Pretend I'm Not Here

by Barbara Feinman Todd

  Its decor, unlike most of the mansion, had a lived-in, understated quality: comfy couches and chairs you could sink into and a few tables for dining or playing games. It was a place reserved for private life rather than photo opportunities. I sat down in a chair that faced the expansive view of the mall and tried not to stare at the two other women, while wondering what was going on.

  It turns out that the two of them were just as interested in figuring out who I was. As we waited for the First Lady, Houston and Bateson tried to get a bead on me. They asked questions about my professional accomplishments. I felt like they were two cops working in tandem to get the suspect to reveal how she’d ended up at the scene of a crime. What other books have you worked on? they wanted to know. How did Hillary find you? Where did you go to school? When did you graduate? Their tone was gradually but noticeably shifting from curious to territorial. Then one of them asked if I considered myself religious.

  I had been raised in a Reform Jewish household, but I was unreligious, really, agnostic at best. Religion just didn’t resonate with me. But I had already taught at Georgetown for a couple of years, and it’s a Jesuit university. So I was comfortable around religious-minded people, though I wasn’t one myself. Even so, I hesitated when these two women asked me about my religion. Plus, I still had no idea who they were.

  “Not religious in the traditional sense, necessarily,” Houston said. “But spiritual, do you consider yourself spiritual?”

  “Spiritual?” I said. “Sure, I guess.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I’m, uh, I’m a figure skater.”

  They looked at me with blank stares, as they should have, considering that I wasn’t really sure where I was going with this.

  “Skaters tend to be either jumpers or spinners,” I began to explain slowly, allowing myself time to feel my way around, wanting to give these strangers some kind of answer, in part because I felt pressured, and also because their intrusiveness annoyed me and I thought it might be fun to mess with them. “And I’m a spinner. Definitely a spinner. And the practice of spinning,” I went on, “it grounds me. The act of spinning is literally one of centering oneself. There’s a beauty in going nowhere fast.” I looked into their faces, and they were nodding. They appeared inclined to take themselves very seriously and perhaps that is what fueled my performance. “And in accepting this, you learn to focus not on the destination, but on the journey.”

  Just then Mrs. Clinton entered the room and saved me from meandering further into my own nonsense. Finally, I thought, we were going to get down to the business at hand, whatever that business actually was. Because I was there solely to help the First Lady with her book project, I briefly wondered whether these women were being brought in on the book somehow.

  Soon enough it became apparent what the spiritual inquisition had been about. Houston, I was piecing together from the conversation that followed, was some kind of spiritual or psychic guide and had, on other occasions, led a therapeutic exercise with the First Lady, one in which she would imagine she was addressing some historical figure.

  I gathered next that the First Lady would then carry on a dialogue with that person. Apparently Houston and Bateson were here at the White House to facilitate another one of these role-playing activities. Nancy Reagan had her horoscopes and Mary Todd Lincoln had her séances. Whatever gets you through the night, I told myself.

  Bateson remained a silent observer while Houston suggested the First Lady close her eyes and imagine she was talking to Eleanor Roosevelt. There they were together in the White House, the ghost of a former First Lady in conversation with the current First Lady, discussing the challenges of the job. Then Houston told her to switch roles and inhabit Mrs. Roosevelt’s mind.

  What was unfolding before me was oddly familiar, really just another iteration of method acting, what I engaged in to assume a ghostwriting role. I used it as a technique akin to literary ventriloquism, a means of appropriating authorial voice. As a writing tool it struck me as one of many useful ways to construct a voice. But this was not that: rather, what I was witness to felt like an act of desperation, not of creativity, and a deeply personal one at that. I wondered if everyone had forgotten I was there.

  I’d gone to school in California and, although I’d never eaten magic mushrooms or taken LSD, I’d hung out with plenty of people who had and who had hallucinated all sorts of wacky stuff. So really, in the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t such a big deal. Well, I guess that’s true when it’s happening with someone other than the wife of the leader of the free world. But watching Mrs. Clinton pretend to talk to Mahatma Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to her state of mind, I thought. If these two women were the people she chose to spend her time with, had she been brought to her knees by the Washington machine so forcibly that the only way up was through this silly exercise?

  And so, while it wasn’t exactly fodder for the type of book I was supposed to be birthing, it raised my curiosity, and I looked up Bateson and Houston as soon as I got home. Bateson, it turned out, was a cultural anthropologist and writer, having followed in the footsteps of her parents, the famous anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Houston was a New Agey author and motivational speaker who believed in various forms of psychic experience. A quick Google search now, twenty years after our meeting, brings up Houston’s website, complete with the requisite “Dalai Lama and me” shot and a bio declaring that Houston, as a “scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacities, is one of the foremost visionary thinkers and doers of our time. She is long regarded as one of the principal founders of the Human Potential Movement.” She is also, apparently, the founder and sole teacher of something she refers to as the Mystery School.

  But I didn’t know any of this on that afternoon in 1995. All I knew was that Mrs. Clinton had summoned me to the White House to meet with a couple of women with whom she had some sort of ongoing relationship and who made me feel uneasy. No one seemed to think the afternoon’s activities were out of the ordinary and so neither should I.

  Nevertheless, as I left the White House that day, I felt unsettled about my standing. Mrs. Clinton’s posse of handlers, schedulers, social secretaries, speechwriters, and other myriad helpers—the infamous “Hillaryland”—had always regarded me cordially but with little warmth and even less interest, and the vibe I had gotten from Houston and Bateson had felt downright frosty. People in Washington measured their own power by how closely they stood to the center. I was an outsider granted instant proximity. This gave me power, however temporary, and it may have threatened Hillaryland’s power. But this was all abstract. I had a much more pressing and tangible concern: I didn’t see how this session could possibly fit into the book we were supposed to be producing, and the afternoon I had just spent struck me as entirely fruitless. I didn’t know what to think or how to proceed.

  I recounted the events of that afternoon that had occurred five months earlier as we made our way back to Woodward’s house. A heavy, sickening feeling was growing in the pit of my stomach, but once I’d started talking and Woodward had started nodding his approval, the story just came out. He reassured me he would keep his promise not to tell anyone what I’d told him, that he’d protect me.

  He wouldn’t use the material I had given him. Not now, not ever. He had said he only wanted to understand Mrs. Clinton’s general state of mind. This is what I wanted to hear and so I tried to silence the voice inside my head telling me I’d just made a huge mistake, both a tactical one and a moral one.

  I went home, and with nothing else left to do before my flight the next day, I cleaned up my apartment and made sure I’d paid all my bills before taking off for Italy. I like order in that specific way that a nervous person with an unquiet mind likes order. Before departing on a trip, I leave my home in an organized, tidy state.

  Upon my return, I want to enter a home with a clean kitchen, a freshly made bed, and a bathroom that looks like it’s had recent and vigorous contac
t with a sponge. I lived in a brownstone that featured a turret, a round open space that jutted off my living room with big windows that looked directly onto S Street with Florida and Connecticut Avenues in the distance. My sister’s husband, the sculptor and furniture maker (who, you’ll remember had been front-page news in the Washington Post back in the ’80s, thanks to me), had built a desk for the space, a curved walnut surface with black metal legs and copper feet. I tidied the desk and dusted its surface, and filed away the stacks of papers that had accumulated over the months of Village.

  As I was doing so I came across a microcassette tape. I held the tape in my hand and stared at the label, written in my inelegant scrawl: “Vince Foster.”

  Foster was a boyhood friend of Bill Clinton’s and had hired Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law firm, which later became entangled in the Whitewater scandal. The president had appointed Foster White House deputy counsel. In May of 1993, just a few months after Foster began working in the Clinton administration, he got caught up in a Washington flap called Travelgate. Foster had become distraught over the possibility that in the coming weeks he’d be forced to testify before Congress regarding the Clintons’ involvement.

  In the summer of 1993, just six months after the Clintons moved into the White House, Foster was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot in Fort Marcy Park, across the Potomac from northwest D.C., off George Washington Parkway. Later a torn-up, unsigned suicide note was discovered in Foster’s briefcase, the last lines of which read, “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”

  One of the themes of It Takes a Village was the resilience of children, and on the trip to Chicago for the Oprah show appearance, I’d finagled some face time with the First Lady and asked her about Vince Foster in the context of what children need in order to grow up to be resilient adults. I’d recorded her answer onto the tape that was now in my hand. Nothing even the slightest bit provocative was on it but, still, Foster’s name was a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists who contended that the Clintons had had him murdered, so as I held it in my hand I felt uneasy, and I decided to put it away for safekeeping because it was too late in the day to arrange its return to the White House, which I was contractually obliged to do.

  Since my desk didn’t have any drawers I put it in my secretary, an old piece of furniture from my parents’ house that had one of those fold-down writing surfaces. If you pulled down the desktop, it revealed a row of pigeonholes where you could line up bills to be paid or store envelopes or a letter opener. Or a tape from the White House you weren’t really supposed to have retained.

  That night I tossed and turned, fretting about flying but also about my conversation with Woodward. I’d known the man for a dozen years. I’d been to his wedding, his daughter’s school plays. He had consoled me through my mother’s illness and death. He wouldn’t betray me. But what if he did? What if he somehow rationalized to himself that he wasn’t betraying a source? Was there a Woodwardian loophole to the transaction that I wasn’t considering? What if everything fell apart? What would I do if I didn’t have my work writing books? It was too late to go to law school, like my father had wanted. I was in my midthirties, no spring chicken, as Ben Bradlee liked to point out as often as possible.

  I put these thoughts on repeat and let them play over and over as I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Finally I told myself firmly that I just needed to get on the plane to Italy and embrace the whole dolce far niente thing: drink wine, stare out at the sea, and think about anything besides work. I always felt restless and tense after finishing a ghostwriting project, as if I’d been dropped off at a gas station on a lonely stretch of desert road and watched my fellow traveler drive off without me. I needed to get my bearings. I needed to get out of Washington.

  For three weeks I traveled around Italy, first with a friend and then on my own, as planned. The friend was Deborah Needleman, now the editor of the New York Times T Magazine, and I’d known her since we became friends when we both worked at the Post. Deborah was obsessed with gardens and had arranged for us to tour several of Italy’s most beautiful ones.

  We were both total Italophiles, and we immersed ourselves in the scenery, the people, and the language. Spending time with her helped me begin to feel like myself again. This was before the Internet was as we know it now, so not only was I far away from Washington but I was also cut off from everyone I knew. With an ocean between us, I was able to push Mrs. Clinton and Woodward out of my mind, or at least hold them at bay.

  After Rome we went to Florence, which is where Deborah and I separated, she to catch her flight back to New York, me to take the train to the Riviera. Soon enough I was stowed away at a little seaside hotel that was empty and affordable. No one knew where I was. No one even knew my name except the hotel receptionist because she had my passport locked in a safe. The anonymity of this, after the fishbowl of Washington, was intoxicating.

  Each morning I spent a few hours writing fiction, and then I would go buy a sandwich and sit out by the sea for hours, just watching and listening to the waves crash against the shore. It was October so it was too cold to swim, and the beach was empty except for an occasional fisherman, with his cuttlefish haul, or a villager going for a stroll. I became fascinated by a young, beautiful nun who, each day, I saw taking a walk by the sea, dressed in a long gray-and-white habit, on the arm of an older woman I imagined to be her mother.

  Every afternoon they took the same route at the same pace and never spoke. They had an air of stoic resignation about them and I decided the young nun was ill, probably with tuberculosis, and that the sea air had been prescribed by the local dottore. Or maybe she was lovesick, having forsaken man as her husband but finding marriage to the Lord personally unfulfilling. Maybe—fingers crossed—she had tragically fallen for an Italian priest.

  I cycled through these various scenarios but never landed on a resolution. I hadn’t left the frustrated novelist back at home. Wherever I went, there she was, trying to weave a dramatic plot point out of the mundane.

  Is this the real me? I wondered. This curious, sometimes meddlesome thirtysomething who just wanted to know? Certainly that side of me had come in handy during my years of ghostwriting, but did that mean I liked it? That I should embrace it? It was embarrassing sometimes. More than once, at a party or with a client or even with a friend, I had asked just one more question and drawn a raised eyebrow or a sidelong look that said, Why do you care? What’s it to you?

  But really, what fascinated me more than what did happen—in the realm of journalism and to a certain extent, ghostwriting—was what could happen. So why was I spending so much of my time pursuing the former and not the latter? Was it as simple as what I told myself, that I had to make a living?

  The sea air, the pasta, the potentially poignant Italian “characters” all around me—these were conditions ripe for self-reflection, but I knew I would be asking myself similar questions even if I were back in my apartment in D.C. I asked them every time I finished a project and was suddenly no longer required to focus on anyone other than myself. I felt like I’d been asking them for years. There I would be, on the brink of some breakthrough with the questions, and then another project would come along, and before I knew what had happened, I would be submerged in another person’s life, their triumphs and troubles.

  All too soon it was time to head to Milan, so I left behind the tragic nun and the risotto al nero di seppia. I took the train from Cinque Terre to Milan and spent a day sightseeing and visiting La Scala. After walking probably ten miles among the boutique-lined streets, I wore myself out and crawled into bed in a hotel room that was beyond my budget. My exhaustion had overruled my judgment.

  On the flight home, I was agitated. The air was rough, bouncing us around. As we neared our destination, the plane dipped down through the clouds, and Washington was again visible, exactly as I had left it: The monuments of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington we
re arranged like step stones through a brilliant green lawn leading right up to the backyard of the White House. It was a beautiful city, I admitted, trying to talk myself into something. Maybe it would be good to be back, after all.

  I slid my key into the lock and pushed open the door with my free hand. The Dupont Circle apartment I had moved into for the Village project was in an old brownstone with a working fireplace and an ornately carved wood mantel above it, and a congresswoman who lived beneath me. I loved the location, and the apartment was cozy, sunny, and full of character. It was a one-bedroom, considerably nicer and bigger than that first cockroach-filled studio in Foggy Bottom I’d lived in thirteen years earlier.

  I pulled my suitcase over the threshold and into the foyer. Late-morning light flooded the living room through the turret windows. I was sleep deprived and starving for sugary or salty carbohydrates. I walked into the kitchen and stopped short, disoriented by what I saw there on the floor: blue-and-gray shards of something that looked familiar.

  It took me a minute to understand the scene in front of me, but then I realized it was my beloved ceramic pie plate, a gift from my sister, who frequented craft fairs and had bought this for me as a housewarming gift when I’d moved into my first place. It had been on the shelf above the sink. Somehow it had become dislodged and shattered.