The Fall Of the World's Own Optimist
Luna
"And she's not even that pretty," they will say one day, and John will remember that he didn't care. That her face and frame were rake-thin and so sharp he expected to cut his hands up on her collarbones every time he touched her, that she was a bitch, a Libertarian and not two-thirds his age: none of it mattered.
Twenty-five years a politician. He had to have the girl.
"I hate Jed Bartlet," she'd said to him.
He'd been leaning against the locked door of a spare room, watching her back. She took forever to ease one long leg out of her damned pantyhose. His mouth was wet. "You can say that again."
She got free of the pantyhose and turned around. Her skirt up around her waist, no panties, tan lines highlighting her nakedness. He couldn't look away, and she was advancing on him.
"I." Her hand across his lips. "Hate." He bit down on her wrist. She gasped: "Jed Bartlet."
He pinched the unnaturally pale stripe of skin above her hipbone. "So do I."
That was the first time, that night a month after the MS came out. The second-worst summer of his career. So it was not Helen's body that he wanted, but her shamelessness: shameless ice-green eyes glaring at him during the Correspondents' Dinner, shamelessly admitting in the car that she was leaving with him because she'd never fucked anyone in the line of succession. The scorn in her was an open fire, while his was a slow burn and he'd been suffocating on the smoke.
In that room at the Observatory, shameless. She hadn't cared that he'd have to find some way to cover tooth marks on his fingers, claw marks on his neck.
Pretty? he will think one day. He'd have gone after her if she'd been a boy.
*
For the longest time he thought, no, knew it was a one-night stand. He left his thoughts of Helen locked inside a room somewhere in his head. A fantasy, a midlife crisis. Campaigning left no time for those things, and it was an election year.
On Inauguration Day the sky had been the color of cold ash. He'd stood through the swearing-in, looking at the back of the President's head. A breeze had moved between them, and John realized that somewhere in campaigning he'd lost sight of who the candidate was. Four more years, four more years of this. Sudden as a cough or a climax it coursed through him: the envy and the anger. And the lust. That night he looked much too long at champagne flutes and the fingers holding them.
For weeks, he managed to pretend he wasn't cracking. He watched his hands for tremors, made sure he spoke softly to his staff and remembered to shave twice to stop the shadow of his beard. Suzanne had gone to Texas. Suzanne liked to be in Texas. Still, he didn't cave until a night in late February, sleet lashing at the windows, and he found the phone in his hand.
He'll never remember how he knew her number, or even what he said. Only her voice, lazy, insolent: "What makes you so sure I don't have company here?"
The nerves along his spine twitched, but he threw his shoulders back and spoke with all the authority he could muster. "You don't," he said. "I'm sending over a car."
She hung up. But in an hour he was walking her past the agents at his door. Not touching; she'd never let him touch her with all her clothes on.
And never in his bed. She made that clear from the start. On the staircase, and later against the bathroom wall, her back slammed into the towel bar, his knees punished by the Italian tile. Helen didn't bruise, and when she came she bared her teeth in triumph.
The shower was turned up to scalding; her shoulder blades dug into his chest. Their reflections blurred and blended on the glass door, and he realized that she was laughing silently.
"You must be thrilled," she said. "You got Saint Bartlet re-elected."
He looked down at the top of her head, watching the water turn her mousy hair black. "I don't like it any more than you do."
"The patron saint of bullshitters," she said, and went into her soundless laugh again.
Something about the word in her New England voice got inside him, made him reach under her chin and turn her head so he could kiss her. Steam softened her face when she pulled away.
"You came over, though," he said. His voice was hoarse.
Her eyes froze over again with--what? Contempt, he thought. She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back. "I must have issues with my father."
She went down on him with a mouthful of hot water, and it was impossible to imagine that there was snow on the ground. Impossible to consider his wife, his kids, even his career.
That was her best trick, her biggest attraction: she gave him blackouts.
*
When his children are grown, if they come to see him at all, they'll be wondering what's wrong with him. He'll hear the disgust in their voices, and he'll be sorry. He won't say he knew what was wrong the whole time.
Guilt made him feel at once hollow and heavy; he looked around when he heard his own footsteps. Food lost its taste. His mind would drift and then he'd catch himself staring at his hands. After the guilt, a fresh wave of energy. He thought faster and clearer. Confidence. Competence.
He'd wake up one morning with an ache in his head and his groin, wanting her again.
The symptoms didn't surprise him. Only their intensity, and the speed with which they shuttled past. It happened too quickly for logic, too quickly even to name what was happening. Though he tried, at least, once.
"I've been smoking again," Leo said, at the Thursday night meeting. He was tapping his fingertips on the table, but he didn't seem to know it. "Since...well."
He paused and swallowed some coffee. Nobody prompted him; it was against protocol.
"Since a couple months before the election, actually. I just didn't let myself know that I was doing it. Making it a habit. I'd smoked maybe a pack in the last ten years." Leo shrugged. "I suppose I needed something to do with my hands."
John was listening so intently that he didn't know was speaking until he hears his own voice: "I'm seeing a woman."
Leo's hand froze with one finger raised. Everyone in the room turned to John; it wasn't because he'd broken the protocol. With an effort, he made himself sit up, spine straight against the wall of silence and darkness and eyes.
"Who?" Leo said, after the first endless seconds.
"I'm not telling you that."
Their eyes were locked across the table, cold as crossed swords. John felt his throat close, pulling the muscles in his neck and shoulders taut. He would not look down.
"John." There was a demand written plain in Leo's eyes, his hard-set jaw.
"No, Leo," he said, refusing to let his voice waver. "I apologize for interrupting you."
He would not look down. Answered Leo's glare with a glare of his own, thinking, go ahead, you bastard, last I knew I still outranked you.
"I was talking about substitutes," Leo said, and raised his coffee cup to his mouth. He sipped and went on without shifting his gaze. Nobody relaxed, not for the rest of the night.
John went upstairs with the blood hammering away at his skull. He sent Janeane home and sat down hard behind his desk, pretending to read words that failed to resolve into sense. He wasn't conscious of reaching for it, but the phone was in his hand.
He looked around his office, the walls smeared with shadow outside the single circle of lamplight. It wasn't because he didn't know better. Maybe it was because he couldn't see far enough.
Fuck Leo McGarry, and fuck Jed Bartlet. John jabbed the button, got an outside line and called Helen.
She was on her period, she was leaving for Grand Cayman in two days, she couldn't stand him. But he had to have her, and when his driver came for her she got in the car.
*
One more time, he told himself, over and over. And each time he was left hungrier.
Even when he was desperate enough to have taken the chance, he never tried to talk her into spending a night. Not because she would have laughed at him: she laughed at him anyway. But he could not imagine her still and sleeping, eyes closed, unguarded. He could not imagine that he wouldn't hurt her.
He wanted to see her in the stare of the morning sun. He wanted her tied to a bed, locked in a room, stored somewhere inside him. Wanted to own her simply so that he wouldn't want her anymore. She'd upset the balance of supply and demand, smothered his conscience and his reason. It was a wonder she couldn't revoke gravity.
Helen stood naked looking into his open refrigerator, as if she was sunning herself. She took out a blue plastic bottle of water and drank most of it faster than he would have expected. Framed by the square of harsh light, she looked like something carved from bone. Deceptively fragile.
She shot a look at him over her shoulder. "This is the last one," she said.
"I'll drink tap water." He scratched the back of his neck. "It won't kill me. It might knock me unconscious, but it won't kill me."
"Try not to be an idiot, John." She turned around, holding the water bottle against one cocked hip.
Something in her voice sounded almost gentle, raised goosebumps on his bare arms. He blinked, watched her and waited.
She drank some more water; left a drop glittering on her lower lip. Her hair hung in thick tangles around her cheekbones. Her nipples were hard: at least she was human enough to feel cold. "Do you still wonder why I come over?"
"I thought maybe it was me." He could have bitten his tongue in two. A grown man, in his own damned kitchen, Number One Observatory Circle. Ought to have some shards of dignity here somewhere. I thought maybe it was me.
Lines of shadow cut across her forehead. But the laughter was there, he saw it glinting in her green eyes. She took a step toward him. "All we ever do is fuck," she said.
If she'd spoken in Swahili he couldn't have been more surprised. It was true. He'd never danced with her, never even seen her eat. He edged forward, placing a hand on the point of her elbow, and couldn't help chuckling. "Come into the den, I'll put on the NCAA Tournament and explain basketball to you with really small words."
She drew herself up so her face was level with his, her toes en pointe on the parquet floor. "I don't want to talk about basketball." She wiped her mouth with a gesture like someone cutting her throat. "And I sure as hell don't want to hear any sob stories about your job or your wife. I'm not a therapist."
"Leaves a lot to talk about."
"I'm not a charity, either," she said, and pressed herself against him.
*
Though he hadn't meant to memorize, the details of that night were carved into his mind. It was the last one. He could, and did, play it over and over on the black screen of his closed eyelids. Between meetings he felt her fingers spidering over his skin, her bite against his shoulder. She was constantly after him, just underneath his senses. A dull pain, a silent laugh.
On a Wednesday, he stood behind a lectern and scanned a crowd for her face, though she wouldn't be there, and he wouldn't have seen her. He was staring into the sun. Someone handed him a glass of water. His stomach twisted when he tried to swallow, and he tasted her, sour at the back of his throat. It was enough to make him sick.
That night he had five hours to sleep and he lay awake the first three. The hot sheets weighed down on him, made him sweat; he wadded the pillow under his neck. Suzanne lay on the far side of the bed with her knees pulled up against her stomach. She didn't move, sculptural in her sleep.
He was never going to rest, so he pushed himself up from the bed and left the room. He stood in the hallway, leaned against the wall, shut his eyes.
Helen. Her skin young and marble-hard, her hands on his hands on her impossibly narrow waist. Head tipped back and her face was as a wolf's, her teeth small and pointed, her eyes huge and hungry. Glowing, though he'd pushed her against the chrome freezer door and there was no other light.
He opened his eyes and there was nothing but the dark hallway, darker at the far end, where the window let the night pour in.
She hadn't ruined him, not really. She could prove the sex, nothing else. Suzanne would probably--he felt the panels of the door, rigid against his back--Suzanne would leave him, for a while if not forever. But it wouldn't be the end of the world, it wouldn't even be enough to bring down Saint Bartlet and his heavenly host. He hadn't given Helen that kind of power, yet.
He went back to bed and kept his eyes open as long as he could, focused on the ceiling or the slope of Suzanne's shoulder. When he dreamed, his dreams were all the same.
After twenty-five years, he had to have the girl.
The next day he had three minutes alone in his office, between a lunch with some union reps and a lunch with a college track team. He hadn't eaten. His hands were not exactly steady when he picked up the phone.
He'll never remember what she said, only that her whisper was next to a growl. And he could feel her eyes, her fingers on him when he said, "Well, to start with, we could talk about life on Mars."
*
And one day, when he's fallen to the stature of a footnote in a civics text, a cautionary tale for ambitious kids to ignore, maybe he'll pick up her book. He'll touch the glossy photograph on the jacket--even airbrushed he'll see the wolf in her. He'll thumb through the pages, and it won't matter how many lies she tells. She'll never make him look weaker than he was.
John slept past six a.m. for the first time in more years than he remembered. Janeane was making the flight arrangements for him--maybe the last time he'd use military transport--and he'd see the week out in Texas. He was going home. He was leaving home.
He sat down at his desk and stared at the gray print of the morning's Post. A seven-figure book deal. He guessed she'd invest half the money and wear the rest around her neck. She probably thought she'd earned it. He shook his head. She probably had.
"Didn't you have any sense that this was the kind of person who would do this?" the President had asked him.
John had wanted to laugh, he'd wanted to vomit. He'd wanted to throw a punch. Sense had nothing to do with it--Leo had said that himself, hadn't he, in a meeting once? "It has nothing to do with smart and stupid."
He'd known what she was, but not as well as she'd known him. That was how she'd won.
With a small tarnished key, he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a folder and let it smack against the desk like an ax hitting the block. In the folder was a letter he'd typed himself, hunt-and-peck, on his first morning here. One problem she was solving whether she knew it or not: he didn't have to think about the nomination anymore. Or the future of the party. Only one day, one long day, at a time.
Fuck Leo McGarry and fuck Jed Bartlet. John smiled.
One day, he'll laugh.
"And fuck you, too, Helen," he said to the empty house. He grabbed a pen, pinned the letter down with the heel of his left hand, and signed his name.
Luna
"And she's not even that pretty," they will say one day, and John will remember that he didn't care. That her face and frame were rake-thin and so sharp he expected to cut his hands up on her collarbones every time he touched her, that she was a bitch, a Libertarian and not two-thirds his age: none of it mattered.
Twenty-five years a politician. He had to have the girl.
"I hate Jed Bartlet," she'd said to him.
He'd been leaning against the locked door of a spare room, watching her back. She took forever to ease one long leg out of her damned pantyhose. His mouth was wet. "You can say that again."
She got free of the pantyhose and turned around. Her skirt up around her waist, no panties, tan lines highlighting her nakedness. He couldn't look away, and she was advancing on him.
"I." Her hand across his lips. "Hate." He bit down on her wrist. She gasped: "Jed Bartlet."
He pinched the unnaturally pale stripe of skin above her hipbone. "So do I."
That was the first time, that night a month after the MS came out. The second-worst summer of his career. So it was not Helen's body that he wanted, but her shamelessness: shameless ice-green eyes glaring at him during the Correspondents' Dinner, shamelessly admitting in the car that she was leaving with him because she'd never fucked anyone in the line of succession. The scorn in her was an open fire, while his was a slow burn and he'd been suffocating on the smoke.
In that room at the Observatory, shameless. She hadn't cared that he'd have to find some way to cover tooth marks on his fingers, claw marks on his neck.
Pretty? he will think one day. He'd have gone after her if she'd been a boy.
*
For the longest time he thought, no, knew it was a one-night stand. He left his thoughts of Helen locked inside a room somewhere in his head. A fantasy, a midlife crisis. Campaigning left no time for those things, and it was an election year.
On Inauguration Day the sky had been the color of cold ash. He'd stood through the swearing-in, looking at the back of the President's head. A breeze had moved between them, and John realized that somewhere in campaigning he'd lost sight of who the candidate was. Four more years, four more years of this. Sudden as a cough or a climax it coursed through him: the envy and the anger. And the lust. That night he looked much too long at champagne flutes and the fingers holding them.
For weeks, he managed to pretend he wasn't cracking. He watched his hands for tremors, made sure he spoke softly to his staff and remembered to shave twice to stop the shadow of his beard. Suzanne had gone to Texas. Suzanne liked to be in Texas. Still, he didn't cave until a night in late February, sleet lashing at the windows, and he found the phone in his hand.
He'll never remember how he knew her number, or even what he said. Only her voice, lazy, insolent: "What makes you so sure I don't have company here?"
The nerves along his spine twitched, but he threw his shoulders back and spoke with all the authority he could muster. "You don't," he said. "I'm sending over a car."
She hung up. But in an hour he was walking her past the agents at his door. Not touching; she'd never let him touch her with all her clothes on.
And never in his bed. She made that clear from the start. On the staircase, and later against the bathroom wall, her back slammed into the towel bar, his knees punished by the Italian tile. Helen didn't bruise, and when she came she bared her teeth in triumph.
The shower was turned up to scalding; her shoulder blades dug into his chest. Their reflections blurred and blended on the glass door, and he realized that she was laughing silently.
"You must be thrilled," she said. "You got Saint Bartlet re-elected."
He looked down at the top of her head, watching the water turn her mousy hair black. "I don't like it any more than you do."
"The patron saint of bullshitters," she said, and went into her soundless laugh again.
Something about the word in her New England voice got inside him, made him reach under her chin and turn her head so he could kiss her. Steam softened her face when she pulled away.
"You came over, though," he said. His voice was hoarse.
Her eyes froze over again with--what? Contempt, he thought. She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back. "I must have issues with my father."
She went down on him with a mouthful of hot water, and it was impossible to imagine that there was snow on the ground. Impossible to consider his wife, his kids, even his career.
That was her best trick, her biggest attraction: she gave him blackouts.
*
When his children are grown, if they come to see him at all, they'll be wondering what's wrong with him. He'll hear the disgust in their voices, and he'll be sorry. He won't say he knew what was wrong the whole time.
Guilt made him feel at once hollow and heavy; he looked around when he heard his own footsteps. Food lost its taste. His mind would drift and then he'd catch himself staring at his hands. After the guilt, a fresh wave of energy. He thought faster and clearer. Confidence. Competence.
He'd wake up one morning with an ache in his head and his groin, wanting her again.
The symptoms didn't surprise him. Only their intensity, and the speed with which they shuttled past. It happened too quickly for logic, too quickly even to name what was happening. Though he tried, at least, once.
"I've been smoking again," Leo said, at the Thursday night meeting. He was tapping his fingertips on the table, but he didn't seem to know it. "Since...well."
He paused and swallowed some coffee. Nobody prompted him; it was against protocol.
"Since a couple months before the election, actually. I just didn't let myself know that I was doing it. Making it a habit. I'd smoked maybe a pack in the last ten years." Leo shrugged. "I suppose I needed something to do with my hands."
John was listening so intently that he didn't know was speaking until he hears his own voice: "I'm seeing a woman."
Leo's hand froze with one finger raised. Everyone in the room turned to John; it wasn't because he'd broken the protocol. With an effort, he made himself sit up, spine straight against the wall of silence and darkness and eyes.
"Who?" Leo said, after the first endless seconds.
"I'm not telling you that."
Their eyes were locked across the table, cold as crossed swords. John felt his throat close, pulling the muscles in his neck and shoulders taut. He would not look down.
"John." There was a demand written plain in Leo's eyes, his hard-set jaw.
"No, Leo," he said, refusing to let his voice waver. "I apologize for interrupting you."
He would not look down. Answered Leo's glare with a glare of his own, thinking, go ahead, you bastard, last I knew I still outranked you.
"I was talking about substitutes," Leo said, and raised his coffee cup to his mouth. He sipped and went on without shifting his gaze. Nobody relaxed, not for the rest of the night.
John went upstairs with the blood hammering away at his skull. He sent Janeane home and sat down hard behind his desk, pretending to read words that failed to resolve into sense. He wasn't conscious of reaching for it, but the phone was in his hand.
He looked around his office, the walls smeared with shadow outside the single circle of lamplight. It wasn't because he didn't know better. Maybe it was because he couldn't see far enough.
Fuck Leo McGarry, and fuck Jed Bartlet. John jabbed the button, got an outside line and called Helen.
She was on her period, she was leaving for Grand Cayman in two days, she couldn't stand him. But he had to have her, and when his driver came for her she got in the car.
*
One more time, he told himself, over and over. And each time he was left hungrier.
Even when he was desperate enough to have taken the chance, he never tried to talk her into spending a night. Not because she would have laughed at him: she laughed at him anyway. But he could not imagine her still and sleeping, eyes closed, unguarded. He could not imagine that he wouldn't hurt her.
He wanted to see her in the stare of the morning sun. He wanted her tied to a bed, locked in a room, stored somewhere inside him. Wanted to own her simply so that he wouldn't want her anymore. She'd upset the balance of supply and demand, smothered his conscience and his reason. It was a wonder she couldn't revoke gravity.
Helen stood naked looking into his open refrigerator, as if she was sunning herself. She took out a blue plastic bottle of water and drank most of it faster than he would have expected. Framed by the square of harsh light, she looked like something carved from bone. Deceptively fragile.
She shot a look at him over her shoulder. "This is the last one," she said.
"I'll drink tap water." He scratched the back of his neck. "It won't kill me. It might knock me unconscious, but it won't kill me."
"Try not to be an idiot, John." She turned around, holding the water bottle against one cocked hip.
Something in her voice sounded almost gentle, raised goosebumps on his bare arms. He blinked, watched her and waited.
She drank some more water; left a drop glittering on her lower lip. Her hair hung in thick tangles around her cheekbones. Her nipples were hard: at least she was human enough to feel cold. "Do you still wonder why I come over?"
"I thought maybe it was me." He could have bitten his tongue in two. A grown man, in his own damned kitchen, Number One Observatory Circle. Ought to have some shards of dignity here somewhere. I thought maybe it was me.
Lines of shadow cut across her forehead. But the laughter was there, he saw it glinting in her green eyes. She took a step toward him. "All we ever do is fuck," she said.
If she'd spoken in Swahili he couldn't have been more surprised. It was true. He'd never danced with her, never even seen her eat. He edged forward, placing a hand on the point of her elbow, and couldn't help chuckling. "Come into the den, I'll put on the NCAA Tournament and explain basketball to you with really small words."
She drew herself up so her face was level with his, her toes en pointe on the parquet floor. "I don't want to talk about basketball." She wiped her mouth with a gesture like someone cutting her throat. "And I sure as hell don't want to hear any sob stories about your job or your wife. I'm not a therapist."
"Leaves a lot to talk about."
"I'm not a charity, either," she said, and pressed herself against him.
*
Though he hadn't meant to memorize, the details of that night were carved into his mind. It was the last one. He could, and did, play it over and over on the black screen of his closed eyelids. Between meetings he felt her fingers spidering over his skin, her bite against his shoulder. She was constantly after him, just underneath his senses. A dull pain, a silent laugh.
On a Wednesday, he stood behind a lectern and scanned a crowd for her face, though she wouldn't be there, and he wouldn't have seen her. He was staring into the sun. Someone handed him a glass of water. His stomach twisted when he tried to swallow, and he tasted her, sour at the back of his throat. It was enough to make him sick.
That night he had five hours to sleep and he lay awake the first three. The hot sheets weighed down on him, made him sweat; he wadded the pillow under his neck. Suzanne lay on the far side of the bed with her knees pulled up against her stomach. She didn't move, sculptural in her sleep.
He was never going to rest, so he pushed himself up from the bed and left the room. He stood in the hallway, leaned against the wall, shut his eyes.
Helen. Her skin young and marble-hard, her hands on his hands on her impossibly narrow waist. Head tipped back and her face was as a wolf's, her teeth small and pointed, her eyes huge and hungry. Glowing, though he'd pushed her against the chrome freezer door and there was no other light.
He opened his eyes and there was nothing but the dark hallway, darker at the far end, where the window let the night pour in.
She hadn't ruined him, not really. She could prove the sex, nothing else. Suzanne would probably--he felt the panels of the door, rigid against his back--Suzanne would leave him, for a while if not forever. But it wouldn't be the end of the world, it wouldn't even be enough to bring down Saint Bartlet and his heavenly host. He hadn't given Helen that kind of power, yet.
He went back to bed and kept his eyes open as long as he could, focused on the ceiling or the slope of Suzanne's shoulder. When he dreamed, his dreams were all the same.
After twenty-five years, he had to have the girl.
The next day he had three minutes alone in his office, between a lunch with some union reps and a lunch with a college track team. He hadn't eaten. His hands were not exactly steady when he picked up the phone.
He'll never remember what she said, only that her whisper was next to a growl. And he could feel her eyes, her fingers on him when he said, "Well, to start with, we could talk about life on Mars."
*
And one day, when he's fallen to the stature of a footnote in a civics text, a cautionary tale for ambitious kids to ignore, maybe he'll pick up her book. He'll touch the glossy photograph on the jacket--even airbrushed he'll see the wolf in her. He'll thumb through the pages, and it won't matter how many lies she tells. She'll never make him look weaker than he was.
John slept past six a.m. for the first time in more years than he remembered. Janeane was making the flight arrangements for him--maybe the last time he'd use military transport--and he'd see the week out in Texas. He was going home. He was leaving home.
He sat down at his desk and stared at the gray print of the morning's Post. A seven-figure book deal. He guessed she'd invest half the money and wear the rest around her neck. She probably thought she'd earned it. He shook his head. She probably had.
"Didn't you have any sense that this was the kind of person who would do this?" the President had asked him.
John had wanted to laugh, he'd wanted to vomit. He'd wanted to throw a punch. Sense had nothing to do with it--Leo had said that himself, hadn't he, in a meeting once? "It has nothing to do with smart and stupid."
He'd known what she was, but not as well as she'd known him. That was how she'd won.
With a small tarnished key, he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a folder and let it smack against the desk like an ax hitting the block. In the folder was a letter he'd typed himself, hunt-and-peck, on his first morning here. One problem she was solving whether she knew it or not: he didn't have to think about the nomination anymore. Or the future of the party. Only one day, one long day, at a time.
Fuck Leo McGarry and fuck Jed Bartlet. John smiled.
One day, he'll laugh.
"And fuck you, too, Helen," he said to the empty house. He grabbed a pen, pinned the letter down with the heel of his left hand, and signed his name.