| In Lieu of Another Drink |
[Dec. 19th, 2006|11:32 pm] |
Remember when I walked with you, how my hand would reach for your back- it wasn’t to guide you, wherever you traversed; it was to pull you closer, me closer to you, always closer, like now, with you cradled in my hand, the bed as my second, the sheet as my cover, and finally, finally you’re as close as possible, as close as I can possibly be, like I’ve always wanted me to you.
*
Your kiss is sweet and dizzy. Arms locked around my waist, you push on me with the force of that snowball striking glass, and although my hips feel your growing and pressing desire, your fingers are painstaking under my sweater as if it would cut you to touch me the wrong the way. You have my tongue, so I try to tell you with pale yielding, that nothing of you would ever be wrong to me.
*
So many times before-/ no, I never thought of here or there, it was more “not here”- to never keep you alone, in my thoughts, for more than a passing glance or a smile traded through the doorway. You’re not smiling or glancing now- before, that used to make me crazy, but now, there’s so much more in your stoicism to the turned-down lights, the nonchalance of my lips on your neck. You lower yourself onto the bed and me onto you, as if to wonder aloud, where else would I be?
*
My breath on your chest, one lazy determined hand falters in your navel, which makes you gasp and me laugh a little. I tip my head to your chin at this impromptu entr'acte, but you’re not amused, you want me and yes, yes, it’s been nine years but it won’t be but a minute more. This is what you were talking about when you brought up "Coffee Cake and Candidates," but- god damn it!- I had to force it- tenacious, you chortle, if that’s what you call someone who puts their hand on the fire until the nerves are burned numb. And thus: now we’re here and we have to do this because this level of denial is enough to make a person cut his ear off and post it in the mail.
*
All the nothings I’ve asked you to do, and when I ask for the Biggest Thing of All, the openness in your eyes makes my heart twist and empty, inside me. And then-
*
You ask, does it feel okay? but I don’t know because it’s never been you before. I want to say it’s much better than to think of you with someone else. You move fast at first, desperate rushing blood, and then slower, desperate to answer the doubts that may be in my head. I want you just as much and the scared- well, that comes too, but I believe it stems from the wanting, not from you.
*
You think you are the perceptive one, but you would be surprised at what I know- that you never imagined I wanted you this badly, or that I had a plan all along, for what I would do if this should ever come to pass. That I want to take for myself every part of you that I was forced to endure be usurped: vindicated, I kiss the marauding gloss off your lips, liberate your shoulders from the veils of a blue empire-waist dress, reclaim your heel from that elusive strap, the one you teased me with in the most exasperating way. Most of all, I know you don't know there's never been a time when I didn’t see you.
*
I’ve seen you intense, delirious, sweat; your skin, your needs, chestnut curls loped over one ear, your scar, a little scruff on your chin, you mouth when it moves (but never on me), ankles, knees, elbows, veins- in fact, all of you that is visible to me now, I’ve seen, but never like this. I think it is only a human who can stay exactly the same and yet transform completely.
Such is the power of love. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 7th, 2006|10:50 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
In Expectation of Christmas Day
December 25 | 4 AM CST
I crack open the door to the den. Josh, who for some inostensible reason is on his cell phone in the wee hours of Christmas morning, is rumpled, in a dirty sweatshirt with a cowlick that I would have thought was a geometric impossibility, given the small amount of hair he has now.
“You better not have forgotten to get me a gift,” I warn him, ignoring his paralytic-deer look and coming over to his bed. “Don’t even bother trying to order flowers now if you did.”
He hastily slams his phone down, on the opposite side of me, I note- so I can’t see the number. “Aren’t you cold?” He tries to distract me by rubbing my arms.
“A little. Who were you talking to?
“Why are you wearing a tank top? It’s the middle of December!”
“It wasn’t cold in my bed! Who were you calling?” I press.
He pulls off his old, beat up Harvard sweatshirt and thrusts it towards me. I stare him down for a beat, before I desist and put it on. “Better?” he asks. I nod. “Good. Whatcha doing up?” he wants to know, as two dimples appear.
I offer him my best sadistic smile. “Are you cheating on me?”
“Are you serious?” I can tell by his face he’s only half-sure I’m not. Aw, cute. “Of course I’m not. No seriously, I’m not. It was a secret call- but it wasn’t about- God, I would never- seriously, Donna-”
“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty unlikely,” I chuckle.
“I would never do that to- hey, what do you mean by that? ‘Pretty unlikely,’” he demands.
“Well...” I gesticulate in his general direction. “I mean, come on. Maybe a few years back, you may have had a chance, but now...”
“You are mean. Mean, Donna Moss.”
I climb up over his lap, and wind my arms around his neck. “What I mean to say is that no other woman better lay a hand on you or I’ll kill them. It makes me crazy to think that other women can even look upon you and your studly physique.”
“My irresistible smile.”
“Your irresistible smile,” I oblige, kissing him.
“My irrepressible charm...”
“Your irrepressible charm.”
“- and intelligence,” he adds.
“And intelligence,” I repeat, bemused. “Had enough of yourself yet?”
“My inimitable you,” he grins up at me.
“Okay, one more,” I play along, pleased. “Dedicated to inimitable me.”
“See? No one else could turn you on with such verbal dexterity as I.”
We kiss and when we break away, I tell him, “I’m not repeating that. I think I’ve stroked your ego enough for one night.”
“Speaking of, you still haven’t told me what you’re doing down here. In my room. In my bed, actually, in the middle of the night.”
“Getting some water,” I demure.
“There’s a bathroom upstairs.”
“I don’t drink tap.”
“I know. But how’d you wind up in the den?”
“I got lost, Josh,” I retort, exasperated. “Have you no limits?”
But I’m sunk and he knows it. “You can’t sleep without me, can you?”
“Oh dear God...”
“Just wanted to come gaze upon my Adonis-like face, my Herculean chest.”
“Did you know there’s a huge spaghetti sauce stain on this sleeve?”
“Oh, that’s been there for years.”
“Well, that makes it much less gross.”
His smile is like a headlight through the night. “Were you plotting how you could take advantage of me in the dark?” he goads, with a glimmer in his eye.
“What can I say, Josh?” I sigh, as I slide off him and gather some blankets around me, feeling the hard metal coils through the three decades-old sofa bed. “When I see a man in an electric flannel blanket, I can’t control myself.”
He is inexhaustible. “Were you going to whisper dirty things in my ear?”
“Would you have wanted me to?”
“Whisper? I dunno... might be a nice change.”
“From what?”
“From me worrying that the old folks upstairs are going to have us evicted.”
“Shut up!” I punch him lightly on the leg.
“Hey, I’ll take our chances- I had no idea you could scream like that.”
“JOSH!” I smack him, mortified. I mean, it’s one thing when it just happens... another entirely to talk about it. On a pullout couch in your parents’ house wearing a dirty sweatshirt, no less.
“It’s hot, Donna- way hot.”
“I hope the memory turns you on.”
He ignores my threat, in order to further exacerbate me. “I pegged you for more of a breathy admonitions of love sort. But I was very pleasantly surprised.”
“You know, I was actually just thinking about that before I came down here.”
“Screaming my name in the night?”
“The first time we... with our guards down.”
“Yeah. That was- nice.”
“Way up there on the scale of niceness,” I agree.
“You certainly shocked me. All three times. If you hadn’t fallen asleep, I think you would have killed me.”
“Custer had his last stand, and I had mine,” I shrug. “I realized there was no way I could watch you dick around with that deadline for three and half more weeks. I would have killed you, and I assure you, it would not have been pleasant.”
“Good to know you’re not above sexual extortion. It’s the mark of a truly evolved woman.”
“Maybe. Sometimes, I think those Christian fundamentalists with the promise rings and no birth control might be onto something.”
“I must be tired- no delirious- because I just imagined you saying that crazy Christians who hate women have a point.”
“I was really mad at myself after we slept together before the election. I was alone, on the opposite side of the bed, and all I could think was, Damnit, I just knew this would happen! Sex never resolves anything and it didn’t.”
“No, the sex didn’t. But having you with me when Leo died, and when Santos won- being with you to share this amazing thing we accomplished together- that resolved a lot. I couldn’t have gotten through that without you, and moreover, I wouldn’t have wanted to.”
“Thank you,” I say, a little bowled over by his candor. “You really did an amazing thing, Josh. I know politics is a world of ‘What have you done for me today?’ but don’t lose sight of how huge it really was. You plucked a Congressman from obscurity and made him a president. I think you and Leo McGarry are the only two people in the world who could do that.”
“Yeah...” He’s quiet. I think maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Leo. Then he asks, “Did I tell you I talked to the President after Leo’s funeral?”
“After we were all up in the Residence?”
“Yeah. He said, ‘Leo and I are the past; you’re the future.’ It made me think of you,” he tells me without looking at me.
“Why did it make you think of me?” I ask quietly.
“I don’t know. But you immediately came into my mind. I looked for you outside the Residence- I thought you might have hung around- but you had already left.”
“Yeah.” I know I was a real jerk to Josh the day of Leo’s funeral, and while he may have deserved my cold shoulder, I could have put it off for a day. “I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you.”
He shrugs it off; our détente that day is apparently not the point of this story. One thing I admire in Josh is that he never holds a grudge with people he cares about. He was definitely hurt that I snubbed him when we came back to Washington, but he’s never used it against me.
And now, he’s looking right at me. He’s still leaned over, but not on his elbow anymore, and there’s an earnestness on his face. “When I left the White House that night, I walked out through the gates and I swear, I could hear the faintest echo of the ‘Carol of the Bells.’ Then I realized why you were in my mind.”
He swallows hard, and continues. “A guy falls down a hole, and a friend walks by and jumps in. The guy says, Why’d you do that, now were both stuck. And the friend says, Yeah, but I know the way out.”
*
Donna's sapphire eyes are wide as saucers. I really musn’t tell her enough how much I love her- have always loved her, even before it was that kind of love. I feel a catch in my throat watching her as I recite the parable Leo told me in my darkest of hours. “Anyway, I realized I had always had two people, Leo and you. Now, there was only you- and I was afraid I’d blown it. I didn’t realize- no, I did realize, but I didn’t let you know how important you were to me. I should have. I didn’t, I should have, and I’m sorry.”
She’s crying now. “You don’t have to be sorry,” she whispers into the darkness, and then kisses me softly. Only when her breath hits my cheek do I realize I’m crying too.
She pulls away from me and wipes her eyes. “Why do people always cry at holidays? It’s silly. There’s no reason to be sad,” she mumbles, embarrassed.
“I’m not sad,” I tell her, taking her hand away from her face. “I’m grateful.”
Her gaze drops to my chest, and somewhere, to the hole still deep inside there. “Me too,” she sniffles.
“I know I’m not an easy person to love,” I start, with difficulty.
Her feverish shake of her head stops me. “No one is easy to love, Josh. Love isn’t easy. It’s hard. It’s hard because it can hurt and nobody likes to be hurt.”
“I love you for saying that, really, but I’m more pathological- more paranoid- than most.”
Donna laughs a little at that. “Well, that’s probably true. Not that you don’t have reason to be,” she admits, seriously. “You’ve lost a lot in your life. Of course it’s affected you.”
“When Joanie died, I swore I would never have children because I never wanted to be in as much pain as my parents were.”
She tries to do damage control, but her face is clearly devastated. “Well... we’ll work it out.”
“No, don’t misunderstand. I want to have kids with you. My point was just that you’ve managed to change my whole outlook on life. Before I felt like I was just watching people I cared about be taken away, so I swore I wouldn’t add any more to the mix to be picked off. But somehow you made it in anyway....” I smile, but it fades quickly. “And then Gaza happened.”
“And you swore me off,” she deduces.
“It wasn’t that deliberate, but yeah, I suppose that’s what happened. It wasn’t about you- it was just a pathological reflex to how much it hurt to see you in pain.”
“I know.” Then with a small smile, she adds, “Good thing your plan to ditch me didn’t work.”
“No, it didn’t,” I smile. “Must be fate.”
“Or locusts,” she offers. “They can be prickly ones to get rid of.”
There’s a moment where we just stare at each other, a flow of easy unspoken expressions passing between people who love each other, by the inky star-dotted sky filling the picture window behind us. Donna drops her head on my shoulder. We survey her old street in suburban Wisconsin, the colored lights and luminaria candles that have been left on in expectation of Christmas Day.
“I did get you a Christmas present,” I tell her with a playful tug at the spaghetti-stained sleeve. “Do you want it now?”
She nods. I reach down into my carryon and pull out a ring box wrapped in gold foil, tied with a red ribbon, and hand it to her.
Donna looks up at me, her eyes dancing, and then pulls the ribbon loose. She opens it, and lifts out a delicate antique band topped with a brilliant pearl. “That was the only heirloom my grandmother took with her when she fled the Nazis."
"It's beautiful."
"My father planned to give it to Joanie on her sixteenth birthday. I never knew about it until my mother came to see me after we won the nomination. She gave it to me and told me she and my father had put it away for me to give to my wife, who could pass it on to our daughter. And in her next breath, my mother- ever subtle- asked me, ‘So where is Donna going to work, now that Russell’s lost?’ She will be very, very happy if you accept it.”
*
Josh, laughing, takes the ring from my hand. “Obviously, this is just a token, you can pick out a diamond one when we’re back in DC.” He takes both my hands in his free one as he bends down on one knee on the faded, ancient olive-green carpet in my parents’ den and proceeds to propose to me in a pair of boxers and a sauce-marked shirt. And to top it all off, I can barely see through all the water clouding my eyes.
“Donnatella Moss, will you do me the honor, and marry me?”
Oh Lord, I’m a mess. “Yes. Yes, I will marry you,” I can barely say as I wrap my arms furiously around his neck.
“Thank you,” he whispers, and then places a few big smacking kisses on the side of my face. “Although, I have to say, I may have to stop giving you gifts because it just makes you all emotional-”
I laugh, thinking of how young and stupid and unbelievably touched I was that first Christmas together. “Can I just say, though, about that inscription?”
“The one I caught you rereading several times that day when you should have been doing your job?” he groans, no doubt expecting some pithy remark about his grammar or syntax or even the saccharine content. “What about it?”
"You know how I said I wanted skis?" I beam at my soon-to-be husband. “This is what I really wished for.” |
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| 20 Hours in Wisconsin |
[Dec. 5th, 2006|10:38 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
December 25 | 3 AM CST
Sleepless in Hollow Kettle: Part II
I toss. I turn. I miss Josh.
It took us awhile to figure out how to configure ourselves in bed. The first time we slept together, we were so far apart in the bed, I’m pretty sure we were in different zip codes. The second time, our (not so) quickie upstairs while waiting for the next round of exit polls on Election Day was better- we simultaneously occupied the same space. The third time we slept together, we actually shared our bodies a little- I vaguely remember Josh’s knee abutted into my calf and his hand lightly curled around my hip after a particularly raucous session following his California trip to recruit Sam.
We would joke about our post-coital ergonomic awkwardness later, in Hawaii, when more than a few Mai Tais did the trick of making us so sluggish that instead of “dismounting”- as Josh accused me of- we merely collapsed in a heap on top of each other.
“This is nice,” I mumbled, dazed and drunken, into Josh’s chest.
“Yeah, it is,” he replied, as his hand slowly crept up my shoulder to plop down on my hair. “Nice that you didn’t do that dismount and jump two feet forward move.”
“Did what?”
“Like the gymnasts on the Olympic team. They wait their whole lives to do their little jump over the horse or whatever, and then they can’t seem to get off the beam fast enough.”
“And you’re the horse or the beam? Which, by the way, are two totally separate events, not to mention apparatuses.”
“And then they hop, which I’ve never understood. And the hop earns them big points.”
“They hop?”
“Yeah, that that two-step bunny-hop thing they do at the end.”
“You think I do a two-step bunny-hop after we finish...?!”
“Yeah, after you ride me like a horse, you jump like a bunny as far away as you can possibly get without actually sleeping on the floor.”
I turned, hurt, and looked at him. “You think I wanted to get away from you?” Although as I asked, I heard the echo of: “I just thought maybe you needed some space or something...”
“Well, at first I thought that *you* thought that I- we - we just terrible. The sneaking out in the middle of the night thing wasn’t a particularly handy testament to my ability to satisfy you.”
“There was a lot of other stuff too, you know,” I retorted, my tone undoubtedly more defensive and pissy than was warranted. Isn’t it funny how sex alone really doesn't bridge the distance between two people?
“For me too,” he reminded me.
“I tried to talk to you-” I started to protest.
“I tried to talk to you! ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘You don’t have to leave.’”
“Well, I’m not leaving now,” I quipped, with forced caprice.
Josh responded with a sixth-grade smackdown. “Good!”
“Fine!” I nearly yelled. “You’re going to give me a hangover if we keep talking about this,” I muttered, reaching for my water.
“Not so good,” he said, as he eyed me critically from across the bed, to see what I would do after I put down the bottle. Would I return to his arms? Sidle up beside him? Grab a pillow and blanket and head for the floor?
I decided to put it back on him. I turned back towards him, propped up, expectantly on one arm. I mirrored him, propping myself expectantly on the opposite arm, so we were face-to-face, en garde, whatever you want to call it. Then he smiled at me. And suddenly, I wasn’t pissy anymore and I poked his knee with mine and he swooped over to my side and with a growl “captured” me, basically threw himself over and trapped me beneath him- where I was more than thrilled to be.
“You know what’s a good cure for hangovers?”
I expected him to say kisses or something completely lame. “No, what?”
“Sweat.”
And this is why women start websites for him.
How funny, I think, as I roll over one more time. Years ago, when Josh was over my shoulder, freaking out (in a completely owned way) about LemonLyman, there was absolutely not even the possibility of a real flirtation between us- banter about tax code, sure, but no double entendre. Okay, maybe some double entendre (hello, my streetcorner?).
I wonder if it’s true that men fantasize about all their female friends. Josh was single for a long time. He must have thought about it at some point...not that I want to imagine him imagining himself with CJ or Cathy or Debbie. (Ew...)
For the record, I never had a fantasy about Josh until after the Cliff Calley scandal, when he threw snowballs at my window and chided me for calling him “wild thing,” and he kept admiring my dress in a way that told me he wanted to see it thrown in a ball somewhere in the corner of a darkened room. He touched me a little too much to be inconspicuous that night, and when I got home I indulged in a little pre-bed fantasy about what it might be like to kiss my boss, and to have him kiss me back.
No doubt I loved Josh before this. There actually wasn’t a time when I wasn’t in love with him. But love is a many-colored thing- and the first year was powder pink, more infatuation for this person I admired so much, who was so much more amazing than anyone I had ever known before. After Rosslyn, the pink turned deeper- red, like a red light, bright and clear and able to seen from a mile away. Amy added the green, then came the black of an SUV, white fluorescent hospital lights, a touch of blue from Nevada and its precious 8 electoral votes.
When you mix it all together, I imagine you wind up with a color that is close to blood and that’s what Josh and I are now.
I know he’s scared about the future- for the record, so am I- but when you think about it, it’s not like we’re starting a life together. We’re actually just continuing a life that includes wild successes, professional failures, losing parents, losing mentors, losing Congress, beer, bullets, bad decisions, bad boyfriends, treason, tears, and two presidencies. We’ve survived it all; we’re bound by it all. And no matter what happens, we’ll be with each other for it all.
I won’t leave.
I throw the comforter off and am hit by the cold air in my old room. I want to see Josh, to fall into his arms and say, I want to marry you, and I won’t leave. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 18th, 2006|04:21 am] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Sleepless in Hollow Kettle, Part I
Christmas Day | 3:00 AM CST
I blink into the darkness. There is a starving artist art show oil painting of a seascape on the wall across from the pullout couch. The outline of waves breaking on the rocks is vaguely discernible through the faint glow of Christmas tree light coming through the slats in the louvre doors.
I turn. Then I turn back over. I miss Donna.
I miss her body. I miss her arm slipped around my waist. I miss her lips on my neck and my face.
And yeah- I miss *that* too.
We haven’t spent much time apart since we’ve been together, and so the idea that I miss her is new and unusual. I don’t usually miss anyone. And yet, I miss her, right this second.
It’s not just that she’s upstairs. It’s that something happened- a space happened- when she kind of rolled her eyes after I said we should, you know, take up the marriage question when we’re back in DC. I know it was justified (it’s me after all). But it was just the way she seemed so... resigned to my ineffectualness as her lover that makes me miss her- in preparation, I suppose, of her imminently dumping me.
What she doesn’t know is that I have a ring- I had it before I came here, although I was not intending it to be an engagement ring- just sort of a pre-engagement thing. It’s a family heirloom kind of thing. But I figure it’s fashionable to take Donna to David Yurman or whatever to pick out her own ring- she’s an independent woman, knows what she wants yada yada- so it’s okay that its pearl and not diamond and she doesn’t have to wear it on her left hand if she doesn’t want to.
I have to ask her. Soon. Now, even. But how do I ask her? Do I have to get down on one knee? That seems lame, and trite.
Donna Lyman has a nice ring to it.
Donna Lyman at the White House...
The First Lady’s Chief of Staff Donna Lyman...
Josh and Donna Lyman welcomed their first child...
Before my head explodes, I reach for my cell.
“Hey Bob, it’s me. Listen, I want to run something by you... Do you think I have to do the whole one-knee thing?”
Toby heaves a heavy- no, leaden- sigh of exasperation. “You called me, in the middle of the night, on Christmas Eve, to ask me about your posture?”
“No,” I replie unfettered. “I called you because you’re the only one I know who isn’t doing anything on Christmas Eve-”
“You’ll note my shock that a Westport Presbyterian such as yourself knows even one Jew.”
“I was about to say,” I cut in, “who knows about this.”
“And by this, you mean you and Donna?”
“Yeah.”
“You think I’m the only one who knows about you and Donna?”
“The only one who doesn’t celebrate Christmas.”
Silence. Then- “BWHAHAHAHA.” A pause. “Are you serious? You think I’m the only-- who knows about you and-- Okay- Randy Finklestein [Dem pollster], Dan Tiberon [same], Mara Gelberg [Cong. aide], her old roommate Joy Madison [married a Lutheran]-”
“I know who these people are, Toby- what’s your point?”
“My point?! My point is that all these people have eyes and saw your tongue dragging all over the floor every time you looked at Donna. And my broader point is that they are all Jews, all free tonight, and thus available to take your call and discuss whether you need to get down on one knee. In fact, I think Mara and Joy would have quite constructive comments about it.”
“Donna and I were- I was nev- we were never-”
“You and Donna were the worst-kept secret in Washington politics.”
“There was no secret! Not until the very, very end of the Santos campaign.”
“Well, that’s why it was awful. The worst secret because there was no titilation, just tragedy.”
“We were tragic?”
“Who said were?”
“Why did I call you, you’re no help.”
“You read my mind.”
“You don’t have a wife, or a fiance. You can be absolutely no help to me at all. What do you know about women? Nada!”
“Zip. Zero. Zilch.”
“I should call CJ.”
“Go with that impulse.”
“Think she’s up now? It’s only 1am in California.”
“If she’s not up, she won’t answer the phone.”
“So why did you answer the phone?”
“I was up. I’m at Andi’s house. With Andi’s parents.”
“I thought Andi was basically living with someone.”
He clears his throat. “She is.”
“Wait, you’re there with Andi and Andi’s boyfriend, and Andi’s parents?!”
“And my children! You know, three feet tall, sticky hands, have weird names and oddly unisex haircuts?”
“You couldn’t just have come by tomorrow?”
“It’s my job to put the presents under the tree.”
“Why is it your job?”
“Because I didn’t want him to do it.”
“Aw, Toby... Sorry. I didn’t mean to-”
“You didn’t.”
“Okay.”
“Hey Josh-”
“Yeah?”
“Do the one knee thing. Donna’ll like it.”
“Yeah, she will. Thanks.”
“Mazel Tov.”
I click end on the call, then immediately dial a second number I know by heart.
CJ answers on the first ring. “Mi Amore!”
“Is this one 1-900-TallSex?”
“I’m 72 inches fully extended, babe.”
“I like ‘em big,” I grin.
“I hope you’re not using a White House phone.”
“Nah. We’re still in the breakdown lane”
“Ah, the OEOB. I used to threaten to send the press there, on days when execution seemed like to lenient a punishment. Josh Lyman... it’s 1am.”
“Not here. Here it’s 3am.”
“Here is... not DC,” she realizes, and I hear her bolt up in bed. “Are you in- are you in Wisconsin?”
“Did you just squeal?” I ask incredulously. Donna is likewise amazed at how one of the most powerful women in the world is completely pwned by the smallest trifle of JoshandDonnaLove.
“Are you at her house?” CJ squeals.
I am happy to inform her I am. “None other than the Moss family den.”
“NO!”
“Yes.”
“You came to meet her parents? That’s- that’s adorable!”
“Well, technically, I had already met her parents, but yeah, I am pretty adorable, aren’t I?”
“Are you engaged?”
“CJ....” I whine. “I called you! Can you at least let me tell you the news?”
“You are!”
“We’re not,” I say sadly. “Thanks, Buzzkill.”
“Why the hell aren’t you?” she demands, and then answers, “Because you suck. You have a beautiful woman, who adores you, and you can’t commit. You can’t say to her, You’re beautiful and I adore you, now marry me or I’ll... I’ll throw myself off a bridge!”
“Hang on, Claudia, I just found a pen. Repeat that last part one more time- off a what?”
“If you don’t ask Donna to marry you, you won’t need to plan your death because I will have already taken care of it for you.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I admit quietly. “I don’t know how to tell her.”
Her voice softens, even though her response is tough. “You don’t do the telling in this one, mi amore, you just ask the question.”
“Yeah,” I reply defeatedly. She doesn’t get it either.
“Don’t fuck it up, Josh. And if you run your mouth, you will, so just ask her and be done with it.” Maybe she does get it...
“I miss her,” I blurt out.
“Where is she?” CJ asks alarmed.
I can pratically hear her melt as I say, “Upstairs.”
“Awwww... can you sneak up? Maybe call her to come down?”
“Maybe I should just let her sleep and act, you know, four about the whole business.”
“You know, Josh Lyman, I meant what I said before. You really can be very sweet. I mean, it wouldn’t be enough to make up for your colossal ego and inexcusable diet, but I can see why Donna fell hard.”
“You can live vicariously. Even on the honeymoon.”
“Slow down there compadre, you have even asked yet.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I can put you on the record on this?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. Okay. Done. On the record. Kiss Donna for me.”
“CJ, I can say without hesitation, I will have absolutely no problem doing that.”
“Doing what?” I look up to find Donna in a pink t-shirt and striped boxers in the doorway, twinkling Christmas lights circumscribing her like an angel.
Gulp. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 28th, 2006|12:35 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Chapter XI: Questions Stirring
December 25 | 2:35 AM CT
The big hand makes another hop upward to the 7. I stare, wide-awake, at the ceiling. I know I was tired when I trudged upstairs an hour ago...
I had wanted to have cider and sit by the fire and watch the snow fall outside on the lamp-lit street. But by the time we pulled into the driveway after church, I was exhausted and Josh was more than exhausted because he had actually worked a full day before he flew out to Wisconsin to spend Christmas Eve with me and mine. My parents barely blinked before they headed upstairs to bed. I walked Josh to the den, where I helped him unfold the pull-out couch, and we kissed (a lot); then he walked me to the stairs, where we kissed a lot again, but then he heard a noise and scurried off, alone, lest my makers catch him with his hands on the wrong side of my cashmere Christmas sweater.
But now it’s almost 3am and Josh is below me, probably passed out. I wish he could sleep more than four hours a night. As it is now, he stumbles in around 1am on work nights, and is barely able to make it to the bathroom to brush his teeth before he collapses opposite me on the bed. Sometimes he’ll zonk for twenty minutes and then he’ll wake me up so we can R&R in other ways. Like the night before I left to come to Wisconsin...
“Josh....” Groan. In my dream, I was on a yacht, swaying gently in tune with the hum of the earth. Now I realize it’s Josh, tugging at the comforter. “Quit it!”
Yank! “Donna, you have all the covers!”
“Don’t whine.”
“I’m not,” he rebuffs. “But Donnnnnnnaaaaaaa.... you can’t *usurp* all the bedclothes!”
“I usurped them?” I question, pulling the comforter tighter around me, away from Josh.
“Yes. You have unjustly taken what was rightfully mine.” He’s now half-seated in bed, and boring into my back. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Oh please, don’t act like you’re some kind of lawyer or something...”
“DONNA! What have I told you about the jurist jokes?”
“I’m not a lawyer, I just play one at the OEOB.” I can’t help but giggle because I know the indignance on his face. Josh is not what you would call transparent. “You with your little ‘Men in Black’ glasses, trash talking about code six-four-one-whatever, trying to scare people who have no idea you’ve never even set foot in a courtroom!”
“Do I need to pull out the transcripts? Again, Donna?”
“You were...number two...hundred in your class?”
“Two, Donna! Number two! Beat out by Callum Wallace, who-”
“Who I’m sure has the jurisprudence to see that I’m sleeping here!” I open one eye. “Your powers of deductive reasoning leave much to be desired.”
“I had this assistant once, little blonde one, she was overcome by my powers. She used to love to remind me how powerful I was.”
“She probably just wanted a raise.”
“So many ways to respond to that- but alas, I am a gentleman.”
I have to turn around to face him, in order for him to fully see my narrow-eyed displeasure. He’s wearing the irresistible canary smile. “You sleep naked.”
“Is that a direct order, ma’am?”
“You sleep naked because you claim you’re always hot.”
“Well, yes...” he says, furrowing his brow. “I am hot and shouldn’t that be shared with rest of the world? Or at least with the rest of the bedroom?”
“When I say, ‘Josh, it’s the dead of winter. Let’s turn up the heat.’ And you say,” - and here I mimic the Josh whine which is so spot-on I should patent it - “Donnnnnaaaa! How are you cold?! We have forty dead geese in this comforter and a thermal blanket and a sheet. I can’t sleep when we turn up the heat! It’s too hot!”
He lets loose a howl of protest about midway through my little mockery. “Hey, come on- all you have to do is lie there, while I do all the work.”
Now it’s my turn. “Oh, Josh!”
“No really- no wonder you want it to be ninety degrees, it’s like a day at the beach for you! Meanwhile, I’m doing two hours with my personal trainer here, yelling at me to pick up the pace-”
I end his extended metaphor with a Standard European whack over the head. “You’re a bastard!” I laugh.
“Yeah, and you date me, so what does that make you?”
“I don’t want to know.” I pull myself up and make a pathetic reach for the water bottle on the opposite end table. Josh, always a gentlemanly bastard, quickly retrieves it for me. I take a drink. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. So...” He has that salacious look on his face. “You’re awake.”
Grin. “It would appear so.”
He grins back. “My powers of deduction.”
I slink one knee over his legs, and pull myself onto him, winding my arms around his neck. “And persuasion, apparently,” I mutter as I kiss him.
We break for a breath and he throws a look downward at his lap. “Yours are uh, effective as always. Apparently.”
So, all was fine, except this was the time I smacked the headboard and it really hurt, but I couldn’t concentrate on the pain, because at that point there was a loud crash from the old people’s apartment upstairs and the sound of pissed-off footfalls battering the ceiling. We woke them up. Again.
“Be quiet! Be quiet!” Josh whispers furiously. We lie frozen and listen. A few successive “Goddamnits” reverberate through the vent and we have our hands clasped over our mouths, practically choking to hold in our laughter.
“Someone needs to tell Mr. Roper to chill,” Josh mutters, annoyed, and I can feel why.
“He hates us.”
Josh raises one eyebrow quizzically. “Well, he definitely hates me. But he always checks you out at the mailbox-”
“He does not! He just wants to put faces with the Apartment of Sin downstairs.” Josh scoffs in disbelief. “Josh, he’s like a hundred. And married.”
“Eh, old or not, he wouldn’t mind sending you a package.” I swat his bicep. “Hey, that’s not a bad idea- if he complains, we can just send you up there as an ambassador.”
“You know, when you said you know women, you weren’t kidding. What woman wouldn’t want her man to sell her out to the dirty old guy upstairs?”
“For the team, Donna. For the greater good.”
“Team Moss-Lyman.”
He makes a face. “That doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily. Let’s just call it Team Lyman.”
“It’s a misnomer.” I wonder, is it me or did somehow the conversation turn on a dime from jocular to- quite possibly- our first discussion about...marriage?
His face is serious, and earnest, and hopeful and vulnerable- and yet, still confident and ruddy and beloved, all at once. “So change your name, and then it won’t be.”
Did he just ask me if I would-
CRASH!
Loud clomping on the copper tiles above us. Muffled expletives. We can hear partial strains of them coming through our vent.
“GODDAMNIT!” Josh booms up to the heavens; he has to put his hand over my mouth to stop me from erupting.
Silence. Then, a sheepish shuffle across the floor upstairs. A squeak as our nemesis slinks back into bed.
We completely crack up, quickly resume and finish our business, and fall asleep with just about an hour until the alarm goes off. In the shower, on the road, at my desk, on the plane to Wisconsin, and here at my parents’ house, I wonder whether I am technically engaged (or rather, spiritually or ‘for all intents and purposes’, as the technical part is probably the ring thing).
Now, I’m in my old bedroom, well past 3am four days later, Christmas Day, and I’m wondering the same thing. What did he mean at the church today? "We should talk about getting married." Is that the same as, We should get married? Or, I want to marry you? Or how about, Will you marry me? I hear the angel in my ear saying, Duh Donna, do you think he wants to talk about *not* getting married? But then that pesky devil says, Hell girl, if he were really in love he would have been one-knee down in a pile of slush with a diamond so bright Three Wise Men and a flock of sheep would be behind it.
It's not that I spend my days dreaming about bridal gowns and making lists of potential songs to first-dance to. I don't. I really don't, and never did, even when I was younger, no matter what Josh used to think. I have just always wanted to be in love- real love- and now I am. And I'm happy. And I'm enjoying each day as it comes, and not really thinking about the future.... but if Josh is thinking about the future, of course, I would prefer it be inevitable forever than imminent forget-about-it.
Not that Josh isn’t the sort who would feel out my answer before he asked... Who am I kidding? I have no idea what to think, what's in store for me and Josh. I know I love him. And he loves me. He'll ask me- someday. I just hope that this time, it doesn’t take nine years. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 31st, 2006|01:02 am] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
X: Look Homeward
Rating: PG
December 25 | 1:45 AM CT
Hour: 8
It turns out that after a church service ends, people don’t actually leave. At least, not in Wisconsin. There’s a whole assembly-line meet-and-greet I have to go through before we’re allowed to exit. Of course, as Donna and I start to walk down the salted coat of ice that is the church walkway, I’m consumed with nutty over how to do the thing I just decided in the pew to do.
We're walking down the path back to the car and I'm feeling a little dizzy and disoriented, because I've slept about four hours in the past two- now, three- days and probably also because I think I've just decided to marry Donna and make babies with her and that comes with a motherload of fears and questions and how-in-the-hell-will-this-work isms.
I glance over and notice that she's not worried in the least. She's just meandering along, peeking at all the candles in paper bags that line the walkway, looking quite statuesque in black heels and an elegant black coat. I almost can't believe she's the same girl who threw her arms around me and cried over a handwritten page in a Heimlich Beckengruber book. I suspect it will take slightly more to win her over this time.
I steal a look at her profile- Ms. Moss, my former much-abused assistant who now shares the same job title and makes just as much as me. Sure, back in the day, she used to date the gomers and I could call them such because I was more powerful and more important than they were. But now? Now, Donna's dates would call me- maybe not a gomer, but an aging, balding, twitching, tweaking, tied-to-his-desk, one-track-minded workaholic. She could hook up with the creme de la creme- maybe a Senator's son, or some liberal philanthropist. A curator at the Smithsonian. A diplomat from Monaco or hell, a prince even- she looks a lot like Grace Kelly, doesn’t she?
And then Grace Kelly marries Moe. Or not. No- I will not be Moe. I know women and I've known this woman for nine years. And I've dazzled her before... remember the snowballs at the window? And in a tuxedo and a white scarf no less!
Crap. All I've got this time are the dress slacks I've been wearing for the past 36 hours that I’m pretty sure could stand up on their own by now.
"Hey..." She touches my elbow and looks at me curiously. "What's up?"
Play it cool, Lyman. "Nothing," I shrug, forcing a small smile which she is in no way buying.
"Nothing?"
"Yeah, why?"
She stops and peers critically at me. "You look distressed."
"I do?"
"Your face is all screwed up and wrinkled-"
"Gee, thanks."
"Your forehead," she corrects with a laugh. "It's Christmas. And for you, at the very least, it's your big night off." She surveys her parents and the babies and the grannies negotiating the ice in the church parking lot. "Okay, so big was an overstatement,” she concedes. Off in the distance, her parents are talking to a family in the adjacent spot. Her mother kibitzes, and her dad is pointing upwards, as three little kids in hats and mittens gaze rapt up at the sky, searching for Santa and his trusty reindeer stead.
Donna sees it too, and murmurs, “Aw, cute.” I wonder if she notices that she takes a half-step nearer to me when she says that, so that she’s now not standing next to me, but is kind of smooshed into my shoulder. I put my arm around her and pull her even closer. “I wonder if he takes requests.”
“Who?”
“Well Santa, but I’m okay if your dad stands in as present-purchaser,” I tell her. “As long as he remembers to take the price stickers off the stuff.” A young Donna once found a price sticker on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” cassette tape and made the fateful deduction that Santa probably wasn’t taking part in the last-minute holiday scramble at the Madison KMart.
“I think he might be a little mad you tried to draft him in 2006.”
“Ah, yes- the infamous ‘Santas for President’ buttons.”
“Actually, I think Santa might just stick a ‘Santos for President’ bumper sticker on your stocking and call it a wash.”
“Yeah, I suppose in terms of getting what you ask for, I’m covered for this year and at least a couple birthdays.”
“Famous last words,” she needles.
“Tell me about it,” I mutter. “I can see the card now- ‘Dear Josh, Enjoy your 140 hour work week for the next four years of your life. Merry Christmas! Love, Santa.’ I should have read the fine print, huh?”
“It’s what you always wanted,” she tells me in a way that indicates she’s not entirely sure that’s true.
“It is,” I confirm resolutely. “It absolutely is.”
“It was always your dream to sit in the CoS chair. Wasn’t that your excuse for not getting more dates in college- you had to study so you could do this?”
“I had plenty of dates,” I counter defensively.
“That’s not what you told me-”
“Women love me! And when the hell did I ever tell you I didn’t have a lot of dates?”
“Okay, I suppose it was actually your mother who said that,” Donna amends.
Post-It Note to Self: Remember to call and have a word (or a few choice words) with my mother. “Good to know you can count on your mom to have your back. But you know,” I surmise thoughtfully, “she probably just told you that so you wouldn’t feel-” I stop short, realizing too late that this maybe isn’t the best tack to take with the woman I’m hoping to propose to.
She raises a pointed eyebrow at me. “So I wouldn’t feel what?” she asks suspiciously.
“Eh...” I deflect. “Nothing.” She pinches me- hard.
“Joshua...”
“I’m just saying that she- my mom, mind you- may have thought that you might, as women are want to do, feel a jealous and even a little inadequate-”
“Inadequate?!”
“- if you knew the full extent of my extensive romantic experiences. All I’m saying, is that she was probably just trying to be sensitive to you and your new role in my life.”
“Uh-huh,” Donna nods in a one-hundred percent patronizingly way. “Except that she told me this, like, six years ago.”
“Oh... well she probably knew you had it bad for me and just wanted to let you down easy.”
“Oh, I’m absolutely sure that’s what she intended to do. Who knows what I would have done, outside your office, consumed with unbearable heartlust for you.”
“I don’t how you stood it,” I grin.
“Oh, I bet you have an idea,” she says pointedly. “Don’t you have an idea of what it’s like to be consumed with unbearable-”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“- since you are...” she prompts me.
I take the bait- because it’s Donna and I always do, but it’s also the mood- the cold, completely still air, the little kids looking up at the sky, her mother who keeps looking over at us, her smile so bright from across the parking lot, people in China could probably use it for reading light. “Since I am consumed with unbearable heartlust for you.” In a spurt of I-don’t-know-what, I blurt out, “And since I am- maybe when we get back to Washington, we should talk about maybe, you know, um, getting married.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Yeah,” she responds in this deadpan, noncommittal way. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?!” I exclaim (mean Donna makes my ego smart). “What do you mean, maybe? Are you waiting for a better offer?”
“I don’t know,” she says, all bambiesque. “Do you think I could get one?”
“I’m Chief of Staff to the President-”
“Almost President.”
“I attended both Harvard and Yale-”
“And yet, I had three times as many majors as you.”
“I was a Fulbright Scholar, and Law Review editor-”
“But you’re not a real lawyer.”
“I *am* the law!”
“-which the founding fathers would probably dispute.”
“I have my own fan club!”
“Actually, if you remember, they don’t like you so much.”
“Did I not just take you to Hawaii-”
“Yeah, about seven years after I asked you to, and you only did it because I threatened to quit sleeping with you.”
“Well, the last time I checked Gilda, you didn’t have any complaints.”
She turns to me and grins. “I do have complaints.”
“Like what?” I demand to know, narrowing my eyes at her.
She takes a step closer to me and kisses me softly on the mouth. “I don’t get to do it enough.”
“I’m hoping to remedy that,” I tell her. “You have a problem, I have a solution. You know- like it’s always been,” I tease.
“Josh Lyman- husband in chief? Chief domestic operative?”
“Can’t do better than that, baby.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.” She’s genuinely skeptical, and while not mad at me, it makes me feel bad anyway. Why doesn’t she think I’m serious?
“It took you nine years for you to kiss me, five weeks of no-strings-attached sex to get you to sit down and have a real conversation with me, and then another four weeks of me crashing at your place for you to say, hey, I think you should move your stuff in.”
“Yeah, and now we live together and I’m here in God-knows-where sleeping in the den of your parents’ house on some holiday I don’t even celebrate, so what’s your point?”
“Don’t be defensive," she chides me. "I’m happy you’re here and I absolutely appreciate it. And I’m happy with our lives now. I’m just saying, you don’t have to say things to me just because you think its what I want to hear.”
“That’s not why I said it.”
“Okay. So next week, when we’re both back in DC, we’ll talk about it,” she decides. “We’ll have dinner at that really great French restaurant in Georgetown- what’s it called?”
“Celleveleure. You can remember it by thinking that it sounds like ‘voiture’- which is ‘car’ in French- and you have to sell your car to afford a meal there.”
“You took me there once,” she reminds me. “After Roslyn, after that Christmas, remember? You were on the medication, and didn’t want to go out, so we stayed in and watched Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve at your apartment and then you took me out for dinner the next day as a thank-you.”
“I remember. Of course I remember.”
“You drove us home, though, so obviously the pricing situation wasn’t too bad,” she smiles.
“Nah, I just mortgaged the house again.”
“Well, this will be my treat. And we can talk, or not talk.” She smiles a little smaller now. “About whatever you want.”
I nod. We can see now the pack of children piling into their car, and her parents getting into theirs. The conversation stops and we walk over to them, but without holding hands. Just two alone, side by side. She has a point and I suppose I could have tried to talk her out of it. But actions speak louder than words ever could, and it’s time to put the ring where my mouth is. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 22nd, 2006|03:54 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Chapter IX: Signs of the Time
December 25 | 12:30 AM CST
Hour: 6
The church has a steeple and a red door. It’s a First Church of Christ (if I ever found a “second” church in any town, I would take a picture) and full of the sort of people we in DC pander to, but never actually ever meet. Nuclear families with babies and grandparents pile out of station wagons and pickup trucks in their finest Sears suits. They talk about how the turkey turned out and where they’re having dinner tomorrow night. The kids are ablaze with pre-present anticipation. The women give each other gift baskets full of jams and gingerbread.
It strikes me that Donna does not seem the least bit out of place in this world. It’s both unexpected and intriguing to me, and I just want to hang back and watch.
In the pew, she points out the various people in Part One of the Life and Times of Donnatella Moss.
“That was my Sunday School teacher.”
“Is Sunday School like Hebrew school?”
“Not at all,” she whispers back. “You color mottos like “Jesus Loves Me” while you’re instructed on all the possible ways to wind up in Hell and you don't come out bilingual.”
“Ironic,” I remark. “I’m sorry I missed that.”
“I’m not,” she retorts. “You would have been the little shit who argued with the teacher on every fallacy. And it’s the Bible, so there’s a lot, and we would have been there all day.”
“Donna!”
“What?”
“You can’t swear!”
“Why not?”
“Because- it’s church!”
“So?”
“So I never went to Sunday School, but I’m pretty sure that’s on the list.”
“What list?”
“The How to Wind up in Hell list.”
“Josh.” She looks at me. “If I wind up in Hell, I’m blaming you. And Freddy.” She smiles slyly and sits back, obviously quite pleased with herself over the reaction that little “slip” garnered.
I lean into the nape of her neck. “Only in his dreams did Freddy have moves that would get you into hell.”
She turns to make some smart retort at which point I shush her loudly. “Stop talking.” I see her grin ear-to-ear in the periphery. I’m grinning inside too, but thinking that it’s okay if *I’m* thinking dirty thoughts about our bedroom antics because hey, if it is Jesus up there watching and being offended, it’s pretty much a sure bet I’m already on the list.
So we sit. I should be listening, I guess, to what the guy up there on the altar is saying, but you know, everyone’s seen this episode. And that’s pretty sad because I think I’ve only ever seen two episodes- the Christmas one and the funeral one, and this is definitely a rerun.
What I am watching are the people listening to this Reverend Somebody-or-other. The parents with little babies and kids crawling on their laps. Three rows up, a curly haired tot in yellow footie pajamas is pulling on the necklace of a woman with a tight blond bun. It reminds me of that famous picture of Jackie O. back when she was Jackie K- you know the one, with John-John tugging on her pearls? So I guess then there are no reruns, or maybe there are, but everything old is new again.
Would you believe it- I’ve only been in Wisconsin for 5 hours and I’m already tossing out the tropes like a neophyte of the But for the Grace of God Society. Oy vey.
I really can’t imagine someone calling Donna “Mom.” Or six someones. Or me telling a little someone, with affected sternness, “Mom says don’t...” Although I used to say “Donna says...” about fifteen thousand times a day when she worked for me, and usually in the shrill, throaty whine of a child, so maybe it’s not so much of a stretch. I can’t imagine her buying and mailing a grown man loafers, unless that man is me. But if she did that for our son, and he didn’t call her back, I’d kick his ass.
Can I imagine little starry-eyed kids on a sugar rush, shaking their presents and running around our house? Or a boy coming up to ask me if he will never see his sister again?
At what point did I start thinking about these things?
A blue-eyed baby with Donna’s pearls in its mouth, my arm protectively draped Dad-like around the back of her. My family. The future was always a blurry unknown for me- when did these people start to take shape?
Most people would say I’m past the time when I should have been thinking about it; indeed, some 44-year-old men have kids going off to college. Some don’t, that’s true. But most have given it some consideration. If I were being honest, I’ve been actively not considering it.
No, the really, truly, only-in-my-head honest answer is this: I was absolutely sure I did not want to have children. Not because I wouldn’t have liked them- I’m sure I would have. But I would rather not have them at all, than to lose one like my parents lost Joanie. I know Shakespeare, better to love and whatnot, but that’s different. That’s heartbreak, which yes, is a palpable and considerable pain. But losing a child is a whole other pain entirely, one I was absolutely convinced I couldn’t survive.
Until now.
I want a baby. Maybe more than one. Probably not six, but I’m not wholly adverse. I want to meet JoshandDonna in the flesh. And Donna wants kids, and I want Donna, so there’s that. But more than any of that, I know that if I have Donna, I can take whatever comes our way. I’m not afraid all the time anymore. I don’t feel like the other shoe is always about to drop. She’s provided me with a weird sort of absolution- like she’s made me realize the world isn’t turning on my axis (I think she may even have said that, in those terms, one exasperated day).
That sounds harsh, but for me, it was cathartic. The house didn’t burn down because of me, Joanie wasn’t trapped because I ran out, her blood and my Dad’s didn’t clot because I wasn’t there to stop it, Leo didn’t die because I wanted him on the ticket. “What would you have done to stop it? Seriously, Josh- the world doesn’t turn on your axis, it actually moves all on its own without so much as a care for you and what you’re doing.”
She can be blunt, and her bluntness probably saved my life.
So yeah, I’ve been giving it some consideration, but I come to the definitive decision right here in this pew: it’s time.
Reverend Such-and-Such is in front of me now, impressing the most well-known story in the Bible on me and the brethren of the sixth row. “And the angel of the Lord appeared to them and they were so afraid. And the angel said, ‘Fear not! For I bring you tidings of great joy...”
He pauses here, dramatically, as if the congregation is really hanging in suspense about what comes next. Completely in tune, Donna turns to me and jokes, “I bet you’re wondering what happens. I’ve already heard this one, but it’s good.”
The reverend rears up and shouts, “And the angel said, let this be a sign unto you!”
The little voice in my ear whispers louder, “It’s time.”
Hold up- this is out of bounds. The otherworldly are not allowed to speak to me in these environs. It’s heretical. Doubly heretical, since I’m actually only here as a courtesy and will probably be rewarded with truly mind-blowing sex for it, and don’t think I didn’t think about that when I agreed to come.
“Why Donna?”
It’s the peppermint ice cream and Moo Shoo on the floor day a few weeks ago. My chopsticks pause mid-air. “Excuse me?”
“That’s what Amy wants to know,” Donna informs me calmly, as she fishes a snow pea out of her carton.
I can’t quite tell if this is a “talk” yet, so I decide to scarf down this bite in case it's the last one for awhile. “Amy doesn’t care what I do,” I rebuff, mouth full. “Amy’s primary interest is Amy.”
“No, she cares,” Donna responds. “That’s why she she makes those subtle, snarky comments like she did after Leo’s funeral. It’s her way of dancing around the issue. She’s waiting for you to tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“Why you want to date me.”
“You’re good in bed,” I retort breezily. “Can you pass the rice?”
“Fine, be that way,” she huffs, reaching for the carton of fried rice. “But you're the one who has to be her boss and that question will always be between you until you answer it.”
“I seriously don’t understand what it is with women,” I remark, as I shovel a few more spoonfuls onto my plate. “We dated, it didn’t work, we broke up. You and I are together now, it’s working, and Amy’s with the lumberjack. People move on. Simple.”
But Donna is shaking her head like I’m the dumbest person on earth, so clearly it’s not so simple. “What? Where’s the question there, I ask you?”
“Josh- it’s not like you broke up with Amy and then met me in a bar.”
Okay....and?
“We’ve always been- we’re just- how could someone-” She stutters, at first like she’s nervous and then I realize she’s struggling not to cry. “What the hell do I know, forget it!”
For the life of me, I’m not sure how it dawned on me, but it did, thank God.
She starts to stand up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, running one hand hurriedly across the cheek opposite me.
“Hey... don’t go.”
“I’m just going to the-”
“Don’t go.” I pull her down next to me on the floor, so her back is flush against my chest, and wrap my arms around her. She’s stiff and standoffish at first, but after a minute, relaxes into my embrace and lets me hold her. “I’m with Donna because she makes me happy in a way I never thought I would be.” I kiss the side of her face. “That’s what I’d tell Amy and anyone else who wants to know.”
When I say that, she turns and cuddles up to me. The Amy stuff threw me, but I’m not a complete dufus. This is about her and me- and specifically, all the stuff I was supposed to respond to in the four week window. We went on vacation and we didn’t have it out. We’ve been back three weeks, her crashing at my place, and we haven’t had the talk and she’s worried that soon it’ll be eight years and she’ll still be schlepping over here with an overnight bag. “I don’t want to you to go. And not just to the bathroom,” I tease, as I brush back some of her hair. “I don’t want you to go, period.”
She looks up, so hopelessly innocent that it makes my heart ache... to know that she will be made or broken on what I say next and that she trusts me so much that she’s not ashamed to show me her vulnerability. “I would really like it if you lived here. With me. We don’t have to stay here. We can find a new place. But I don’t want you to go.”
“Josh...” Her face is lit with love. “Are you sure?”
“You told me in Hawaii that you love me. That first night, when we were making love, you said you loved me so much.”
“Yes,” she says, looking a little embarrassed.
“I didn’t respond,” I continue.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“And you never said it again, for the rest of the trip or since we came back.”
Now she looks pained. “I didn’t want you to feel- I didn’t want you to think I wanted to trap you,” she tries to explain. “It was just a vacation.”
“Donna, it was so much more than a vacation.” I take one of her hands in mine on my lap. “You took me by surprise, when you said it. And I was ready to say it back, but I didn’t want to... belittle it. When you said it- it was very in the moment, it seemed like the words just pushed themselves out of you.”
“That’s how it felt,” she laughs. “I didn’t plan it, but I couldn’t hold back. I wanted you to know.”
“And I want you to know- I love you.”
That's what I'm thinking about when the curly kid with the footie pjs suddenly breaks into a toothless grin. Grinning and staring at me, staring at Donna in profile next to me.
It’s time. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 22nd, 2006|03:45 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Chapter IX: Signs of the Time
December 25 | 12:30 AM CST
Hour: 6
The church has a steeple and a red door. It’s a First Church of Christ (if I ever found a “second” church in any town, I would take a picture) and full of the sort of people we in DC pander to, but never actually ever meet. Nuclear families with babies and grandparents pile out of station wagons and pickup trucks in their finest Sears suits. They talk about how the turkey turned out and where they’re having dinner tomorrow night. The kids are ablaze with pre-present anticipation. The women give each other gift baskets full of jams and gingerbread.
It strikes me that Donna does not seem the least bit out of place in this world. It’s both unexpected and intriguing to me, and I just want to hang back and watch.
In the pew, she points out the various people in Part One of the Life and Times of Donnatella Moss.
“That was my Sunday School teacher.”
“Is Sunday School like Hebrew school?”
“Not at all,” she whispers back. “You color mottos like “Jesus Loves Me” while you’re instructed on all the possible ways to wind up in Hell and you don't come out bilingual.”
“Ironic,” I remark. “I’m sorry I missed that.”
“I’m not,” she retorts. “You would have been the little shit who argued with the teacher on every fallacy. And it’s the Bible, so there’s a lot, and we would have been there all day.”
“Donna!”
“What?”
“You can’t swear!”
“Why not?”
“Because- it’s church!”
“So?”
“So I never went to Sunday School, but I’m pretty sure that’s on the list.”
“What list?”
“The How to Wind up in Hell list.”
“Josh.” She looks at me. “If I wind up in Hell, I’m blaming you. And Freddy.” She smiles slyly and sits back, obviously quite pleased with herself over the reaction that little “slip” garnered.
I lean into the nape of her neck. “Only in his dreams did Freddy have moves that would get you into hell.”
She turns to make some smart retort at which point I shush her loudly. “Stop talking.” I see her grin ear-to-ear in the periphery. I’m grinning inside too, but thinking that it’s okay if *I’m* thinking dirty thoughts about our bedroom antics because hey, if it is Jesus up there watching and being offended, it’s pretty much a sure bet I’m already on the list.
So we sit. I should be listening, I guess, to what the guy up there on the alter is saying, but you know, everyone’s seen this episode. And that’s pretty sad because I think I’ve only ever seen two episodes- the Christmas one and the funeral one, and this is definitely a rerun.
What I am watching are the people listening to this Reverend Somebody-or-other. The parents with little babies and kids crawling on their laps. Three rows up, a curly haired tot in yellow footie pajamas is pulling on the necklace of a woman with a tight blond bun. It reminds me of that famous picture of Jackie O. back when she was Jackie K- you know the one, with John-John tugging on her pearls? So I guess then there are no reruns, or maybe there are, but everything old is new again.
Would you believe it- I’ve only been in Wisconsin for 5 hours and I’m already troping like a neophyte of the But for the Grace of God Society. Oy vey.
I really can’t imagine someone calling Donna “Mom.” Or six someones. Or me telling a little someone, with affected sternness, “Mom says don’t...” Although I used to say “Donna says...” about fifteen thousand times a day when she worked for me, and usually in the shrill, throaty whine of a child, so maybe it’s not so much of a stretch. I can’t imagine her buying and mailing a grown man loafers, unless that man is me. But if she did that for our son, and he didn’t call her back, I’d kick his ass.
Can I imagine little starry-eyed kids on a sugar rush, shaking their presents and running around our house? Or a boy coming up to ask me if he will never see his sister again? At what point do you start to think about these things?
More specifically: when did I start thinking about these things- a blue-eyed baby with Donna’s pearls in its mouth, my arm protectively draped Dad-like around the back of her. My family. The future was always a blurry unknown- when did these people start to take shape?
Most people would say I’m past the time when I should have been thinking about it; indeed, some 44-year-old men have kids going off to college. Some don’t, that’s true. But most have given it some consideration. If I were being honest, I’ve been actively not considering it.
No, the really, truly, only-in-my-head honest answer is this: I was absolutely sure I did not want to have children. Not because I wouldn’t have liked them- I’m sure I would have. But I would rather not have them at all, than to lose one like my parents lost Joanie. I know Shakespeare, yada yada, but that’s different. That’s heartbreak, which yes, is a palpable and considerable pain. But losing a child is a whole other pain entirely, one I was absolutely convinced I couldn’t survive.
Until now.
I want a baby. Maybe more than one. Probably not six, but I’m not wholly adverse. I want to meet JoshandDonna in the flesh. And Donna wants kids, and I want Donna, so there’s that. But more than any of that, I know that if I have Donna, I can take whatever comes our way. I’m not afraid all the time anymore. I don’t feel like the other shoe is always about to drop. She’s provided me with a weird sort of absolution- like she’s made me realize the world isn’t turning on my axis (I think she may even have said that, in those terms, one exasperated day).
That sounds harsh, but for me, it was cathartic. The house didn’t burn down because of me, Joanie wasn’t trapped because I ran out, her blood and my Dad’s didn’t clot because I wasn’t there to stop it, Leo didn’t die because I wanted him on the ticket. “What would you have done to stop it? Seriously, Josh- the world doesn’t turn on your axis, it actually moves all on its own without so much as a care for you and what you’re doing.”
She can be blunt, and her bluntness probably saved my life.
So yeah, I’ve been giving it some consideration, but I came to the definitive decision right here in that pew: it’s time.
Reverend Such-and-Such is in front of me now, impressing the most well-known story in the Bible on me and the brethren of the sixth pew on the west side. “And the angel of the Lord appeared to them and they were so afraid. And the angel said, ‘Fear not! For I bring you tidings of great joy...”
He pauses here, dramatically, as if the congregation is really hanging in suspense about what comes next. Completely in tune, Donna turns to me and jokes, “I bet you’re wondering what comes next. I’ve already heard this one, but it’s good.”
“And the angel said, let this be a sign unto you...”
The little voice in my ear whispers louder, “It’s time.”
Hold up- this is out of bounds. The otherworldly are not allowed to speak to me in these environs. It’s heretical. Doubly heretical, since I’m actually only here as a courtesy and will probably be rewarded with truly mind-blowing sex for it, and don’t think I didn’t think about that when I agreed to come.
“Why Donna?”
It’s the peppermint ice cream and Moo Shoo on the floor day a few weeks ago. My chopsticks pause mid-air. “Excuse me?”
“That’s what Amy wants to know,” Donna informs me calmly, as she fishes a snow pea out of her carton.
I can’t quite tell if this is a “talk” yet, so I decide to scarf down this bite in case its the last one for awhile. “Amy doesn’t care what I do,” I rebuff, mouth full. “Amy’s primary interest is Amy.”
“No, she cares,” Donna responds. “That’s why she she makes those subtle, snarky comments like she did after Leo’s funeral. It’s her way of dancing around the issue. She’s waiting for you to tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“Why you want to date me.”
“You’re good in bed,” I retort breezily. “Can you pass the rice?”
“Fine, be that way,” she huffs, reaching for the carton of fried rice. “But your the one who has to be her boss and that question will always be between you until you answer it.”
“I seriously don’t understand what it is with women,” I remark, as I shovel a few more spoonfuls onto my plate. “We dated, it didn’t work, we broke up. You and I are together now, it’s working, and Amy’s with the lumberjack. People move on. Simple.”
But Donna is shaking her head like I’m the dumbest person on earth, so clearly it’s not so simple. “What? Where’s the question there, I ask you?”
“Josh- it’s not like you broke up with Amy and then met me in a bar.”
Okay....and?
“We’ve always been- we’re just- how could someone-” She stutters, at first like she’s nervous and then I realize she’s struggling not to cry. “What the hell do I know, forget it!”
For the life of me, I’m not sure how this came to dawn on me, but it did, and thank God.
She starts to stand up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, running one hand hurriedly across the cheek opposite me.
“Hey... don’t go.”
“I’m just going to the-”
“Don’t go.” I pull her down next to me on the floor, so her back is flush against my chest, and wrap my arms around her. She’s stiff and standoffish at first, but after a minute, relaxes into my embrace and lets me hold her. “I’m with Donna because she makes me happy in a way I never thought I would be.” I kiss the side of her face. “That’s what I’d tell Amy and anyone else who wants to know.”
When I say that, she turns and cuddles up to me. The Amy stuff threw me, but I’m not a complete dufus. This is about her and me- and specifically, all the stuff I was supposed to respond to in the four week window. We went on vacation and we didn’t have it out. We’ve been back three weeks, her crashing at my place, and we haven’t had the talk and she’s worried that soon it’ll be eight years and she’ll still be schlepping over here with an overnight bag. “I don’t want to you to go. And not just to the bathroom,” I tease, as I brush back some of her hair. “I don’t want you to go, period.”
She looks up, so hopelessly innocent that it makes my heart ache... to know that she will be made or broken on what I say next and that she trusts me so much that she’s not ashamed to show me her vulnerability. “I would really like it if you lived here. With me. We don’t have to stay here. We can find a new place. But I don’t want you to go.”
“Josh...” Her face is lit with love. “Are you sure?”
“You told me in Hawaii that you love me. That first night, when we were making love, you said you loved me so much.”
“Yes,” she says, looking a little embarrassed.
“I didn’t respond,” I continue.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“And you never said it again, for the rest of the trip or since we came back.”
Now she looks pained. “I didn’t want you to feel- I didn’t want you to think I wanted to trap you,” she tries to explain. “It was just a vacation.”
“Donna, it was so much more than a vacation.” I take one of her hands in mine on my lap. “You took me by surprise, when you said it. And I was ready to say it back, but I didn’t want to... belittle it. When you said it- it was very in the moment, it seemed like the words just pushed themselves out of you.”
“That’s how it felt,” she laughs. “I didn’t plan it, but I couldn’t hold back. I wanted you to know.”
“And I want you to know- I love you.”
The curly kid with the footie pjs suddenly breaks into a toothless grin. Grinning and staring at me, staring at Donna in profile next to me.
It’s time. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|08:41 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
VIII: Unshakeables
December 24 | 11:45 PM CT
Hour: 4.5
I need to stop freaking out. It’s just the dishes.
That’s what I try to tell myself as her mom dons a pair of those yellow rubber gloves you see in commercials for Pine Sol and starts to wash. I pick up a towel, poised to dry. It’s the just the dishes, Josh.
But it’s not. It’s her mom and me, alone- both acutely aware of the last and only other time we were alone, in Germany, when she almost lost her only child and I almost lost the chance for all six (maybe) of mine.
Granted, by the time Mrs. Moss had arrived at Landstuhl, Donna had survived the embolism, but she hadn’t yet woken up. In the four hours she spent soaring in some morphine-induced space-time continuum, full of trippy lights and hazy thoughts, Mrs. Moss and I were suspended in our own horrible parallel universe: the World Without Her. Whenever I think about it, I can only recall the words of the men who returned from Vietnam and Toby’s unknown soldier- that you can’t know what it was like unless you were there, and while you may come back, you never come back unchanged.
I had a heads up she was coming, the White House had given her my number. When she arrived, I was keeping vigil in the plastic chair across from Donna’s bed. Colin was sprawled out, useless, in a chair outside her room in the ICU. I saw her through the window when she first walked up to the reception desk. I jumped up, wanting to head her off, because it didn’t seem right that she should have to see her without being prepared by a familiar face, someone who could really tell her what to expect. I was stunned when I saw Donna post-op- she didn’t look as bad as I expected when I first arrived, but after the embolism... it was then I realized she really could have, could still, die.
As I sat in the chair, I thought about my sister’s funeral. It was closed-casket, for obvious reasons, but there were pictures of her everywhere. Person after person stood up and made speeches about how she “had her whole life ahead of her,” but yet, whenever people came up to console my parents, they would say, “It was God’s plan, it was her time.”
A few nights after she was buried, I asked my father about it. “Which is it?” I demanded to know.
“What do you mean?”
“If God decided Joanie would live fourteen years with us, and then take her home to be with Him, then she didn’t have a whole life ahead of her. She was at the end of her life. God made the decision and nobody had a choice- right?”
I remember him telling me he didn’t have an answer for me. He said he would look into it, and told me please don’t ask your mother about that. That request, completely improvisational to a child’s question, was a defining moment for me. It was then I realized my childhood was over and that my life would never be the same. I was born into the world that day armed with only two concrete beliefs: I needed to protect my mother and God was full of crap.
When I saw Mrs. Moss outside, eyes bloodshot, face drawn, clinging helplessly to the cuff of an oversized, white cardigan sweater, I shot up and barred the door with my body. Colin, who had figured out who she was came up behind her. She looked between us, and having absolutely no clue who he was or why he was here, fell into me.
“How is she?” she asked, her voice raspy from exhaustion.
“She hasn’t woken up. The doctors removed the clot, but they don’t know any more.”
She looked directly into my eyes and asked me the one question I had really hoped to avoid. “You’ve seen her, you know her better than any- what do you think, Josh? Is she going to be okay?”
“Mrs. Moss, I don’t...” I looked over her head in an attempt to escape, only to lock into Colin’s face, staring at me, chiding me for even thinking to raise false hope in this mother’s heart.
I looked backed at Mrs. Moss and told her I believed Donna would make it. I had added a third item to my unshakable-faith-in list: protect mom, God sucks, and Donna. The problem was, that last one seemed to call the former ones into question, a fact I was aware of then, and which I wrestle with still, and even more so since Leo died.
A million miles back on Earth, her mother asks, “Are you going to come to church with us?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic,” she notices.
“Well, I had hard enough time sitting through religious services when I believed in this stuff.”
“You don’t have to come. You could stay here, take a nap,” she suggests, and then adds in Donna’s same disarmingly sly way, “Let your brain regenerate the cells it lost listening to Roy and Dani.”
“Ha!” I laugh. “No, I want to come. I think it would be nice.”
She smiles at me. “I think it would be nice too.”
We are silent as we tend to the silverware. But after a moment of consideration, she offers me this advice. “Don’t pay attention to the particulars. Christmas isn’t a story about Christ or even religion really. It’s about the original Great Expectation, when people who were lost found guidance, God made a promise and people believed He delivered.”
She pauses and sets her sponge down; looks up, but past me. “What amazes me is how so many people- whole cultures even- miss the point of what God did. He promised the Jewish people a savior. But when the time arrived, he didn’t send someone with a sword or a thunderbolt. He didn’t break open the clouds or part the seas. He sent a baby. And not to a crowd of people, but to a woman and the man she loved. After being forced to leave their town, travelling across the country, cold, hungry, without a home, and all the pains of childbirth- in that manger, they found peace.”
Her proselytization has made her tear up, but it’s honest and I find it hard to look at. I’m also finding it hard to not be swept up in her homily, a roman a clef for me- my story and her own, which find their intersection in Donna’s precious life. “That’s the story, Josh. It’s not a Christian story. It is a human story.”
“Starring a nice Jewish boy and his wife,” I joke past the lump in my throat. “I’ll just imagine Woody Allen as Joseph trying to wield a hammer and fend off sheep in his wife’s time of need. It would make great dinner theatre.”
“I bet it would," she chuckles. "Anyway, I didn’t mean to preach to you. The story- Christmas- miracles, it just makes me- as a mother- just...” She loses the battles against her own emotions and takes a moment to cry. I never know what to do when people cry in front of me. To look away seems to deny or dismiss their feelings, but on the other hand, to coddle them seems to demean them as infantile. I’m not sure what I did for these sixty seconds, but it must have struck a balance because Mrs. Moss seems very grateful to me. “We almost lost her,” she utters, waving a hand across her face, “and now- the Chief of Staff to the First Lady!- and *you*-” She pats my arm. “What do I know about theology? All I know is that I have a lot to be thankful for.”
She returns her attention to the sink, picking up a wet rag and wiping down the now-clear counter area. I’m hit with the memory of how, on our first night in Hawaii, in the midst of the darkness and mingled hot breath, Donna wrapped her arms tightly around my neck and said, softly but resolutely in my ear, “I love you so much, Josh.”
It was the “Josh” that did it for me because.... well, you know. In politics, we lead grand lives on the national stage- there are few experiences that impress us, even fewer moments we save because they are so plentiful. But I’ll keep both of those moments with me always, forever.
“I have a lot to be thankful for too,” I voice quietly as I fold her dishtowel and place it carefully back on the dry rack. Mrs. Moss puts her hand over mine on the counter.
At this moment, Donna comes downstairs and in a weird transubstantiation sort of thing, takes the place of the ghost in the room.
“Is Daddy ready to leave?” Her mom smiles broadly, with no trace of the sadness.
“Yup, he’s warming up the car,” she answers. Donna surveys the kitchen and her mother tells her I was quite helpful. As we walk out to leave, I take her hand in mine and hold it all the way to church. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|08:38 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
VIII: Unshakeables
December 24 | 11:45 PM CT
Hour: 4.5
I need to stop freaking out. It’s just the dishes.
That’s what I try to tell myself as her mom dons a pair of those yellow rubber gloves you see in commercials for Pine Sol and starts to wash. I pick up a towel, poised to dry. It’s the just the dishes, Josh.
But it’s not. It’s her mom and me, alone- both acutely aware of the last and only other time we were alone, in Germany, when she almost lost her only child and I almost lost the chance for all six (maybe) of mine.
Granted, by the time Mrs. Moss had arrived at Landstuhl, Donna had survived the embolism, but she hadn’t yet woken up. In the four hours she spent soaring in some morphine-induced space-time continuum, full of trippy lights and hazy thoughts, Mrs. Moss and I were suspended in our own horrible parallel universe: the World Without Her. Whenever I think about it, I can only recall the words of the men who returned from Vietnam and Toby’s unknown soldier- that you can’t know what it was like unless you were there, and while you may come back, you never come back unchanged.
I had a heads up she was coming, the White House had given her my number. When she arrived, I was keeping vigil in the plastic chair across from Donna’s bed. Colin was sprawled out, useless, in a chair outside her room in the ICU. I saw her through the window when she first walked up to the reception desk. I jumped up, wanting to head her off, because it didn’t seem right that she should have to see her without being prepared by a familiar face, someone who could really tell her what to expect. I was stunned when I saw Donna post-op- she didn’t look as bad as I expected when I first arrived, but after the embolism... it was then I realized she really could have, could still, die.
As I sat in the chair, I thought about my sister’s funeral. It was closed-casket, for obvious reasons, but there were pictures of her everywhere. Person after person stood up and made speeches about how she “had her whole life ahead of her,” but yet, whenever people came up to console my parents, they would say, “It was God’s plan, it was her time.”
A few nights after she was buried, I asked my father about it. “Which is it?” I demanded to know.
“What do you mean?”
“If God decided Joanie would live fourteen years with us, and then take her home to be with Him, then she didn’t have a whole life ahead of her. She was at the end of her life. God made the decision and nobody had a choice- right?”
I remember him telling me he didn’t have an answer for me. He said he would look into it, and told me please don’t ask your mother about that. That request, completely improvisational to a child’s question, was a defining moment for me. It was then I realized my childhood was over and that my life would never be the same. I was born into the world that day armed with only two concrete beliefs: I needed to protect my mother and God was full of crap.
When I saw Mrs. Moss outside, eyes bloodshot, face drawn, clinging helplessly to the cuff of an oversized, white cardigan sweater, I shot up and barred the door with my body. Colin, who had figured out who she was came up behind her. She looked between us, and having absolutely no clue who he was or why he was here, fell into me.
“How is she?” she asks, her voice raspy from exhaustion.
“She hasn’t woken up. The doctors removed the clot, but they don’t know any more.”
She looked directly into my eyes and asked me the one question I had really hoped to avoid. “You’ve seen her, you know her better than any- what do you think, Josh? Is she going to be okay?”
“Mrs. Moss, I don’t...” I looked over her head in an attempt to escape, only to lock into Colin’s face, staring at me, chiding me for even thinking to raise false hope in this mother’s heart.
I looked backed at Mrs. Moss and told her I believed Donna would make it. I had added a third item to my unshakable-faith-in list: protect mom, God sucks, and Donna. The problem was, that last one seemed to call the former ones into question, a fact I was aware of then, and which I wrestle with still, and even more so since Leo died.
A million miles back on Earth, her mother asks, “Are you going to come to church with us?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic,” she notices.
“Well, I had hard enough time sitting through religious services when I believed in this stuff.”
“You don’t have to come. You could stay here, take a nap,” she suggests, and then adds in Donna’s same disarmingly sly way, “Let your brain regenerate the cells it lost listening to Roy and Dani.”
“Ha!” I laugh. “No, I want to come. I think it would be nice.”
She smiles at me. “I think it would be nice too.”
We are silent as we tend to the silverware. But after a moment of consideration, she offers me this advice. “Don’t pay attention to the particulars. Christmas isn’t a story about Christ or religion really. It’s about the original Great Expectation, when people who were lost found guidance, God made a promise and people believed He delivered.”
She pauses and sets her sponge down; looks up, but past me. “What amazes me is how so many people- cultures even- miss the point of what God did. He promised the Jewish people a savior. But when the time arrived, he didn’t send someone with a sword or a thunderbolt. He didn’t break open the clouds or part the seas. He sent a baby. And not to a crowd of people, but to a woman and the man she loved. After being forced to leave their town, travelling across the country, cold, hungry, without a home, and all the pains of childbirth- in that manger, they found peace.”
Her proselytization has made her tear up, but it’s honest and I find it hard to look at. I’m also finding it hard to not be swept up in her homily, a roman a clef for me- my story and her own, which find their intersection in Donna’s precious life. “That’s the story, Josh. It’s not a Christian story. It is a human story.”
“Starring a nice Jewish boy and his wife,” I joke pas the lump in my throat. “I’ll just imagine Woody Allen as Joseph trying to wield a hammer and fend off sheep in his wife’s time of need. It would make great dinner theatre.”
“I bet it would. Anyway, I didn’t mean to preach to you. The story- Christmas- miracles, it just makes me- as a mother- just...” She loses the battles against her own emotions and takes a moment to cry. I never know what to do when people cry in front of me. To look away seems to deny or dismiss their feelings, but on the other hand, to coddle them seems to demean them as infantile. I’m not sure what I did for these sixty seconds, but it must have struck a balance because Mrs. Moss seemed very grateful to me. “We almost lost her,” she utters, waving a hand across her face, “and now- the Chief of Staff to the First Lady!- and *you*-” She pats my arm. “What do I know about theology? All I know is that I have a lot to be thankful for.”
She returns her attention to the sink, picking up a wet rag and wiping down the now-clear counter area. I’m hit with the memory of how, on our first night in Hawaii, in the midst of the darkness and mingled hot breath, Donna wrapped her arms tightly around my neck and said, softly but resolutely in my ear, “I love you so much, Josh.”
It was the “Josh” that did it for me because.... well, you know. In politics, we lead grand lives on the national stage- there are few experiences that impress us, even fewer moments we save because they are so plentiful. But I’ll keep both of those moments with me always, forever.
“I have a lot to be thankful for too,” I voice quietly as I fold her dishtowel and place it carefully back on the dry rack. Mrs. Moss puts her hand over mind on the counter.
Donna comes downstairs and in a weird transubstantiation sort of thing, takes the place of the ghost in the room.
“Is Daddy ready to leave?” Her mom smiles broadly, with no trace of the sadness.
“Yup, he’s warming up the car,” she answers. Donna surveys the kitchen and her mother tells her I was quite helpful. As we walk out to leave, I take her hand in mine and hold it all the way to church. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 15th, 2006|08:56 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
VIII: Just Dessert
Hour: 4
December 24 | 11:15 PM CT
She’s pretty amazing.
Why? Reason #1: as Amy noted so duly outside our apartment last night, she got me to Wisconsin. Where I’m being stared down by her evil cousin and her dumb husband over some God-awful potpourri- pinecone-plaid-laden Christmas centerpiece. I’m eating stuffing, a food for which I’ve had historic loathing (haute cuisine? It’s stale bread and celery! America, you’ve been hoodwinked!) But her mom made it and I want to stay on her mom’s good side (she loves me).
Reason #2: In a race against time to keep my head from exploding over the !)(&@!& Baker news, she can get me to come in from the cold in ten minutes flat. No one but Donna has ever had that power. She is also the only person to ever outrank the White House with me, which probably should have been a tip-off right there, but I admit, I can be kind of oblivious to this sort of stuff and so it took me a couple of years to catch on.
But not anymore. She’s helping her mother bring in the dessert from the kitchen and I can’t stop staring at her. Even as I’m trying to work a celery string out of my back teeth, which would normally annoy the crap out of me, but all I can think is how damn happy I am. An abnormal state for me. Not that I’m a downer, because I’m not- I would describe Josh pre-two-months-ago as gregarious, energetic, passionate- all positive terms, but also conspicuously kinetic ones. They are “striving for” terms. And that’s what I was- running on all eight cylinders, winning the White House, raising the poll numbers, capturing the Senate, running a dead campaign all the way to victory. I still am that guy work-wise. But at home- which is actually now referred to as “home” and not “my apartment,” not just a functional space but a place imbued with meaning- I’m happy. Contented, relaxed, sedate, standing-down, disarmed, chilling on the couch or in bed with my girl. She doesn’t even like baseball and I still love her and I *never* would have believed that could happen.
I think Mrs. Moss baked a pie for each member of the table. A bit excessive. Donna comes out with a lemon meringue one and sets it down on the sideboard. “Can I help?” I offer. Her mother shushes me: of course not. You just take it easy, she tells me. Donna looks over the table and smiles warmly at me. I don’t want to brag or anything, but everyone says she’s glowing these days, and everyone is right.
Love does inspire strange chemical changes. Take me, for example. I’m a serious guy, interested in serious things. However, if the Republicans ever planted a nanny cam in the house of the future Chief of Staff, American voters would run for their lives. Don’t believe me? Here’s a short list of things I do that would scare ordinary Americans like the ones sitting at this table right now.
- I sing loudly and obnoxiously in the shower. I wake up earlier than Donna, but (as she grumbles), she’s attuned to me. So I hop in the shower and Donna will often slink out of bed, pad into the bathroom for some quick relief, but not announce herself. I, being acutely honed to her, sense her presence and at the precise moment when she is nodding off on the toilet, break into a rousing chorus of “More than a Feeling.” Hey, what’s the worst she can do- jump in and shut me up? It’s what we sophisticates call a win-win situation.
- I reply to the Post-It notes she leaves me with little kissy symbols. Ex:
Will stop by at lunch. Call your mom.
Love, D
see you 12:30- XX JL
She asked me once where the Os were and I quipped that if I offered kisses, lots of Os were sure to follow. Hee. I can be witty AND sexy AND all impromptu too. She rolled her eyes and started to walk away, so I shouted back, “Am I right, Ms. Oh-God-Oh-Josh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Josh-You’re-a-God-Josh!”
She wheeled around at me. “I never said that!”
“Fine, so I made the last part up, but the rest-”
“You’re right, you’re right, okay?” she conceded.
“I know I’m right,” I told her with a grin. “And the last part was implied.” She looks like she wants to pound on me, which she has done before. Don’t let her slender physique fool you- she’s a scrapper. More than one floor-based Chinese supper has ended up with cartons hastily shoved out of harm’s way as she tackles me on the carpet. There have been many reasons for this, but the prevailing one comes back to hormonal love reaction which spurs the need to touch each other all the time. Full-body contact is, by that rubric, extremely effective.
There are other signs too... like how we keep trading glances and little smiles, which her mother is pretending to not to see and even more not to beam at, as we eat our dessert and listen politely to Dani discuss the impending babies she and Roy will have. Donna startles out of our reverie when Dani queries, “Do you still want to have kids, Donna?”
“Still?” I tease her, eyebrows raised.
Before Donna has a chance to respond, Dani pipes up, “She wanted six.”
“Six?!”
“Like the Brady Bunch,” Dani affirms.
“I was also twelve at the time,” Donna retorts.
“They were all blonde and tall too,” I muse.
“Except for Cindy,” Roy corrects me, quite seriously. “She wasn't tall. And Bobby wasn't either, now that I think about it.”
I try to clarify, quite judiciously, “Well Roy, they were also children. I think that may have had something to do with it.”
“Good point. Didn’t think about that,” he replies earnestly. Good grief.
“How many kids do you want, Donna?” You can always count on your mom to turn the screw on you in a tight spot.
“Um... I don’t know," Donna stammers.
“Donna!” Dani chastises her. “You’ve got to think about these things, honey. You’re not getting any younger.”
“I’m younger than you, Dani,” Donna responds pointedly.
“Yeah, but only by fifteen months. And I’m already married and trying.”
“We’re trying- practicing!” I jump in to defend my woman’s honor. And, predictably, it didn’t quite achieve the effect of returning her cheeks to their normal coloring. Fortunately, I’m an ace at covering. “Our friend has twins.”
“You babysit for them?” Dani asks skeptically.
“Well...no. But I’ve held them before. Well, one of them.”
“So when you said, practice, you really meant-”
“Yes, Roy,” Donna and I, and Dani, all hastily interrupt before one of the grown-ups in the room chokes on a crust.
“I think I’m done here,” Mr. Moss says, not without disgust, standing up with his empty plate. He walks into the kitchen and Mrs. Moss, who must have finished as we were swapping sex lives with Dani and Roy, follows him. For a moment, we four are left to stare at each other. Well actually three, as Roy is busy mopping up whipped cream with some orphaned apple pieces.
“So we should clear the table!” Donna suddenly jumps up from her chair.
“I have to go upstairs and change,” Dani announces as she makes a clean escape.
Donna and I carry the dishes into the kitchen and put them in the sink. She says nothing. She’s really bothered by this, which is sweet and totally uncalled for. I come up behind her and inch my hands around her waist at the sink. “We can have six babies if you want.”
I feel her cheek curve as I place a kiss just below her jawbone. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That was embarrassing.”
“Come on, we all watched the Brady Bunch, even Westport snobs.”
“Not that,” she says. “The fact that Dani put you on the spot.”
“She didn’t put me on the spot. She put you on the spot.” She half-turns her head and shoots me a look. “Oh wait, you were thinking about having *my* kids?? Now, I’m offended.”
“Shut up.” She swats me with a dish towel.
“But seriously,” I continue and I do mean this seriously. “It’s your call, however many you want. You have to have them- that’s the hard part. All I have to do is screw them up.”
“Are you serious?” she asks.
“Did the ‘seriously’ not give it away?”
“You would be okay with six children?” she asks disbelievingly. "Not that I want six, I just want to know-"
“Donna, many emulations is the price a great man must be prepared to pay.”
“Would you name them all Josh, like George Foreman?”
“George Foreman named all of his kids Josh? I’m flattered.” I spy a plate of olives and cheese cubes and determine to make that my clean-up focus for now.
“Josh!”
“I should send him an ‘I’m flattered’ card." I ponder the possibility out loud. "Do you know if he’s a Democrat?”
“How do I stand you?” she demands to know.
I pop a delicious pre-pitted olive in my mouth. “You’re impervious?”
“Obviously," she grins.
“Whew! Look at this mess!” Mrs. Moss comes back into the kitchen sighing, but that motherly look of satisfaction is unmistakable. Her brood is home to roost and she’s loving every hectic, overcooked second of it.
“Josh will stay and help you,” Donna offers evilly. “I have to freshen up and I’ll check and see how Dani’s doing. But Josh is great- he’s very helpful around the house.”
“Good, Josh. We can catch up, just the two of us, and have a little chat. It’ll be fun.”
I’m toast. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 2nd, 2006|02:16 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
VII: A Matter of Degrees
December 24 | 10:25 CST
Hour: 3
“Hello?” Josh is up like a shot from his seat, and my radar is going nutsy on overtime.
"Who's Amy?" Dani hisses at me. I hold up my hand to shut her up so I can hear. Three seconds into this call, I can already tell Josh is unnerved by what Amy's telling him. Not that Josh is particularly enigmatic, but even still, I can hone in on his mood like a hawk. I’m like the National Hurricane Center of Joshiness, a skill I crafted with years of careful study as his assistant and which now proves an invaluable resource for me as his girlfriend.
"Who's Amy?" Dani demands again, louder this time, because apparently she didn't get the hint that it's none of her damn business.
Josh frowns at the noise, and irritated, moves from the table without excusing himself for some privacy. My eyes follow him and I wince as I see one hand already tugging at his rapidly-depleting tuft of hair. Ooh, I really want to take his hand and hold it so he doesn’t do that.
He's gone for about ten minutes, and when he does come back, I can sense his approach before he even hits the doorway. “What is it?” He shoots me a look and I know we can’t discuss it here, but he’s about to blow. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back." As I jump up to follow him to the den, I hear Dani screeching in the background, "Why is his ex-girlfriend calling Donna's house on Christmas Eve?!"
We've reached the portico on the back of the kitchen and now he’s grabbing his coat. “Josh, it’s three degrees out,” I try to coax him, but he’s already out the door, down the back steps two at a time, and pacing like a madman across the snow-covered yard.
Two mittens and a scarf later, I’m leaning on the railing, listening to Josh mumble a presumable string of expletives. “Baker!” he finally spits out.
“What about Baker?” I inquire calmly.
“Amy just saw Cliff Calley with Baker’s top guy, having dinner at Morton’s. She made a call to a guy she knows and he told her that Baker asked Calley to staff for him!”
“Why would a Pennsylvania Governor need a legislative liaison?” He turns to me with a look of fury, dread, and a trifle of relief that I understand. “Why would a vice-president need a legislative liaison?” I continue cautiously. “Unless he didn’t plan to be vice-president for very long.” He nods. “You think he wants to run for president?”
Josh throws his head back, looking up into the pure black sky as if pleading with it to swallow him up. “He thinks he should be the President," he spits angrily. "He thinks the leak about his wife was just a fluke of bad luck.”
“But he ducked the whole primary season. He can’t possibly think-”
“He does,” Josh snaps. “He does and I knew it, and I let us float him name anyway." He looks around frantically as if to find something to throw, but the place is desolate, so he hurls more profanity instead. "Goddamnit!”
“You don’t trust Baker,” I deduce.
“He’s just like Hoynes." I'm stunned and sobered to hear his voice cracking. "I need a VP I can count on, not another shark in the White House- I’m already up to my head in guppies that don't know what the hell they're doing!” Josh is gloveless and I don’t know how he’s managing to grip railing, which much be frozen through. “Fuck!”
I’m shivering now, but I suck it up because the winter of Josh’s despair is nowhere near a thaw. “There is a difference though,” I point out, careful to remain as temperate as possible. You have to tread carefully with Josh at times like these to offset the nutty. “Hoynes had the wild card- the MS. Santos is clean as a whistle. Baker couldn’t challenge him, and even if has was stupid and arrogant enough to try, he’d never get any support.”
“It’s not the direct affront I’m worried about,” Josh rebukes. “It’s him wanting to use Santos as a fall guy. Think about it- most people, even Democrats, think that Vinick lost because of the nuclear accident. Not because Santos beat him, but because Vinick tripped himself up.”
He's whipping himself up into a full-blown frenzy now. “All election season we heard it hammered home- Santos is inexperienced, Santos is naive- he’s down on two fronts: one, that he’s not savvy enough to work inside the Washington machine, the other that he doesn’t have the hands-on experience in what voters want. The House isn’t like the Senate- Reps aren’t visible, they’re not accountable. Unless you have a problem, you don’t seek our your House rep. Unlike Baker, savior of the state that’s Alabama in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.”
“You’re forgetting one key fact,” I counter. “Santos isn’t a Congressman anymore, he’s the president.”
“Yeah. It's just that...I don't- I don't know if we can do this without a Leo." He runs a hand over his face and sniffles. "I needed him just as much as Santos did."
I realize how dire this fear is by the fact that Josh just referred to the elected leader of the free world the same way we would the bastard who steals our recycle bins. But Joshua, Josh, Josh- you have so much more acumen than me at this, I don't know how you can't see what is so obvious to the rest of us.
"Josh?" I call him back from deep within his beloved, deluded brain. Josh looks up at me and I smile bravely past the lump in my own throat. "We have a Leo- it's you."
His head shakes defeatedly. "I don't know-"
"I do." I am firm. "Leo taught you everything you need to know- he wouldn't have sent you to find the guy if he hadn't."
"Yeah."
"You have to trust him, Josh. You have to trust yourself." He is still not convinced, so I'm forced to invoke the Socratic Method. "Do you believe the President-elect trusts you?"
"Yes," he replies. "I'm about the only one he trusts, except for Lou and maybe you."
"Maybe me?" I echo, amused because only Josh would say that out loud.
"Associating with me of your own volition makes you suspect."
“Yeah," I smile because hey, I can understand that. But God help me, as I watch him obliviously ruining a pair of alligator loafers here in the Wisconsin tundra, I'm mad for him. "Hey, Josh?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s freezing out here.”
Finally- a smile. A little teeny one, that I know is because I’m me and I’m here and I’m with him on this and everything else too. Knowing that he knows that- and how much he appreciates it- makes me all warm and fluttery inside. “Yeah.”
“Let’s go inside.”
He reaches out one bare hand and takes mine, holding it as he ascends the steps. “When you said it was three degrees out, you meant that literally, didn’t you?”
We’re face to face, a breath away, on the landing now, and I’m toying with the lapel on his overcoat. “Yeah.”
“What kind of people would settle in a place where the median temperature is a single digit?”
“Ask that question again in about sixty seconds. I’m sure my father and Roy would love to take a crack at it.”
“And when you say crack, you mean like with a bat and at my head, right?”
“Affirmative.”
When we reach the door, he stops me with his hand on my elbow. "Thank you."
I smile. "Always."
He places a soft kiss on my lips, whispering "I love you," on my tongue which may sound like an ergonomic impossibility, but which I assure you can be done and quite deliciously so.
"Mmm..."
He pulls back and chuckles, "I thought you didn't like red."
"Well, as they say, it's all in the presentation," I quip, pulling him to my mouth once more. My eyes slip closed as I revel in the slow sensation of Josh's kiss swirling with mine. He utters that what we're hungry for isn't being served in the dining room, and when I start to feel that familiar, soft push against my hip bone, it's like a lightning bolt to my very core.
We force ourselves to break away and Josh asks in a ragged voice, "I really have to stay on the couch?"
"You really do." I pause and then add coyly, "But that's not to say there's not a lock in the den."
At once, every other part of him comes to attention. "Is there a lock in the den?"
"There is."
"How many hours until bed?"
"At least four."
"At least four," he repeats.
"Dinner, dessert, church, bed."
"What part are we on?"
I sigh and open the door. "Your stomach's growling; take an educated guess."
"Right." He follows me inside and we take off our coats and I hang them both up in the closet. As soon as my hand releases the hanger, he pounces on me- pulling me flush with him, his mouth making love to the most sensitive part of my throat, working its way around to my mouth and it takes all of my willpower to push down a delirious scream.
"What was that for?" I ask, dazed, touching my lip and confirming that there is indeed not a trace of the lipstick I put on less than an hour ago.
He's flushed and furious and back on the hunt and I know his rationale- if he can't do anything in Washington, he'll damn well do something in Wisconsin, and I don't think I need to spell out that that something is me.
He grins and tells me, "I just wanted you to know it wasn't my stomach." |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 27th, 2006|11:12 am] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
VI: Blame China
Hour: 1.5 - 3
Donna zips up her skirt with a little butt-shake. “How do you do that?” I demand to know. I meanwhile, am on my back on the bed feeling like I just had the marrow sapped out of me. I could sleep for a year.
"Zapped by your lovemaking powers?" I take it as a rhetorical question.
“You’re so damn...perky," I deride, making a face at her. "I’m going to pin a little bunny tail on you or something.”
“Okay, I’ll be a bunny and you be my tireless hare,” she quips, then hits my knee. “Tireless.Hare! Up and at ‘em, Jack Rabbit.”
“I’m gonna call you General Woundwart,” I grumble.
“Fine- stay down there, Little Fiver.” She doesn’t miss a beat with my Watership Down allusion. “He was the runt, wasn’t he?”
“Must you drive every one of my colorful comments into the ground?” I groan, as she tugs on my hand.
“Always,” she grins. “It’s just so cute when you're forced to realize you’re not the only one who ever read a famous book,” she says with a patronizing ruffle of my hair.
“Hey! Gentle with the hair.”
She throws her hands up in protest and asks, “Remind me why I missed you?”
Ah- hear that? That’s the knock of opportunity, my friend, and I got a brigade of dimple ready to answer. I flash her The Smile. The boyish one, the one that lights her up like the White House Christmas tree. “Need I say more?”
“No,” she laughs.
I step up to her and place a soft kiss on her lips. We’re getting quite good at this romantic thing. We had a dicussion about it, actually- about the need broaden the spectrum, open up the universe- add some pitch, some inflection to punctuate our new physical frontier. Why? Because a favorite song repeated too much becomes repetitious. Fortune cookie conventional wisdom from Donna Moss. "You don’t have to ape one of those little paper prophecies," I told her over Moo Shoo on my (now our) living room floor. "If you had just said 'peppermint ice cream,' I would have known exactly what you meant."
She lowered her chopsticks and replied she thought that was past the point when I was listening to her. Suddenly, I was not so hungry anymore. As I stared at a caricature warrior on the carton in front of me, it occurred to me that was Before the China Trip. “Before the China Trip”- the standard WW euphemism for When Donna Worked Here, aka the Donna Era, aka before Donna quit. Even Toby- eternal decrier of all thinly-veiled expressions of unrequited JoshandDonna love, lust, and the like- used the BTCH with me. Of course, that was even worse, because I knew he would have pushed the envelope if there hadn't been a chance that Andi was also in the car.
Odd, isn’t it, how bonds are made and broken- those 45 seconds between the beepers and the MSNBC news break-in were probably the primary reason Toby and I couldn’t be in the same room with each other for the next two years. I guess if I had to explain it, I’d say it’s like, in the locker room, when you accidentally see another guy in the shower, and then you can’t look him in the eye for the next couple of weeks. Or ever, you know, because you know. It’s also the reason Toby will be the last call I make on my deathbed. That is, if we’re not in a double-seater wheelchair out on the bocce court of some Florida old folks home. I just hope someone’s there to wheel me to another room the day Great-Grandma Claudia “Jackal” Jean Cregg Concannon throws her walker to the wind and wants them to stage their own production of the Zeigler Follies.
Which- while I’m on the subject- um, hypocritical much Toby? Moping all broody-schmoopy around CJ’s office all the time- don't think I and everyone else with eyes didn't know what that was all about! Broody is Toby’s boyish. But did I ever throw that in his face, despite ample opportunity? No.
Anyway, the Moo Shoo three weeks ago was the first time I ever cried in front of Donna when she wasn’t high as a kite in a German hospital, and the night I asked her to move in with me. Also notable as the time at which point I was able to finally utter the words, “Back when Donna worked for me,” without feeling like I wanted to throw up.
Perhaps it was unfair to blame China- Donna’s decision to quit had actually nothing to do with it, and everything to do with me (although me greeting her in Chinese no doubt gets us both a check in the “con” column). But I can live with it. They’re Communists, after all. They violate human rights. They make public service ads encouraging people to smoke! I’m hard up for empathy.
“Josh...” Donna calls me back to the present. “What are you thinking about?”
I grin. “Peppermint ice cream.” She knows exactly what I mean.
“Come on,” she says, as she delicately takes my hand. “We’re late for dinner.”
As we walk down the stairs, I can hear the concentrated laughter coming from the dining room. “Hey, didn’t you say you wanted to brief me on your cousins before dinner?”
Her body stiffens. “Yes,” she says abruptly, and I’m a little afraid at her stark reaction. “But we don’t have time now. Jesse’s sweet but pretty dumb and Dani is a complete bitch,” she informs me, and tops that off it with a cheery, “Time to eat!”
* * *
I see Dani first. She’s in the seat one from the head of the table and directly in my line of sight when we round the corner, next to her husband Roy. I can already see her sizing up Josh, which right there incenses me because who is she to pass judgment on the second most powerful man in the country? Except she doesn’t know that he is the second most... and she doesn’t care. It’s like giving James Joyce to someone who only speaks Zulu. I plaster my best fake smile on. Just two hours, Donna. Two hours and then you’ll have church where you won’t have to talk and then they’ll leave in their own car for their own home.
And then maybe I’ll have time to do the one thing I really, really want to do, which I know is so dorky, but there’s an explanation behind it. What I really want to do is to sit with Josh in front of the Christmas tree beside our picture window that looks out onto a snow-covered landscape with no cars, no streetlights, nothing- just stars and snow and Josh. Maybe we’ll drink eggnog (albeit heavy on the egg, easy on the nog for Joshua) or cocoa or even peppermint tea.
Why do I want to do this? Because it was when I played out this idyllic scene with Jack Reese that I realized I was madly, hungrily, hopelessly in love with Josh. I almost had a little nutty there at the inn, on the sofa in our room with the spectacular view because all I wanted to do was be with Josh. And not downing special draft at the Hawk and Dove. I mean *with* him. In his arms. In his bed. I missed him more than I could stand and at that point, we’d only been apart forty-five minutes.
So you can imagine how I felt when a certain girlfriend of Josh's asked me a certain question quite soon after that. A certain someone who was everywhere I couldn’t be and knew it and let me know it at every turn- until that night, when somehow my silence turned the tables on our tragic little triangle drama. Score one for Platonic Girl.
God, that sounds like some Sunday School superhero. And it's even more comical when we remember that this is Josh "Lemon" Lyman, we're talking about.
“Josh, this is my cousin Dani and her husband, Roy. Dani, this is my-- my boyfriend, Josh.” I know I blush a little when I say that- it sounds weird to me because Josh is just Josh and anyone who knows me knows he defies category in my life.
“How do you do,” Josh shakes their hands. He’s adorably.
“Sit down, Josh, please. Would you like some wine?” My mother, ever the hostess, inquires, standing proudly in front of a sideboard that has a wine in every shade.
“Sure...” He responds, but he’s bringing his best manners and wouldn’t think of taking a drink before me. Especially with parts of my DNA eyeing him like hawks, or probably more aptly, vultures on carrion. “Donna, which do you want?”
“Reisling’s fine,” I answer.
“Great and I’ll have a chianti,” he tells my mom. Who can’t seem to stop sneaking quick looks at Josh, followed by extended, pointed looks at me. She hands Josh two glasses, and he passes me mine. My father gets up and starts filling our water glasses. Dani babbles aimlessly to Roy. All the while, my mother continues her bizarre catatonia, which is unnerving me, until in one horrified swallow, its progenitor comes to me.
“Oh my God,” I must say it aloud, because Josh turns and asks me what’s the matter.
I dab my mouth with my napkin for cover, and inform him in a hushed voice, “My mother knows we had sex.”
My father had just handed Josh a filled glass and now he practically spits out the water like it's arsenic. With an odd look on his face, my father watches Josh’s cheeks puff out like a blowfish as he tries desperately to contain their contents. After a tense second, Josh is able to gulp it down, but this success is followed by a protracted coughing fit- so severe that I am tempted to tell the table he’s actually the last known case of tuberculosis in an industrialized country. Once he’s breathing again, some idle chatter- pity chatter, to allow the guest to compose himself- at the table resumes without us.
“How does she know?” he croaks.
I shrug. “How should I know? Noise? Vibration?”
“How do you know she knows?”
“She’s beaming at me.” And still, she is.
He steals a stealthy look at her, then leans over and in a hoarse voice, realizes, “You didn’t really tell her all that crap about Sarah Protrero, did you?”
“Of course I did,” I reply casually. "Bambi." I smile and sip my wine as he gapes at me. "By the way, you just blinked.”
The private joke sets him at ease and he can only chuckle and shake his head at himself. But in his eyes, I see the unspoken thanks for breaking the ice.
“So Josh.” Dani claims control of the conversation and I can tell from her tone, it’s act one of Inquisition, the Sequel. “Coming all the way to Wisconsin for the holidays- where is your family?”
“Um, my mother’s in Florida.”
“Has your father passed on?” He nods. God Dani, at least wait until the third question to dredge up a person’s deceased family members. Geesh.
“Oh I’m so sorry,” she says, completely devoid of sympathy. “Is your mother remarried?”
“No.”
“That’s good- no messy stepfamily to deal with. Any brothers and sisters?"
I resist the urge to take his hand, but he seems okay when he answers, “It’s just me.”
“So you and Donna- both only children. They say that’s a bad match because only children are very self-centered- you know, used to calling the shots. I never understood why parents only want to have one child... I mean, it’s such hard work.. and if you bother to do it all once, may as well get your money’s worth right?”
“Um...Sure. That's one way to look at it, I guess."
“Donna, would you pass around that bread please,” my mother interrupts, thank God. “Josh, this was my Grandmother’s recipe, I made it- from scratch- just for you.” Josh turns The Smile with The Dimples on her and she eats it up. Mom and I will have to have a talk about her not indulging him just because he’s cute- after all, five years down the road when we’re married and he does something dumb that makes me mad, I can’t very well have my mother siding with him.
“This is really terrific!” he compliments her. “See? Loves me,” he adds for my benefit, with his mouth full.
I shake my head. “No...”
“She’s plying me with baked goods!” he whispers.
“PLYING?”
He considers, then decides, “You’re in charge of plying,” and turns back to where my mother is explaining to my cousins that she and Josh once spent a whole week eating schnitzel and sauerkraut and rock-hard cafeteria rolls, crying for homebaked bread and bagels, respectively, and when she came to DC Josh brought her bagels from Schwartz’s and so now its her turn.
So my mom is in her boisterous mode, and finally the talk at the table seems like it’s trending towards relaxed and then Roy, brain surgeon that he is, turns to ask me:
“Is that when you were in that car bomb in Israel?”
Grinding. Halt.
Now Josh's Donna radar is up. “Uh, in Gaza, but yeah.” My body feels more rigid than my answer.
Dani leans over to Roy and tells him, “Gaza is in Israel.”
“No it’s not,” I correct her. “It’s next to it, but it’s not part of Israel.” I feel Josh touch my hip under the table, wanting to know if I’m okay.
“Whatever, it’s all the same,” Dani retorts huffily. “That was almost two years ago. I remember because the day it happened was our sixth-month anniversary.”
“Auspicious,” I note with a smile. Beside me, Josh snorts. My mom gives me a look. Dani isn’t listening and Roy has no idea what the word means.
“Donna, you had that awful scar- did you ever see if the plastic surgeon could fix it- you know, graft it or whatever?”
I could throw this wine across the table at her face, but I just say, “You know, Dani, I’m not sure skin grafting is really a good topic for dinner discussion.”
“Dani, pass me that bread,” my dad jumps in. “And the butter. And that salt. Hey Roy, did you ever fix the transmission on that old truck?” Now, the conversation has turned to trucks and transmissions and in the middle of a long, complicated answer by Roy, my dad gives me a wink- kind of a, Nice Save, kid.
So we survive the bread and salad courses. When the soup comes around, it’s Italian Wedding and- of course- an opportunity that provides more fodder than rice grains.
“Italian wedding!” My mother gleefully sets the pot down right in front of us. I mean, sure, “right in front of us” is also the center of the table, but I know it was intentional.
Dani hasn’t said much in the past ten minutes and I can only assume that means her three brain cells were banging into each other and needed to be unloaded. That’s the only explanation I have for this next question.
“Have you ever been married before?”
It takes Josh a second before he realizes he’s the only man at the table who isn’t currently married. “No...” he replies, as if it’s the most absurd question he’s ever heard.
“I just thought maybe,” she starts defensively, “because you’re much older than Donna-”
“Dani,” I cut her off. What else is there really to say to someone who should so obviously know better?
“I’m sorry,” she lies. “I didn’t mean any offense.”
God bless Josh, when he shrugs and replies unfazed, “None taken. I work a lot. I think I sort of skipped a personal life for a few... decades.”
“So what exactly do you do in the White House?” Roy wants to know.
“He’s the Chief of Staff, Roy,” my mom boasts with much pride. “He works for President Santos and Donna is the Chief of Staff for the First Lady.”
“Yeah, but what do you do?”
“Well, we won’t actually be Chiefs of Staff until next month, but a Chief of Staff runs the office, defines the Administration’s agenda and implements it, makes sure the speeches are written, that Congress is passing bills it should and not passing ones it shouldn’t, works with military and diplomatic leaders.”
“Basically everything,” I add, with just as much pride.
Roy snickers. “So what does the President do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you do all that,” he says to Josh, “then what’s the President do all day? Sit around at the desk and look important?”
“He makes the decisions,” Josh replies. “And almost everything I mentioned, the President would be involved with, but my primary job is to protect the President, and make sure his time and efforts are being utilized effectively.”
As if on cue, my clutch starts to move on the chair spindle; I have Josh’s Blackberry inside and reach for it.
“Who is it?”
I show him and he looks as surprised I am at the caller. "Amy?" |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 25th, 2006|12:02 am] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
V: No More Free Rides
Rating: R
Spoilers: Trans/Tomorrow
December 24 | 9:25 CST
Hour: 1.5
I watch as she makes a quick detour to punch in the button-lock to the door, careful to make as little noise as possible. She trots back to this creaky old bed with one of those pink ruffled doile-things (that’s not called a doile but I can’t think of its real name) on the bottom and- I am not kidding here people- just hikes her skirt up above her knees and straddles my lap.
Go back and read that last bit once more.
And once more. Because you won’t believe you read it when I tell you what I said next.
"We can't."
See what I mean?
“Come on, Josh,” she prompts me in a barely-audible breathy voice, running her fingers through my hair. “Before my cousins get here.” Did I mention she’s very tenacious?
“Donna...” My brain blanks as her very tenacious navel is now peeking at me from under her shirt. She has such a cute tummy and she’s very ticklish when I kiss her there and I’m ticklish in places she likes to kiss but you know, I endure. Somehow. “Hey...Donna... we shouldn’t...do...this...Donna?”
It’s time to lay down the law. I won’t be much help to her or the next President if I’m dead. “HEY JAGADHAMBA!” There, I have her attention now. “It’ll be a lot easier for me to turn you down if you take your pelvis out of my face!” I finish with a tight and pained smile, facsimile to other unmentionables.
She throws her back laughing. “Jagadhamba? What the hell is that?”
“Jagadhamba is a Hindu goddess,” I inform her, “known for her gyrating ways; she who dances the dance of life.”
Her face instantly softens and I can also see the microscopic neurons whipping out their highlighters and color-coded index cards with glee to file away life-dancing goddess in Donna’s brain. “I dance the dance of life?”
“Yes, as you thrust your hips at me, things are coming to life, yes,” I confirm with a little squeak.
"Come do a little dance with me,” she whispers, as she slides her knee so that it’s now actually behind me- and yet, the rest of her, not. Well, I think I’ll succeed at laying down something, but it won’t be the law, as she continues her campaign to cajole my cajones. “Just a quick one...”
“You’re quite punchy now,” I notice. “That’s a sure symptom of Josh Withdrawal. Happens all the time. I’m like smack to women.”
“Okay, you need to fuck me before I decide my considerable kinetic resources would be better spent slapping your considerable ego out of you.”
“Donnatella, such language!” I admonish in my best Catholic nun voice, covering the ears of a nearby teddy bear wearing angel wings and a halo. “And in the room of what was obviously once such a sweet little girl.”
“Not so sweet,” she smiles devilishly. Maybe she didn’t actually look like a devil when she smiled, but she was undoing my belt buckle at the time and I think that’s where the comparison sprung from.
And now she’s -
YEOW. Abort! “Donna. Hand.Stop.NOW,” I implore. Look, I’m as red-blooded as the next guy, but there are some things I will not do for love. Like stare across a table at a man whose caught me defiling his daughter in his house while eating the food of the woman who brought her into the world. No thank you. If that means I need to pencil in some extended hot showers until she gets back, fine. But I have no plans to act out the Man Who Came at Dinner with Mr. Moss, his wife, fifty cousins, and a pack of cats. No ma’am.
“Oh Josh,” she says in her patented you’re-such-a-dolt-Josh voice. “Please. It's nothing I haven't done here before."
It takes a second to before I connect that she just name-dropped the Rattyest of Rat Bastards while attempting to initiate intimate contact with me, something I’m entirely sure I’m not comfortable with. "Freeride?" In this bedroom? before the eyes of these innocent stuffed animals? I’ll kick his ass.
"Oh God yeah. But not as much, cause you know, we had our own place. But before that-"
“Before that?!” I yelp. “Who was before that?” Outraged. I am outraged. This is outrageous.
“Duh- you know this,” she tells me, impervious to my ire. And she rolls her eyes when I don’t answer, instead choosing to continue to look very, very indignant. “Um, Freddy? Freddy Briggs, you know ‘when I was sixteen’-”
“I thought you said there was no Freddy!”
“There was no Freddy per se- ” Per se?! “His name wasn’t Freddy.”
“You said you made it up!”
“Yeah- his name. But the man who-”
“BOY, Donna, he was a boy. Sixteen-year-old males are boys, not men.”
“I never said he was sixteen,” she informs me. Smugly. “I said that I was sixteen when we-”
Ok- whoa. I raise my hand in protest and advise, "Think very carefully before you proceed with this next portion of the story."
"About what?"
"That I, in my current position as the head of your household, the man entrusted with your care and protection, who feels certain primal manly emotions like-
"Jealousy and competition?"
"Protection and caretaking."
"I'm fine," she smiles. "Anyway, I was just going to say that I used to sneak a six pack under my bed and ‘Freddy’ and I would come up here and drink it after nighttime football games."
Whew. And here I thought she was about to reveal some nascent debauchery that involved her and a guy who measures his success in yardage. "Just drink? That's not-"
"Yes Josh, the captain of the football team and I smuggled booze up to my bedroom so that we could watch the Mets."
"You dated the captain of the football team? I thought you told me you were a nerd!"
She shrugs. "I tutored him." Then she grins, thinking about it. “He was not very smart. That’s why he was a senior at nineteen.”
I wonder what the statute of limitations is on statutory prosecutions. Yeah, non-practicing lawyer my eye, Donna! You want a shyster, I’ll show you some shyster and throw your little chester molester and his purity-taking predilections into the joint for twenty to life. If he’s not there already. Your dad would LOVE me!
“Donna, WHY would a smart, AP English tutor type like yourself have wanted to date a left-back football boob who probably thinks Toni Morrison was lead singer for the Doors!”
She looks at me. Then with grand fanfare, gestures to her current position, which is, as you may remember, spread-eagled on my lap. With my belt in hand. And also now too, her panties. Not sure at what point that happened, but I know my brain was too busy thinking of all the other connotations for “free ride” to appreciate it. "Oh my God!"
“What?” she queries innocently. “Long, cold Midwestern nights- it’s not like there was much else to do, Josh!”
“Oh, I’ll show you what else there is to do...” I challenge, as I seize her waist with both hands.
Her eyes fly open with surprise and delight. “We have to be careful to be quiet,” she whispers. “This bed squeaks.”
“Then I guess we better use the wall,” I determine, as I assume the position for both of us in one swift catlike movement. Lothario, I know, but my heart and et cetera are already taken, ladies. “Guess Fred and Freeride didn’t teach you that one, did they?”
“Oh Josh, you are such a dweeb.” She slaps me upside the head, not as foreplay, but it doesn’t matter because two minutes later I become the third male to claim victory in Donnatella Moss’ old bedroom and ten minutes later I set a new world record in her Hall of Fame. That’s as far as I care to elaborate on that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a portrait of me flanked by lit candles and offerings when we come here next Christmas.
“Oh fuck- Josh- Oh God-!”
Mind you, on account of the situation, her moans are weightless and muffled into my hair. But I’m totally eating it up because when you’re newly in love, it’s like time is completely protracted so that one day apart feels like a lifetime, especially when you’re doing it a couple times everyday. I can’t stop kissing her, my mouth won’t let me, even when I start to suspect my brain tissue is dying from lack of oxygen. “Oh, D-”
“DONNA!”
I practically knock into the bedside table. Okay, I actually did knock into it, but I didn’t knock it over. At least not everything on it.
“DINNERTIME!”
Holy crap! I’m definitely buck naked and that’s definitely her mom calling up the stairs! Visions of cell phone pictures of my white ass on doile posted on a gonzo future-mother-in-law website flash through my mind.
“Get back here!” an on-the-cusp-of-satisfied Donna hisses at me. You’ve seen how anal she is in the office, and take my word for it, the woman is just as diligent in the bedroom.
“DONNA, GET DOWN HERE!” Her Dad. Soon to be Prisoner #24601 after he opens the door and trips over my pants.
“We have to go!” I stammer- weak, I know. “Your dad will come up and kill-”
“You won’t live long enough to finish that sentence if you don’t-”
That’s all she needed to say- I don’t mess with the Moss family. Needless to say, she's smiling like a canary by the time we head downstairs for dinner. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 20th, 2006|10:34 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
IV: Upstairs, Downstairs
Rating: PG for language
Spoilers: Trans/Tomorrow
December 24 |8:45 CST
Hour 1
Remind me to kick your ass when we get inside, I silently curse my little tweakazoid in the backseat. I adore Josh. I do. And his random outbursts and diarrhetic mouth are part of the reason why. But why does he have be so... Josh about them? I mean, a normal person would just have said, Yes, Amy stopped by to talk about a work thing, and then shut up. It’s really sweet that he wants to make a good impression, but when Josh is amped up and tries, it usually results in disaster.
We turn into the driveway and I can already see some neighbors milling around in front of our living room window. The house I grew up in is a very basic two-story place built in the 1970s, a far cry from the elegant three-story brick colonial in tony Westport where Josh lived after the fire. He had complete run of the third floor, which consisted of his bedroom and bathroom, a playroom, work room, and a guest bedroom on the opposite end where his two college girlfriends pretended to sleep when they came home with him over break.
It will be fun to see Josh rub elbows with the “real people” electorate, aka the good folks of Hollow Kettle Road. As he steps out of the car, I can see the apprehension on his face- he’s nervous. I know he’s worried about my parents thinking the following, in no particular order: he had me “assist him” back when he took me in as a 24-year-old with no money and a lot of naivete; he’s too caught up in his work to properly take care of me; he’s too old to be a father and will he try to discourage me from having children.
Not that I care about any of that. The first one requires a simple “No,” and the other two are just ridiculous. I’m not a naive 24-year-old anymore, I can take care of myself, and I can certainly make my own decisions about my ovaries and anything else.
The half dozen times I’ve told him this haven’t convinced him, and I doubt I’ll be able to now. Nonethless, I slip my hand into his, and we walk to the door to meet my family. When we reach the porch, he squeezes back.
My mom saw us come up the drive, and has already bounded to the door. “Josh!” she cries when she sees him. “How nice to see you. I’m so glad you could come, I know it’s not easy, what with your schedule and all.”
“I’m really happy to be here, Mrs. Moss.”
“Oh please, Josh,” she says, as she embraces him in one of those half-hug, half-pat movements. “You don’t have to call me that.”
“Thanks.”
“So there’s a lot of food, I’m sure you’re hungry and- oh Donna, the Cutlers are here, if you want to say hello.”
I decide I need to rein in my mother’s overzealous hospitality. “Mom, I think we’ll just grab a quick snack, and then I’m going to take Josh up to my room so he put his stuff down and get settled. Then, I’ll come down and talk to the Cutlers, okay?”
“Sure, of course.” She smiles at us. “Dinner’s at 9:30.”
“We won’t miss it,” I promise her, as I lead Josh down the hall. We steal some cheese and crackers from the kitchen, and then head up the back staircase to my room. Upstairs, when we’re alone, feels a world away from the boisterous din of drunken chatter and Christmas music. As soon as we ascend the last step, I can’t help it- I push him up against the wall. “Finally...” I mutter as I press my mouth to his.
He drops his bag so he can properly welcome my body home. “I missed you,” he tells me when we manage to pull apart.
“So I gather,” I retort. “Come on, my room’s this way.”
Confused, he jerks his thumb towards the door we were just making out on. "Isn't this your room?"
"No, that's my parents’ room," I reply nonchalantly because who cares? They're downstairs.
“Got it," he winces. "Hey Donna?"
"Yeah?"
"Please don't bring your powers of persuasion up against your parents' door anymore."
I grin, and conspicuously ignore his plea. “This,” I say, as I open the last door in the hall, “is my room.”
Josh steps inside and takes in the pink walls, frilly curtains, and white wooden desk, not to mention the copious stuffed animals and various academic ribbons prominently placed on the walls. I fully expect him to make fun of me. I’m standing, arms-crossed, in the doorway waiting for it. But he doesn’t. He just stands there and stares towards the window, coat still on, bag in hand. It's a bit weird. “Hey... you okay?” I ask softly, stepping up behind him.
His face is eerily transfixed on the shelf in front of us. “My sister had that same bear," he finally says.
Oh. I walk over and pick it up the one he’s pointing to. “It’s a Paddington Bear,” I tell him, as I hand it to him. “They were popular in the ‘60s, I think.”
He turns it over in his hands. “Yeah.” Then just as quickly as it, whatever it is, came over him, it disappears and he's back to his usual self. I take the bear and sit down at the desk chair; when Josh isn’t looking, I put it behind the desk, out of view.
With a noisy expulsion, Josh tosses his carryon into the corner, shrugs off his coat, and flops down on the bed I've had since I was four. Which is pink. With ruffles. And teddy bears.
It is at this point, that the situation has crossed the line from reality to comedy. I decide this experience needs to be documented, so I retrieve a piece of paper and a pen from my desk. Maybe I’ll write a script for a new sitcom- I could call it “Mr CoS Goes to Wisconsin” or “Lemon Lost.”- okay the title may need work, but the concept is brilliant. Touche:
You: A twin?
Me: Yup.
You: We're supposed to fit here?
Me: (snort). Josh... (long, long look) Josh. My father owns a gun.
You: (light dawning) You're supposed to fit here. I'm supposed to fit somewhere on the couch downstairs.
Me: Uh-huh.
You: Donna, your parents know we live together, right?
Me: Of course they do.
You: (sitting up, suspiciously- as suspicious as you can pull off whilst clutching a Strawberry Shortcake pillow) And they know you lived with Freeride?
Me: That would be correct.
You: Donna, your parents know you're not a virgin right?
Me: Josh, knowing that I receive mail at the same address as my boyfriend is not the same as hearing his name in rapid succession with a choice four-letter word through the air vent.
You: (sitting back) Good point. I can't expect you to control yourself with me in a bed. Especially a twin.
I just smile and watch you, my ravishable, bleary-eyed, jet-lagged Josh, legs outstretched in your rumpled Tuesday suit on this Wednesday evening, sagging against the white wicker headboard and clutching a freckled girl bedecked in berries to your chest. Wild horses, hold me back. "You better not sleep through dinner," I warn, as I see your eyes slip close. This is life for a power couple at the top Washington eschelon- one passed out fully-clothed on the bed, the other across doodling at the desk.
"Won't," you rebuff. "I just want to imagine you naked behind my eyelids while you talk."
With some very funny dialogue in the can, along with my future Best Comedy Series nod, I am now very painstakingly trying draw this image of you and Strawberry for posterity or ransom, whichever one comes first. "Well, that's alright then."
"Because it's going to be a long, cold Midwestern night." You open one eye. "On the couch."
You sleep and I'm drawing as best I can considering I can't draw (you thought there was nothing I didn't major in, and once again, I expose your wrongness) and that the tool of my artistic realization happens to be a silver glitter pen. Fifteen minutes later, my dad knocks and without waiting for clearance, opens the door. He knows he can trust his daughter not to be doing anything that would create an awkward situation between the three of us. Or perhaps he saw the sorry state you were in when you got off the plane and knew there was no possible way you could be capable of doing anything besides drooling on my aunt's handmade afghan.
"Hi Dad," I say.
You groan and stir and I know I'm smiling as I watch the befuddlement on my father's face. Midwestern men don't say much. They certainly don't moan and flail and whine for their girlfriends when roused from their naps.
"You okay there, Josh?" he booms.
Your eyes fly open as you pray to three pantheons that you haven't said anything incriminating.
"Fine, sir." I love that you show my father the same respect as you do your boss.
"Don't get too comfortable in that bed," Dad growls.
I have never in my life seen anyone leap to their feet as fast as the co-president of the United States just did in my old childhood bedroom. If this whole chief-of-staff thing doesn't work out, you could have a career in the military kid. Besides, you'd look cute in a sailor suit with a bugle.
"No sir."
"Plenty of time to get a good night sleep tonight Josh. Our couch is very comfortable," I add slyly.
"Midge and Stoogie approve."
You rub your face. "More cousins?"
"Josh! You may know them as Justice Midge and Stoogie."
"Cats? On the couch?"
"Cats and boyfriends on the couch," I answer cheerily.
"Great," you squeak. "It's great, because we were never allowed to have animals when I was growing up. Because they shed and eat their own fecal matter and can transmit tapeworm and other deadly parasites."
"Josh, if I find you in the same bed I used to tuck my daughter into, trust me, you'll be wishing for for an incursion as friendly as a tapeworm."
"Why do you think I brought the secret service with me?" you chuckle nervously.
My dad turns and walks out of the room muttering, "They'd be on my side."
When the door shuts, Josh sits back down on the bed and starts thumbing through his bag . "Your dad's a real..." he starts, then amends, "I'm glad your mom likes me."
"She doesn't like you so much," I inform him.
"She does so! Hey, I played about seven thousands rounds of rummy with her at Landstuhl! That, while your IRA bag man was trying to-Trust me, your mom and I are like this. She loves me."
I shake my head. "She did love you. Not so much after I told her you brought up Sarah Protrero to me."
"I didn't bring her up, Amy did."
"You mentioned asking her out on a date-"
"I mentioned that AMY had asked me to ask her out on a date!"
"- at Leo's funeral and just mere days after you kissed me and retracted it."
Did you hear that thud? That was the sound of Josh's dreams of a successful parental visit coming crashing down. "You didn't tell her that."
"I did," I confirm, mightily enjoying this opportunity to razz him. "Except when I told it to her, I may have mentioned that you had drunken stress-relief sex with me in between. More than once."
"Did you mention that you initiated it?!" he blusters. "More than once? And that every time, I had to hold your arms to keep you from scandalizing the elevator!”
“Of course I didn’t!” I retort, aghast. "She's my mother, Josh!"
"You told your mom that I kissed you, retracted it, then got hammered and slept with you, then asked you about my chances of getting with another girl at the Vice-President-elect's funeral?!"
"That does sound really bad, doesn't it." I have to have the best poker face in the world to have been able to keep from cracking up at this point.
"I can't eat this woman's food now!" he's fretting. "I have to fix this!"
I put the cap on my pen, because this deserves my undecided attention. "I would love to hear your plan for doing that."
"Okay- first, we need to clear up this Sarah Protrero thing because that was just misleading."
"You can assure my mother I'm the only girl you want to have sex with," I offer.
"Right. I mean, no! Of course not."
"Of course not?"
"I wouldn't put it like that."
"And how would you put it?"
"I'd say that she was misinformed- misled- about Sarah."
"So you'll tell my mom I lied to her," I deduce.
"No-!"
"That she raised a liar. And that I'm not trustworthy."
"Donna!"
"It's no wonder you want Sarah as a backup."
"I don't want Sarah as - I don't even know this woman!"
"Not the way you know me, like, you know- bibically."
"Okay, now you're just having fun at my expense."
"And you are just figuring this out?" I kiss his forehead. "Compliment her on the stuffing. It has plums and chili powder, and it's her own special recipe. Lie down for a few more minutes, I'm going to freshen up, and then I'll come get you."
I'm almost to the door when Josh calls out, "Donna? Your parents didn't like you with Freeride, did they?"
"My parents hated me and Freeride."
"I'd like them to like us," he tells me with a yawn. "It'll make the next fifty years a lot more pleasant."
You know, just when I think you are a hopeless case, you say something like that. And on top of psychadelic fruit-picker, no less.
"And we definitely want to be able to dump our kids on them for indeterminate amounts of time."
"Obviously, but I didn't want to be the one to say it. Donna- what are you doing?"
"We have twenty minutes until dinner." I check my watch. "Fourteen. Plenty of time."
“For wha- Ohhhhhh.” |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 20th, 2006|10:02 am] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
III: Forbidden Fruit
Rating: PG for language
Spoilers: Trans/Tom - future fic
December 24 | 7:29 CST
My dad and I are cruising down the interstate, en route to the airport. A quick glance at the spedometer tells me we're going about 85 miles an hour. I had forgotten what it was like to drive in a place where you can actually drive, not just sit in stand-still on a major roadway with plenty of time for you to wonder why you didn't just take the train.
“So... how’s that new job of yours?”
“Fine,” I say as I turn the vents so that the warm air can blow right on me. I had forgotten how much colder it is here than, well, anywhere else in the world except maybe Alaska and Antarctica. “Good. Not really too much to do now, you know, for me. It’s much busier for Josh.”
“What do you think of Mrs. Santos?”
“She’s great. We get along well. She trusts me because she trusts Josh, and she trusts Josh because the President-elect trusts him. I think she’s scared about how her life is about to change, and she wants to create a close-knit circle of people that she can count on to protect their privacy.”
“I saw her on tv a few times during the campaign. She seemed okay.”
“She is okay,” I assure him. “I have the feeling she sees me as someone who can empathize with her- you know, Josh and the President will sort of be living the same life for the next four years and there will be parts we’ll be privy to, and parts we won’t, and that hurts sometimes, to be shut out.”
My dad doesn’t really know what to say to that, so we’re quiet until he says, a little awkwardly, “So, your mom says you went on a vacation?”
“Oh yeah- to Hawaii!”
“You have fun?”
“It was amazing,” I gush. “I’ve always wanted to go. The trip was a complete surprise. Josh called me one afternoon and says, where are you? I told him I was with Mrs. Santos at the President-elect’s house. And he says, don’t move, I’m sending a car for you. I asked where he was, and he said, the airport and if I don’t hang up right now we’ll miss the plane.”
I have told this story about fifteen different times, but it never ceases to make my heart do little flip-floppy things. “Two minutes later, a secret service SUV shows up. Apparently, the President-elect stepped in to make sure I made it to the airport in time. Anyway, I made the flight and Josh had booked a suite at this absolutely beautiful hotel. We had this fabulous balcony that looked right out at a waterfall, and when it was windy, you could feel the spray on your skin...”
I trail off, lost in the memory of how Josh and I discovered this when we stumbled out for some air, delirious and on one of those particularly potent post-orgasm highs. The sensation of the cool breeze mixed with the light shower was like an instant recharger for us and our routine post-coital makeout session was rapidly ramped up into a full-scale scandalization of the deck chair. I told Josh, there was something kind of Tarzan-like about him, bare-chested and dotted with water beads, eyeing me hungrily against a lush jungle backdrop. He then made an ape-like utterance and the moment was lost.
When I tell him so, he sulks then corrects me that "jungle" is not synonymous with "tropical," because tropical refers to a position in reference to circles of latitude and has absolutely nothing to do with a warm or lush climate, as evidenced by the fact that both the Andes Mountains and Kilamanjaro are in the tropics, along with all the Hawaiian islands. He also points out he has read both Henry Miller tomes and says he found them to be quite mild, probably due to his vast personal experiences with women and sex, while most people were shocked by their debaucherous content. I suggest that decency standards have probably changed since the early 1900s, when he was in school. He says he'll show me a decency standard and as lame as his words are, I must confess he definitely has the goods to back up his confident expressions. Just thinking about being beneath him on that chaise with his arms on either side of me and that look in his eyes...
Of course, I edit all this out. But I do add, quite to my own surprise, “Being in love is the best feeling in the world. I would have thought a cardboard box was spectacular,if I were there with Josh.”
It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I think I see a hint of a smile curve on my father’s cheek. He may have commented, except just then we came up on the airport exit.
“What airline, Donna?”
“United.” We’re almost here! What I have realized is that Josh and I talk a lot for the little time we are actually in the same room together. We’re pretty much each other’s best friend and I don’t know who else to call when my mother spars with me over bad tv, or if I want to tell someone that she (astutely) compared my boyfriend a poodle. “I’m glad he picked Hawaii, which is where I always wanted to go.”
“Yeah, your mom always wanted to go to Europe.” We’re driving through the International section now.
“You should go,” I urge him.
He’s looking for the arrivals corridor. “Don’t think she’s much interested in it now.”
I think that’s peculiar, until I see his face when we pass the Lufthansa depot. I didn’t make the connection at first because I made my trip to Germany in a Medevac chopper.
“There it is,” my dad points out. “Do you see him?”
I crane my head, trying to see inside the baggage claim area. “No.”
“I can’t wait on the curb, so we’ll just have to park and walk over to the terminal.” We do and I’m quiet the whole time, as I wrestle with my sudden, overwhelming desire to hug Josh.
December 24 | 8:05 PM CST
“God bless Dulles,” I mutter, as I pass under the “Welcome to Madison, Local Time...” sign as I peel around the corner of the terminal towards the escalator that leads to the pick-up area.
Four hours, some stale pretzels, and three Cokes later, I’m finally here. I know all the research on soda- rotted teeth, ulcers, cancer, yada- but I needed some drug that would limit my concentration time for each thought to roughly ten seconds, and this is pretty much the only one that won’t get me fired or imprisoned on a felony offense. Bottom line, I couldn’t be on a flight for four hours to the cow capital of the world with nothing to do but imagine all the ways my girlfriend’s family hates me.
Girlfriend. Donna. Sex. Aiport motel. Escalator. Pick-up. Taxi & Limousine Service. Shall we take a taxi to the airport motel?
Do you see the beauty of the ten-second thought-change? Nowhere in the whiparound did the words Dad, Fist, Gun, Shallow Grave enter in. No imagining the collusion of milk men conspiring, Crucible-style, to bury my body in the woods and tell the press I was freakishly run-over by a miscreant cheese wheel.
Seriously, that’s not what I’m worried about. Donna’s dad doesn’t care that she dates, or even that she lives with a man, although I’m sure he probably doesn’t delve too much into that one. I think he may not like that that man is me. I don’t know- I suppose I did steal his daughter from a life of malteds and Maypoles and the Middle American dream of a life lived across-the-street from your parents, but there isn’t much I can do about that. Or that I’m willing to do about it. I won't apologize for a nice apartment off Dupont Circle and the chance to work in the White House, twice.
But I can’t be cocky, arrogant, superior, snobby, or dismissive- you know, me. I can’t be me. For the next 20 hours, I will be polite, deferential, and ask piquant questions about curd or whatever else titillates them around here.
I’m doomed. I hope dirt doesn't taste too bad.
But on the bright side, it’s been ten seconds, more in fact, so let’s spin the wheel of my mind and see where it lands. Airport motel sex for 10, Josh! And speak of a devilishly good idea that will remind Donna of all the reasons I’m right for her, I spy the trademark tousled blonde ponytail near the door and speed up my step. I am mere seconds away from a reunion with my woman!
And her dad.
Her dad?!
She brought her father to the airport?! Oh great, and from this angle, he’s standing right in front of the local hotel and motel listings. Now that, Alanis Morrisette, is ironic.
They’re checking arrival times when I come up behind them. “Donna?”
She whirls around and her put-the-brakes-on-sex snafu is temporarily forgotten as she throws her arms around me. “Hi!” She’s still holding me and I frantically try to find somewhere to put my eyes other than the red-faced dude who's got about three inches and thirty pounds on me. “I’m happy you’re here,” she whispers.
I swallow and respond with a noncommittal, “Yeah...” I hope she hears in my tone all the stuff I'm not too keen on expressing in the present company.
She releases me and asks, “You remember my dad?”
Wouldn’t know him if I fell over him. “Of course, Mr. Moss.” I extend my hand. Fathers like firm handshakes. Firm handshakes command respect.
“Josh.”
“Nice see you.” Don’t be too formal, it’s pretentious. Be folksy. Less airs, more folks.
“You have a suitcase, Josh?”
“Nope,” I say with a laugh that’s a little too loud to be comfortable or even intelligible, since an inquiry about luggage in a baggage claim terminal is actually not funny at all. Nervously, I explain, “Just here for a drive-by visit with Donna.”
Mr. Moss stops and looks peculiarly at me. Donna’s smile freezes on her face and she daintily takes my arm.
“Walk with me, Josh.” Her father starts on ahead of us, which makes me feel like I’m back in the seventh grade when my mother escorted me on my first date with a girl. She was supposed to just drop us off. But no. She claims I always knew the plan was for her to come into the movie and sit two rows ahead. She didn’t understand that middle-schoolers don’t overcome that sort of mortification; it would have traumatized me for life except that I was so hounded by the opposite sex, I couldn’t have escaped them if I tried.
“OW!” Donna just pinched me.
She leans in and says in a low voice. “Ix-nay on the ex-say talk.”
“Did your father finish third grade? Cause if he did, Donna, he understood what you just said. Besides, it wasn’t sex-” I blanche as the echo replays in my head. Shit.
She shakes her head and we quickly fall into our schtick. “How’s the apartment?”
“Burned to the ground,” I reply sadly.
“Seriously, did you remember to turn off the coffee pot?"
"Donna! I thought we decided YOU were in charge of appliances!"
Now it's her turn to blanche, which is quite a feat for Donna. " Josh!" She's already reaching for her cell. "Maybe one of the secret service guys can-”
I wrap my arm around her shoulder. “Yes, I did," I tell her, as I squeeze her to me and put a little kiss on her pissed-off face.
“Did you call your mother?”
“No, but I don’t need to call her on Christmas Eve.”
“Yes, you do.” Now she tries to hand me her phone.
“Why? We’re Jewish!”
“Because she will call me to wish me a Merry Christmas tomorrow, but she’ll call you tonight to make sure you remembered to buy me a present and to make sure it’s a nice present-”
“I'm supposed to buy you a present?" I interject. "Look, I made up the appliances thing, but you *are* in charge of shopping. Your words, not mine.”
“- and when we don’t pick up, she’s going to think we’re screening her call when she took the time to remember me on a holiday she doesn’t even celebrate.”
“So me calling my mother back is really just all about you?”
“Isn’t everything?”
“I really missed you-” I start to say.
"Yeah?” she brightens.
“Now, not so much,” I finish.
We are at the car park now, and Donna and her dad stop at a four-seater truck. She hops up to the front seat, and I’m left to sit... in the back. Alone. Just me back here alone. And no radio. And a mile marker that tells me we’re 20 miles from Donna’s house. I suppose it's fitting that my 20 hours in Wisconsin starts with 20 miles in a truck.
8:18 PM
Silence.
8:21 PM
Same.
8:24 PM
Still silent.
8:26 PM
Progress! We have words- no sentences or even phrases yet, but I’m optimistic. The expression so far centered around a squirrel with misdirection and less-than-beatific invocation of the holy family.
8:32 PM
My world is one of cell phones and Blackberries and politicians and Jewish mothers. 14 uninterrupted minutes of silence is making me ungodly paranoid.
8:35 PM
Start to wonder if I’m deaf. There must be talking, I just can’t hear it.
8:39 PM
“So Josh, how’s work?”
“Great!!” I lean forward, ready for a super discussion with this man of penultimate importance in my personal life. “What about you?”
“Fine.”
8:40 PM
Kind of overshot on that last one.
8:45 PM
Hollow Kettle Road. Donna’s street. Don’t bother to ask if putting “hollow” before “kettle” is redundant, as a filled kettle would actually not be a kettle nor a cistern of any kind, but rather just a rock or other solid, useless mass of some sort. I have asked- several times over the past nine years in fact- and have yet to receive a satisfactory answer.
Donna turns to her father. “What time are Dani and Roy and Jesse and Marion getting here?”
“Not until about 9:30,” her father says.
“Wow, that’s late for mom. She used to be so adamant that the soup course be distributed at 9:30, sharp.”
“Yeah, but Jesse had- I don’t know, some issue with a plumber?”
Donna turns around to me. “Dani and Jesse are my cousins.”
“Oh.”
“Did you eat?”
“Not since the vac-packed fare on the plane.”
She rolls her eyes. “I did cut up carrots and celery and put them in your carryon.”
“Oh right.” I reach over and pull out the tupperware and hand it to her, full as she left it. “Here you go.” She gives me a look as I feign ignorance. “Oh sorry- I thought they were for you! That’s why I didn’t eat them.”
“Whatever. We’ll have turkey and whatnot when my cousins get here.” She looks at her watch. “You should have time to take a quick nap, I bet you haven’t slept either.”
“No, I haven’t. And I lost two hours of sleep last night when Amy came by,” I mention, as I re-zip my bag.
“The girl you used to date?” the voice in the driver’s seat barks.
Oh crap. You know those questions where they say there is no right or wrong answer? This is definitely not one of those questions. What do I say?! Option A: Lie. Option B: Admit you just said your ex kept you up last night while your girlfriend was away visiting her parents. I suspect he would not believe A, which would lead us to B anyway. “Um... yeah?” I venture.
“Yes, but she works for Josh now,” Donna pipes up quickly. “She has Josh’s old job.”
“Huh,” is all he responds. I suppose it’s better than him dumping me on the side of the road to be eaten alive by grizzly bears or the other animal predators that troll the woods of Wisconsin.
"Yeah, you know, I just had to get clear with her about our new relationship. You can't be invovled in any messy entanglements with people you work with. It's too distracting. Not that I think she's interested in me- I really have no idea- but I just had to tell her, you know, she's my subordinate. Forbidden fruit, at least in the White House. In some workplaces, it would be okay, I suppose. But I'm her boss, now, so-"
"Weren't you Donna's boss?" a very pointed paternal voice inquires.
"Oh, yeah," I reply and for some reason- maybe the caffeine and cold air combo- it doesn't register that I'm actually saving him the trouble of digging a hole for my sorry carcass. "I was her boss in the White House. And on the campaign too, but campaigns are different- boundaries are a lot more lax. It's like Vegas- what happens on the trail stays on the trail, and trust me, when it comes to shady, inappropriate associations the trail is ripe for the picking, you know?"
It is at this point that I glance up at the rearview to see if he does know, and I am taken hostage by a pair of eagle eyes glaring at me- so venomously that I freeze like that squirrel did with two axles and a billboard-sized grill barreling towards it. Except there are no woods for me to scamper back and hide in, so I shrink back on the seat and pretend to be really, really interested in my luggage tag. He hates me. So this should be fun. Really fun.
Donna turns back around and throws me the are-you-a-complete-moron look. “Anyway...” she continues, in a lame attempt to defuse the dark cloud which has settled over this 4x4, “by the time we get home from church, it’ll probably be about two. So you’ll definitely want to try and catch a quick nap or I’ll have to carry you out of the pew.”
I nod. I have learned that silence is not so bad.
And now we’re here. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 18th, 2006|10:39 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
II: Best Laid Plans
December 24 | 6:47 PM CST
Flight 752 Dulles to Madison International. Gate 7A.
“Donna, can you pass me that towel?”
Or is that 7 really a 4? Josh’s French sevens are soo pretentious. So totally Harvard-Yale-Yankee-jackass.
“Donna?”
ETA 7:15. Don’t come til 8- D BAD W/DELAY!!!
The “D” in this case stands for Dulles, in case you’re wondering. Josh is cute with exclamation marks in that he can never use just one. It suits him, the obsessive little tweakazoid that he is- he’s the attention span of a four-year-old trapped in the subhuman body of a 12-year-old boy. You wouldn’t think a human being could run on coffee, Mountain Dew, and donuts alone, but apparently one can. I swear I should donate him to science.
Don’t come til...
And I must be trapped in the psyche of a 15-year-old boy, because these days I seem to find double entendre in *everything*- especially hastily scribbled post-it notes from my boyfriend.
“DONNA!”
I jerk to attention. “Sorry, Mom- what did you say?”
My mother gives me one of those I-know-what-you’re-thinking smiles, notorious in the annals of motherhood. “I asked if you could hand me that towel.”
“Oh. Sure.” I reach for it on the corner of the table, where I’m coring apples for pie, and throw it to her, standing near the sink. “What time is it?”
“About fifteen minutes since the last time you asked me,” she teases me, but nonetheless glances over at the clock on the stove and relays, “Just about seven.”
“Thanks.” I wrest the last apple's core from its center and perform the necessary calculations with this latest information. It’s a twenty-minute drive from our house to the airport, so I have to leave by 7:20 in order to be able to be at the airport at about quarter of 8. That way, if there is a Dulles miracle and Josh’s plane isn’t delayed, he won’t have had to wait too long for me.
“You’d think you hadn’t just seen each other yesterday..." My mom is standing with the towel thrown over her shoulder, her hands on her hips, and grinning like a canary at me. “May I have those green beans, please?” she asks. I was working on green beans before the apples. "Like I asked you for five minutes ago."
“Sure.” I rise and walk the bowl over to her. “Do you need any help?”
“Are you done with the apples?”
“Yup.”
She takes stock of our kitchen and considers. If Josh has ever wondered where my extreme orderliness comes from, this trip will put his questions to rest. My mother- Chief of Staff of our house- has food for an army lined up on every available surface- table, counters, stove-top, cooling rack, above the microwave. The kitchen is Central Command and there is literally enough food for at least fifty people to eat too much. Not that we won’t use it- we will. On Christmas Eve, we always have an open house, followed by a sit-down dinner with my Wisconsin cousins at 9:30 sharp, followed by midnight service at Saint Anne’s, where my cousins Dani, Jesse, and I were all baptized, communed, confessed, and confirmed. Just like our mothers (who are sisters). Dani and Jesse were also, just like our mothers, married there.
Despite the expectation, I don't see myself dragging a puffy white sateen dress from Wedding World down the puke-colored aisle of Saint Anne’s in the near future- or ever actually. Although it would be funny to see Josh at the altar, furiously scrambling to send one last Blackberry before I reach him. I kind of like that image- it's real. I don’t want him gazing all dewy-eyed at me- I want a fumbling, tousled Josh Lyman Original profession of love. I decided that this afternoon while spending some quality time with the men of Genoa City (Young and the Restless) and Llanview (One Life to Live) and their beloveds.
I would never admit it to Josh, but there is a certain pleasure to plopping down on the couch in some bulky cable-knit socks and a pair of sweats and watching mindless shows where you whoop for your favorite characters, and call-out the ones you hate. My mom and I were all in sync over tuna fish sandwiches about who should be the father of Phyllis’ baby on Y&R, but we nearly got into a row over who was Blair's true love (Todd. Everyone knows that- well, everyone except my mother.).
You know, it would be kind of fun to spend an afternoon watching soaps with Josh. The hotel we stayed at in Hawaii used to show Spanish telenovelas during the breakfast buffet. So, one morning, I’m at the fruit bar making a salad, and when I walk over to Josh, I find him staring, mouth agape, at this wild-eyed, flailing stud creating a frenzy on a cheap-looking cafe set. As I looked between the tv screen and Josh, and I couldn’t help starting to laugh like a loon. He got very huffy over that, and demanded I tell him what was so funny (!!).
What’s so funny, I inform him, is that’s YOU!
He scoffs, but the more he blusters, the more I laugh until he's really mad (and wild-eyed and frenzied) and basically having a little mini-meltdown at the table because I just refuse to kowtow to his indignation. I say, You’re lucky I think you’re cute and kiss him and he says he loves me, but hates Telemundo AND soaps AND all male actors since Robert DeNiro’s last good movie, which was probably before I was born (it wasn’t). He also feels bad that my oeuvre of television viewing is so paltry that I find such drivel engaging, but he has hope for his powers of edification. After all, I had hereto only ever slept with drivel, and look at how he's turned that around for me! I throw a strawberry at him and he asks me if I can name the only fruit that has its seeds on the outside, and I answer, of course it’s the strawberry, who doesn’t know that?
"Donna, if you don't leave, you're going to be late for dinner," my mother warns.
My overactive brain must been quite adept at killing time, because it took about ten minutes for me to mentally scroll through all those memories, I’ve put the cored-and-cut apples in the pie crust, and put the pie in the oven, and it’s time for me to brush my teeth and head out to the airport to get my man.
Who once sucked down a shot of toothpaste in an attempt to get me to kiss him again. I told him never to do that again and he hasn’t. That plane can't touch down fast enough. Could I drag him to one of those by-the-hour motels by the airport and still make it back in time for the main course?
“Donna, step away from that oven, please,” my mom commands, exasperated. She’s got a casserole dish in each hand and I’m just staring off into space chewing absently on a green bean and thinking about sex.
“Sorry.” I don’t think I’ve been much much help. “Need anything else?”
“Yes, I need you to get out of my kitchen,” she snaps. But when she turns around I can see she's smiling. “Go on-don’t you have someplace to be? You don’t want to keep Josh waiting.”
“It’s good for him,” I retort, as I steal one more bean before she takes them to salt and sauté. “Do you know the number of people with open-door privileges is the same for both the President-elect and Josh? The president has two people who have open door privileges- his Chief of Staff and the First Lady. Josh’s are the President-elect and me. Not that it matters to me- I can push Josh around enough at home, I don’t need to do it at work too.”
“Did you prep the pull-out in the den?” she asks me.
“Yes.”
She throws me an apologetic look. “You know, I wouldn’t care, but Daddy-”
“It’s fine, Mom. I’d actually be worried about Josh and Dad having a run-in in the upstairs hall or something- he’d probably have a heart attack.”
“Your Dad is just-”
“Not Dad- Josh.”
“He is a bit- high-strung...” my mother chuckles.
“Ya think?”
“He reminds me of a poodle.”
I practically choke on a bean. “Oh my God, did you just say Josh reminds you of a poodle? Pepe le Lyman - I love it!”
“I meant it as a compliment!” she backtracks. “Kathy Anderson next door when I was growing up had a poodle, he was very cute, but very, very twitchy.”
“Very twitchy,” I concur about Josh.
My mom glances at the clock again. “Ooh, Donna, it’s 7:15, you should go.”
“I’m ready,” I tell her. “I just have to brush my teeth.” After the Todd and Blair blowout, I went upstairs to change into some slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. I didn’t need to stay tuned for previews- it’ll probably be another three years before I sit down to afternoon tv again.
I head up to the bathroom, take care of my teeth, then add another drop of cologne behind my ears. I should put on another coat of lip gloss, but instead pocket the tube. How great would it be if I could time my application to just when Josh walks out of the gate? How kissable would I be? Even more than usual.
I head back downstairs, armed with lip ammunition and a secret olfactory weapon wafting through my hair. My father is in the kitchen talking to my mother, who has a semi-distressed look on her face.
“Hey, Dad. So, whose car should I take?”
“Um...” my mother stammers.
“I’ll drive you,” my dad says gruffly. My father is always kind of gruff. He’s just a gruff, burly, Irish sort of guy. He works, he takes care of his family and his house, he likes to drink on Fridays. He loves my mom, and me. He never talks about God, but he’s never late to church on Sunday. That’s my father in a nutshell.
His jacket is on and his keys are already in hand, so it seems we’re going to get Josh. My mother throws me an apologetic look. It occurs to me that my father has only met Josh once, back when we first started in the White House and my parents made their first and only joint trip to Washington to see me. My mom has been several times since, notably the time she came to stay with me when I was recovering. That’s also how she came to know her future son-in-law. My dad doesn’t know Josh at all.
So this will be a little awkward. But okay.
“What time is Josh’s plane in?”
“Uh, about 8,” I tell him.
“Well, let’s go,” Dad prods me. “I’ll get the car warmed up.”
As I put on my coat, my hand brushes the lip gloss in my pocket and I just have to shake my head. Don’t think I’ll need this. So much for the best laid plans. Maybe I should run up and replace it with a bottle of Bayer. They say aspirin is good for preventing heart attacks... |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 17th, 2006|09:58 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Rating: PG13 for language
Spoilers: Tomorrow.
May be helpful, but not required, to read Retrograde Emotion below!
I: Stranger in a Strange Land
December 23, 11:53 EST
Oxford... no. Too work.
Blue oxford.
No. Too Hamptons.
(They don’t know what people are wearing in the Hamptons) !
(You don’t go to the Hamptons, and you know what people are wearing in the Hamptons: This shirt.)
Fuck it. I’m coming to the table wearing a yarmulke and nothing else.
OY. Step away from the suitcase, Josh. It’s time to take a break, approach the situation with a fresh perspective.
I walk backwards, hands raised in detante, as I eye the evil box on my bed. If she really loved me, she would have done this for me, I sulk. It’s been fifteen minutes and I’m still stumped- any idea what that does to the ego of someone with a 760 Verbal? It shouldn’t take me quarters of hours to pack a Goddamned suitcase!
I deserve a beer. Beer inspires ideas, right? Sure it does. I pad out to the kitchen and try to think of some of the great ideas inspired by beer. I can’t, but by now, I’m already here, so why waste the trek.
My beer is a consolation to my soul and I don’t want to compromise our union by re-entering hostile territory. I troll the living room for a bit, picking up pieces of paper and setting them down under the auspice of quick refresher reads. When I hit the sanitation brief, I remember that I wanted to see if the bastards across the street stole our recycle bin. Again. I’m not sure how you lose a recycle bin, but they have- twice- and so have we, except ours have been stolen. Huh. Coincidence.
Someone is lurking by our barrels- the brazen bastards! What did I tell you? I think someone wants a piece of me-
Wait. I squint to see. Is that... ?
I throw on the moccasin slippers Donna can’t believe I own, much less would wear in plain view of a member of the opposite sex, particularly one I had a snowball’s chance of getting into bed. In my defense, my mom bought them for me and clearly at a time when there wasn’t even a snowball’s chance of a snowball’s chance, you know what I mean?
I step lightly down the stairs so I don’t rouse our neighbors who lead slightly less vampire-ish lives, and turn the knob to the front door. The temperature drops about thirty degrees when I open the door, but the air is completely, eerily still. I’m Jewish, but it’s not escaped me that the air never seems to stand still after December 25.
She’s in profile, but she doesn’t see me. I lean against the wrought-iron rail on the front landing. “Hey, stranger.”
Amy’s head whips around and her face flushes as red as the poinsettia at the bottom of the stoop. After a moment of mortified arbitration, she takes the three steps from the curb to the bottom step. “Hey,” she tries to say casually.
“Come here often?” I tease her, even though I kind of have a sense of what she’s doing here and I don’t think it’s anything to tease about. We’ve all been through it at least once.
“I was just...”
“On your way home.” I offer her an out and she takes it, gladly. She stands before me, her fingers absently skimming the bannister as if she were physically trying to grab on to some part of this experience- the experience of standing outside my house. But whatever revelation she’s looking for, I’m not- me, physically- a part of it. I’ve interrupted her exorcism. “I sometimes take the long way just to clear my head.”
“Yup.” She is terse at first, but finally realizes she has to either converse with me or be on her way, because after all, it’s my stoop. “What are you doing rattling around out here in the middle of the night?”
I’m not sure if the answer is insensitive, but I tell her anyway. “Packing.” I have a pair of sweatpants on and so I sit down. It’s not too cold.
“Who died?” she snarks. “Ye who will be wrested from his desk by death alone.”
“No one died,” I smile, and lean my head back on the bannister. Her sarcasm is a way to insulate herself for the inevitable answer, and I understand that. “We’re going to spend Christmas with Donna’s parents.” As soon as I say her name, I become aware that I have been turning my Blackberry over in my left hand since I looked out the window. I miss her the most during the nights. Apparently. “Donna’s already there, she flew out this morning.”
Amy nods, with a cold smile that’s a completely ineffective counterpoint to the pain in her eyes. “You’re Jewish.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Your mother must be thrilled,” she mutters under her breath. “You’ll be in God-knows-where America, thousands of miles from Florida, popping Christmas crackers with Protestants.”
“It’s what you have to do.”
“Convert?”
“In a sense. You change your priorities. You make new priorities.”
“New priorities, like learning all of the Beatitudes or reindeer names or six different kinds of domestically-produced cheeses?”
“No,” I smile. I have to let her play this out; I suppose she’s earned it because I wasn’t very nice. I am struck by the fact that empathy for one’s ex-lovers increases exponentially when one finds love. Is it spurred by unfairness? Or does benevolence just radiate from the heart that’s full?
“You have one day off a year and you really want to spend it on a plane to and from Wisconsin, broken up by only lame holiday fare that you wouldn’t even want to partake of with your own family, let alone someone else’s?”
“I do, actually,” I tell her.
“Oh Josh,” she smirks. “What it takes to bed a woman these days, huh?”
“What I want to do with my one day off is in Wisconsin, so if that’s where I need to be to be with her, that’s where I’ll be.” She opens her mouth, but I cut her off. “And before you make a comment, Amy, I’m not talking about sex.”
“Guess you probably can’t in the farmhouse anyway, what with Pa and his shotgun and all.”
It's a direct knock at Donna and so I decide to hit her where it hurts. “You don’t love the lumberjack, do you?” Inappropriate, I know, but I can’t watch her like this anymore. Somewhere in that bitter shell is a decent person crippled by her fear of being cracked open.
“What’s it to you?” she scoffs.
“If you did, you’d understand spending twenty hours in Wisconsin.”
“Twenty hours?”
“Yup. Fly out tomorrow at 3:00, and I’m on a flight back the next day at the same time.”
“That’s twenty-four hours.”
“I’m not counting the time in transit.”
“Oh.” The lumberjack hit a nerve, I know. She sidles over to the opposite side of the bottom step and sits down. “Twenty hours, huh? I’ve heard of spending twenty hours in Vegas, but never Wisconsin. But, it must be the love thing.” When she says it, she looks up under her lashes and I see it- the person who I once thought I might have had a real shot with. I'm relieved to hear her say that she knows it’s not us, it won’t ever be us. “Are you in love with her?”
“Yes,” I tell her. No one has ever asked me that before but I liked when she said it, and how easy it was for me to answer.
“Good.” She turns her attention back to the street and sighs.
I follow her gaze. “I’ve never felt this way before,” I confess. “It’s wonderful. You feel very... finished. Not finished like sidelined, or down for the count. Finished like- a painting is just splat on a canvas until it’s done, and then it’s art. You know what I mean?”
“No- I have no idea what you meant when you just used ‘splat’ as a noun,” she quips comfortably.
“Hey, I scored 760 on Verbal- if people who score 760 need to make up words for precision, they should have license to do so,” I rebuff. “I have an excellent linguistic arsenal, and clearly none of it quite conveyed that sentiment the way that ‘splat’ did.” We chuckle at my gaffe and indignant justification. When our voices dissipate, I make a quiet explication. “It wasn’t us. It wasn’t you. It’s just supposed to be Donna.”
She digests what I’ve said, and then, pulls forth the question that drove her here. “Was it always?”
“I don’t know,” I reply honestly. I consider for a moment- the tables are turned a bit and now I feel uncomfortable under her scrutiny. But I want to answer her. “It’s hard to say, because you don’t really keep track of it like that. Like when you get a cold- I mean, who knows when or where you picked up the germ, you only take notice when it consumes you full-blown.”
“The wheels kind of come off your metaphors after midnight, don’t they?”
“Kind of,” I laugh. “But you know what I’m trying to say, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she tells me, gathering her skirt and coat from under her and standing up. “I do.” Just like that, the shell has snapped shut. I know, as I watch her steel herself before me, that was my last look inside. The last ember of our whatever-it-was relationship has died, case closed, we’re boss and staffer now, only.
Even though I know women, and I know what they like, I admit to being 100% guy in breakups. The truth is, I haven’t thought about Amy at all since we ended our unfortunate reconnaissance. Our split was a nonstarter for me, I didn’t miss her, and to tell you the truth, when I see her now, I only remember “us” in the abstract. I recall, in a veiled way, how she opened and closed like an oyster and how that was an issue. I remember wanting her to open up and stay open, but with as little resonance as if I’d read it in a book. I don’t feel whatever must have fueled me at the time- passion maybe? I don’t know.
This is also how I knew it was Donna. I felt the force of circumstance when she could have died and I didn’t know, when she was miserable and I didn’t see, when she left and thrived and I wasn’t there to share in it. We’re cool with all that now, it’s water under the bridge, but it comes back- does it come back! - sometimes when we make love, and it’s fierce, the emotion that pushes us into each other just to be close enough, and what pulls us back because the hurt that hurt so bad before would be unbearable now.
But none of this is for Amy to know because she’s on her own road. When Donna calls me, like she should any minute, I’ll mention this chat I had on our stoop and tomorrow when I’m in her arms and her ear is tickling my mouth I’ll tell her about the fear and the ecstasy and how scary it is to submit to this love thing.
And then you see someone like Amy, who won't let anyone come close to her canvas, and all you think is, Thank God I've got the love thing.
As I contemplate this, and Amy contemplates how to say goodbye, the phone rings. She notes my face lit up more than my phone and correctly assumes that it’s Donna. She hesitates for a second, then attempts to smile. It falters, so she raises her hand in a half-salute, turns, and walks away.
I pick up the phone. "Hey.... I miss you," I say and I know I'm grinning at the sound of her voice. "I miss you and I'm counting the hours until arrive in the lovely state of Wisconsin, locale for the great American novel, East of Edam..." |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 14th, 2006|10:31 pm] |
Retrograde Emotion
Rating: PG 13 for language
Spoilers: Transition
There are two kinds of talks between men and women who are involved. The kind that men dread, the Let's-define-a-relationship talk. And the kind that women dread, the I’ve-just-defined-a-relationship-with-someone-who-isn’t-you talk.
Little did I know when I walked into Morton’s, at five minutes to five on December 2, that Josh Lyman was about to have a chat of the second variety with me. I assume he wants to lecture me about how I need to “understand this building” we’ll be moving into in a few weeks. So in preparation for that talk, I’m already fortified with a dry martini and a reserve of snarkiness when he walks in at one minute past five and takes the stool beside me at the bar.
“Hi, thanks for coming," he says and orders a Scotch from the bartender.
“You’re not going to offer to buy me a drink?" I drawl, as is my way, as he takes off his coat and scarf. “Boss,” I add pointedly.
He smiles sideways at me. You may have noticed that at the start of this, I referred to “men and women who are involved.” I use this verb tense because involvement is like virginity- you can’t take it back. You’re always in some state of involvement. Par example: when Josh smiles sideways at me and it reminds me of when he did it from the opposite pillow. Is that inappropriate, because he’s essentially now my boss? Maybe. But I can’t help it, it’s there and it can’t ever be erased.
“I’m not here as your boss,” Josh corrects me as the barkeep slides a drink to him. “This is a strictly social visit.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Are you here to pick me up?” I query, amused.
He doesn’t bite, but instead takes that mildly exasperated tone he adopted at Leo’s funeral, the last time we spoke until he called me to meet him. “I’m here as a friend, Amy. Look, um...the President-elect didn’t consult with me before he made you the job offer.”
“Josh,” I warn, “this sounds dangerously close to you suggesting I not take the job because you used to date me.”
“Not at all,” he surprises me. “I hope you take the job- I think you’ll be great at it. And with Sam, Lou, and you- I actually believe we might have a chance of survival.”
“Your sales pitch needs work,” I smile, happy to hear his confidence in me since I have, in fact, decided to serve President Santos as his Legislative Liaison.
He does not smile back, but instead looks soberly at me. “There’s something you have to know. The President-elect doesn’t know we were involved and I plan to tell him. I need him to trust me and I can’t do that without full disclosure. Just the same,” he says carefully, “if we’re going to work together, I need you to trust me.”
Now I really want to know what he has to tell me. “Just spit it out, Josh.”
“Donna and I are together.”
I swear I almost spit gin onto the bartender’s bow-tie. “Your assistant?”
“She’s not my-”
“Your old assistant?”
“The Chief of Staff to the soon-to-be First Lady.”
No way. Donna- Donna who doesn’t even have an A.B.- has my old job? “Seriously?”
“She was a spokesperson for the campaign, Amy. It’s not out of the blue.”
“Okay...” I’ll let this slide, because we need to talk about what else Donna’s been doing. Like Josh. He looks uncomfortable talking about it. I am willing to bet Josh and Donna’s involvement started in a situation similar to this: alcohol, anxiety, you know the rest. Except Morton’s doesn’t have a hotel above it. “Are you worried about working so closely?”
He looks at me funny. “With Donna?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Donna and I are living together-”
Say what?
“Amy, we’re getting married.”
WHAT?
“Married?” I sputter. “Since when? Three weeks ago, you were ready to call some chick from Justice and now-” His face stops me and I’m sure I heard my jaw hit the bar. “You were with Donna when I saw you at the funeral.”
“Yeah.”
“You let me do that whole spiel about Sarah when you were already together? And her too? What the hell?”
“What the hell, Amy?” he echoes. “Because we’ll tell people when we we’re ready to, not when you decide to run your mouth off.” I can still push his buttons, albeit not in a desirable way. Evidently.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“Don’t worry about it," he sighs. "The truth is, we lacked clarity- if that’s the word- and you actually helped push us towards it. Donna made a remark about Sarah Petro and-"
“Protrero,” I correct him dazedly. “Sarah Protrero from Justice.” Only three weeks since we discussed Sarah, and the whole universe has been wrenched in a new direction.
“Right,” he acquiesces. “Anyway, you should know about me and Donna. I don’t presume to know how you feel about working for me period, but since we were involved and I consider you a friend, I wanted to tell you.”
“Does it bother you that I have a boyfriend?” I ask skeptically. I really doubt it.
Josh responds with a pointed silence, as he nurses his drink and thinks of a diplomatic way to answer, but I get to it before he’s forced to take me there. “Oh.” Duh. I am slow, the realization hits me. “It would bother you if it were Donna and Donna had a boyfriend.”
His head cocks just a tad to the left as he takes another drink, a kind of unconscious twitch to loosen his collar. I have to smile ruefully at the fact that it bothers him just to think about it, and in this moment, I know I’ve lost the Josh I knew. To love. Or rather, maybe “my Josh” was never the real Josh and that was the root of our problem all along.
“I get it, Josh,” I assure him. “And I’m okay with it.”
* _* December 22 * _ *
I was okay with it. Actually no, I was actually never okay with it but up until tonight I was giving a damn fine performance. And then:
The President-elect walks to the center of the main parlor of the Burke House, where we senior staff-to-be are all kicked back with a whole lot of brandy and eggnog. He has his arm around Mrs. Santos, who is carrying a bottle of champagne. She's beaming at Donna. I experience a woozy coming-into-consciousness that I would equate to the part of a horror movie when the heroine realizes she’s in a car in a dark wood alone with the killer and no cell phone .
“Now, now- hush,” the President-elect starts. He points at Josh. “I have to do this before you skip out on us.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” Josh quips with an embarrassed groan, to which the rest of the room titters.
“I’ll keep it short and sweet,” the President-elect promises. “Josh, as you all know, is no less than a miracle worker. I owe my election to him, because I wouldn’t even have run if he hadn’t come to Texas and hog-tied me to a campaign bus. I have every confidence that he’ll be a superlative Chief of Staff for the country. But today, we celebrate another miracle- and if you know Josh, you know just how miraculous this is- ”
I desperately scan the faces in the room for some warning of what’s coming. Sam looks elated. Mrs. Santos looks proud. Donna looks bashful. Josh looks- Josh looks-
“Josh has asked this beautiful, talented woman to marry him and rumor has it, she said yes.” A collective gasp courses through half of the room, while the other half- the faces I saw- break into grins. “You did say yes, didn’t you, Donna?”
“Yes, I said yes.” She turns and looks adorably at Josh, who’s looking adorably at her, while I stand in the middle of this saturnalia, silent and stricken.
“Good, because that would have been really embarrassing,” the President-elect booms heartily.
The First Lady-in-waiting swats his arm. “Matt, stop. Make yourself useful and open this,” she says, and he obliges when she hands him the bottle. The cork pops, and the Santoses pass two crystal flutes to their soon to be Chiefs of Staff, and keep two for themselves, while stewards come around to serve pre-poured glasses to the rest of us. “To Donna and Josh, the future Mr. and Mrs. Lyman, we love you and we wish you a lifetime of happiness.”
We do?
“Here, here!” the room cries and lifts their glasses to toast the couple. Josh and Donna kiss before they drink, which affords a drunken Sam the opportunity to shout, “Speech! Speech!” to which the President-elect and a louder-than-you-would-expect Ronna join in.
Josh makes a show of leaning back against the sofa, and says to Donna, “Go for it, kid, you’re the spokesperson in the relationship. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.”
“Speeches are for razzing!" Sam heckles loudly. "We love Donna, we don’t want to razz her. We want to razz you. Since you are now our boss and this is one of the rare socially-acceptable occasions when we can do that to your face.”
The President-elect practically bellows at that. I think Sam may have already found his staunchest supporter for his imminent presidential campaign.
“Alright, alright,” Josh holds his hands up in surrender, as he rises from the sofa. He throws a cocky look back at the room and says, “You don’t have to ask me twice to say a few words about this woman beside me.” He means that line as a joke, you know, because he’s such a consummate lover (and now, I suppose, fiancé), he knows women, yada yada. But there is no jocularity when he turns to look at Donna and he bites his lower lip before he starts in... “A few words about this remarkable woman, who was barely more than a kid when she first showed up in my office and hired herself as my assistant.”
Oh, for the love of God, not this story. Again.
“That was nine years and three elections ago.” He looks over at the President-elect. “You say you couldn’t have done it without me, but I couldn’t have done it with you,” he finishes to Donna. “You’ve saved my career- more than once- put two justices on the Supreme Court, and earned the opportunity to serve in this White House at the highest level. And somewhere in between, you found the time to be my most reliable partner, my most trusted confidante, and my best friend. And in all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never once lost sight of who you are. I don’t think you quite realize what an extraordinary thing that is, but I do and so does everyone in this room who loves and admires you for it.” Donna quickly wipes her eyes, embarrassed; as if to provide a reprieve, Josh jokingly adds, with a stern look to this touched audience, “Not as much as I do. I’m the good cop in this scenario.”
Sam pipes up, “You didn’t give us much razzing material, and I’m kind of pissed at you for that, but I can’t knock a chance to compliment Donna.” Josh is now standing next to the arm of the sofa with Donna pressed to his side. “Seriously, we can’t think of two people who deserve this more. And for those of us who’ve been subjected to their tragically-transparent flirting and desperate, unspoken longing since Manchester in ‘98- thank God you finally sealed the deal, Josh- you dumbkoff!”
Am I in the room?
Sam doesn’t seem to think so. Neither does Josh, from what I can tell- no, Gee, that comment may seem insensitive to the person who was acutally sleeping with me during my apparently career-long quest to score with Donna. But maybe not. I’ll never know because by the time I can look at him without completely giving myself away, we’ve already toasted twice more and now they’re kissing for the crowd, to the extent that it incites whoops and much fork clanking on flutes.
When I finally am able to look, I find that I can’t stop- I can’t get over his face. I never dreamed the term “ga-ga” would be counted among Josh Lyman’s repertoire of expressions, but there it is. All lit by Christmas lights and finery and his blonde intended’s 15,000-kilowatt smile. She looks gorgeous. Of course, she’s not even as old as I was when I dated Josh and she has a better metabolism than me. Both of which make me hate her, as if I needed two more reasons.
I don’t hate her. I’m indifferent to her; or at least I want to be, there’s nothing I would like better than to just brush her off like, oh I don’t know, every other neophyte who answers phones and keep schedules for the DC power brokers. She’s not an us, she’s a them- well, now she’s an us, an inner circler, but only because she came in courtesy of a car bombed SUV and Josh Lyman’s coattails.
Okay, I take back the first part- it was a truly awful thing to think and I’m sorry I thought it. I am very sorry she was in that explosion and not at all sorry she lived. Really, I mean that. But the second part I’ll own. She did ride Josh into the White House; and yes, I mean that with every implication. Look, I know some people will say, How hypocritical for a women’s advocate to trash perky, little deputy do-gooder Donna! Shouldn’t I commend her for being so enterprising and industrious?
No. And here’s why. Because Donna is everything that I am fighting against. Josh didn’t hire her because she was ballsy, he hired her because she was cute, young, and ballsy. She has no credentials, which to me translates as: screw education, if your boss thinks you’re cute, you too can become the First Lady’s CoS and marry one of the powerful men in the Democratic party!
Shit. Where did that last part come from?
Josh’s walls are covered with paper from Yale and Harvard. Donna has a certificate from some Bumblebutt, Wisconsin high school. Mismatched much? How does that happen?
Duh, Amy. But here’s a visual aid just to add some salt to that bloodied heart of yours:
The party is breaking up, and the de facto Guests of Honor are huddled up in that obnoxious, exclusive way that only newly-minted married, or soon to be married, couples can be in a roomful of people at a party at someone else’s house.
Because I am staring, I am privy to the subtlest of looks passes between them- the corners of Donna’s mouth rise another millimeter, Josh’s next breath is just a little deeper, a little more desperate- and I know it will be long time before they get to sleep tonight.
I surmise that they are probably in throes of the delirious just-started-having-sex-regularly phase of love. No scratch that- “regularly” is staying over two or three nights a week. They are living together, which is a whole other racheted-up phase of hormonal frenzy. They probably do it two or three times a day. I covertly slide my eyes back over to the couch. She’s propped on the arm, a little above Josh, who has both her hands in his. His face is upturned and adoring.
Scratch that. Most likely, they’re doing it two or three times the two or three times a day they're having sex. In other words, they can’t keep their hands and mouths and unmentionables away from each other. And now, they're standing up to leave, to go home and give all their body parts a chance to indulge in requisition much-missed, I'm sure, over the past four hours.
Because I had one too many glasses of wine and I haven’t slept much, I decide to walk back to my apartment. And when I say walk, I mean the route that will take me four blocks out of my way past Josh's place. I can’t believe she lives there. I can’t believe he let her live there. I wonder what she’s done to the place. It wasn’t that bad, as a guy’s apartment goes, because Josh is never there much. But he has a treadmill (that he never uses) smack in the middle of the main room, and a really hideous comforter on his bed. I bet the treadmill’s still there; the comforter probably spends the majority of its time thrown hastily on the floor.
I round the corner of Josh’s street, the fourth in a row of lovely brownstones. I’m so enchanted with the red-bowed wreaths and white light spectacle around me that I don’t notice until I’m practically next door-
Oh.God. He’s outside. With her. On the stoop. They don’t see me; I’m behind them, and they’re looking at the stars. I want to walk away, but I can’t. If I move, the tears brimming in my eyes will start to spill down my cheeks.
“Four years,” he tells her with a weary sigh. “Four years and I’m done.”
“Famous last words,” she chuckles.
He looks down at her. “No, seriously. I had a talk with the President about it.”
“You spoke to the President?”
“Yeah. I wanted to know if...” he can’t quite articulate what he wanted to know.
“You wanted to know if it was okay,” she is able to say for him. “Okay that you’re not Leo.” She looks up to see that her deduction is correct and he places an affirmative kiss on her forehead. “What did you say?”
“I said, it’s a privilege and an honor to serve this office. But I want to be more than a good citizen. I said- I said I want to marry you and be the guy you count on, the one my family counts on.”
“Did you really say that?”
“Yes.”
“And what did President Bartlet say?”
“He said, ‘About damn time you took your head out of your ass and married that girl.’”
“No he didn’t!”
“Swear to God,” he assures her. “But he told me not to tell you because he wants to save that anecdote for the wedding.”
“Turncoat,” she chides him. “Don’t worry, I’ll put on poker face when he tells it.”
“Don’t bother,” he retorts. “Your ability to lie is on par with my ability to drink. Nonexistent. A shonda really.”
“I’m from Wisconsin! What’s your excuse? That you had no friends in school?”
“How can I make you stop talking?” he teases and makes a playful pass for her mouth. Which turns steamy and serious as soon as they start to kiss. They are also, apparently, in the phase where every kiss is a communiqué, a chance to reaffirm loyalty, belovedness, and other such intensities felt. Josh and I never made it to that phase.
She pulls back. “You really think you’ll be able to leave the White House?”
“I don’t want to wake up one day and realized I missed what should have been the best part of my life.” He’s brushing her hair with his hand. “I mean, I would never call it just a job, but at the same time, when I'm on my last breath, I’m not going to be reaching for one last look at that sugar subsidy briefing.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” she kids him.
But he is wholly seriously when he continues, “I know I can leave the White House because I have. When I went to Germany. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t thought at all about what was happening in the Oval until your IRA boyfriend pointed it out to me.”
“Oh,” is all she says, but after a moment of consideration, she lays her cheek on his chest.
“Anyway... when you face that, you realize... I don’t know. I realized I won’t be able to solve all the world’s problems in my lifetime and it’s not worth cutting my ear off.”
“You lost me with the ear bit.”
“Like Van Gogh. I was in this Nietzsche seminar once and we were talking about the time he was in a mental hospital. Someone asked the professor if he would have written half of what he wrote if he hadn’t been crazy. The professor answered that an inordinate number of people who did great things were driven to them by their personal torment. They wrote and painted and composed because it was unbearable for them to live in the world. I’ll happily take inconsequence and obscurity for this.”
“This stoop?”
“This stoop is not inconsequential,” he counters, his voice laden with the gravity of what he is about to say. “It’s a part of a trajectory that links Birkenau and a burning house to the babies our babies will have someday. The definition of civilization. The future we all claim to be working for- it’s being brokered right here on these stairs. We won’t solve sugar subsides or the host of problems the world faces, but so long as there’s kissing on stoops, there will be kissing upstairs, and humankind will live to fight another day.”
She uses his shoulder to pull herself up. “What do you say we go take one for humanity?”
“It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it,” he quips, as he follows. He moves to open the door, but she calls him back-
“Josh-”
There they are, the two of them face to face in dusky silhouette with this Christmas movie set backdrop, on their stoop. She whispers and I can’t hear what she says. I can’t quite make out how his face shifts. But in the next minute, her arms are wound around his neck, his face is buried in her hair, and he slowly rocks her to the beat of the turning earth.
Or so I imagine. Whatever the tempo, he moves with her, and she with him, however much I like it or not.
So with nothing left to do, I turn and start to walk the four blocks back to my apartment. After all, tomorrow is a work day. |
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[Jun. 30th, 2006|12:27 pm] |
A Day in the Life,
from the Desk of Josh Lyman
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Tomorrow
I didn’t read it, that’s a gross overstatement. I peeked at it. How could I not? She shouldn’t have left it right there on the table. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t right on the table. It was actually in a box on the table, and yes, the box was marked D. Moss, but it was open! She left it open. I figured she wanted me to read it without admitting she wanted me to read it. I know women, and women do that.
As soon as I peeked, I had to read it. Because there was so much I didn’t know. Maybe I should have known, maybe I was guilty of being actively ignorant- I have to know because I saw it. See it. How could I not see it? The stress, the anxiety, the wondering about my intentions, what I’m thinking, if I’m thinking or if I’m just pathologically pathological and letting the forces of Donna, exhaustion, and horniness act on me without any push-back.
How could she not know how I feel about her? But she didn’t and I knew this because if she did, she would not have thought I’d be uncomfortable with sex in my apartment. We’ve moved past that, sort of, to moving in. I say sort of because more days than not for the past month sex is about the only time we see each other. This realization hits me like a ton of bricks.
Also in the box: my boy Heimlich. I must be grinning as I turn the book over in my hands. I was so the man that Christmas. God, that was a lot of Christmases ago. Suddenly, my Cassanovan coup feels more like the creepy old dude reliving his glory days on the high school football field.
I must do something nice for Donna. Not candy or jewelry nice (really, let’s be honest, that’s EZ Pass to sex nice). Something that will do what the inscription in that book did for her nine years ago- assure of my gratitude, admiration, and love for her. Now a different kind of love. Different, and the most important I’ll share with anyone, ever, in my life.
I put Donna’s diary back in the box and pad over to the bed. She’s asleep because it’s almost 2am. I not, because I just got home from the OEOB. In bed, still awake, an idea comes to me. Tomorrow, I’ll bring home some of that new stationery.
- Two Days Later -
Donna’s in the bathroom. I told her I have some work left to do, but I’ll do it out in the kitchen because I know she’s had a crappy day and just wants to go to bed. I scribbled a few final sentences onto the new stationery. I’ve been working on this all day, but now that it’s done, I’m feeling a little self-conscious- I don’t know why. I know she’ll like it and it will mean the world to her that I wrote it. Maybe it’s just like when the Congressman turned to me, after being on the campaign trail for an entire primary season, and said, “This is getting real isn’t it?” Duh, yeah, what did you think it was?
The light in the bathroom, her half of the bed, what’s now our room, and my feeble attempt at a love letter- yeah, this is real, Josh. And you’ll do this because that woman in there will be your partner, your wife, the mother of your children, and the key to your success or failure as a person on this planet. Oy, now I know why my mother always sent me all those Philip Roth books- reverse psychology to keep me from turning into one of the balding, pouchy antiheroes who claim they don’t want a girlfriend, but really could never get or keep any woman.
In an attempt not to be that guy, I put my assignation on her pillow.
THE WHITE HOUSE
JOSHUA N. LYMAN ~ CHIEF OF STAFF
A Day in the Life
You set the alarm for 5am, fifteen minutes before I have to wake up and an hour before you do. You made love to me, sent me to shower, and went back to sleep. You were totally out by the time I came out, and you had a half-smile on your face. I kissed your hair, wished I could spend more time with you, and thanked God that you stick with me even though I can’t. Then I went into the kitchen and found the pot of coffee you must have put on while I was in the bathroom and I started to choke up because you deserve way more than fifteen minutes of time with your boyfriend, especially when you have to wake up an hour early to get it.
As I walk to the car, the Secret Service dude asks how I am. I say, lucky. He tells me I say that every morning.
The first thing I see when I sit down at my desk is that picture of you from the dinner the Bartlets threw after we won. It’s a good picture (although I don’t think you could ever take a bad one), and my favorite one of you. You look so confident and graceful seated next to the First Lady-in-waiting. Everyone sees the ease, but I see in your smile the same idealist who drove from Wisconsin to New Hampshire way back in the day. How far you’ve come- and I could not be prouder of you. You inspire me everyday.
As usual, there’s a mini-crisis to deal with over lunch, so I call your office to say I won’t be able to meet you. You, as always, are cheerful and wholly supportive as you tell me not to worry about it, to take care of the country, and you’ll see me at home. I want to tell you how much I love the idea of you and me at home, how it’s really what’s keeping me going through this very shitty day, but all I say is okay and I love you.
Sometime before six, I come out of the President-elect’s office. You’ve waited twenty minutes just to say hello to me before you leave. It’s been a bad day for you too, I can tell from your face. You look tired, but I suppose that started when you woke up too early. I am upset that you waited, and remind you exasperatedly that there is always room on my schedule for you. You say it’s not important, you didn’t want to intrude, and don’t want to fight, you just want me to hold you for a second, so I do. You tell me you lost the AIDs partnership, you tried and tried, but the notoriously fickle charity president backed out anyway. I remind you that she’s an ass, and you say you know, but we are the chief ass-handlers. I laugh out loud at that and remind you that you are superlative at that- just look at your boyfriend. In my mind, I swear that hell or high water I will be home before nine so that we can have a cocktail and unwind and I can try to make you feel better. But I don’t say it because I know it’s a promise that’s not in my power to keep.
Before you leave, you pull out a container of chicken marsala and tell me if you smell fried food on me when I come home, you’ll kick my ass. You don’t need to threaten me, I won’t buck your mandated diet plan. You pretty much assured that when reminded me that we’ve already courted two potentially fatal heart conditions and the third strike is out. I know how I felt when it was you on the operating table and I’d sooner cut out my heart than put you through that.
It’s 8:40 and I’m only halfway done with this interminable report on farm futures in India. It will take me ten minutes to get home- twenty-five if I count the time to pick up a bottle of wine and some white roses that won’t clash with the poinsettias you bought. It’s started to snow. My insides get warm remembering the expression on your face the time I lobbed snowballs at your window. Maybe I’ll serenade you again, although I doubt the Secret Service guys will be as good seconds as Toby, Danny, and Charlie.
The picture of you alone is on the left side of the desk; the picture of us in Hawaii is next to the clock. Screw the report, if I have to, I’ll wake up two hours early to finish it. We both have a responsibility to the country, to the soon-to-be First Family, but to each other too- you’ve seem to have mastered this dual role much better than I. You take better care of me than I do of you. It frustrates and worries me, but I’ll try to do better for you and so long as you stick with me, I’ll never stop trying. That’s one promise I can make and keep- I won’t ever stop working to be a better man, friend, lover, and partner to you.
As evidence, it’s the dead of winter, and I’m picking up a bottle of white wine completely out of season. (I have to tease you just a little so you’ll know I wrote this and not Otto).
On the way back to the car, a woman with a baby stroller catches my eye. Either there’s been a burst of fertility in DC or it’s me. I especially like the blonde, blue-eyed ones and seem to notice them more than the others...
When I open the door at 9:17, I find you sprawled out on the couch and you break into the most amazing smile. All that, just for walking through the door- it makes me want to do it every night. I ask what you’re working on. You ask for a seven letter word for commiserate. I say who cares, take the paper from your hand and throw it across the room. You say you love it when I show off my athletic prowess, it really turns you on. Totally overdue, top of niceness scale makeout session on our couch ensues.
You’re in my arms and you thank me for coming home because you really needed me tonight. Oh, and the flowers are beautiful. So are you.
Thank you for your endless patience and love, I know it isn’t easy.
All my love always, Lulu.
JL |
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