Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Then one added, “We think women can run the world. And you’re doing it. But . . .” She waved a hand, as if that ended her sentence.

  “But we don’t want to do it being mean girls,” said the other one.

  Cleo swallowed, found she couldn’t find her tongue. Why was it so hot out in May? Was this global warming? Why was she sweating more after the run than while she was actually running? She glanced around for members of her staff, but she’d already told them that once the photo ops were over, they should head home. They were reconvening tomorrow for bagels and lox at a Westchester synagogue, then moving on to muffins and coffee at a nearby church. Mean girl? Really? She’d never once, ever, ever considered herself a mean girl. Yes, obviously, what she had done to MaryAnne was unkind, but that didn’t rise to the level of those horror stories she sometimes heard from other moms on the sidelines of Lucas’s games. Those mean girls did all sorts of untoward things: texting ugly photos of their friends, spreading rumors about their rivals, acting sweet but ultimately pushing the knife into someone’s back just a little deeper. She was ambitious, but she wasn’t ruthless. She was cutthroat, but she’d never stab you in the back.

  She found her breath, steadying herself. One of the girls offered her a water.

  “Here,” she said. “Are you, um, OK?”

  Maybe she had been all those things, though. In the pursuit of more, more, more, maybe she had been exactly the type to slice MaryAnne right through the trapezius, even if she had done it simply to get a leg up, to propel herself out of Seattle and away from her grief and on to something better. Cleo felt a little dizzy and closed her eyes, pointed her face toward the sky until it passed. Jesus. She’d justified her behaviors toward MaryAnne for so many years that she hadn’t considered them objectively: that after her parents died and maybe before that too—with MaryAnne’s leg up from her own parents’ connections and with Cleo’s just a bit more promising work ethic and acumen, she had believed she deserved the success, that she was the worthier one, so she stripped those opportunities from her best friend.

  That wasn’t deserving at all.

  “What I would tell you,” Cleo said finally, once she righted herself and looked from one set of wide eyes to the other, “is that . . . well, the truth is that I’m not great at friends. Obviously. I wish I had better advice, but being an adult sometimes means that you make choices. And I made mine. And then you live with the consequences, which sometimes work in your favor and sometimes, well, they do not.” She tried to smile, but she worried she just looked nauseated.

  “That’s not very reassuring,” the first girl said.

  “We’ve been told we can have it all,” the second one echoed. “You’re telling us that we can’t?”

  “I’m telling you that sometimes you find yourself at a crossroads, and maybe you guys will be best friends forever, and I hope that you will.” She smiled then, genuinely. She wished that so very much for these girls who had not yet faced what the world would throw at them, how it would ask them to work harder, fight better, climb faster than it would ask of any man. “But what I’m also telling you is that sometimes you have to make choices, and sometimes this means that you’ll choose . . . you.” Cleo thought of Beverly Hills, 90210, which she and MaryAnne had considered appointment television, and that episode where Kelly Taylor chooses herself. She hadn’t meant to quote Kelly Taylor, but maybe she should rewatch (when would she have time to rewatch?) and see if Kelly Taylor wasn’t a bit of a feminist.

  “You?” one of the friends asked.

  “You,” Cleo answered, pointing a finger at her. Would it have been so hard if Cleo had chosen them? She and MaryAnne together?

  “OK,” one girl said. “Well, thanks.”

  Cleo didn’t want to leave it on a down note. She hadn’t meant to discourage them. “Would you like to take a photo?”

  They each shook their head, turned their back, walked away.

  Bowen met her on the corner outside her apartment, just in front of the Korean deli, which had been there since she bought the place and had saved her more than a few times when her pantry and refrigerator were empty and she had a toddler to feed.

  She had showered since the fun run and stood in front of her mirror for too long, trying to figure out what to wear. She knew that, especially for women, clothes told your story before you even opened your mouth, and she had a story to tell today. Also, she wanted to look nice for Bowen, even if she pretended that she didn’t, but she wanted to look amazing for Nobells. She might be a buttoned-up senator, but drop-dead gorgeous still felt like its own sort of revenge.

  She settled on the same violet blouse she’d worn to meet Matty in Seattle, which reminded her of MaryAnne, which reminded her of those sophomore girls from the park. She tugged on a pair of skinny jeans that she already knew she’d regret with today’s humidity, then reached for her phone and pulled up Facebook. Clicked on MaryAnne’s page. The comment thread to her op-ed had grown even longer, what with her ad having run a few days past. Cleo had told Gaby to stop giving her updates on the YouTube ratio because she didn’t need the approval of strangers. (Theoretically she did, if she were to run for president, but for now, no, no, she did not.) But the people she knew . . . well, she was learning that after thirty-seven years, maybe she did actually care about their opinions.

  With Oliver jetting back east to his rendezvous with Gaby, she had one fewer defender in the comments. Instead, what she read was a frenzy, a pile-on, an online mob scene that she was familiar with because anytime she was featured in a big news piece, Gaby reminded her not to read the comments. Never read the comments. And here she was, reading them all. Cleo chastised herself: before MaryAnne blew this up, she’d never, ever have read the comments!

  Susan Harris, Maureen Allen, and Beth Shin were still particularly worked up. They were using words like angry and bitchy and too tough for her own good. It was amazing, Cleo thought, her thumb scrolling downward through the comments, how society had done this—conditioned women to eat their own likenesses so they didn’t realize that if they banded together, they’d be unstoppable. Cleo’s thumb hovered as it struck her: she had done exactly the same thing to MaryAnne.

  “Shit,” she said aloud. “Just fucking shit.” As an adult, and especially in Congress, Cleo had been careful never to alienate another female congresswoman (there still weren’t that many of them) and truly didn’t see women as competition. But maybe that lesson was learned only after she’d stepped on a few shoulders (and a few aspirations) to ascend the ladder to her current position. “Shit,” she said again.

  She exited out of MaryAnne’s page and clicked over to Matty’s. He’d taken his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend to Snoqualmie Falls for the weekend. There were lots of pictures of them hiking and eating hearty meals with jams and bacons and honeys. This made her a little sad—for him because it seemed like maybe he could use someone more complicated, and also for her, Cleo, because maybe she could have used someone simpler. Regret. She made a mental note to send him a gift basket from an amazing fishery that her colleague from Alaska was always heralding. It seemed like the type of thing Matty would get a kick out of—a delivery of salmon from Alaska on dry ice! She grinned, just thinking about the look of pure joy on his face. Then she recalculated: maybe she didn’t know anything about his girlfriend and whether or not she were simple or easy or right for Matty, and who was she to make snap judgments when she had just wished that everyone else would stop making them about her? Still, though, she’d send the salmon.

  She checked the time and realized she was late, so she did her makeup in a hurry and scrambled out the door to meet Bowen, who was punctual and greeted her with a hug, which she did not recoil from.

  “We can just walk from here, if that’s OK,” Cleo said as they started up Amsterdam Avenue.

  “You’re the boss,” he said. “Though I’m still not quite getting this.”

  “I told you,” she said, because she had told him on the train
. “It’s about accountability.”

  “Whose?” Bowen grabbed her elbow as she started to cross without a light, but then the traffic slowed and he let go and they crossed together, side by side. “And why?”

  Cleo sighed. On the surface, without explaining the regrets list, maybe it did sound crazy: digging up the worst of yourself from your past, facing it publicly. But Bowen didn’t push it—he wanted the story, she knew: prominent senator confronts the man who may or may not have taken advantage of her a decade earlier—these stories were en vogue and generated eyeballs and frenzied Twitter threads and buoyant comments sections too. But he also wanted to protect her. She could sense that even without him saying so. I don’t need protection, she wanted to tell him. Single moms who have clawed their way up and through and beyond have long learned how to protect themselves.

  Cleo didn’t want Bowen, or even Gaby, to tell her how to stay safe in a storm. She didn’t want Matty to ask who looked out for her. She did. That was just how it had been since she was seventeen.

  Besides, sometimes you choose you. Bowen had every right to choose himself over her, to go for the story. If Cleo had been in the same position, she’d have done the same.

  “I’m just trying to make it right,” she said.

  “Make it right for whom?” They both did a little dance to the side of the sidewalk when a child blasted by them too fast on a scooter. Her mom yelled out from half a block away, sprinting to keep up.

  Cleo thought of her list. She thought of MaryAnne. She thought of those two girls this morning. She thought of Emily Godwin and of Jonathan with his hand on the curve of another woman’s back. She thought of how angry Gaby would be that she was doing this without her. She thought of Veronica Kaye, who told her to lean in to difficult choices because that’s what turned you into a leader.

  “I don’t know,” she said, pulling on her sunglasses, arming herself for what came next. “But sometimes making it right is just what you do, even if you don’t know what happens after.”

  Bowen watched the child disappear around the corner of the block, the mom still flying after her. Something passed between Cleo and Bowen then, an understanding that he wasn’t her savior, and she wasn’t asking him to be either.

  “I’ll follow your lead,” he said.

  “Only forward!” she replied but found that the intended humor belly flopped, neither of them in the mood for jokes.

  Tracking Nobells down was the easiest part. Cleo still had an alumni log-in, so she quickly accessed his lecture schedule and office hours, which remained the same as they had been more than a decade ago. Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. He, like her, was methodical and by the book (until he wasn’t). Of course, she couldn’t be certain that he’d be there. She reminded herself of this as she felt her pulse palpably accelerate as they drew closer. People change, habits deviate. But she remembered that he used to love spending Saturdays on campus, usually tucked in his office reading, away from the chaos of his family. Though technically these weren’t his official office hours, he made it known—or he had certainly made it known to Cleo anyway—that students were welcome to disturb him. She didn’t want to show up at his apartment; that wasn’t the sort of score she wanted to settle. Besides, this felt like neutral territory, in his old office, on their old campus, now that she was a senator. The balance of power having been leveled.

  Cleo and Bowen reached the campus on 116th Street. Undergrad was still in session, wrapping up in the weeks as spring ebbed into summer, and younger versions of who she used to be scurried around them everywhere, backpacks weighing down their shoulders, messy buns atop their heads, iced coffees on hand to push them through their weekend cram sessions.

  Cleo looked for the single mothers, the ones pushing infants or toddlers, with purple circles under their eyes and stains on their T-shirts. She saw none. She reminded herself that at Northwestern, in fact, she’d been unencumbered. No Lucas just yet. Not even a notion of him. If you’d asked her who in her life would have gotten pregnant her senior year of college, she would have said anyone but me. And yet, her fourteen-year-old was currently two hundred miles away at a pool party for his soccer team, so Cleo was starting to understand that she was not the best narrator of her own story.

  “This way,” Cleo said to Bowen and pointed toward Greene Hall, which was a rectangular slab of concrete with more slabs of concrete running vertically through it. There had been a long-standing on-campus argument as to whether it was a hideous eyesore or a beloved near–work of art. Though at the time Cleo had sided with eyesore, she now viewed it from afar with affection, even with her growing nerves and her hard-to-ignore flop sweat. (To be fair, this morning’s humidity had given way to a sincere heat wave, and with not a cloud in the Manhattan sky, Cleo felt as if she were walking on the surface of the sun.) Beside her, Bowen swept his hand through his hair, which stayed aloft, right in the same position where his hand had exited, held there by his own perspiration.

  Cleo swung the door open to Greene Hall and was met with the blessed blast of air-conditioning. “Oh sweet Jesus,” she said.

  “And you tell me you’re not religious,” Bowen replied, then let out a little moan of his own.

  Nobells’s office was on the sixth floor, so they wound their way through the lobby, garnering a few glances, but Bowen more than her. Senators might be celebrities in DC because they wielded power, but here, in New York City, his star-power star outshone hers. He waved to three girls giggling by the elevator bank before the two of them ducked inside.

  “Press six,” she said. She was too nervous to do so. She wondered if she even had feeling in her arms. She lifted them to test it, and yes, demonstrably, her brain still connected to her limbs, so at least that was set. Bowen watched her raise her arms like a zombie, then lower them to her sides. She did it again.

  “Are you sure you’re OK?” He squinted, really looked at her, took a step closer. “I’m just following your lead here, but . . . I mean . . . Cleo, is it rude to say that you are looking a little . . . peaked?”

  She was looking peaked, she knew. She could feel herself growing more peaked with each floor they ascended. But she thought of that yellow pad of paper, and she thought of her 233 regrets, and she thought that some of them were silly but some of them were profound, and if she, Cleo McDougal, junior senator to New York State, couldn’t right this wrong, address this grievance, then maybe she was not the woman she assumed herself to be. She stared at the ceiling and realized she truly wasn’t here to merely address her own regret. She wanted Nobells to confess to his too. MaryAnne had tugged at this thread, and now that Cleo was pulling it, she couldn’t stop until the whole thing unwound.

  She wiped her palms on her jeans. This didn’t really help.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Bowen did not appear convinced.

  The elevator dinged, and Cleo pushed her breath out, then stepped over the gilded divide between the elevator and her past and onto the cold tile floors that she’d walked down so many times, so many years ago.

  Nobells’s office door was propped open. People don’t change, Cleo thought as she rounded the corner and saw it ajar, then came to such an abrupt halt that Bowen tripped over her.

  “Shit, sorry,” he whispered, retreating again behind her.

  Cleo was too anxiety-ridden to answer.

  “Last chance,” he said. “Let’s just go. Get a drink. This doesn’t matter.”

  That rattled her, brought her to. She turned and met his eyes.

  “It does matter, Bowen. That’s the point.” She started to say: acknowledging my wrongdoing matters, but she wasn’t quite there. If she’d been ready to take that leap, she would have circled back to MaryAnne and apologized with sincerity. Instead she said: “He nearly ruined my career. What if he’s done this to other women who weren’t as lucky?”

  Bowen bounced his head and unlocked his phone.

  “OK, let’s go,” Cleo said.

  She straightened her
posture, brushed her hair back, and strode down the hall, pausing only momentarily outside Nobells’s door. Cleo raised her fist, knocked, though it was just a courtesy, since the door was open and welcoming.

  His face fell for just a second; then it washed with confusion and then, finally, recognition. Nobells leaped to his feet, his chair squeaking just as it used to, the air smelling of books and an illicit cigar and that musky aftershave, just as it used to.

  “Cleo!” he exclaimed and moved toward her. He pulled her into an embrace. As her muscle memory kicked in, Cleo thought that she might throw up.

  She pressed her hands against his chest, putting space between them, then untangling completely.

  “Should I call you Senator McDougal now?” he asked. “I always knew. I always knew.” He wagged a finger at her like he had been part of her success, like he hadn’t been anything other than a blight in her history. He eased back into his chair, then peered at her with sudden surprise, as if it were just occurring to him—this brilliant legal mind who had taught the best and the brightest at Columbia and had been a Big Law partner for twenty years—why his former student and ex-mistress might be showing up unannounced on an otherwise unremarkable day.

  “Please, come sit.” He gestured to the leather love seat. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  Cleo did not sit. To begin with, she didn’t want to. They used to have sex on that same couch or at least one markedly similar. She glanced at it, as if she could replay their movie reel, and then she wondered how many other young women had fucked him there too. But beyond that, she worried, despite her steely exterior, that if she moved even a step, her legs would betray her and she might collapse from nerves right there. And that, quite obviously, would be a mess. She could already see the headlines now. Senator McDougal Collapses from Heat Exhaustion in an Air-Conditioned Building! Or: Senator McDougal Suffers Emotional Breakdown in Front of Former Professor! The opposing party could fundraise off that for years. Market her fragility. Claim that she was basically half-dead or completely out of her mind with hysteria, when she was confronting a man who was twenty years her senior and probably relied on Viagra to get an erection. But, she knew, the headline would be about her.