Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  I was ecstatic. I was forty-nine, newly clean, and seeing the world again. I wanted back in.

  To get married that quickly, I figured we’d have to drive to Nevada, just a few hours away. But after googling around, I learned we could do it that same day in California. I dashed out and bought a pair of plain gold wedding bands.

  Meantime, I searched for a local one-stop marriage shop. True to its name, Instant Marriage LA provided in-a-moment marriage services—license, officiant, on-call minister if you chose to use their on-site Encino chapel (capacity: twenty guests). I called and asked the woman who answered if she could send someone to Melissa’s apartment that evening. It was already the middle of the afternoon and the owner, a Russian immigrant named Maria Kharlash, said she was about to close but could do it the next day. I offered to pay extra and Maria drove from the Valley through rush-hour traffic.

  The decision never felt rash or harebrained or reckless. It felt urgent. I felt like I’d been given a reprieve. I felt the astonishing luck of a man who’d agreed to meet a woman for coffee when it was all but impossible for him to leave a hotel room without a crack pipe in his hand, and who then fell in love at first sight—at first glance.

  That initial glance was such a profound moment. I realize now that what floored me then was the reflective gaze I spotted in Melissa’s eyes. She looked at me the way my brother always looked at me, the way my dad looked at me before that last, terrifying encounter in his driveway: with love, admiration, wonderment. She saw the pain and trauma inside me and still fell in love immediately. The most insidious thing about addiction, the hardest thing to overcome, is waking up unable to see the best of yourself.

  Beau and Dad saw the best in me even when I wasn’t at my best. Looking at them was like looking in a mirror and, instead of seeing an alcoholic or a drug addict, seeing the healthiest me reflected back. I never thought that Beau was worried I wouldn’t be okay. I never thought he didn’t have confidence in me. It was how we stayed connected.

  When I saw Melissa that night at the Sunset Marquis, I abruptly realized how dependent I was on that reflective gaze. I remember when I did not see it in Kathleen’s eyes—I carbon-date it, really, to after I was discharged from the Navy Reserve for failing that drug test in 2014. It then became so clear, a few short weeks after Beau had died, when Kathleen and I were sitting together in the therapist’s office after our twenty-two-mile anniversary walk and she told me, “I’ll never forgive you.” That’s when it hit me that I had no chance of handling the pain I was in. That’s when I decided to get a drink. When you see those doubts and questions in the eyes of the person you’re supposed to love the most, it breaks you in half.

  In retrospect, it would’ve been hell to live with someone incapable of forgiving me while pretending that she had. And now, at last, I was starting to understand what Beau had been trying to tell me: it, too, had been all part of the process.

  * * *

  Around 6 p.m. on May 17, 2019, just before Maria arrived at Melissa’s apartment, I called my dad to tell him I was getting married.

  It took him a quick minute to take in the news; it had happened so fast, nobody in the family even knew I’d met someone. Yet he reset instantly, the way he always does. He seems incapable of not coming through when it matters most. He was thrilled that I sounded so happy.

  “Honey,” he said, “I knew that when you found love again, I’d get you back.”

  I felt the reflective gaze in his voice.

  “Dad, I always had love,” I replied. “And the only thing that allowed me to see it was the fact that you never gave up on me—that you always believed in me.”

  I passed the phone to Melissa. Dad’s first words to her were the same ones that his grandmother said to the high school English teacher he’d married five years after becoming a widower.

  “Thank you,” my dad told Melissa, his voice soft and warm and welcoming, “for giving my boy the courage to love again.”

  The ceremony itself was comically surreal: sign some papers, say a few words—you’re married! We did it under an awning on the apartment’s airy patio. The only other person there besides Melissa, me, and Maria was the photographer from the rooftop pool who’d been part of the group who insisted I meet Melissa—and he was there by accident. He’d called right before the ceremony, unaware of what we were about to do, to say that he was walking by our place and thought he’d check in on us, see how we were. Melissa told him to come up but didn’t tell him why. When he walked through the door, we enlisted him to take wedding pictures.

  Wearing a sleek white jumpsuit she’d plucked out of her closet minutes earlier, Melissa looked like a million bucks. When she stepped onto the patio outside, the setting sun lit her up like a votive candle. I threw on a blue blazer, white dress shirt, and jeans; I decided not to go full Canadian tuxedo, like the day we met.

  The whole thing lasted maybe ten minutes. Melissa and I exchanged extemporaneous vows about our love and commitment to each other. In a Russian accent that gave her words a kind of Old World officiousness, Maria followed with whatever an officiant is statutorily required to say by the state of California.

  That was it. We were now husband and wife.

  It was both bemusing and incredibly deep. Our relationship didn’t feel in any way altered, except that now it was official. We had no plans to tell anybody beyond our parents, my daughters, and a few close friends. Yet the shock from the tabloid press that we knew would follow wasn’t lost on us.

  We simply stayed focused on each other throughout the ceremony. The purpling Hollywood Hills to the east, the downtown skyscrapers to the south, the snow-white gulls that spun up and down and around the silhouetted palm trees nearby as an orange sun dripped into the Pacific—I barely noticed any of it that evening. I simply stared into Melissa’s blue eyes and felt grateful for what I saw reflected back.

  Everything else—we tuned it out. There was always stuff to tune out. The noise out of Washington swirled around us even as we stood there together on that beautiful California night. After I’d talked earlier with Dad, I had to delay the service a few minutes to take another call from my lawyer. Trump had blasted me that afternoon on Fox News, demanding another investigation related to Burisma, even as Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that same day he’d found no evidence to back Giuliani’s crackpot claims.

  I shook my head, hung up, and got married.

  Where’s Hunter?

  I was right there.

  I was so standing right there.

  EPILOGUE DEAR BEAU

  Dear Beau,

  Where are you, buddy? God, I miss you. You’ve never been more than a step from my thoughts since the very last time I held your hand. I promise you I’m trying my best, but I really wish you were here to give me a hug and tell me everything’s going to be okay.

  I never felt the ache of your absence more than the night our family stood on the stage together after Dad gave his victory speech as president-elect. He did it, Beau! He beat back a vile man with a vile mission, and he did it without lowering himself to the unprecedented depths reached by his opposition. The moment it became clear he’d won I thought of the long discussion that you, me, and Dad had during Dad’s first presidential run, back when you and I were teenagers. I remember the three of us arguing passionately about whether one could become president while still being true to yourself and your principles, or whether you’d be forced to employ the dark arts of negativity and cynical, self-serving politics.

  We were certain then that Dad could hold onto those principles that make him who he is and still get elected to the country’s highest office. It took a while—a long while, for sure. He had so many opportunities during this election to do to the other side what they were doing to us—to attack Trump’s adult kids and family, to rile up the crazies—but he didn’t.

  Standing on that stage, Beau, holding your seven-month-old namesake, who Dad lifted from my arms as fireworks lit the sky, all I could t
hink about was how proud you would’ve been.

  You would have loved the scene on election night, too, even though the night would’ve driven you nuts, not least because the vote counting dragged on for days. Yet one of the benefits of waiting so long for the race to be called was that we all waited it out together, at Mom and Dad’s house—Melissa and the baby, my girls, Natalie and Hunter, Ashley and Howard. More than waiting together, we were also quarantined together. There was no escaping one another.

  For much of the first night, little Hunter and I sat together on the couch in the downstairs room with the big TV on, the rest of the family filtering in and out. The early returns were all over the place—we were up, we were down; we were winning Ohio, then losing Ohio. All night Hunter and I looked at each other and exchanged variations on “I hate this! Why do we put ourselves through this?” But of course we loved it. We’d yell at Natalie to sit down so we could see the TV, just like I used to get on you for hogging the remote. They’re so funny and mature now, Beau.

  My girls took on their own roles. Maisy made everyone laugh with her wry observations. Finnegan was full of insight. She’d sit by Mom and Dad and give specific edits as Dad reviewed speeches he gave to update supporters and the rest of the country as that night and the following days wore on. Even with Ron Klain, Mike Donilon, and Aunt Val giving their own advice over speaker phone, Finnegan had the confidence to voice what she thought. And then there was Naomi—God, you’d love Naomi. She has this sense of poise and elegance and grace—and the driest wit. They miss you so much, Beau.

  The night played out exactly how you would’ve hoped. It was the culmination of what you once told Dad: no matter what happened, he couldn’t give up. I know you didn’t mean he necessarily had to keep running for president, but that he did have to continue to have the purpose that holds this family together.

  Throughout the campaign Trump attacked everyone in the family in the harshest, most horrible terms. But instead of tearing us apart, the barrage of assaults accomplished the opposite: they allowed us to fully heal again. That first night, when the networks called Florida and Ohio for Trump, and we trailed in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the family didn’t devolve into a circular firing squad. Everybody just curled up on the couch together. Win, lose, or draw, nothing was going to change that.

  Given the place I was in only a year and a half earlier, I felt blessed. A little before midnight, before Dad left to give an update in front of a crowd honking car horns at a drive-in rally, I told him what we always told him: no matter what, we’d already won. I felt for him, though. It was a Herculean task to project confidence at a moment when people around the world were trying to figure out how this election could even be close.

  By the time I went to bed, at 3 a.m., the sense of dread everyone felt was overwhelming. Melissa had already fallen asleep and I spent the rest of the night staring up at the ceiling. I tried not to think dark thoughts, but it was hard not to think that what Melissa and I had feared most might come to pass. Those early hours, before the vast majority of our outstanding votes had been counted, felt perilous. A Trump victory was not only a threat to democracy, it also seemed a threat to my personal freedom. If Dad hadn’t won, I’m certain Trump would’ve continued to pursue me in the criminal fashion he’d adopted from the start.

  Then I woke up the next morning, and the morning after that, and everybody was still together and the election had begun to turn. One of Melissa’s many gifts to me is the understanding that everything happens in its own time, if you allow it to. As long as I’m sober and healthy and available, good things will come.

  Four days after the election, on a glorious Saturday morning, I was sitting in the sunroom with all the girls, Natalie and Hunter, Melissa and baby Beau, Ashley and Howard, and Annie and Anthony—when the networks called Pennsylvania for Dad. That clinched it. Mom and Dad were on a dock out on the pond, so we all ran to the porch and screamed at the top of our lungs, “We won! We just won!”

  It was a moment of relief, exhaustion, and absolute joy. By the time the counting finished, more Americans had voted for Dad than for any president in history. Still more amazing is the level of decency and integrity he brings to the office—exactly what the three of us ultimately determined was possible those many years ago. Neither Dad nor I said that aloud. We didn’t have to. We hugged and kissed instead.

  * * *

  I’ve survived, buddy. I know you were with me through it all. They came after me with everything they had. It was all “Where’s Hunter?” all the time. But it turned out they did me an unintended favor. I became the beneficiary of the absurdity and transparent criminality of my pursuers. Each attack added to my new superpower: the ability to absorb their negative energy and use it to make me stronger. It was like political aikido. Every bogus whistleblower, out-of-context email, salacious photograph or video clip (manufactured or real), made me feel nearly invincible to their slings and arrows.

  They doubled down on the notion I wouldn’t be strong enough to maintain my sobriety, that I’d crack and they’d pounce. But here’s what they didn’t count on, Beau: you were with me the whole way, in the form of Melissa and baby Beau, my girls, our sister, our aunts and uncles, Mom and Dad. Everyone. Your strength and love was embodied in the strength and love that surrounded me.

  That was never truer than when Giuliani, Bannon, and their collaborators purported to have a laptop that chronicled the lurid details of my descent into addiction the last three years. What should have been the most anxiety-producing event of an anxiety-producing campaign became a televised burlesque. I turned to Melissa at one point and said, “You’d think this would make me want to drink. But it’s the furthest thing from my mind.”

  In that moment, I knew there was absolutely nothing they could do to take away this beautiful thing I’d built. When they finished, Melissa and I simply went about our day. We made lunch. We took baby Beau to the beach to watch the sunset.

  Here’s my takeaway: the ability to shrug everything off and carry on, two weeks before the most consequential election in our lifetimes, was the result of the thousands of expressions of love given to me and that I’d given back. Talking to my girls every day; knowing Melissa was always there for me in the next room; looking up from my desk to see baby Beau’s big, toothless smile aimed directly at me—I’m living in those moments and not in the shitstorm I couldn’t control.

  I took solace in being attacked by such despicable opposition. When you’re assaulted by people with the capacity to take away an infant suckling from his mother’s breast and place him in a cage—well, I knew I was playing on the right side. I knew that if I could hold on and have the strength to ride out the attacks, justice would be done. It doesn’t always happen that way. But it happened that way this time.

  Dad, of course, never flinched. A turning point in the campaign was the first debate, and a turning point in that debate came when Dad talked about you. Trump played the only card he ever plays: attack. In that moment, the difference between the two men was never starker.

  We knew he’d attack me. Before the debate, I told Dad not to duck when Trump brought me up, as I was sure he would. I told him that I wasn’t embarrassed about what I’d faced to overcome my addiction. I told him that there were tens of millions of families who would relate to it, whether because of their own struggles or the struggles being faced by someone they loved. Not only was I comfortable with him talking about it, I believed it needed to be said.

  He said it. While Dad was honoring your service in Iraq as a response to the leaks that Trump had called Americans who fought in wars “losers” and “suckers,” Trump interrupted with his trademark callousness and went after me.

  Dad countered artfully, empathetically, indelibly.

  “My son,” he said, ignoring Trump while looking straight into a camera, “like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it, he’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m pro
ud of my son.”

  Those words not only disarmed Trump but gave comfort and hope to millions of Americans. I felt nothing but pride. You would’ve, too.

  * * *

  Beau, I’m finally living a life you always wanted me to. You’d love California, you’d love where I live. There are so many beautiful things to be grateful for, and I try to remind myself to look at them every day. We’ve been in a lockdown because of the pandemic but I’m not really missing the outside world all that much. I have Melissa and baby Beau and my girls. I have the whole family. I’ve been writing. I’ve returned to painting.

  I’ve been painting like crazy. It’s kept me grounded, and initially kept me away from that underworld just down the canyon from us. It unlocked something that had been trying to emerge from inside me since, well, since we were kids. I finally have the time and space—and sobriety—to explore it.

  Now, I wake up with baby Beau, make a cup of coffee, and paint through the morning. Then Melissa makes us lunch. Sometimes we take a walk, sometimes we take a drive. Then I paint through the afternoon, my hands and forearms covered in blues and yellows and greens. I’m driven to create.

  For all the art I’ve made since I was a kid—art that only you ever really saw—and the sketchbooks I’ve filled over the years, I feel like I’ve returned to my authentic self. Whether anybody likes it or not isn’t what drives to me to get up to paint. I paint no matter what. I paint because I want to. I paint because I have to. Our house is filled with paintings.

  It’s all part of a new chapter, another step in the process. I still have a ton of work to do on myself, with my addiction, and clearing the wreckage of my past. I’m trying to make good on my debts—both figurative and literal.