Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Her phone buzzed on her desk, another news notification.

  Has Cleo McDougal Pushed the Women’s Movement Too Far?

  She swiped up, clearing it from her screen.

  On Monday, Cleo got to her office early—she had been so thrown off her routine that both her boxing class and hour-free phone time had gone out the window—but she still rose with the sun, a habit ingrained from the time Lucas was tiny and needed a feeding, and now a habit reinforced because it was quiet time to work. She usually dropped Lucas at school, then made her way in at a reasonable hour, but today he mumbled that he had a ride with Benjamin’s older sister, so Cleo commuted early, and Arianna was the only one in the office when she arrived. She was filling the coffee maker and nearly spilled the grounds when Cleo swung the wood door open.

  “Oh! Oh my God, Senator McDougal! I’m sorry!” Arianna steadied the carafe, a look of genuine alarm on her face.

  “Why are you sorry?” Cleo sighed. She was exhausted, not just in her usual exhausted way, which really didn’t faze her, but deep in her bones—emotionally drained too. It wasn’t even because of the news coverage—it was simply, Cleo was learning, the unending fatigue that came from stirring up the wreckage from your past. “Only Forward!” Wasn’t everything so much easier that way? When you didn’t have to unearth why you had sabotaged your best friend, when you didn’t have to consider how you turned over part of your future to an ill-intentioned professor? “What could you have to be sorry about, Arianna?”

  “Oh, well, like, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “I disturbed you,” Cleo pointed out. “You were here before I was.”

  “No, I know, you’re right. Sorry.” Arianna poured the water into the machine, clicked it on, waited for it to hum to life.

  “You did it again.” Cleo wanted to curl up on the floor and take a nap. Could she do that today? Under her desk? On her rug?

  “Shoot, dammit.” Arianna caught herself. “It’s a terrible habit, I know. S—” She stopped just in time.

  Cleo swept by her on her way to her office. She did want to solve Arianna’s problems, but she couldn’t solve them today.

  “Oh, Senator McDougal?” Arianna trailed her, watched Cleo flop into her chair.

  “Yes?”

  “I, well, I just wanted to tell you that I admired what you did this weekend. When I was at Columbia, we had a list of men . . .”

  “A what?” Cleo was sitting up straighter now, not sure she had heard correctly. “A list of men?”

  “Yeah, a list. Of, like, predatory professors.”

  Cleo was suddenly awake, her eyes open wider, her heart pulsing faster. Maybe she really had underestimated Arianna. She raised her eyebrows as if to tell Arianna to continue.

  “Right, and, I mean, he was on it. I don’t know why; I don’t have any direct knowledge of his behavior, but . . . I didn’t realize you were his student too.” She hesitated. “Maybe it doesn’t make it better to know that other women had concerns about him too. But, I don’t know, maybe it does.”

  Cleo felt the sting of tears behind her eyes. She didn’t want to cry in front of Arianna, and she bit the inside of her lip to distract herself with a different sort of pain.

  “I appreciate that, Arianna; I really do.”

  “It sucks that he did that to you.”

  “I was consenting.” Cleo didn’t know why she kept excusing the situation with that. Consenting and unethical were two different things. Also, he could have cost Cleo her entire career. It was only true luck that she had called the nonprofit on the day that they were hiring and that the advocacy the job required stuck. Nobells couldn’t have anticipated that.

  “Right, but, I mean, yeah, so what? That’s why we made the list. Well, not me, I didn’t make it. I carried around mace, so . . .” She trailed off, like mace could have prevented Cleo from showing up at Nobells’s apartment with a bottle of wine. But maybe what she meant, Cleo realized, was that she was already well prepared, aware of the fact that unexpected threats lurked in innocuous corners, even at an Ivy League law school. “But what I mean is that people don’t have to be, like, evil to be bad.” Arianna thought about this for a second. “Like, what he did was disgusting, and maybe what made it worse is that he wasn’t evil. It’s those guys, you know? Those are the ones you have to be more worried about, I think.”

  Cleo thought of Jonathan Godwin. She did know. But she also thought of Matty and of Bowen, and she didn’t want Arianna to think that all men were the enemy.

  “There are some good ones out there; don’t convince yourself that there aren’t.”

  “Oh my God, I know!” Arianna squealed. “I mean, I love men.” Cleo remembered her flirtation with the aide from Senator Frost’s office. “But still . . . that doesn’t mean that they can’t be complete douchebags.”

  Cleo laughed then because Arianna was indeed wiser than she had given her credit for. Certainly wiser than Cleo had been at twenty-four, and she was a new mother at that age and had graduated at the top of her class from Northwestern. She thought of Bowen and how you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Maybe she was guilty of that with a lot of people: Arianna, Bowen, even herself.

  “Listen,” Cleo said, ready to start her day. “If you hear of any specifics, will you let me know? I worry that out here by myself, the story will turn into exactly what it wasn’t.”

  “Oh yeah, for sure. Like the desperate twentysomething sex-starved woman who seduced her professor.” Arianna practically snorted, and Cleo didn’t know if she loved this young woman for her clear-eyed bravado or resented her for pinpointing exactly what half the country would say and repeating it back to her. “All I know, Senator McDougal, is that I got about a million Snaps from my friends last night—”

  “Snaps?”

  “Snapchat.”

  “Oh, right.” Cleo should have known that. Lucas’s phone was constantly pinging.

  “I got a million Snaps last night from my friends saying how lucky I was to work for you.”

  “I really appreciate that, Arianna.” For the second time in their conversation, Cleo worried she might cry.

  And never, in the history of her political career, had Cleo McDougal cried.

  Cleo, awash in memories of a good man, remembered to order Matty that gift basket from the Alaskan fishery. She even wrote a silly note to accompany it: Matty—they say there are other fish in the sea, so I thought you might want to try this one, since I guess it’s clear that it’s not me.☺ Your friend, Cleo. Was it too much? She was about to ask Arianna if it was too much when Gaby blew in. Cleo hit Order and exited out of the page quickly before she could give it further thought. Across from her, Gaby plunked down in a chair and scowled.

  “How was your weekend?” Cleo asked, as if there were nothing else to discuss. “How’s Oliver?”

  Gaby steeled her jaw, threw her hair over her shoulder.

  “He was, is, extremely sexy.” She glared at Cleo. That discussion was now over. “I’d ask you how your weekend went, but I saw the livestream.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cleo said, because that was obvious.

  “Why would you do that without me? Why would you not ask me first?”

  “I didn’t want to be talked out of it.”

  Gaby smacked her hand flat against Cleo’s desk. “Why would I have talked you out of it?” She pulled her hand back. “No, you’re right. I may have. This was reckless, Cleo, and you hired me to ensure that you don’t do reckless.”

  “Have you met me, Gaby? I don’t do reckless! You were the one who told me to embrace my regrets.”

  Gaby held up a finger, stopping her right there. “No, I told you to get me a list of ten—”

  “And I did!”

  “And then I was going to pick five—well, four after Seattle.” Gaby finished her sentence.

  “Well, cross one more off your list. Now we’re down to three.” Cleo considered it. “No, two—I forgot the Jackman housing bill. You said we could c
ount that.”

  Gaby, fuming, just stared.

  “What?” Cleo shot back. “This was what Veronica Kaye wanted. This was what you wanted.”

  “Have you seen the news?” Gaby said. “It’s all they’re talking about!” She reached for her phone. Has Cleo McDougal Pushed the Women’s Movement Too Far?

  “I thought the motto was ‘no press is bad press.’”

  Gaby jumped to her feet. “If that’s your motto, then you haven’t been paying attention. Of course there is bad press! And this press . . . it’s not just bad for you; I mean, you literally handed the other side a loaded gun—”

  Cleo was on her feet too. She was exhausted, yes, and a little battle-weary, but she wasn’t about to roll over and play dead just because Gaby wanted her to.

  “Not literally—”

  “You figuratively just handed all these men, well, and some women, a loaded gun! Spurned ex-lover shows up at the doorstep of her revered professor! Or worse—”

  “There’s not a worse to that,” Cleo snapped.

  “There is,” Gaby pressed. “Because half the talking heads are now wondering if you didn’t sleep your way to the top, if he didn’t call in favors for you.”

  “Well, that is ridiculous,” Cleo screeched. “I barely sleep my way anywhere!”

  Gaby nodded. “I could, of course, leak the sad details of your sex life, but I don’t think that would sway anyone.”

  Cleo, still amped, yelled on top of her, “Arianna just seconds ago told me that her friends are cheering for me!”

  “People can be cheering for you, Cleo, and also thinking you’re starting to lose your mind. Two things can be true at once.”

  This was one of Gaby’s favorite sayings, as if Cleo weren’t aware that sometimes the universe presented dichotomies, both of which were justified. The responsible twenty-three-year-old who also slept with her married professor. She damn well understood that two things could be true at once. Tell her something she didn’t know, Gabrielle!

  Cleo started to reply, but Gaby talked over her. “After MaryAnne, we needed to be cautious. This . . . this was the opposite of cautious.”

  “You one hundred percent told me last week that we were all signals go on regrets.”

  “Yeah, but I was talking about adopting a dog or . . . I don’t know, getting bangs!”

  Cleo sank back in her chair, so Gaby did the same.

  “A) I am not getting bangs—”

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment suggestion,” Gaby conceded. “It was not a good one. Bangs wouldn’t suit you.”

  Gaby sighed. Cleo sighed. Both of them knew that neither of them really came out on top when they argued. They were too evenly matched and also each too stubborn to really give up much ground. Also, this wasn’t the part of the romantic comedy where Kate Hudson started fighting with her best friend. It wasn’t even a romantic comedy, actually. Bowen Babson hadn’t even fucking kissed her.

  “Also, there’s something else to consider, which really, honestly, Clee, I wish you’d come to me first.”

  “What is it?” Cleo didn’t have any fight left in her either.

  “This whole film-before-you-think culture, well, people are wondering if you made Nobells look guilty without giving him a chance to defend himself.”

  Cleo felt the blood drain from her face. “He is guilty; he was guilty. I have emails! Bowen vetted it before we did anything!”

  “We’ll see how that plays out, I guess. And I should say it’s not all terrible. A lot of it isn’t, actually. I’m running some internals, trying to see where your voters would come down. It seems like you’ve locked up women. The men, well . . .” Gaby flipped her hand at the implication. “Of course.”

  “I’m not interested in internals, Gaby. This is my life, not a policy issue. I thought that was the point? I thought you wanted to make me look . . . less robotic; isn’t that what you said? Exploit my gumption, if I were to quote Veronica Kaye?”

  “I just don’t want anyone calling you crazy.”

  Cleo folded her hands underneath her chin. “Aren’t they going to call me crazy anyway? Isn’t that just what people do? To a young woman—”

  “Youngish.”

  “To a youngish woman who is considering running for president? Isn’t that just what people are going to do?”

  Cleo thought of Lucas then, and for the first time really did understand why this was excruciating for him. Her past, her sex life, the gossip, the way she went about it without giving him any warning. She had thought she was protecting him by slipping to New York and leaving him to his idyllic soccer pool party, but he wasn’t a child now. She could see why it felt more like a betrayal. She needed to pay better attention to him, she realized, her heart splitting open just a little. She needed to recalibrate her life to ensure that it was in sync with his. If it wasn’t, what was the purpose of this whole thing?

  Gaby lost herself for a beat too. “I have to ask: we were friends in law school. Good friends, I thought. Why wouldn’t you tell me? Why did I have to first hear the hints of this from MaryAnne Newman’s op-ed, and I mean, how the hell did she even know?” Gaby looked pained at Cleo’s exclusion, at her silence. Cleo saw it in the wince of her eyes, the hunch of her shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” Cleo said. And she really didn’t. In law school it was probably out of shame, first for the affair, then out of the notion that perhaps someone could think she was benefitting from the affair, and then, finally, because of how humiliating it had been when he ended it. In the years since, likely because it was easier to stuff it down and move on. That was how Cleo got through just about everything. “I didn’t tell anyone. Hadn’t told anyone until this weekend. I have no idea about MaryAnne other than she was always an excellent gossip. She would have made a kick-ass reporter, to be honest.”

  “You could have told me. I wouldn’t have judged you,” Gaby said.

  “It wasn’t about judgment,” Cleo replied, though maybe it was. Women judged other women all the time. Just ask Susan and Maureen and Beth, who had made up their minds about Cleo two decades ago and also how she probably made up her mind about them too. “I was just protecting myself, I guess.”

  “I think you were protecting him,” Gaby suggested, rising, ready to get on with their day.

  Cleo thought about that for a long time after Gaby left, after she’d drunk the coffee Arianna had brewed, after Gaby returned and said that internals for women were looking even stronger than she anticipated but that the blowback was poised to be formidable too. Cleo thought about how tangled up it can all get, love and ambition and life and sex and doubt and acceptance and loneliness and, yes, regret. And how sometimes, in the mix of all that, you no longer see yourself clearly and instead you start to view yourself through someone else’s lens, for better and also for worse. Cleo was lucky enough to have disentangled herself from Nobells before he convinced her he could mold her into whomever he wished, before he enticed her to believe that he was the reason behind her success, that they were the Pygmalion myth brought to life, with him carving her out of stone, then giving her breath.

  But she didn’t regret confronting him. She didn’t regret asking Bowen to livestream it. She didn’t regret burning it all down. If she had to do it all again, she would. Tomorrow.

  That was the opposite of regret, she decided. That was living.

  SIXTEEN

  Arianna was the one who first saw the hashtag, which made sense, since neither Gaby nor Cleo spent anywhere near the same amount of time on social media as she did.

  “Oh yeah,” she said the next morning. “I have a search set up for you. You don’t?”

  Timothy, one of the four men who worked on her staff and who was theoretically charged with being her deputy communications manager, wandered in and said, “Wait, you don’t have a search on yourself?” Then he wandered out, like he had contributed all that he needed to.

  Cleo had looked at Gaby, who was unpeeling an orange and licking the j
uice off her fingertips. “Do you have a search set up on me?”

  Gaby shook her head. “I thought we brought Arianna and Timothy in specifically to do this so I didn’t have to?” She broke off an orange wedge. “If I tracked every mention, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. Not after your little rendezvous to Columbia, that’s for sure.”

  Things were still not totally settled between the two of them. They weren’t going to fight about it, Cleo knew, but that didn’t mean that Gaby had altogether let it go—not just that Cleo had ostensibly ruined her weekend with Oliver but that she hadn’t consulted Gaby about the whole thing in the first place. Cleo didn’t blame her. She probably would have nursed the bruise too. She did trust, however, that Gaby would never pen an op-ed about her no matter what, and because of this trust, she gave Gaby the space to be a little pissy and then move on.

  “You guys should definitely have a search,” Arianna said, the student becoming the master. “Like, that’s where I see so much good stuff.”

  From another office, Timothy echoed: “Yeah, for sure! Searches turn up all the good stuff.”

  Cleo didn’t know if “good stuff” meant juicy gossip, and thus not really good stuff, or genuinely good stuff, as in Cleo was a saint. It didn’t matter. Arianna was still talking.

  “So, like, I saw this hashtag last night, and I thought it was a one-off, but look, this morning . . . there are hundreds of them.” Arianna jabbed at her phone with the dexterity that only a child who has been raised on an iPhone can. She thrust the screen toward them. “See?”

  There, on Twitter, were hundreds of tweets, more coming in by the second.

  #pullingaCleo

  “What the hell is ‘pulling a Cleo’?” Gaby asked before she sucked on the rind of the orange. Cleo made a face. “What? All of the nutrients are in the rind. I’m training for a marathon.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”