A Woman First- First Woman

by Selina Meyer

  As the end of the fortnight drew near, the count informed Edgar that he couldn’t possibly be finished with his revisions in the near future and that Edgar could go home while I would stay to complete the work. To speed the process, I would move into the castle. Edgar ran up his expense account for a few more days and then duty-freed his way home, leaving me and the count and two dozen servants pretty much alone in the enormous palace. Heinrich, as he insisted I call him, liked to work on the will for a few hours around midday and then send me into town to shop for a new dress or get my hair done at one of the many establishments where he had an unlimited line of credit. I would join him for dinner, for which he always wore one of his old-fashioned wing-collared tuxedo shirts and either a dinner jacket or sometimes a smoking jacket made of dark purple velvet.*

  When I sat down at the dinner table, I would usually find a small box with some exquisite jewel at my place, except on Thursdays when he always gave me perfume. I recall sitting there one night wearing a shimmering gray Balenciaga gown I had bought that afternoon and a delicate pair of diamond and emerald earrings with a matching necklace, eating a roast quail stuffed with figs, as Ludwig the butler poured me a third glass of an ancient Cheval Blanc while a small orchestra played Schubert’s highly evocative Arpeggione Sonata behind a screen and thinking, “You know, maybe being a lawyer isn’t so bad after all.” But of course, this couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t.

  It got better.

  The change came suddenly one night as we were playing cribbage (a particular favorite of the count’s) in one of the grand salons after dinner and drinking a honeyed Sauternes in front of a roaring fire. Ludwig entered and solemnly announced that his serene highness, the Prince de Longueville, had arrived and would like to see the count. The count laughed and said something and then translated for me. “I told him to send the little c-cksucker in but to make sure he was properly dressed first,” he said, then added, “They’ll all be coming out of the woodwork now.” He explained that the prince was another relative, one of his innumerable sons or step-daughters or great-nephews or fourth cousins who were the product of his eleven marriages. “They’ve heard I’m rewriting the will again, and they want to try and protect their piece of the strudel!”

  A few moments later, a good-looking thirtyish Frenchman with a long nose entered in black tie and bowed to the count and kissed my hand. He did not seem even remotely surprised to find me there and offered up some brief token explanation about having been in the neighborhood and wanting to pay his respects to his dear step-great-grandfather-in-law. The count, looking amused, insisted that the prince must stay for a few days and do a bit of shooting because, since he had been confined to the wheelchair, he had been unable to tackle the pheasants himself and they were now running amok. Plus, he added mischievously, he thought I might be getting bored and might like a companion to show me around the estate.

  The prince seemed to like this plan just fine, having assumed that the count had fallen under my sway and that I held the keys to his financial future. And so we passed a very happy week wandering around the countryside on foot or on horseback shooting birds and talking of our lives in a way that became surprisingly intimate very quickly. I still wonder whether I could have been truly happy with Claude de Longueville. He was an elegant and cultured man, a true deep thinker, and a sensitive and caring lover, but he was also prone to melancholy and had that somewhat resigned air of the fin-de-siècle about him. I think the fact that we both knew it would not last was perhaps what made us so open and so tender toward one another. And although he could not have anticipated what would happen next, what would turn out to be our final night together was imbued with a wistful sense of farewell. For this, too, could not last forever, and it, also, did not.

  It got better.

  The very next morning, as the count and I were reviewing the latest changes in his will, a hideous racket arose from the front of the house. “It is Enrico,” sighed the old man. “I knew it was just a matter of time.” Enrico, it turned out, was the Marchese Albergonza, another relative—an Italian who arrived in an extremely noisy yellow Ferrari that, he declared, was the only thing besides mozzarella cheese that Italians made that was worth a “Fiddler’s f-ck.” Instead of a demure kiss on the hand, he grabbed me by the side of my face and kissed me full on the lips, saying that having cheated death three times on the roads on the way here, he desperately needed a woman. He and Claude clearly loathed each other but kept a chilly, formal peace in the count’s presence.

  That night at dinner Enrico squeezed my knee and then my thigh and then ran his hand over and eventually under my panties as I attempted to make conversation and keep a straight face. Later, as I went up the stairs to my bedroom, where I expected to find Claude waiting, Enrico caught me on the landing and kissed me, hard. “You are the most enticing woman I have ever met!” he whispered urgently. “Come away with me! Come away with me now!”

  And so I did.

  It was madness, of course. I had no clothes other than the evening gown I was wearing and nothing else, not even a toothbrush. But he told me not to worry, that his step-uncle would send everything or, if he didn’t, he, Enrico, would buy me new and “even more beautiful” things. I knew, of course, that his main reason for abducting me was not my irresistible allure but rather a desire to get me away from the count and Claude before I could make any more changes in the will. And you know what? I didn’t care! Where Claude had been sad and a bit grim, Enrico was carefree and full of life.

  When we roared down the long poplar-lined drive leading from the Schloss Kronintorp-Fesselheim, I don’t think Enrico had any real plan for where he was going to take me. But since the road pointed in that direction anyway, he declared that we must go skiing while the snow was still good before spring set in in earnest. Over the next few weeks, we skied at St. Moritz, Gstaad, and, my personal favorite, the small, exclusive resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites. Everywhere we went, Enrico was known, was beloved, and was a cause for wild, decadent, all-night parties with a glamorous, jet-set crowd of dukes and princes and barons and their equally glamorous duchesses, princesses, and baronesses.*

  In short, the whole thing was an empty fraud, but it was also a chic, charming, and quintessentially European fraud, and I, for one, could see no percentage in blowing the whistle on anyone. Why would I? I was having the time of my life. First of all, skiing in Europe, where most of the resorts are built near glaciers and where most of the trails are above the tree line, is infinitely better than skiing in America. I don’t care where you’ve been—Aspen, Stowe, Sun Valley—they all eat a-s in prison compared with even a second-rate place like Zermatt. And after the skiing ended, the next season—boar-hunting season—began. Enrico and I would see some of the same people but also always delightful new people as we shot boars from the Black Forest all the way down to Tuscany. As those of you who read the earlier parts of this book and didn’t just skip lazily to this part will know, I’ve always loved all kinds of hunting, but I think boar hunting will always be my favorite. Something about seeing something move in the distance, hearing the dogs bark, and then suddenly the fiesty little boar rushes out of the undergrowth and pow! Another one bites the dust.

  Once we had exhausted the supply of boars, Enrico and I moved on to Capri, where summer was just beginning. We spent lazy, sunny days swimming, water skiing, and making love in his lovely little villa overlooking the sea. And it was there, one afternoon, when we received word that Graf von Kronintorp-Fesselheim had died and left all his money to a local cat hospital. I packed my bags quickly and caught the next flight back to Washington. Enrico had the good manners to wave goodbye to me from the bed as he talked animatedly into the phone and, for that, I will always love him.

  So, there you have it. Those are the “go-to” memories I rely on when I have to try and endure one of the many unbearable aspects of being a politician. I can tell you, I got d-mn good use out of them on the campaign trail that year, an
d I don’t think any one of those people I met at churches or union halls or town meetings ever imagined that the whole time I was standing there with the warm and happy expression on my face it was because I was actually thousands of miles away schussing down the Col Druscié in Cortina.

  * I know this word is not regarded as “politically correct” when used metaphorically. However, I am using it literally here. I believe that most of these people would be clinically disagnosed by established experts as mentally retarded and I don’t know anyone who has spent a lot of time around the White House press corps who feels otherwise.

  * I will share a little secret with you: Until I met Heinrich, I had always hated wing-collared dress shirts, finding them just a little too “look at me, I’m in the Gay Men’s Chorus!” but on him they seemed authentic and refined.

  * I should point out that, having endured a brief and expensive first marriage to a phony Italian prince herself, the one useful piece of information my mother drilled into me from an early age was that all European titles except English ones (and you had to be a little careful about those, too) were fake and that these people were no more legitimate aristocrats than Porky, Duke of Pig. When Italy, France, and Germany lost their crowned heads, they also lost their legitimate founts of honor, leaving every Tomassino, Ricard, and Harald free to call themselves whatever they wanted to. If they were rich enough, they could usually get another person to go along with the charade, and two or three generations later the whole thing seemed as real as King Arthur. Or maybe more real than that. When the gruff but lovable Kaiser departed for exile, he took with him any notion of restraint on the part of the aspiring merchant classes, who quickly ennobled themselves with varying degrees of ballsiness. The count’s ancestors, who had built an enormous chemicals empire, thought they ought to be grafs and, presto, so they were. The situation was much the same in France, where three different ruling families and the Napoleonic Code by doing away with primo geniture and entail had encouraged every farmer to become a baron or better. And the situation in Italy was the usual sh-t show one can expect from the Italians. All this and more, my mother explained to me over and over, night after night, determined that I would not make the same mistake she had as a young woman, very nearly ruining her life by trusting in the validity of a European’s noble title.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Making Even More History—The Tie Heard ’Round the World

  Like the “Holy Roman Empire,” the Electoral College is neither a “college” nor “electoral.” Like everyone else, I learned about it in school, and like everyone else, I never really understood what it was; in fact I eventually began to understand it a negative amount, though it was explained to me repeatedly. There’s a simple reason why no one understands how the Electoral College works, and it’s not because they’re stupid or lazy. It’s because it was devised more than two hundred years ago by men who wore powdered wigs and enormous colorful codpieces and who loved to argue about airy-fairy ideas that would be a giant annoying nuisance for centuries to come while picking lice off of one another and eating them like those monkeys in the zoo with the swollen red a-ses. Mr. Eggerston, my eleventh grade history teacher, one of the few truly honest teachers I ever had, taught me the real, unvarnished truth about the Founding Fathers and what pigs they were, and I’ve never forgotten it. “Eggs” was a garden-variety prep school drunk and pervert who undoubtedly drilled more than his share of locker room peepholes, but he had a real gift for teaching.

  Wherever they are burning in hell, I bet the founding fathers still enjoy an occasional laugh, in between the screams, when they think about the Electoral College.

  Election Night is supposed to be the end of a presidential campaign. In 2016, though, it was just the beginning, or rather just the middle, or maybe just the beginning of the end.

  The race had been extremely close all along. While I make no excuses, I was handicapped in making a mark as president by the short duration of my presidency, by opposition from glory-hound legislators and the corrupt media, as well as the incompetence of some of my staff. My opponents, their surrogates, and other haters seized upon the “accidental president” line of attack, as though I had won some sort of presidential reality show and not previously served as vice president, senator, and congresswoman. Had I been a man, I’m sure they would not have acted like my presidency was a mere fluke and best forgotten quickly.

  Although I am often critical of the voters, the polls showed that some of them, at least, were not as dumb as they appeared to be. Enough of them seemed to “get me” to create a “Selina Meyer base.” We did some research into this group to find out what their core concerns were. Some of the comments that came back frequently were a desire to “shake sh-t up” and “f-ck yeah” and also avoid burdening the taxpayer the moving costs associated with changing presidents. That gave us something to build on.

  My opponent was Arizona senator William O’Brien, who had been an irritating thorn in my side ever since I had risen to national prominence. I think even Bill O’Brien’s best friends would describe him as an amiable dunce. He was very much a throwback to the bad old days of the smoke-filled room and coke-filled hooker. Still, despite that, he wasn’t even remotely charming. Fat and bushy, he looked like an overstuffed antique armchair suitable for display in one of those rooms in the Smithsonian that no one goes into that are full of thing like colonial spinning wheels or lighthouse bulbs. He smelled a bit like an overstuffed armchair, as well, in particular like one that he himself had been sitting in.

  Senator O’Brien’s running mate was New Mexican spitfire Laura Montez, who had been recruited to add a little “color” to the ticket, since O’Brien came off as white as Uncle Ben’s rice after it had been converted a few dozen times. Race and ethnicity are rightly considered an electrified “third rail” sitting on a bed of live wires in American politics and can rarely be addressed directly without causing an enormous amount of pearl clutching and panty twisting. That’s why I couldn’t come right out and say that she had been born and raised in Connecticut and was no more Mexican than Bill O’Brien was. Or, to put it another way, she was a true “new” Mexican, having become a Mexican right before entering politics.

  The former Laura Cunningham had made a shrewd and cynical political calculation and entered into a presumably loveless marriage of convenience with Alejandro Montez, a good-looking and very gay-seeming slip-and-fall shyster and minor-league politician in his own right. Somehow they’d managed to conceive a few attractive children, and I have to admit that they made a wholesome counterpoint to the boozy and bloated O’Brien, who always seemed to have a little bit of dried vomit on his King Tut beard.

  On my side, I had my associate of long standing, the famously craggy and charming Tom James.

  Tom James. What to say about Tom James?

  First of all, I want to make it crystal clear that I like Tom personally. Always have, always will. I also think he’s intelligent and has an understanding of politics that is both instinctual and the product of years of experience. He’s hard-working and connects easily with all sorts of people, not just those from a similar tweedy Northeastern background. He’s also quite good looking and has a sort of lanky, shambling gait that makes him irresistible to women. These are just some of the reasons why I chose him over my serving vice president, Andrew Doyle, who seemed worn out and has probably seemed worn out since his mom finished labor. Andrew served his country well, or at least okay, but if you just Google a picture of Andrew and compare it to a picture of Tom, you’ll see that it was really no contest. The picture will also remind you to get your prostate checked because, true to the stereotype of the prostate, that bothersome walnut-sized gland that sits proudly between a man’s anus and his testicles proved to be a problem for Andrew, as it is for so many men who look like Andrew.

  Those are the reasons I chose Tom. So, what are the reasons that I shouldn’t have chosen him? Well, for one thing, he’s a vicious, unscrupulous snake in the
grass with a sick pathological need to betray those who show him kindness. Do you remember Ted Bundy? He was the craggy and charming serial killer who lured his victims by preying on their sympathies. He would walk around college campuses with his arm in a sling or cast and ask coeds to help him carry some books or put a sailboat into a Volkswagen (who would fall for that??) before cutting their heads off and moving in with their decomposing bodies. Anyone who is considering a career in politics really should read up extensively on Ted Bundy to get a handle on the sort of people, like Tom James, who you’ll encounter, but just to reiterate, I like Tom personally.

  Election Night turned into Election Nightmare, and then Election Morning and then Election Week and, eventually, Election Month—all thanks to the flawless system devised by the incredibly overrated founding fathers that is the envy of countries across the globe . . . not! After conceding and then unconceding on Election Night, things initially looked pretty promising. I had won the popular vote, which, though it doesn’t count for as much as it should, still gives you the high ground as far as public opinion, since the other guy has to explain all the Electoral College nonsense, which always makes it sound like you’re trying to win on a sneaky technicality.

  At first it seemed like we might be able to resolve the whole matter quickly and in my favor due to some irregularities in, no surprise, Nevada, the perennial runner-up to Florida in the Miss Crazy State Pageant. The post office, which seems to take mail-in ballots for president less seriously than they do “20% Off” coupons from Bed Bath & Beyond, had misplaced thousands of ballots. But when they were eventually discovered in the trunk of a prerampage former postal worker, they were not in my favor and simply perpetuated the stalemate (and also lost me the popular vote) while forcing me to now clutch at the very thin reed of the aforementioned Electoral College.