“Ah, Bowen, hi.”
They each respectively tilted toward the other, kissing each other’s cheek. Bowen Babson, the anchor of Good Afternoon, USA, pulled back from their hellos and grinned. He, like Cleo, had been a young hotshot, on a rocket through the network, landing his own show two years ago, at thirty. Cleo had always admired this drive and naturally admired his confidence (like attracts like), which occasionally allowed for Cleo to daydream about their potential. He also had a reputation for sleeping around Washington (no judgment) and dating women under twenty-five. (Which again reminded Cleo of Matty and how even her relatively geeky high school boyfriend was dating up these days, and no wonder he hadn’t kissed her!) But Bowen was TV-anchor handsome, wavy dark hair, penetrating green eyes, whip smart, and even, Cleo begrudgingly admitted, fairly funny. He was easy to talk to between segments, he asked fair questions, and he was always, always prepared. It wasn’t difficult to see why he cleaned up on the singles scene. It also wasn’t difficult to see why he should have come with a warning label and why he’d never so much as made a single suggestive remark to her. Cleo wouldn’t have expected him to.
Cleo peered over Bowen’s shoulder, trying to track Jonathan. “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
Bowen’s gaze followed hers, his head swiveling toward the back of the room.
“Admiring someone?”
“I’m a senator, Bowen; what makes you think that I’m here in pursuit of romance?”
Jonathan had his back to them now, and Cleo was intent on keeping her focus.
“Sorry,” Bowen said. “You’re right. That was shitty. Though, just for the record, I’d have said the same thing to a man.” He held up his hands. “I’m the furthest thing from a misogynist. I was raised with three sisters. They’d literally pummel me if I had a sexist bone in my body.”
Cleo broke her gaze, met his eyes. And she was surprised to see that they were sincere.
“I’m sorry,” she replied, then thought of Arianna, who apologized too much, and then she thought of MaryAnne, who refused to accept Cleo’s (somewhat sincere) apology. Words were words were words. Intent mattered. “You really weren’t being that shitty. I’m just . . . I’m busy.”
Jonathan had cupped his hand around the woman’s waist now; they were headed toward the exit.
“Oh my God,” Cleo muttered. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“Um, can I help?”
“What? No.” Cleo stood on her tiptoes, her calves genuinely cramping in protest, to watch them through the crowd.
“Some investigative reporting, perhaps?”
They were gone, out the exit door, on to God knew where. Probably a room upstairs at the hotel, while Emily waited at home lassoing the children. Cleo hated Jonathan in that moment, hated that he’d forced her friend to become a cliché. She’d given up her job for their family, and he repaid her with this. For Cleo, there was no greater injustice.
“Fuck,” Cleo said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Can I put that on the record?” Bowen leaned in closer. Though his typical fling was indeed at least a decade younger than Cleo, she wondered if she were misreading things: Bowen Babson appeared to be flirting with her, and she found this both intriguing and suspicious.
“You may not.” Cleo frowned and returned to her table, grabbing her purse and blazer.
“Hey, can I text you?” Bowen called after her.
“What?” Cleo spun around, genuinely shocked that she was not misreading him at all. Or maybe he wanted to text her about something else; maybe Senator Jackman had run into Bowen and mentioned the renewed free housing bill? She found herself extremely unnerved.
“Can, like, can I get in touch. Maybe a drink?”
“I’m thirty-seven, Bowen.” She paused. “And I have a fourteen-year-old.”
“Why are you telling me your biography and assuming I don’t already know this? Besides, I like kids,” he said.
“But do you like teens?”
Bowen looked confused, like he didn’t know the difference between a preciously adorable five-year-old and a surly fourteen-year-old who had to be reminded to both wear deodorant and brush his teeth.
Cleo waved her hands. “Look, call me, don’t, whatever. I have to go.”
“Something’s happening here, between us, clearly.”
Cleo didn’t bother answering. Emily Godwin was her friend. Her friend, for God’s sake, and she didn’t have many of them. She needed to tell her. She needed to tell her immediately. This wasn’t going to be another regret.
“You absolutely, unequivocally are not telling her,” Gaby shouted, so loudly that Cleo turned down the volume on her car speaker.
Cleo hadn’t exactly thought through the plan. She’d just peeled out of the valet stand, intent on landing on Emily’s doorstep and confessing. She had never been a girl’s girl—one only needed to look at the debacle with MaryAnne to intuit this—and for once, she understood both lucidly and emphatically that she could have Emily’s back. Obviously she was going to drive over there right now and tell her.
“You do not get into her business,” Gaby said, still shouting.
“But she should know!” Cleo clicked her blinker too hard, made a turn out of DC toward Alexandria.
“Maybe she already does. Or maybe she doesn’t and doesn’t want to. Or maybe she does but doesn’t want to. Or maybe they have an agreement. Who fucking knows? This isn’t yours to get in the middle of.” Gaby had wound down a bit, her voice now hovering just above a low menace. “I’m sorry, Cleo.” (Was she really sorry? Cleo wondered. When are we going to stop using that phrase when we are so rarely truly and genuinely sorry?) “But you can’t just ring her doorbell and blow up her life. Affairs happen. We’re adults.”
Cleo rolled to a stop at the light. She knew as well as anyone that affairs happened. And yet even after MaryAnne’s op-ed, she hadn’t told Gaby about Nobells, about that second year in law school. She’d never told anyone, actually. Shame, embarrassment, regret—that’s probably what kept her quiet. Culpability too. She’d gotten out of it with little fallout, which should have relieved her. She hadn’t destroyed his family; she hadn’t destroyed her reputation entirely, which even in law school was as a superstar.
She hiccupped, wondering how much she should share now, with her best friend, who wouldn’t judge her. The light changed, and Cleo pressed the gas too quickly, her tires squealing below, as if she could outrace her past, as if it weren’t right on her tail, breathing down her neck.
ELEVEN
If Cleo had just chosen from her list at random as Gaby had suggested, this regret never would have seen the light of day. There was MaryAnne shameful, all done in the name of ambition, and then there was this sort of shameful, which, even thirteen years later, still made her sick with disgust. If she hadn’t seen Jonathan at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, she would have kept it stuffed down, where she preferred it to be. But there it was, a blight smack in the middle of the pages of her yellow pad, folded in between NEVER talk back to Owens (a formidable torts professor who annihilated Cleo in an open argument on product liability) and lay off bourbon, which, all these years later, Cleo had little memory of the why behind it but also couldn’t ever remember drinking bourbon as of late, so it must have been something. She had a vague recollection of an evening out with Gaby in law school and of . . . dancing? She shook her head. It couldn’t be dancing. Cleo McDougal did not dance in public, which she realized, now, might soon change.
There it was, one word, on page four of the yellow pad, and she understood its meaning: NOBELLS. Thirteen years ago, she had double underlined it, as if not just a regret but a warning too.
Cleo leaned back in her office chair and exhaled, her whole body slumping. She really didn’t want to face this reckoning, but the more she thought of poor Emily Godwin, who never failed to cover Cleo’s orange-slice duty and picked up an extra rotisserie chicken from Costco, the more convinced she became that if she were serious about ad
dressing these regrets—if she didn’t just want to use it as a stunt to propel her toward Veronica Kaye’s checkbook (a differentiation of which Cleo was not yet sure)—she had to face Alexander Nobells. MaryAnne Newman hadn’t been wrong about everything in her op-ed.
As a second-year law student and young mother, Cleo had perfected the art of juggling fine china. Metaphorically, of course. She wouldn’t have had time to learn to juggle, even if that had been in the course catalog. (If it had been a requirement in the course catalog, she would have found the time.) Professor Nobells, who ran the Advanced Evidence seminar, had a reputation for being jovial but tough, and Cleo liked him immediately. He wore speckled sweaters with cowl collars and black-framed glasses that were both retro and modern, and sometimes Cleo would watch him, rather than listen to him (an anomaly for her for sure), and think that if life had put him on another track, maybe if he had been less intelligent or less passionate, he could have been an L.L.Bean model. As it was, he was maybe forty or so and looked like a man who had grown into his looks.
He was a partner at the law firm (the best in the city) where she worked the summer between her first and second years and had a reputation for taking an interest in his students’ lives, so Cleo thought nothing of it when he stopped her on her way out of his seminar to ask about Lucas. She hadn’t publicly shared that she was a single mom, but Columbia was small enough that she assumed people knew, and like it or not, she was asked about it when she interviewed for the summer position. (She had repeatedly assured them that she had excellent childcare lined up, which she did. She also wondered if they’d ever ask a single dad such questions and, furthermore, knew that these questions weren’t ethical, but she didn’t want to jeopardize her job prospects by pointing this out.) She tried her best to show up to class in nonwrinkled, nonrumpled clothing and with her hair brushed and cheeks blushed, but she knew this wasn’t a battle she always won. But what she lacked in style, she made up for in preparedness, which was all that mattered to her in the end. She’d thrived at her summer position at his firm and made Law Review her first year. She didn’t give one shit if Lucas’s oatmeal ran down the front of her T-shirt if she could out-debate, out-work, and out-gun her peers.
Professor Nobells, whom she had known only by name over the previous summer, seemed to take sympathy on her that day when he stopped her in the doorframe as she left Advanced Evidence. She knew he was married. He often spun his gold band around his finger as he paced on the dais, and sometimes he’d tell adorable anecdotes about his kids, who were a few years older than Lucas (who was just eighteen months or so—Cleo remembered he’d just learned to say two-word sentences when this all started happening).
Still, when he said, “Miss McDougal, do you have a moment,” she turned back toward him, not really having a free moment because she was due to get Lucas from day care, and she didn’t like to be late because she spent large swaths of her afternoon looking forward to sweeping him up in a bear hug. But she wasn’t the type to brush off her professors, so she said, “Of course. Is everything OK?”
His eyes fanned into a smile. “I just wanted to check on you. I know you’re pulling double duty. And your work is immaculate, so it’s not that.”
She waited for more, her breath in her throat. In law school, though she knew she was good, she still had a small but niggling perpetual worry that she wasn’t as good as she thought. In Seattle, she’d been a superstar because her competition wasn’t as stiff. At Northwestern, she’d made dean’s list because her academics had been her sole focus. (Barring the very occasional night out and even more occasional drunken night out, which resulted in Lucas.) But at Columbia, she knew her attention wasn’t what it should be. Of course it wasn’t! She had a toddler, for God’s sake, and because it was just the two of them, Lucas had to come first.
“Relax,” Professor Nobells said. He reached out and squeezed her shoulder, letting his hand linger, then slide down her arm. “I’m not here to tell you you’re doing anything wrong.”
Cleo exhaled and wondered if she should find it strange that her professor was touching her, but she also noticed that she didn’t mind. It came from a good place, a welcoming place, and Cleo, rather than recoiling, liked it. A decade later, at her desk in her home office, she considered that maybe she liked it just because she hadn’t been touched by anything other than tiny hands in so long.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m fine. Tired a lot. But fine.” She almost told him about how Lucas was teething and she wasn’t sleeping because it was easier just to sleep on his floor rather than trudge back and forth from her room, but she didn’t want to look unprofessional. She didn’t want to look like a harried mother, which she knew would relegate her to the dismissed pile. Motherhood, regardless of how fiercely she loved her son, wasn’t going to handicap her. She had resolved this from the moment the plus sign appeared on her pregnancy test.
“Listen, why don’t you come by for dinner on Thursday?” His hand was back by his side, and Cleo told herself that she must have misread the squeeze. It was a compassionate touch, nothing more. He was her professor, and he wore a ring, and he told cute stories about teaching his kids how to ride bikes! God, what was wrong with her?
“Oh!” Cleo said again. “Um, OK?”
“Can you get a babysitter? I don’t want to put you out.”
Cleo nodded enthusiastically. The benefit of going to law school with a child (perhaps the only benefit) was that there were babysitters aplenty all over the college campus. It was odd to be handing Lucas off to a girl only a few years younger, but having unprotected sex your senior year in college did that to you. So. She learned not to explain herself to the sitters whenever they showed up, and frankly most of them didn’t give it a second thought. They were there for the money, not to consider all the ways Cleo’s life would be different if she’d used a condom.
“I have a list of sitters,” she said. “I’d love to.”
“I always like to make myself available to standout students,” he said. “Guide you through your time here. Send you on your way with counsel and recommendations.”
“That would be amazing,” Cleo replied. She couldn’t believe it. She could, of course; she deserved it, her work merited it, but still, she couldn’t believe it.
“Great, it’s settled. My address is in the directory. Let’s say six-ish?”
Cleo nodded.
“I make an excellent chicken.” He grinned. “I know, I know. I teach law by day and cook by night. A modern man if you’ve ever seen one.”
“Your wife is very lucky,” Cleo said, for no reason other than it sounded like she was.
Cleo clicked her pen, circled NOBELLS on her yellow pad, then quickly typed his name into her Google bar. She was not the type to google-stalk her past. She barely knew how to work Facebook, for God’s sake. She didn’t know that Matty had gone on to become a Microsoft genius; she didn’t know that MaryAnne had gone on to leave the majority of her lofty dreams unfulfilled. Gaby’s campaign motto, “Only Forward,” was an accurate representation of Cleo’s general mind-set. She didn’t see much use in skulking around her history, which was ironic, she realized, as she scanned the first page of internet hits on Alexander Nobells, given that her father encouraged her to put that history down for more permanent posterity.
Just as she clicked on a recent Washington Post article in which Nobells was quoted, Lucas opened her office door. He never bothered knocking, which she didn’t really mind, but she also knew that if she repaid him with the same discourtesy, he’d stop speaking to her for at minimum several hours. (Until he needed something from her. Teens were unpredictable but predictable in their demands, at the very least.)
“I need you to sign these,” he said, dropping a stack of forms on her desk.
“What are they for?”
He shrugged, like it was a nuisance for her to ask. “I don’t know.”
“School? Soccer? Can you give me a general sense?” Cleo reached for them, realizing
it was probably just going to be more expeditious to figure it out herself.
“School,” he said. “Permission slips for our retreat.”
“You have a retreat?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes. They said they sent the parents emails. The end-of-year retreat before graduation? In two weeks, when you go to Syria or . . . wherever?”
“Oh, OK, sure.” Cleo had definitely not read those emails, nor had she even seen them. But she must have discussed this with Lucas at some point, since he knew about her Middle East trip with the Senate Intelligence Committee. She wasn’t even sure why they were holding a graduation in the first place, since the students just rolled over to the high school within the same school, but she didn’t want to sound like a grinch. “Hang on. I’ll sign them now.”
She grabbed a pen while Lucas scowled at the floor.
“Actually, can I ask you something?” She peered up at him, her handsome prodigy, dark hair, broody eyes. He grimaced in reply. “What do you think of Benjamin’s dad?”
Lucas flopped his shoulders. “I don’t know. He’s a dad.”
Something hung in the air between them, or maybe Cleo was imagining it. The emphasis on dad, like, did it really matter if he was a great human being, a hero of some sort? He was a male and he had spawned Benjamin and at least Benjamin was lucky enough to have one. She held her breath, wondering if they were going to get into it again.
Then she pressed on. “Is he nice, though? Home a lot?”
“God, how would I know?”
“Because you spend most of your free time there?” Cleo signed his forms distractedly. She realized she had put her signature where she was supposed to print her name and vice versa. She drew two haphazard arrows, indicating that they should be switched, and assumed this was good enough. If any of her staffers had turned in such an error-riddled form, she’d have insisted that it be redone. Cleo exhaled, debating asking Lucas for a new form—she didn’t like making mistakes, much less stupid ones. She worried that the administrative staff at school would judge her, find her sloppy. Which she never used to be until MaryAnne Newman showed up in her life again. Now she felt like she was making all sorts of mistakes—maybe mistakes was too strong; missteps felt better, but she didn’t like making those either. She thought of the folded newspaper in her bag with a giant ad about her presidential fitness. Goddamn you, MaryAnne Newman!
Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel Page 14
