Title: I Am Not Hester Prynne
Author: coffeeplease
Rating: TEEN (references to "sleeping with", a swear word in French)
Category: AU, little angsty, little sappy
Spoiler Info: Everything up to 6th season finale is fair game
Disclaimer: WB, NBC, John Wells, Aaron Sorkin... owners. I just lease and try not to stain the carpet. Lawsuits don't look good on me.
E-mail address for feedback: permission: Sure, just tell me first
Notes: I read the four novels referenced here years ago. ("Scarlet Letter" was high school.) So if I've butchered their plots, I apologize, to you and my college lit prof. Same AU as My Father, My Dad and The Punch and The Jab. Donna's POV.
I packed up the books in a haphazard fashion. Really, everything that didn't have a memory of Jack was thrown into a box. Since he was never around, most things I owned were not tainted by association. My son's room was rather simple; everything he had there, it seemed, he already had a duplicate of at Josh's house. Except pictures of his biological father, which I packed up carefully for him. He may want them someday.
You know fate is laughing at you when you open up a box of books at your new fiancee's house, after having an adulterous relationship with him for several years, and find The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley's Lover on top. I started laughing. Josh crawled up behind me to see what was so funny.
"Well, you were always one for the research," he mumbled as he took Madame Bovary out of the box.
"Somehow, I don't think our story qualifies as classic literature." His hand came up to massage my back. "For one, I'm not planning on taking any arsenic."
"Thank God, I just got you here, finally." He kissed me lightly. "Hester." He chuckled to himself.
"Not funny, Dimmesdale."
I'm not Hester Prynne or Emma Bovary or Connie Chatterley. The White House didn't brand me with a scarlet "A" and, as much as Josh claims to be an "outdoorsman", we've never made love in the woods. I never thought I would cheat on the man I married but I never thought I'd be in a loveless marriage, either.
Look at those three women. Dimmesdale died in Hester's arms and she wore the letter to her grave. Emma Bovary commits suicide, spurned by the man she loved, one of the many adulterous relationships she has. I guess poor Lady Chatterley and I had it similarly; we waited forever for a divorce. But still, in all those stories, the woman was made to suffer. The man, in most cases, not so much.
But I know Josh suffered. He didn't like the position he was in, who would? Josh and I, we both have values and principles and we were breaking so many rules we never wanted to break. Don't sleep with your boss. Don't sleep with your assistant. Don't sleep with a married woman. Don't cheat on your husband.
Sometimes the story line is not the one we choose.
Am I going to feel guilty the rest of my life? Probably. The love Josh and I have is worth it and I don't regret what was done, but how I wish I had never said "I do" all those years ago. Some nights, I would think of the other Donna, in the parallel universe, who didn't marry Jack. She had the baby "by herself" except she was never really by herself. Like me, she had a boss who held her head while she vomited and kept his mini-fridge well stocked with Cherry Garcia and kosher dill.
Jack saw me one time when I was pregnant. His exact words: "Well, you've gotten, er, big."
He called the baby "his little sailor." Funny, my son gets seasick. My son has inherited so many more traits from the man he calls "Daddy" than the man whose sperm actually hit the egg. He slips and falls in the new shoes I buy him. He is, in his mother's opinion, a little too obsessed with the Mets chances this year. He tends to talk a lot. My son likes the sound of his own voice. He is caring and compassionate and witty. Just like Dad.
You can't force a family. I think those six years or so of my life proved it. Do I really think my son's life was improved because I married his biological father? I absolutely do not. Quite the opposite, in fact. Do I think my son's life would have been better had Josh and I remained apart? That, I don't know. My infidelity caused pain in his young life, pain I would love to kiss and hug away, but I know I can't.
But my son without Josh in his life... unimaginable. Jack tried to force a family; Josh let one create itself around him. There was no light bulb moment for either of us in which we realized we were a family, the three of us. It was the little things, throughout the years.
The peace in Josh's eyes when he watched me feed the baby. Watching Josh, four in the morning, prepare the baby's bottle, boiling water. Josh reading "Goodnight, Moon" until his throat was sore while our three year old kept chanting, "Again!"
Jack would come home, all polished and shined. He would tell the boy about truth and honor and give him some cheap souvenir from an exotic local. He delivered ponderous truisms to a three year old and expected him to retain the knowledge. My son would nod politely until this stranger left him alone.
The marriage was rocky to begin with. To be fair, I didn't go in with high expectations. Nobody, not C.J., Toby or even the President thought it was the greatest idea. Two parent homes are better for children, we all said. We forgot to add that love was even better. I wasn't in love, I was terrified. To this man, to be wed, for the rest of my life. I felt like a 19th century heroine, being forced into a marriage for a property deed. Except no imposing male figure was doing this to me, I was doing it to myself.
We had sex maybe three times after the baby was born. He was never home. He called and he tried, but a bit halfheartedly at best. One time, he was careless and gave one of his girls at port our number. Good thing I speak French; I was able to say "Je suis l'epouse foutue de Jack." Poor girl never called back.
I don't feel any absolution in that Jack cheated most of our marriage. He had the girls at the ports, but they weren't serious. Josh and I were serious. We were serious the day he handed me his campaign badge. We were serious the day we spoke of beer and red lights. We were serious that first awkward kiss, when we both knew it was wrong and we both knew we were powerless to stop it.
The plot just kept moving. Jack was a roadblock. A roadblock that gave me my son, so I will always be grateful and a bit guilty for plowing over him with such intensity. But my real marriage started the day Josh told me he loved me, was in love with me.
I never thought Jack would fight the divorce. I almost skipped to my lawyers office the day I filed; being in love and happy and ultimately quite naive. Josh thought it would be over in a heartbeat, too. He bought a ring and waited. Patiently. For almost five years.
Jack plead, used guilt, threatened, cajoled and ultimately delivered the same truisms to me that he did to my son. He cold have picked up a pen and saved himself the breath. He figured it out, eventually. Everyone did. Josh and I could only hide so much and we were waiting for the day when we wouldn't have to hide at all.
It angers me. Maybe I am like Emma Bovary; honor means less to me than love and passion. My wedding day meant much less to me than the weekends where C.J. or Toby, once even Leo, would take our child and we would hole away in some remote location and luxuriate in being with each other. The many dinners cooked together, one meal for our son, who was picky, and one meal for us. That fateful evening when I cut both their hair a bit too short.
The Valentine's Day where he filled my entire cubicle with roses and bought me a signed copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love In The Time of Cholera." He underlined the ending for me, when Florentino finally makes love to Fermina on the boat, but they have to pretend the boat is quarantined for cholera or else cause a scandal. No port would allow them to dock again, so they remain on the river forever. In a note that trumped the famous Art and Artistry of Alpine Skiing inscription, Josh wrote:
Donnatella,
I know boats are a sensitive subject for us, but I would happily spend the rest of my life with you confined to a small boat on a river. (And you know how seasick I get.) I'd happily spend the rest of my life with you anywhere. Unlike Florentino, I didn't have to wait until we were elderly. Like Florentino, I would have waited forever.
All my love,
Joshua
I read about true love all my life. My bookshelf is full of romance, tragic romance. Jack and I were not a tragic romance, tragic maybe, but there was not much romance to be found. Josh and I plowed through the red lights and roadblocks and I realized that fiction doesn't give you an accurate sense of true love at all. Just a glimpse.
Josh was my husband for those years and I was his wife. Truthfully, I was performing a lot of "wifely duties" for Josh before Jack Reece's shadow ever appeared on the White House lawn. But the partnership we already had before the romance kicked in. Jack never asked me if I approved of the long tours at sea. He never wanted my input on his career.
"I don't know if I should. What do you think?"
"On the plus side, you'd be running your own campaign. With a candidate that you really respect. Will's gonna run Russell. You wouldn't have the role in the Russell campaign you'd really want."
"Run him straight into the ground. What should I do, Donna?"
"Fly to Houston, see what he says."
"See, the thing is, I don't want to run a Santos campaign."
I stopped slicing tomatoes and looked at him.
"You don't?"
He kept stirring the pasta. Our son was watching cartoons in the living room.
"I don't want to apart from the two of you for that long."
I stared at him.
He continued, absently stirring. "The only way I would do it was if you two would come with me. And that means yanking him out of preschool and... and... he has a lot of friends there. I don't know if that would be good for him."
I was still married to another man, but it was just a dusty old chapter from a book. My son and I followed Josh; Santos won. Not long after, the divorce finally went through. Josh and I married quickly after and had two adorable little Lymans who delight in torturing their older brother. He loves them, though. Someday, all three of them will be in high school and be assigned to read "The Scarlet Letter." I wonder if my eldest will think of his own mother.
But I am not Hester Prynne.