’s sense of it.
Lindsay said, “It’s everywhere online. He should have done it the other night though. I don’t know what he thought was going to happen.”
“He was trying to clear his name,” said Brooke.
“But there’s no coming back after that. How could he? I mean, you see his face now, it’s what you think of. I mean, that press conference was not the performance of an innocent man.”
Brooke admitted, “I don’t really know what happened there.”
“Those are the photos I remember,” said Lindsay, pointing to the paper. From back when he was in the hospital, reprinted farther down the page.
Before Brooke’s time. She reminded Lindsay, “But the fire was a long time ago.” Lindsay didn’t understand.
* * *
—
That afternoon, she sat at the circulation desk and did a swath of check-outs for moms and babies after Morgan’s story time—board books, lullaby CDs, and tomes on how to make babies go to sleep, mostly. She’d
never realized it was such a complicated subject, sleeping, but the library had a whole shelf and a half of books about it, patented techniques. She couldn’t imagine how this was a thing, or how something as instinctual as sleeping could require hundreds of pages to get down pat. Olivia, the kid she babysat, was older, and usually fell asleep on the couch while they were watching TV, and Brooke would have to carry her upstairs to her bed. But then maybe it was just the demographic, women like the ones in Brooke’s lineup who had all the time in the world and yet were still rushing to get home in time for their babies’ naps—the kind of women who tended to overcomplicate everything.
“He’s so tired,” one of the mothers told Brooke as she checked out a copy of Moo, Baa, La La La!, pushing the stroller forward and backward to get her fussy baby to soothe. “But he can’t fall asleep yet.” She waved a toy centipede in his face, tiny legs flying and bells jingling, and the baby only fussed louder. “No, he can’t!” she sang in a merry little voice, and Brooke wasn’t sure why he couldn’t. Did it really have to be this hard?
A long line of babies before her now, as on every Wednesday, fat and bald, weird-looking and adorable, with their stressed-out, disheveled mothers. “He’s seven months today!” one of them told Brooke, baby balanced on her ample hip as she picked up a stack of books in the other, and Brooke smiled at them both, feeling somehow connected and also worlds away.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, a new Derek alert, and she checked it once the line had cleared and the library was quiet. He’d be holding a news conference, it said, but maybe she’d already missed it. She searched online for the livestream, which was easy to find because it was everyone’s top story. Derek looking even worse than the other night, if that was possible, but maybe it was the point—not defiance, but contrition. This was careful. This was calculated. The other night was reckless, but he would not be caught off guard again.