Pretend I'm Not Here
Page 11
I dutifully took notes, obsessively checking the tape recorder to make sure it was working. I had brought along extra batteries, pens, reporter’s notepads, and notes. Soon my nerves settled down when I saw that Marjorie and Mrs. Clinton were doing just fine without my input. Just to prove to myself I could put several words together in the right order and make them come out of my mouth audibly, I promised myself I would ask at least one question before the interview concluded.
The First Lady and the congresswoman discussed what it meant for more women than ever before to be in Congress, that women approached legislative work differently from their male counterparts. Women were more likely to use their life experiences to inform this work and were less concerned with wielding power.
Women in politics had to deal with a lot of bullshit and bad behavior on the part of men who were resisting this sharing of the stage. Issues like rape, violence, and reproductive health were now getting airtime. Maybe more women in Congress would really change things, and for the better, I thought. I was excited by the conversation; Mrs. Clinton’s enthusiasm illuminated the room as she talked about how it made her feel to see so many women in office. I wondered how maddening it must be to have to wear the corset of First Ladydom when you have a law degree from Yale and are committed to issues such as global women’s rights and affordable health care.
The interview was wrapping up and Marjorie looked at me. “Do you have anything you want to ask?”
“A real quick one,” I said, nodding. I did have one question, an obvious one but something that I really thought should be addressed. “When do you think we’ll have a woman president?” The second half of the question, the part I was too intimidated to actually ask, was “and would you be interested in being that woman?”
“Sometime in the next fifteen or twenty years,” she said, smiling.
That was fall of 1993. Fifteen years before she would first run for the presidency. She came pretty close to her own prediction.
As the Republican House members had so coarsely predicted, Marjorie’s constituents showed no mercy in town hall meetings and other public venues where she appeared on trips home; Marjorie and her staff watched as her chances of being reelected deteriorated from unlikely to grim. A few months after our White House interview, an otherwise cheerless holiday season was brightened by an invitation from the Clintons for Marjorie and her family to attend Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head, South Carolina.
An exclusive annual retreat for top people to talk about public policy, Renaissance Weekend was described by the New York Times as a “festival of earnestness.” It was also an opportunity for Marjorie to make useful connections for her post-Congress future. But the most valuable of these connections was one that neither she nor even the most calculating political operative could have engineered or even predicted: Marjorie’s oldest son, Marc, and the Clintons’ only child, Chelsea, would meet, starting a teenage friendship that would flourish when they both ended up attending Stanford University.
This friendship eventually evolved into an adult relationship that led to marriage in 2010, making Marjorie and the Clintons in-laws. This union, worthy of a Venn diagram illustrating the incestuous nature of political Washington, got the predictable amount of media attention, focusing on the scandals and setbacks of the couple’s parents, rather than noting how much Marjorie had actually accomplished. I felt the press overlooked an equally meaningful aspect of the story.
The sheer perseverance and resilience it must have taken to live a life that included being the mother of eleven children, the recipient of five Emmys, author of three books, and stints as the head of the National Women’s Business Council, the director, deputy chair of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, and executive director of the Women’s Campaign Fund—that to me seems like something worth exploring. And the setbacks: Losing office. Bankruptcy. Convicted spouse. Divorce. (The marriage ended in 2007 after Ed Mezvinsky reportedly spiraled downward, culminating in his serving five years in prison after pleading guilty to dozens of felonies, receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and becoming entangled in various lawsuits. He had fallen prey to a variety of Nigerian scams and then engaged in some illegal activities to dig himself out of debt.) Marjorie’s life is the living embodiment of that Japanese proverb: Fall down seven times, get up eight.
The complexity of challenges that Marjorie has encountered and dealt with in her life is pretty staggering and I’m not sure she’s been given the respect she deserves just for the resilience she has demonstrated. Washington is a town where everything is measured in polls and fund-raising dollars. You’re either up or you’re down, you’re in or you’re out. You’re good or you’re bad. You’re a conniving opportunist or a selfless do-gooder. You value yourself only by whether you are perceived as a player or not. I had fallen into that trap myself: estimating my own value using others’ criteria, mistaking proximity to power as proof of my worthiness.
After Marjorie’s book hit the bookstores in the early spring of 1994, it was again time to ask, “What next?” I had worked for Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, and now had a “with” on a book that received favorable reviews and some attention. I also had my master’s and was teaching Introduction to Journalism on a regular basis at Georgetown. Unsolicited, book projects were now coming my way, and I was beginning to have the luxury of turning down work that wasn’t appealing, either because the compensation wasn’t enough or the client promised to be difficult. Saying no was hard at first because I was afraid the work would dry up. But it didn’t.
Later that spring I received an unusual offer from a former Washington Post Food section editor who had relocated to Maine to run the Bangor Daily News. He invited me to come up to Maine for the summer and be a floating newsroom writing coach. I would make my way through the roster of reporters, stationed throughout the state in little one-person bureaus, and work with them on improving their writing. It wasn’t exactly Gauguin taking off for Tahiti, but it would get me out of D.C. during its worst weather.
I was more than ready to trade in lobbyists and the White House for lobsters and lighthouses, at least for a summer. While I was proud of Marjorie’s book, it wasn’t mine. Like a surrogate mother leaving the baby behind at the hospital, I felt empty.
I packed up my apartment, put my stuff in storage, said good-bye to my friends, and headed north. When I arrived, I stayed with my new boss and his wife for a few days, and they helped me comb the classifieds for a place to live. I found a room for rent on a horse farm owned by a friendly, warm woman named Bunny. I loved horses, having ridden in college, and Bunny promised to give me lessons in addition to occasional hot meals. I settled in and began to get to know my way around the newsroom and town.
The local news business was a welcome change from what I was used to. Conflicts of interest, for instance, were totally different. Instead of power couples like Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan navigating overlapping realms of politics and journalism, here in Maine it was fishermen doubling as business reporters. Ethical dilemmas were quaint compared to those the Washington press corps faced: rather than worrying about whether you can use what you overhear as a soccer mom in the bleachers about the congressman’s marriage, it was more along the lines of must you recuse yourself from reporting on the effect of a recent drought on the price of blueberries?
The New England lifestyle was just more fun. The car I was driving at the time was made for a summer in Maine, a little blue convertible Miata with a standard shift, which I chronicled in a quarterly column I wrote for Miata Magazine (yes, there is such a thing). An essay I had written for Glamour magazine about the sense of power that driving fast gave me had caught the editor’s eye, and he called me up and invited me to be their “girl columnist.” For a few years I wrote what amounted to a serial love letter to driving. It culminated in my attending Skip Barber Racing School, one of the best places to learn how to drive a racecar, something on my bucket list.
But then one day I got a phone call when I was in the newsroom working with one of the sports reporters. On the line was Bob Barnett, a D.C. book agent/lawyer to the stars. He was both Woodward’s and Ben’s agent. He was calling because he represented a woman named Hanan Ashrawi, who he explained was a well-known and well-respected spokesperson for the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and a university professor. She had completed a draft of This Side of Peace, a memoir of her struggles as a Christian Arab woman in a Muslim, male-dominated world, having to navigate between the likes of Yassir Arafat and Shimon Peres. Alice Mayhew was the editor on the book, Barnett said, and they were hoping I was available to help out for a month, maybe five weeks.
It sounded like a good gig, but it meant returning to Washington. Which of course, having not met my lobsterman, I was inclined to do anyway, as my contract with the Bangor paper was just for the summer. We discussed the details a few more minutes, and then I asked about compensation.
He told me to come up with a figure. My mind went blank. My brother, David, a former government lawyer and now a junk bond trader, had taught me that the first rule of negotiating was never to name a number first. So I said I really didn’t know, hoping that would force Barnett to float the first figure.
But he asked me again what I was looking for so I had to ask him if he would hold a sec, and I dialed my brother who answered by blurting his last name. I could hear guys screaming numbers in the background. I quickly told him what was going on.
“Okay, get back on the line and just tell him $40k.” Then I heard a muffled sound, which must have been David’s hand over the receiver. He was trading something, a gazillion of this, a thousand of that, shorting this, long on that.
“Forty thousand? For five weeks of work? Are you crazy?” I said when he came back on the line. “I can’t ask for that.” We lived in two different worlds. His was in a Michael Douglas movie, and mine was by Nora Ephron.
“Don’t be a chump. If they want you enough, they will pay you what you’re worth. Tell him it’s inconvenient, it will mess up your vacation, blah blah blah.” His hand went back over the receiver, and he was yelling numbers again. “Just go back to him and say $30k.”
I pressed the blinking light and said, “Hi, Bob. Um, I was going to take a vacation after my job here ended. But I guess I could come back for this. But it’s inconvenient. I guess I could do it for $20k.”
“Twenty thousand dollars?” His tone was incredulous. He was practically sputtering. “Why, that’s”—he paused to do the math—“an annual rate of $240k.”
I asked him to hold again as I went back to David, who was yelling again, calling someone in the background a moron. I repeated what Barnett had said, about the annual rate.
“You got a pen?” His tone had gone from patronizing to impatient.
“Yes,” I said dutifully.
“Okay, write this down so you don’t screw it up. Then get back on the phone with this guy and read it word for word: ‘Yes, your math is correct. What’s your point?’”
Barnett agreed to the $20k, so a few weeks later I packed up my car, made my rounds at the newsroom, hugged Bunny and every single one of her horses good-bye, and headed south.
When I got back to Washington, Alice sent me the manuscript and asked me to look for places in the narrative where personal history could be woven into the author’s role on the world stage of the Middle East peace process. Hanan would travel to Washington and spend a handful of days with me during which we were to work on making the manuscript more accessible to a wide audience.
After reading her manuscript, I was excited to meet Hanan. She was a woman of many accomplishments, someone who was an alluring mix of strength and warmth. The woman who wrote these pages was very wise, and I was humbled that anyone thought I could help make this good book even better.
I wasn’t disappointed when I met her. She was the sort of person with whom you instantly feel a connection. She had an immediacy and an authenticity about her that elicited the same of those in her presence. Though serious and not one to mince words, she was also fun and loved chocolate and tobacco, both of which she encouraged me to share.
During one of these sugar and cigarette breaks, she inhaled deeply, looked me straight in the eye, and asked, “When are you going to start focusing on your own writing?”
Good question.
Taken aback by her interest in me, I just shrugged and mumbled. Less out of reluctance and more out of denial. I was touched by her interest. A strong role model for women and fierce supporter of women’s rights, she was keeping with her core values in encouraging me. What she wrote in her acknowledgments section, like Professor Michaels’s words, buoyed my spirits: “Barbara Feinman, craftswoman and friend, understood both structure and substance.”
These two experiences, Marjorie putting my name on the cover of her book and Hanan challenging me to do my own work, helped move me toward bolstering myself to establish my own voice, to stake a claim as a writer with her own story to tell. I felt something shifting, as though I were at a crossroads with my writing, and that I still had a chance to change course.
But I had built up a solid reputation as a book doctor, and this town would never have a shortage of people who wanted to “author” books but who couldn’t or didn’t want to write them themselves. I had to make a living. It wasn’t realistic to think I could do that by writing novels, even if I managed to get one published.
Was it time to make my peace with being a “craftswoman,” as Hanan so kindly put it? What did it mean that I had gravitated to work that required—or allowed?—me to be silent, and invisible? Was it really so different from the fiction I longed to write? Was it time to give up on my fiction, even on my own voice, and be grateful for what I had: a steady stream of income and a comfortable life?
Six
The Senator and His War
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
—Muriel Rukeyser
After my summer in Maine, I relocated to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where a few years back my siblings and I had bought a modest second home in Centreville, about an hour-and-forty-five-minute drive from Washington. The hundred-year-old house sat above a marsh, around the corner from the town public landing where you could launch a boat onto the Corsica River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay.
I decided I would rather live out there for a while than return to Washington. I wanted to see if living a couple of hours from Washington might be the solution I was looking for: close enough to sustain a writing career but far enough away to maintain my equilibrium. I already was paying my share of the mortgage on the house so my expenses would be minimal, and this way I wouldn’t have to shell out rent money for an overpriced Washington apartment.
I also wouldn’t be eating out with friends at expensive Georgetown restaurants or drinking at trendy Adams Morgan bars. It would be a much more simple existence and I could focus on writing—both fiction for myself and editing gigs to pay the bills. I was eager to get settled, having first briefly stayed at my sister’s house in Arlington, just outside of the city, while I worked on Hanan’s book.
In addition to writing, I also planned to fit in a lot of ice-skating. There was a rink on the edge of Easton, about a half hour from our house, and shortly after I started going to morning public sessions, I was hired to teach little kids the basics like swizzles, t-stops, and crossovers. It was a solitary routine for the most part: I’d get up early, go to the rink, head home, fix lunch, and then sit at t
he computer for an afternoon of writing or editing.
The house was creaky and old, which meant that during the day, it was quaint and cozy. But at night, it felt kind of lonely, and, if I let my imagination get the best of me, it was even a little creepy. Luckily there were neighbors close enough that I didn’t feel completely isolated.
With Hanan’s manuscript finished, I turned my attention to my latest project: a book with Bob Kerrey, the former governor of Nebraska, now a Democratic senator. I was excited about it because rather than another political tome, Bob, a Vietnam veteran, wanted to write a personal memoir about war. We had tried to get some work done while I was in Maine and he was in Washington, but we hadn’t made much progress. That’s how he ended up coming out to my family’s Eastern Shore getaway. I told him it would be a good place to write and reflect and we could hammer out a timeline and a to-do list for completing the project.
Right before Bob arrived, I had been away for a few weeks in California doing the reporting for a freelance magazine piece. I picked up Bob in the city and together we drove out to the country. I had described Centreville to him as a sleepy Maryland town on the water, a place where you wake up to the sound of wild Canada geese honking rather than that of car horns honking.
As soon as I opened the front door, it was obvious something was wrong. No one had been in the Maryland house during my absence, and now it was a scene out of Hitchcock. Bird poop everywhere, paintings askew, lamps knocked over, a couple of dead birds. I remembered that the chimney flue was broken, and my sister and brother-in-law had found a single dead bird in the living room the last time they had come for the weekend. But this time it looked like an entire flock of blackbirds had gained entry.