Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Gaby left six more voice messages, but Cleo was in the liquor store by then, and all this seemed to matter less and less as she grew more and more eager to pour herself a bourbon. She knew she had sworn it off years ago on her list, but now it seemed too appealing to resist, calling out to her like the temptation of Alexander Nobells’s scruff used to, and for once, Cleo McDougal was going to be irresponsible. Or better phrased—for once, since she had become a mother and since she had become a senator, Cleo McDougal was going to get absolutely plastered.

  “Do you really think you should?” Bowen kept asking, which she found extremely annoying.

  “Yes,” she barked at him each time he asked. “I really think I should. And I have asked you to join me repeatedly, so you’re either in or you’re out, Bowen.” She grabbed a bottle off the shelf and spun around to meet his eyes. “In. Or. Out?”

  “I’m . . . in? Only because I think you shouldn’t be alone.”

  Cleo almost screamed right there in the liquor store on 105th street. She didn’t need a hero, and if Bowen Babson thought he could be hers, she’d rather drink alone. What she needed was a release.

  Though she hadn’t betrayed it in front of Nobells, his very presence had triggered so much, too much, of who she had been thirteen years ago. Arrogant, sure. She couldn’t have undermined MaryAnne in the way that she had without arrogance. Brilliant, yes. She couldn’t have made Law Review as a single mother without brilliance. But also gullible—that she showed up to his apartment alone with a bottle of wine. Also complicit—that she’d sunk into his couch and didn’t pull away when he kissed her. Also guilty—that she let it go on for eight months, knowing he had a wife and kids—and it ended on his terms and through a fucking email and with him taking credit for who she was yet to be and on top of it all, firing her from the law firm—a position she had earned long before Alexander Nobells swooped in, saying whatever he said to the dean to ruin a chance to learn from the AG too.

  So yes, she thought that she deserved a fucking drink.

  “My producer is already making calls,” Bowen said as the cashier rang up Cleo’s three bottles. “He’s digging in, seeing if there are others. If there are, you’ll be a hero.”

  “If there aren’t?” Cleo wondered if she could open the bourbon in the store and take a swig. No, probably not. She was still a senator, after all. “Then I guess I’ll just be a crazy ex-lover who slept her way to the top.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “No, you don’t have to.” Cleo grabbed the paper bag, thanked the cashier. “Everyone else will instead.”

  Cleo finally succumbed to her phone just as they arrived back at her apartment. She was actively ignoring Gaby, but her son, well, she needed him to know that she was hanging in.

  “I’m OK, Lucas,” she said when her phone buzzed again and she saw his caller ID.

  “You’re OK?” he screamed. “You think I’m calling to see if you’re OK?”

  Cleo quickly ascertained that she had miscalculated. Maybe she should have taken Gaby’s call instead. It probably would have been less confrontational. She hadn’t told Lucas about her plan because she didn’t want to worry him, and honestly, she thought he’d be proud of her once he understood.

  “Luc—”

  He cut her off. “Do you have any idea how mortifying it is to learn at, like, my soccer pool party that my mother is chewing out some guy she used to sleep with?” (He really did screech this in all italics.)

  “Lukey, please stop; give me a chance—”

  He cut her off again. “I don’t get you. You’re all Miss Follow Every Rule, and now you’re, like . . . you’re blowing everything up! You’re making a mess, and I want to die!”

  “You don’t want to die, sweetie.”

  “If. I. Could. Die. Of. Embarrassment. I. Would.”

  Cleo glanced at Bowen now, who looked more than a little concerned, but she waved a hand, as if her son dying of embarrassment were standard Saturday stuff. Actually, with a teenager, sometimes it was.

  “Buddy, I did this because it was important to me. I’m supposed to be the voice of my generation. And I did something really, well, it was wrong. But what he did was more wrong. And I couldn’t see that for a long time, and now, when I could, I wanted to rectify it.”

  The line was silent for a long time. She thought he may have hung up on her. She wouldn’t have been surprised. He was a fourteen-year-old who had just learned that his mom had been sleeping with a forty-something-year-old married man—her professor—while he toddled around in diapers. She could see it from his perspective. It was a little disgusting.

  “I don’t get why you’re doing all of this,” he said finally.

  “Because I want to make the world as level for young women as it is for young men, Lucas. It’s important. And it matters. And if I can’t do that now, what is the point of my power, of my position?” She paused, remembering something. “Speaking of which, please tell me that you broke up with one of the girls you’re dating?”

  “Mom! Oh my God!” he screamed. “Jesus Christ! When will you ever stop turning me into one of your causes? I’m not!”

  And then he really did hang up on her. Which shouldn’t have startled her but did anyway.

  Cleo sighed deeply, fell backward into her couch, stared at the ceiling for a beat. Things were probably easier with Lucas when she didn’t meddle. She didn’t want to be a meddler! She didn’t even have time to really meddle. But if she didn’t, what if her son ended up just like goddamn Jonathan Godwin or Alexander Nobells, and then she would have failed at the one thing that truly mattered?

  I raised an asshole. I’m sorry. Add that one to her list of regrets.

  Bowen eased himself next to her.

  “Should I go? It feels like I should go. I have . . .” He checked his phone. “Seventy-eight emails and a hundred and twenty-four texts to return.”

  Cleo groaned. “About me?”

  “Well,” he said, trying to soften the blow. “About this whole thing.”

  “Kindly pour me a drink,” she said. She glanced at the time on the cable box. It was three fifteen p.m. Nearly five o’clock. That seemed fine.

  Bowen rose and rattled around her kitchen, returned with a tumbler half-full of bourbon.

  “No, you need one too.” Cleo shook her head. “If I drink alone, I’m basically on my way to becoming a cautionary tale.”

  Bowen nodded a small nod, retreated to the kitchen, and returned with a tumbler in each hand.

  She gulped down her entire pour. “More please.”

  He dutifully retrieved the bottle from the kitchen rather than continue to make the back-and-forth trip, and this time he filled her glass nearly to the brim.

  “You don’t seem like the type to get intoxicated in the middle of the day,” he offered, sipping his own drink quite slowly.

  “Oh yeah, for sure, I’m not.” Cleo swallowed a good third of her round. “You see, Bowen Babson, I’m a very buttoned-up, important senator who has to maintain her composure at all times. If I make even the smallest mistake, the interwebs and the men on those interwebs and also sometimes extremely self-hating women come for me.”

  Bowen started to interrupt, but she talked over him.

  “You don’t know Maureen and Beth and Susan. From Seattle. And the things they say about me. Also, I am a mother, even though I’m just thirty-seven and never had much of a life, and mothers don’t do things like get drunk at three fifteen in the afternoon.”

  “Well,” Bowen said in an attempt to slow her down, “some do. But they probably aren’t very good mothers.”

  Cleo polished off the remainder of her second round. The bourbon felt warm in her belly; her blood felt warm throughout her body, actually. The room was feeling a little bouncier, the situation with Nobells feeling a little less pulse-pounding. She glanced at Bowen and suddenly found him extremely, extremely attractive. It was probably the bourbon talking, but then she reminded herself that she always
found him extremely, extremely attractive. She had just never had the opportunity to indulge that.

  She reached for the bottle on her coffee table, pouring her own refill this time. She held up the bottle to refresh Bowen’s glass, but he was still nursing his first round.

  “I’m going to regret this tomorrow,” she said. “I have bourbon on my list, but I can’t for the life of me remember why.”

  “You have bourbon on what list? Your grocery list?” He looked at her peculiarly. Cleo found this even more attractive, even at the same moment realizing her mistake. Only Gaby knew about her list, and probably her sister, but Cleo didn’t want to text her back and ask her and end up in a therapy session with Los Angeles’s life coach to the stars. Telling Bowen Babson, who seemed like the type of guy who wouldn’t have even one regret in his life, about her 233 regrets felt like an admission of failure. Cleo was well on her way to drunk, but even now, she knew that she could not present herself as a failure.

  “Nothing, no list,” she said. “I just, I probably shouldn’t drink this.” Then she finished her glass anyway. The confrontation with Nobells and all that it stirred up was washing away, which was the point. She didn’t want to acknowledge that seeing him again, even all these years later, made her feel not just vulnerable but weak, even when this time she met him with strength.

  “It’s funny.” She rolled her head toward Bowen. “I mean, it’s not funny, but it’s funny how even a decade later, seeing a shithead of a person can make me feel like I’m less than.”

  “Less than what?”

  Cleo rolled her head back to center, then dropped it on the back edge of the couch. “Just . . . less than him. Powerless. Alone.” Cleo thought of those first few days, when she couldn’t stop crying after her parents died and how that was how she felt exactly. Powerless. Alone. And how you didn’t have to lose your parents in an accident to tap into those feelings all over again. That’s what Nobells had done to her at twenty-three, reduced her to that naked fragility where she held none of the cards and he was running the table.

  Bowen was silent.

  “I guess I just regret it,” she said, quieter now.

  “Regret confronting him or regret the affair?”

  Cleo shrugged, squeezed her eyes shut. “What you don’t know about me, Bowen Babson, is that I have a lot of regrets. They are piled high, like, boom, boom, boom.” Cleo used her hand, karate chopping the air, to demonstrate. “Boom!” she said one more time, and this time inadvertently added an extra flourish and hit him in the eye.

  “Ow, shit!”

  “Oh God,” she said. “See! There’s another.”

  Bowen winced and blinked a few times but did not appear blinded by her martial arts.

  “It’s OK,” he said and managed a smile, which she thought was absolutely, unequivocally magnetic. She raised her hand to reach out, to touch his lips—she wanted to run her fingertips right over them—then realized what she was doing and plopped it back in her lap.

  She aimed her face toward his again. She was feeling looser now, and she knew it was the bourbon, but the tricky thing about alcohol is that even when you know that you’re drunk, you very rarely say to yourself: self, you are drunk, and thus it doesn’t stop you from acting in ways that you wouldn’t if you weren’t drunk. It’s as if you are both in control and out of control, though inevitably the next morning, you conclude that it was the latter, not the former.

  “I think you should kiss me.” She was staring at his lips, convinced that there was nothing she would rather do.

  Bowen nearly spit out his drink. “What?”

  “I think you should kiss me now.”

  “I . . .”

  “Bowen, I think it’s very obvious that there is something between us—you did ask me out, need I remind you, so let’s consider this our little date, and I think, therefore, that you should kiss me.” She paused, then added, “I’m a modern woman. I can ask for what I want.”

  Bowen did not kiss her. He sat instead frozen beside her, looking more than a little alarmed, but because Cleo was well past tipsy, she ignored this particular emotion.

  “Oh God,” she lamented. “Is it that I’m too old for you? Jesus Christ. That’s how it is now, isn’t it? Men only go younger, and women, I mean, let’s face it, I’m basically being told that I should settle for a man in his midfifties and will essentially be doomed to providing sponge baths and feeding him soft foods in the later years of our relationship.” She set her drink on the coffee table. Looked pointedly back toward Bowen. “This is bullshit, Bowen Babson. Complete bullshit. I don’t want to be giving sponge baths. Why can’t I date younger too?”

  Bowen reached out, rested his hand on hers. “It’s not because I date only younger. It has nothing to do with that.”

  “Is it because your generation—”

  “We’re the same generation, Cleo.”

  “Is it because your generation needs, like, written consent? You have my consent, Bowen.” She grabbed his chin, forced his eyes toward hers. “You have my consent.”

  Bowen gently removed her fingers, nearly clamped on, from his face. He stood, tucked the hem of his shirt back into his jeans. Cleo could hear his phone buzzing in his back pocket. She could hear her own phone buzzing from the kitchen. She wasn’t yet ready to face the outside world again.

  “Please don’t go,” she said.

  He cleared his throat.

  “It has nothing to do with age or consent,” he said. She felt him taking her in, really, really breathing her in, in her wretched condition on the couch, full of self-pity and a little false bravado and a lot, a lot of bourbon. Cleo suddenly realized that she hadn’t eaten lunch. “It’s that, well, Cleo, it’s obvious to me that you have some regrets. And, to be honest, I’d rather not be another one.”

  “You wouldn’t be, I promise,” Cleo said.

  “Then we’ll reconvene without the bourbon,” he said before he backed toward the door. “That’s really the only way to find out.”

  FIFTEEN

  Nothing, not one thing, was better by the time Cleo returned to Washington on Sunday night. Lucas was still barely speaking to her, back to his usual grunting and holed up in his room. (Emily Godwin had dropped him off late Sunday afternoon before Cleo arrived back. For the return trip, Cleo rented a car rather than run the risk of making chatter on the train or, worse, running into Bowen on his trip back as well.) Her son had mumbled a hello when she poked her head through his doorway, and when she asked if perhaps they could sit and talk, he glared, and she acquiesced that they could discuss it at another time. She was also still avoiding Gaby, who had left her twenty-two messages and did not seem to be enjoying her weekend with Oliver Patel, mostly because of Cleo going rogue and having little to do with Oliver Patel himself.

  Though Cleo had tried her best to ignore the breaking news about her confrontation—one thing she had learned over the years was that headlines rarely changed the nature of her decision-making, though polling from her constituents would, of course—this time the news was impossible to avoid. Alerts were sent to her phone, and commentators debated her tactics (and motives) on talk radio the entire drive back, until she settled in on an easy-listening station, which didn’t do much to soothe her.

  Even at thirty-seven, Cleo had never developed a specific musical taste. She clutched the steering wheel, her nerves frayed from listening to strangers argue the gritty details of her choices in her early twenties, and wished she had. She hadn’t found time for art; she hadn’t found time for music. Maybe, she considered as she cruised down the interstate, if she’d leaned in even just a fraction to that part of herself that must lie dormant—she was her mother’s daughter after all!—she would have found comforts in something other than career success. She wasn’t apologizing for her ambition, and she wasn’t even sorry for where it had led her. But she could see how having a singular focus might have narrowed her perspective. She flipped to an alternative station but didn’t for the life o
f her see how the song playing was considered music, and then she tried the pop channel Lucas preferred, but my God, Cleo thought, the girl singing about losing her man was really selling herself short. And thus, she ended right back on the easy-listening channel, a milquetoast choice for aging millennials and Gen Xers who had no musical taste at all, which was worse, perhaps, than having terrible music taste.

  At least then, Cleo thought, you had an opinion.

  Bowen called her Sunday night, when she was tucked in her home office, reviewing her schedule for the week, and she quickly hit Decline, jabbing at her phone like it was radioactive. She wasn’t exactly sure what her strategy was here—with Bowen, with Gaby, even with her sister, who had sent another slightly alarmist text about her emotional well-being—but, much like her musical tastes, Cleo decided, maybe for the first time in her life, not having a hard line or a strategized plan was the best way to move forward.

  This was not the best way to move forward, quite obviously. Cleo McDougal’s whole life, barring her pregnancy, was fine-tuned down to the minute. And she attributed much of her success to this streamlined, organized vision. But without any instinct on how to proceed, Cleo decided to chuck it all, to abandon everything. She gazed at the lights in her home office and wondered what would happen next if, say, she just stopped giving so many shits about being the best, about being anointed. Would MaryAnne Newman like her then? Would she still write op-eds? Would she still claim she was a bad person? Would Cleo still aspire to be president and crave Veronica Kaye’s approval and the massive check that came with it? Would Cleo have shown up at Nobells’s apartment for a dinner in the first place all those years ago if she’d just been content to be another law school student who passed the bar just fine, went on to a perfectly good firm, and pulled in six figures until she was forty-nine and decided to retire to open a used-book store?

  After declining Bowen’s call, Cleo stilled herself and heard the throb of the bass coming from Lucas’s room. Normally he wore his headphones to shut her out, but this time, with this specific rage, he blasted his speakers instead, as if to say: even if you could come in, even if you were welcomed into this part of my world, I still wouldn’t hear you, and you still wouldn’t have access.