It's late afternoon on Saturday when CJ startles me while I'm lost in thought at my desk. With Josh stumbling in at the Devil's Hour last night, I'm even more sleep deprived than normal. Before CJ came up I'd just finished asking Cathy to surreptitiously get a hold of Sam's good blue suit, the one that brings out his eyes, and arrange getting it to me for dry cleaning ahead of his trip to Wisconsin with Josh where they'll ostensibly be meeting with the Madison party chair. I fed her some line about how I had contacts in the office and how the suit, much nicer than what he'd normally wear when traveling to a "fly over state," would endear him to the office manager there. It was hard not to choke on my own lies. It was also hard to believe that Cathy doesn't have a key to Sam's house. Don't all assistants?
Once she knows I'm aware of her presence, CJ gives me a sympathetic look and a small smile. My left hand is resting on my stomach, so she assumes I'm thinking about the baby, but surprisingly, even to myself, I'm not.
Instead I'm obsessing about the idiot things I said to Josh right before I drifted off to sleep last night. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong and it really was a dream and I haven't admitted to him that I fear that he, and all men really, are just using me. What a pathetic admission. Thinking about it is actually giving me heartburn, or maybe it's the jalapeños I had with lunch.
I'm also a little lost in thought over the idea of becoming Mrs. Lyman in less than a week. I have to admit, marrying Josh is not something I've never considered, but certainly not something I've thought about recently. The truth is, I like my life right now, just the way it is. Or well, just the way it was up until a few months ago before we made the mistake of epic proportions.
If you'd have read my diary from a few years ago, before we actually got together and I stopped writing in it, you'd have thought marriage and children was all I'd wanted in life, but now I'm not so sure the things I'd valued in the past are so important.
Shortly after Josh had his "situation" around Christmas, I picked up my old diary and after writing a little I found myself flipping back to those old entries, to that girl I once was. They were so cringe-inducing that I had to stop reading. My late-teenage love sick desires were worse than a romance novel. Now, given the fact that my unexpected fertility has probably ruined Josh's career, I'll probably have to burn the thing.
None of my wants and needs turned out to be true anyway. Just as my conversation with him last night underlined, my actual relationship with Josh has lacked any of the romantic and emotional declarations my diary had hoped for. Instead our relationship has been filled with a domestic intimacy that the more mature version of me finds comforting. The kind of intimacy created from shared experiences and just generally wanting to spend time together.
Most of the time it doesn't bother me that – aside from laying out some ground rules about marriage, religion and future plans around the time I agreed to marry him - we've never really discussed our relationship. Josh, for all his bluster, is an intensely private person. He likes bragging about his professional victories, but rarely talks about his personal life. In fact, most of the senior staff don't. It's as if serving the president means they're not allowed to acknowledge their personal needs and when they do, like Sam for example, they end up at best in the tabloids and at worst, a liability open to blackmail.
And yet, despite this, I know which side of the bed he likes to sleep on, how he likes his boxer shorts folded, how he makes coffee, eats his eggs and talks to himself (and often me) in the shower. I know how the way he touches me breathes familiarity and I know how he looks when he makes love. Ok, that last one probably was in my diary.
All these things, these domestic things, they're the things your wife knows about you, whether you've discussed your relationship or not. Somewhere deep in me I can feel that this "mistake" is probably the natural conclusion to something we've been brewing for years. But I can't suppress the idea that he might be doing this - marrying me and becoming a father - just out of obligation. That I've now made him the liability in the administration because I got knocked up. All if it makes me want to fall through the floor.
CJ's looking at me expectantly. "Is he free?" She asks, motioning to Josh's door. I nod and wave my hand at her in an opening gesture.
With that she opens his door with a flourish and the last thing I can hear as she sweeps into his office and shuts the door is that she greets him with a cool and disdainful "Idiot Boy."
Yeah, yeah, I think we both get the 'Idiot' title this time.
