CHAPTER 21
LINDA
He asks, through Dana, which is how we do everything now, whether I’ll have dinner with him at the house. My house. Kalorama. No staff, no Otis idling outside, no one. “He says he’ll cook,” Dana reports, making the face she makes. “I verified he knows how. He cooked, before. In Boston.”
“I know he cooked in Boston. I was there.”
“He said you’d say that.”
“He’s learned to predict me again. That’s either progress or a hostage negotiation.”
The old me says no. The new me, the one with a foundation and a squeaky chair and a growing suspicion that the trend might be real, says: “Thursday. He brings the groceries. He does the dishes.”
The negotiation, per Dana, was extensive.
He offered to bring wine; Dana told him the First Lady selects her own wine now.
He offered Thursday or Saturday; Dana told him the First Lady’s Saturdays belong to the foundation.
“He said, ‘She’s not the First Lady in this, she’s my wife,’” Dana tells me, “and I said, ‘Sir, that’s the entire subject under discussion,’ and he went quiet and said, ‘That’s fair.
Thursday, whatever she wants.’ You’re welcome. ”
He arrives with two bags but no entourage, in jeans and a gray sweater, and he stands on my doorstep holding basil like a man at a border crossing, and I let him in.
The kitchen in this house is the closest thing we own to the Boston one. I bought the place for the kitchen. Same proportions, same bad lighting, same window over the sink, same scuffed floor where a table should go.
He makes the pasta he used to make, the one with the sausage and the cream that we lived on the winter the first company was dying, and I sit at the little table and watch him cook, and it’s the strangest, saddest, best hour in months.
He cooks like he does everything, fast and overconfident, burning the first batch of garlic exactly the way he always did, swearing at the pan in a whisper so the President doesn’t offend my kitchen, and I correct his second batch with my eyes, and he says, “I felt that,” without turning, and for five minutes it’s twenty years ago and nothing has happened to us yet.
“The radiator doesn’t knock,” he says. “I’ve noticed. This house is too well-maintained. It makes me nervous.”
“I’ll have something broken by dessert, don’t worry.”
Halfway through, he says, without turning around, “I haven’t cooked since the inauguration. The residence has staff. Staff cook. Somewhere in there I let the building take the cooking too, and I didn’t even notice it going.”
“You noticed nothing going.”
He nods, stirring. Doesn’t defend it. New Declan is, I have to admit, easier to talk to and much harder to hate.
We eat at the table, and it’s good, and I tell him it’s good, and he looks so relieved I almost laugh, and then, because we both know why we’re here, I put the fork down.
“I made a list. Not Dana’s ledger. Mine. The real one.” I’ve been composing it for weeks, in the shower, on walks, in the car. It is not fair, and it is not unfair. It is accurate.”
He sets his own fork down. “Okay.” He sits back.
“Anniversaries,” I say. “Four of them moved, three of them forgotten until the day. The Hawaii trip we cancelled for the Iowa caucus and never re-booked. My mother’s birthday dinner the year of the midterms, where you stayed twenty minutes.
The night Marta’s husband left her and I flew back alone and you sent flowers to my hotel, and the flowers were from the office, Declan, they were arranged by staff, I knew because the card said ‘with sympathy and support’ like a condolence resolution.
Your signature wasn’t even on it. Some intern with good penmanship stood in for my husband at the lowest night of my best friend’s life, and you never knew, because you never asked about the flowers, because the flowers had been handled. ”
He doesn’t look away. “Keep going.”
“The campaign where I did a hundred and sixty events and you thanked me at the victory party as ‘my rock,’ and I realized I’d been promoted from wife to geology.
Every emergency that outranked me, and they all outranked me, because I was the line item that could wait.
And every single one ended the same way.
‘You understand.’ And I did. I did understand.
That was my job in the marriage: understanding, on demand, in bulk. ”
“You did understand,” he says.
“Yes. And you started treating that like permission.”
“I turned your love into unlimited credit,” he says.
“That’s what I’ve got, from the Tuesdays.
I borrowed against it for twenty-six years, and the interest was you, shrinking, and I never read the statements.
” He looks down at his plate. “She never stood a chance of touching you if we were close. The space she walked into was one I made. I made it with every moved dinner, and I kept it swept and lit for her, and when she set up in it I defended her tenancy, because admitting she was a squatter meant admitting I’d evicted you first.”
He’s been doing his own list, it turns out.
Naturally; we were always alike in this.
“The Detroit speech,” he says. “You told me the certainty line was going to get me in trouble with the press pool and you were right and I never said so. The Finnish trade dinner where you warned me the seating was a provocation and I let protocol keep it and spent the evening managing the fallout. Small things. A hundred small things where your read was better and my title was louder.” He shakes his head.
“I’ve been the President so long I forgot I married my best analyst.”
There’s nothing to say to that, because it’s said correctly, at last, without me having to draft it for him.
We both cry a little, over the pasta, in the bad lighting. He cries stubbornly, his face losing an argument with itself. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t staged and it doesn’t fix anything, and it helps anyway.
“I need to say one thing about her,” I say, when we’re both past it. “One thing, and then her name doesn’t come up again in this kitchen.”
“Okay.”
“She saw the space and she took it, and she’s accountable for that, and I will never wish her well.
But I spent two years being furious at her for something I should have spent some of it being furious at us for.
We let the presidency reorganize our marriage.
She just read the new floor plan before I did.
” I fold my napkin. “That’s the last of her. Done.”
He nods slowly. “Done,” he agrees, and we both know it isn’t, because Samantha Elkins is not done, because her kind is never done, but tonight, in this kitchen, she’s finished. We get to have that.
“Why are you telling me this now?” he asks. “The list. Why now?”
He’s asking it straight, no hurt in it, just a man checking the date on the document.
“Because you earned the hearing. And because I need you to understand what you’re actually asking for when you ask me back.
You’re not asking for the First Lady. You’re asking for a full person with her own buildings, who will never again be the variable that absorbs the loss.
If that’s too expensive, the time to say so is now. ”
“It’s not too expensive. It’s the only version I want.
” He says it fast, and then, deliberately, he slows down.
“No. Let me not say it fast. Fast is how I’ve promised you everything.
I’m saying it slow: I want the whole person.
The foundation, the opinions, the moods, the refusal to absorb.
I’ve been alone in that house for months and I have learned that the presidency is a job and you were the life, and I confused them because you were generous enough to blur the line, and I’ll spend the rest of mine keeping the line bright. ”
He reaches across the table and takes my hand, and I let him, and his hand is warm and familiar and twenty-six years long, and we sit there, hands held over the wreckage of the pasta, two people in a kitchen, and then he leans in, slowly, giving me every chance, and I lean in too, because I want to, because my body votes yes with its whole history.
And then I stop it. An inch away. Both of us breathing.
“I love you,” I say. “But I still don’t trust you.”
He doesn’t move back. He just holds there, at the inch, and nods.
“Then I’ll live with the difference until you do,” he says, and his voice is steady, the steadiness of a man who has finally located the actual work.
“There’s no deadline. There’s no event you have to attend.
I’m not going anywhere, and neither is the question, and you can take a year, or five, or never, and my answer stays the same. ”
“Declan.”
“Yeah.”
“If I come back, I come back different. The schedule is mine. The causes are mine. I don’t cover for your building, and your building doesn’t cover for me.
Private time is real time, not the first casualty of every crisis.
And the next time I tell you something about someone near you, you believe me the first time, at my word, no folder, no staffer initials required. ”
“Yes,” he says. No hedging, no lawyer, no “within reason.” “Write it down. I’ll sign it.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Draft it. I’ll sign it in front of witnesses and post it on the fridge next to Rae’s kids’ drawing.” He almost smiles. “I hear that’s where the important documents live.”
He does the dishes. I dry, because some reflexes I keep by choice. We stand at the sink in the bad light, bumping elbows, not talking, and it’s the most married we’ve felt in two years.
We talk about nothing for the last hour. Deliberately. The foundation’s landlord problems, Rae’s kids, a terrible movie we both watched separately and hated in identical ways.
It’s the nothing that tells me more than the list did: he can still sit in a room with me and not need anything from it. I forgot we could do that. He forgot too, I think. We keep remembering, in little jolts, all evening.
At the door he doesn’t try to kiss me again, and I notice, and he notices me noticing, and he says, “Goodnight, Linda. Thank you for the hearing.”
“Thank you for dinner,” I say. “Same time next week. You bring the groceries.”
I close the door and lean on it.
The list exists now, spoken out loud in a kitchen, which is where all our true contracts have ever been written. He heard it without a folder. He cooked. He did the dishes.
It’s not trust.
But it is, I admit to the empty kitchen, a foundation.
I stand there a while, in the quiet, in the house that’s mine, in the life I’m building, and I let myself want what I want without filing it under anything.
And I know a little something about building on foundations.