Part 3: American Idyll

Desperate with darkness, forsythia flames out.

Madness, this: frail leaves of light, whipped wild with wind,

thrust themselves into unwilling skies,

force themselves on days that do not want to give up winter.

Only the need to be known cuts deeper,

the hunger not to be invisible.

Love is like that sometimes, and living always.

("Forsythia")

Light lies across your eyelids like apple-

blossom on new-sprung lawns, like the lover

I once longed to be, lying in your thoughts,

your arms, so gently, dappled and dreaming only

of summer skies and early apple-time.

("Winter Light"—both from "New England Spring" by M. A. Kurtz)

(May 3, 2007)

Donna sat at her desk in her office, listening to the rain drumming against the window behind her. It was just after five on a spring evening, but the room around her was getting dark already. Only the reading lamp on her desk was casting a glow of warmth and light on the papers she was reading; she hadn't bothered to get up to turn on any others. Glancing around the room now, she felt an odd pang of loneliness at the familiarity, and yet the utter strangeness, of it all. After three and a half months she should have been used to being here like this, but she wasn't. She sometimes wondered if she ever would be.

It wasn't the building the office was in that seemed so strange to her, although it was the White House. It wasn't the idea that she had an office of her own in it, instead of a windowless little cubicle in the bullpen just outside the door. It was the office itself, and the memories it called up for her, no matter how hard she tried to keep them at bay. Because the room she was in was Josh's office, and how could it ever seem like anything else?

It was so typical of him to have ended up in this room when he first came to the White House. As Deputy Chief of Staff he should have had the largest one after Leo's, with an anteroom for his assistant—her—and plenty of space to spread out in and use to impress visiting Congressmen and Senators. But, typically, he hadn't paid any attention to that sort of thing. Leo had told him to assign the offices, and he'd thought it made sense to give C.J. the biggest and best-located one so she could use it to talk to newspaper editors and journalists. She'd ended up in the room next to his for a while, while hers was being remodelled—they'd wanted to put in better wiring and cables, and the workers had found some other issues that had had to be dealt with, so it had taken months—but eventually she'd been installed in the big room near the press briefing room, which had the nice anteroom for Carol. Josh had taken the smaller one himself without a second thought to the finer distinctions of rank or prestige.

Bob Russell's Deputy Chief of Staff, a man named Harold Porter, had different ideas. He'd taken one look at the place during their transition tour and claimed C.J.'s old office for his own. The Press Secretary could make do with the smaller, darker one at the end of the hall, and if her assistant had to perch in a cubicle in the bullpen outside—the Deputy's bullpen—that was just fine with him. It would have been fine with Donna, too—she wasn't worried about how big her office was, and there was an intercom that she had no difficulty using—if it hadn't been this office. The one that she was beginning to think would always be Josh's, not hers.

At the beginning that had bothered her differently than the way it bothered her now. She'd been worried about Josh—really worried—for a while after the convention. But then, when he didn't return her calls, and when he continued to refuse, via Leo, every request that he come back and help the party with its campaign, her concern had been overtaken by disappointment, anger, and even—to her distress—shame. She hadn't expected that. However upset she might have been with him when she'd left her job as his assistant, and however difficult she might have found her feelings about him during the campaign to manage or even pin down, she'd never expected him to do anything to make her ashamed of him. One of the things she'd always admired about him had been the way he consistently put the greater good—the needs of the President, the administration, the party—ahead of his own personal desires or disappointments; she couldn't understand his failure to do it this time around. Will hinted more than once that he thought Josh just couldn't take playing second fiddle in a campaign where he'd have to be on more or less equal footing with his former assistant. The thought angered and sickened her. The only way she could deal with it was to try not to think about him at all, which was a lot easier to do before she had to go to work in his old office every day.

But after a while, the daily reminders of the Josh she'd known began to outweigh the thoughts about the Josh Will thought he had become. It probably helped that he sent flowers. He didn't know what room she was in, of course, but the mail clerk brought them to her desk the day they moved in. There was a note with them: "Congratulations and best wishes. Do good. Josh." She'd almost missed what he'd scribbled on the other side: "Thanks for your calls last summer. Sorry I didn't get back to you. You guys did great on your own." It was a strange sort of apology, but it was enough to stir up emotions she'd rather have kept unstirred. She thought about picking up the phone to thank him but ended up writing an equally brief and uninformative note instead, dropping it in her outbox for her assistant to stamp and mail.

She didn't know if he'd gotten the note. A few weeks after she sent it she saw an op-ed piece he'd written for the New York Times, urging the administration to take advantage of its historic opportunities—they'd won the House by a narrow margin, and had an even balance of seats in the Senate—to make significant advances in education and health care and a number of other areas, and, typically, suggesting that they should have done several of these things already and were spinning their wheels. According to the byline, he was now an Executive Director of the Fair Future Foundation, a liberal policy institute in New York. She'd heard on the grapevine that he was helping President Bartlet get his library established, and wondered if he was still living in Washington at all. A glance at the new phone book showed that he wasn't listed at the Georgetown address anymore. For some reason she didn't want to ask her assistant to check, so she googled his name herself, and after a few tries with the phone directories for different states found out that he was listed at an address in Connecticut, in Westport, his home town. She wondered if he had kept the apartment in Georgetown for a base when he was visiting D.C. but had the phone disconnected, or if he'd rented it out or sold it. The thought of his not living there anymore sent a pang through her that almost equalled the one she felt whenever she allowed herself to look around her office and remember how things used to be.

She tried not to do that, but the trying was getting harder instead of easier the way she'd thought it would. With every day she spent in the Russell White House, she missed the Bartlet one more. It wasn't the old job she missed, of course: her new one was infinitely more challenging, exciting, and flattering. And yet . . . . She missed the way things used to be. She missed the people she'd worked with there before, the assistants—most of them had moved on—and, far more importantly, the senior staff. She missed Leo. She missed President Bartlet. Most of all, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it, she knew she missed Josh.

Except for Will, she didn't know most of her new colleagues well at all. None of Bartlet's staff had wanted to come back: Toby had taken his pardon gruffly and gone \

back to New York to teach at Columbia; C.J. had taken Danny Concannon and gone back to California, where she was planning to do nothing except lie by a pool in the sun and sip margueritas and paint her nails for six months before even thinking about what was going to come next. Annabeth had stayed at the White House during the campaign, but surprised everyone afterwards by starting to show up at events on Leo's arm, and it looked as though she was very happy to make looking after Leo her next full-time job. The key White House positions had been filled by old connections of President Russell's, or people who'd brought themselves to his attention during the campaign. The party warhorses who'd had to be rewarded had all been given positions in the Cabinet, or ambassadorships at comfortable embassies overseas.

But it wasn't the familiar faces of the old staff she missed so much as it was the way they approached things, the way things had been done. Josh had been right in his New York Times piece—the Russell staff had fumbled their opening and had been spinning their wheels ever since. They'd spent the transition planning the inaugural celebrations more than the actual work of their administration. They hadn't vetted their candidates for a couple of Cabinet positions very carefully, with the result that they'd been taken by surprise by things that had come out after they'd put the names forward, and had had to scramble to find replacements. It had been embarrassing, and a huge waste of opportunity: the result had been that they'd delayed proposing any legislation for weeks, and when they had put a bill forward, it had been the most innocuous imaginable. "We need a sure win," Will had said, gruffly. It had been that, all right—an "anti-crime" bill that had put forward funding for more police officers on big-city streets and called for tougher sentences for a variety of crimes, including rape and domestic violence. Those last provisions—which Donna made sure were much touted in the press—were gratifying to the women's caucus, but really the bill could as easily have been proposed by a Republican President as a Democratic one, and was equally acceptable to both parties, a sure win indeed. Donna knew what Josh would have said about it—in fact, she knew what he was saying, as he'd had another op-ed piece in the Times and one in the Post, and had appeared on several political talk shows more than once to say it. She found the whole thing deeply embarrassing. Not that there was anything she could have done about it; she'd been included in the discussions at only the most superficial level. Will had made it quite clear to her that, regardless of what C.J. might have been able to do at times, in this White House the Press Secretary's role was to present policy, not formulate it. She was welcome—even encouraged—to speak up about how to show the President and his bills in the best light, but for anything beyond that, there were lines she shouldn't cross.

So here they were, almost four months into their first term, their honeymoon all but wasted, and she was reading through the language of the bill they were planning to send to the Hill next week and finding nothing more than another plodding, pedestrian, safely middle-of-the-road ("When has the middle of the road ever been a safe place to be?" she could almost hear Josh shouting) piece of legislation, this one designed to provide greater access—they were calling it "universal access"—to computers and the internet in schools across the country. It was the sort of thing no one could really object to, though Donna found herself wondering whether first-graders in inner-city slums really needed more screen time than they were already getting on their t.v.'s at home, and whether the money wouldn't be better spent to hire more teachers and cut classroom sizes so the children would actually get to interact one-on-one with a not-too-stressed-out, semi-educated adult for part of their day.

However, Will was billing this proposal as their big "Education Initiative" and wanted her to whip up enthusiasm for it in the press, so she was biting back her questions and studying the text now, before it went to the Hill next week. She didn't really need to do that—Porter had given her a digest of it to work from—but old habits died hard. Josh would have known every sentence and every clause by heart before talking to the press about anything, or taking it to the Hill. He would have expected her to know them pretty thoroughly too, just so she'd understand what he was going on about when he was on one of his rants, and could help him keep track of all his notes and revisions as the bill was worked and reworked and gone over with a fine-tooth comb for inconsistencies or poor wording that might create problems in its passage through Congress, or later, if it became law.

Josh—she shook her head, trying not to think of him sitting at this desk, in this chair, working half the night or more to make sure everything the White House did was the best it could possibly be. But she couldn't shake him out of her thoughts. Whatever had happened before she left her old job, whatever had happened on the campaign, she missed him. She missed his dedication, his intellect, his passion for his work, his conviction that every day they spent in that historic building was an opportunity and an obligation to try to make the world a better place. And, for all her efforts not to, she knew she just missed him. She missed his face, his voice, his smile, his hand hovering over the small of her back. His teasing conversation, his quick—even if undependable—concern. Even his ego. Even the way he took her for granted. Even the way he yelled her name . . . .

Goodness, she must be tired. She didn't really miss all those things, surely? She shook her head again and tried to turn her attention back to the bill; she wanted to finish up so she could go home. It wasn't five-thirty yet, but the Russell staff generally left around six most nights, and earlier on Fridays. The President believed in keeping what he called civilized hours, and was civilized enough to expect his staff to keep them with him as much as possible. He believed in weekends and vacations, too. She was expecting to spend Saturday and Sunday at home, on call if she was needed of course, but not likely to be needed. Other than her weekday press briefings, she hadn't really been called on to do all that much; they'd been lucky so far, and there hadn't been any major crises in the country they'd had to respond to. If she wanted to go away for the weekend, most of the time she could. She hadn't bothered to, though; there wasn't really any place she wanted to go, any one she wanted to see. Except . . . .

For the third time, Donna shook herself; this time she made a little noise of exasperation, too, and managed to force her mind to take in what the fine print in the last pages of the bill in front of her was saying. She read for a few minutes. Then she stopped, blinking. Had she really read that right? She'd been having trouble concentrating a few minutes ago; she must have missed something that would explain it. She turned back several pages, and started again. And read it again. And then again. And then again.

After a while, Donna got up slowly out of her chair and started to pack up her things. She felt abstracted, not really thinking about what she was doing but about what she ought to do. She ought to phone Will. No, he wouldn't appreciate that—now that he was C.O.S. he protected his time. He'd tell her to talk to Porter. She ought to talk to Porter; he was in charge of Legislative Affairs, and the obvious go-to person for this. But she wasn't that sure of what she thought she'd seen—she was no lawyer, after all—and Porter made her uncomfortable. He had a way of talking to her that made her feel as if he was just waiting for her to put a foot wrong. She suspected he didn't like the fact that she knew Will better than he did and had a more secure relationship with him—though she wasn't really sure anymore what her relationship with Will was, if she ever had been. Or perhaps he just disliked working with someone with as little prior experience at the senior level as she had. He had a way of talking about the assistants when he was around her that always made her hackles rise. "Oh, I'm waiting for Alice to do that. Of course, I'll probably have to wait all day—you know what these assistants are like." If Will had noticed it, he wasn't showing any signs, and Donna didn't want to draw it to his attention if he hadn't. But she didn't really want to give Porter any more opportunities than he already had to call her qualifications into question or to make her feel like a fool. And in any case, Porter had undoubtedly gone home for the night already. As—she could see as she walked past the Chief of Staff's office—had Will.

The rain was making the streets black and slippery, catching all the lights on the cars and reflecting them in a confused and confusing tangle that matched her thoughts as she drove home. It was knocking the blossoms off the trees—spring had come late this year—and strewing pink and white petals across the pavement in front of her house and the steps to the front door. She parked her car and picked her way through them, trying not to slip in her high heels and not to let the sight of all that wasted beauty make her feel any lower or bluer than she did already.

Inside, she kicked her shoes off and switched on her t.v. before heading to the kitchen to put on the kettle for a comforting cup of something hot. She was in the mood for tea, not coffee. She was digging in her cupboard to see if she had anything herbal and soothing left when she heard his voice coming from her living room. She stood for a moment, frozen, her hand poised halfway between the cupboard and the counter with a brightly colored box of teabags in it. Then she turned and all but ran to the next room, where she dropped onto the couch and stared at the set. The kettle started to sing in the kitchen, but she didn't hear it. She couldn't hear anything except his voice filling her room.

He was sitting at a table with a handful of other commentators, all talking at once, but it was his voice that rose out of the babble with the most conviction, his gestures that were the most arresting, his arguments that were backed up with the most solid facts and figures and made the most sense. His criticism of Russell was, if anything, more fierce than ever. Donna watched him hungrily. When that segment finished she kept watching, waiting and hoping for him to come back.

Finally she realized he wasn't going to and turned the set off. She sat there for another minute, listening to the kettle screaming in the kitchen while she hugged her knees, trying to hold back the ache that seemed to be pushing against the inside of her skin and trying to get out. It was the same ache she'd been ignoring all day, all week, all . . . . She didn't know how long she'd been ignoring it. She just knew she couldn't keep it in any longer; it was unbearable. She had to see him again. She had to. She had to talk to him. She had to ask him what he thought, what she should do. It didn't really surprise her that she needed to do that; she'd needed it for a long time now, however hard she'd tried to ignore what everything inside her had been screaming at her it wanted her to do. She didn't really care any more that he hadn't tried to promote her out of her old job; it didn't really matter any more what he'd thought about working with her during the campaign. She needed him. She'd always needed him, and nothing had felt quite right without him for a very long time. She'd left her job with him, but she'd never expected him to leave his job too. She'd never expected things to change this much, that she couldn't find him just down the hall if she wanted to, in that office she'd just left, where, however irrationally, she'd felt he was always supposed to be. His voice and his picture on the t.v. weren't enough—not even close to enough. She couldn't get through another day without being in the same room with him, without seeing him and talking to him again the way they used to. It was just for work, she told herself. It was just because she trusted his opinion more than anyone else's when it came to this sort of work. She knew she was lying and she didn't really care.

She had the weekend free; the likelihood that anything would come up that required a White House press briefing was small, and if it did, she had a good deputy. She went to the kitchen and turned off the kettle, then went to her computer and brought up the phone directory for Westport and there he was, just as he'd been the last time she'd looked, with an address and telephone number listed for anyone to find. She looked at the number, knowing she should call and afraid of what might happen if she did. He might be out, or she might talk to him for a few minutes and then he'd put her off, maybe arrange to see her the next time he was in D.C. It wasn't enough. It wasn't even close to enough.

It was an impulsive, crazy thing to do, she knew, but it wouldn't be the first time she'd done something crazy and impulsive that ended up taking her to Josh. She pulled her smallest suitcase out of her closet, threw a few things into it, and headed for her car. Twenty minutes later she was on the Beltway, travelling east and north.

oooooo