Wrath
the stylus

DISCLAIMER: I borrow, I manipulate, I put words into the mouths of. I do not own. Not even a little bit.
SUMMARY: A post-ep for Two Cathedrals. Abbey gets lost, quotes the Aeneid, and says some things that Jed needs to hear. Or: "I should have remembered that she took Latin."

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Wrath
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Goddamit, Abigail Bartlet. You are without a doubt the most infuriating woman I have ever known.

My wife is lost. Well, that is not precisely true. I'm sure Abbey knows exactly where she is. It's just that no one in the West Wing or the East Wing or any other wing of this house can tell me where she, in all her knowingness, might be located. A personal Secret Service detail, a staff large enough to run Rhode Island and she still manages to get away. Goddammit, Abbey. Don't do this. Don't do this thing you do where you're stronger than the rest of us and the only say we get in things is to admire your Atlas-like abilities from our all-too-human positions.

I think I'm going to have to go look for her. Ron is sheepishly staring down at the seal on my carpet as I repeat, in a voice that is growing more shrill each time I ask this question: "What do you mean you can't find her?"

They're confident that she has not left the White House enclosure. Great. You could lose a Blackhawk helicopter in this place, with all the corridors and basement rooms and secret passageways that lead to stairs which go nowhere. Not to mention all the rooms that I am convinced have portraits of the same three people hanging in them- just the same pictures of the same three guys over and over again in different rooms with different colored carpeting. And Abbey knows this place a hell of a lot better than I do. For all I know she's spent the last month digging a tunnel from the Oval Office to China and depositing the dirt in the Rose Garden by virtue of a hidden pouch in her pants. The entire Rose Garden could be rising, millimeters at a time as she plots her escape.

I'm going to go look for her.

She knows I'm here, even though she's pretending like she doesn't. Although I did it quietly, she heard me open the door to- to whatever this room is in a corner of the basement. It looks like we use it to store outdoor furniture when we're not having tea for two hundred on the lawn. She's seated on a bench with her back to the door, staring at the bare cinder-block wall, so I could see her spine draw up a bit tighter when I pushed into the room. But she hasn't turned around; she's pretending I'm not here and probably hoping I'll go away.

I'm not going away.

I stand just behind her, trying to stare at the wall, too. I may be sixty years old and the President of the United States, but I'm not above a bit of self-indulgent spite. Even that doesn't work, because my eyes keep sliding back to her and the way her shoulders look like they are quivering slightly with the tension. The line of her spine, under the rumpled jacket of her suit, is as taut as the string on a guitar. And her hair, spilling over her collar, is flat: she has run her hands through it too many times today the way she does, raking it back off of her face with her left hand while her right takes notes or taps a pencil or gestures to her listener. I can't see her face- she's got her head turned away from me and tipped down- but I bet her lipstick is all gone. In the too-bright light of the naked bulb overhead, she suddenly looks very fragile.

Oh, Abbey, when did we get this old?

In the Cathedral I was angry. Now, I just feel empty. I break the silence when I cannot stand it any longer. "The Service is worried. They lost you. And your staff is beating down my door."

She considers this for a long moment. "Is the homing device in my shoe broken?" Her voice is the color of fog but rougher, harder; it could cut diamond. "Has my blip disappeared from their radar screens?"

If I'm honest with myself, when I reach out to touch her it is as much for my own comfort as hers.

"Don't, Jed."

"Don't what?"

"Don't do this right now."

"Abbey-" I remove my hand but leave it hovering above her shoulder, like a bird about to land.

"Not. Now." She turns her face so that she's staring just past me and I see the fatigue etched into her profile. "Right now I need to think and I can't do that with you here."

I am not quiet as I leave.

My office is full of the dull light of an overcast afternoon and I am clawing my way to the bottom of an endless stack of paper.

"Leo, am I a horrible person?"

He pauses minutely, mid-stride. "Sir, with all due respect, are you sure you want me to answer that?"

"Leo..." That rising, warning tone was good for scaring graduate students and it works equally well on Presidential Chiefs of Staff. Or at least on this one.

"Sir, you are not a horrible person. If you were, I never would have worked this hard for you. Contrary to popular belief, the couch in my office is not comfortable enough for me to actually choose to make this place my second home based on its merits as a back aid." Leo sets the stack of papers he is carrying on the front edge of my desk and takes a seat across from me. "Is there something you want to talk about, sir?"

"Jed." This is an old game, how we mark off the domains of our relationship into public and private.

"Is there something you want to talk about, Jed?"

"Leo, can you find out for me what Babbish and Abbey discussed..." When was it? "You know, when they talked?"

When Leo cocks his head to the side and scrunches his eyes like that, it's usually a sign that I'm not going to like the answer. "Jed, you want me to go behind your wife's back to find out what your wife and your White House Counsel talked about in a closed-door meeting? Are you planning to try to use this information to talk to your wife? Because I would like some advance warning and time to clear the area of non-essential staff before this shit hits the proverbial residence ceiling fan. We can't keep hiring new assistants every time you get curious and cowardly."

It sounded like a lot better idea my way. When he puts it like that, it just sounds dumb. "So... you're saying you can't get me that information?"

"What I'm saying, old friend, is that I value my skin in its current- intact- condition. And when it comes to flaying people alive, I'm a lot more afraid of your wife than I am of you. So no, I won't get you that information. You'll have to ask her yourself."

I was afraid he's say that. And he's right, too. I hate it when he's right.

She comes to bed later than me, which is not unusual. She's a night-owl and doesn't sleep all that much to boot, perhaps a hold-over from the period of her residency when she stumbled around awake for days on end, just trying to stay upright long enough to accomplish the next task. I know this feeling, now; I understand it as President in a way that I never did as an Economics professor because even when I stayed up what seemed like a week straight for my doctoral thesis, there were no lives on the line. All of this has changed.

Today there was a funeral, as if we needed reminding.

There are things about being married that I wouldn't wish on anyone. One of them is this: trying to go to bed with something hanging between you. She moves more stealthily than usual, as if by being quiet we can keep from rousing the animosity. Our bed, when she lays still, is very big; and she is very far away.

I consider reaching over to touch her, running a hand down the groove between her shoulders blades to the dip at the end of her spine. I want to believe that I could make this go away with a touch, with the width of my hand. That first year, the year we nearly breathed together, it would have worked. In our three-room apartment shabby with years of absentminded neglect, the whole world went away at night just because of the way her eyes glinted in the dark, because of the way she would shift to drape her leg over my hip. Mostly, it is the memory of her earlier rejection that keeps my hands on my side of the bed.

But I can't stand this. I have never, ever been the patient one in this relationship. "Abbey, talk to me." The pleading note has crept into my voice. The one that doesn't come out even during hostage situations or under threat of nuclear war. Just here. In the dark in a bed that is far too big. With my wife, with Abbey. Still, after all these years, some days it is hard to believe that she chose to be yoked to me and I to her. Forever is a very long time.

"Please, talk to me." Because if you don't say something, I'm not sure I can keep breathing.

The bedclothes sound like leaves burning as she rises and crosses to the windows, facing out into darkness. I know better than to follow. She hugs herself, the moon streaming around her form, sparking in her tousled hair. She says something, very softly, that I cannot make out.

"What?"

She half-turns, still not looking at me, her face a dark hollow in the night. Softly, she repeats: "Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?" She runs a hand through her hair and laughs, a brittle, rasping sound. "You're not the only one who studied Latin, Jed. Not the only one who has a bone to pick with God." Her voice is low and distant; I'm not sure that she's really talking to me. But I keep still, listening, because her anger is so much better than her silence.

Her spine is like a tension wire. I should have touched her in the limo today. I should have remembered that when the Secret Service seals off a building, they let the First Lady stay inside. I should have remembered that she took Latin.

"Abbey, I'm sorry. About earlier, I mean. About the funeral and the thing and..." I stare down at my knotted hands so as not to have to face the strength of her stillness.

When I look back at her, she is shaking her head slowly. "Jed. Stop it." There is no malice in her voice, and no entreaty. "We can't change it. I just...I need to know when you got so far away from me."

That voice squeezes my heart in my chest. This is what a heart attack feels like, I think numbly. I am a desperate man, casting out for a foothold. "Abbey, I'm right here. I know there are a lot of people trying to attack us for what has happened, and there will be more, but I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here."

She whirls on her heel to face me fully, and as she turns I notice there is something bright on her cheek, glittering down her dark profile. Her voice is strong: "It's not you they want, Jed. It's me."

"What do you mean?"

Angry now, but controlled. "You're going to be fine, Jed. You always are. Your staff is going to write the right words and appear calm and collected and photogenic and they're going to devise a strategy to get you out of this looking like a beneficent, gentle giant who cannot be bothered with the problems of his own mere mortality. They're the best, you've said it yourself. And they can get people out of captivity in Haiti and you out of hot water with the whole of America and still have time to argue about whether or not they should have written 'strongly disapproves of' or 'vehemently opposes.'"

Unbidden, the thought rises that she is beautiful in her anger. She blazes clean and righteous, like a flame in the shadowed room. I am holding my breath, mesmerized by her wrath and by the beauty of it.

"Meanwhile, I am going to lose my medical license, like I lost the right to the title when we took up this crazy life. I'm going to lose my credibility. The only thing I've ever really been good at, besides loving your sorry ass. And maybe the man I love- to the pressures of his job, or the phantom in his brain, or this goddamned country. As far as I'm concerned, the job, the disease, the country, they can all go to hell. And your deus iustus, your 'just God,'" she spits the words, "can go with them. So you're not the only one who gets to be angry and self-indulgent. Because it isn't fair for any of us."

Abbey, you're scaring me. I'm petrified. I can't move.

Somehow she is beside me, her hands on my cheeks. I slowly realize she is wiping tears away. When did I start to cry?

"Oh fuck," I hear her whisper softly, and then she crawls up on the bed beside me and puts her arms around me. "Shh. It's okay." Rocking me a bit, like when the girls had nightmares and woke up calling for their mommy. "It's okay, Jed."

"No, it's not," I reply brokenly. How can it ever be okay? I try to turn around, I want to see her face, her eyes. Her eyes tell me what she is really thinking, even when no one else knows. But it's too dark. Her face is luminous, but her eyes are dark in it like coals. How is this okay?

I reach up to touch her cheek with one hand, just the breath of my fingers against the strong bones there, hearing again the blood in her voice when she called him my just god. Wondering why she is still here. This is what I don't tell anyone, not even Leo: that some nights I wake up to just watch her sleeping, just to make sure that she is still here. I told God I was through with Him today. Officium perfeci. I didn't mean it, but it doesn't really matter all that much. He could get along without me- He has and He will. Without her, I would be helpless.

"I'm sorry, Abbey. I'm so sorry." Repeating it over and over like a prayer for absolution. I didn't know it would be like this. I knew what I would gain, what I could give; but I never dreamed it would cost you so much. I'm so sorry.

She tightens her arms around me. "I know, Jed. I know."

For a brief moment I can breathe again here in the dark, in her arms. But what she isn't saying is shattering the peace of the moment. Even together, we might not be strong enough to change this. We might not be strong enough to save this- not ourselves but the things we have worked for: jobs and schools and tax cuts for lower income families and hearts massaged back to beating by gloved hands in gaping chest cavities. "Vengeance is mine." Even the God of the New Covenant craves so much blood in sacrifice.

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Fin
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