Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Cleo’s partner was a skinny jazz dancer who had been part of the national touring company of Chicago and A Chorus Line, among others, and now ran the Dance DC studio, which catered to bigwigs who thought they had missed out on their chance in their youth and thus burned calories and stress in leotards and headbands and tights after their work on the Hill. Francis was slight and had a frenetic energy about him, and though it wasn’t gracious, Cleo thought he looked a bit like a mouse. She thought of MaryAnne again and how they would have nicknamed him something like Mousecheeks, and she was surprised that this made her sad—not the nickname but that she and MaryAnne had so deftly obliterated their friendship, that just thinking about middle school PE now depressed her. (To be clear, there was a lot about middle school PE to find depressing, but the secret monikers about their classmates were not one of them.)

  Francis, who couldn’t have been more than five foot six, informed her that they were going to be doing a mambo and asked if she knew anything about the mambo. Cleo immediately felt defensive and wanted to turn it around and demand if he knew anything about eliminating the trade deficit but caught herself just in time.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know the first thing.”

  If this displeased Francis, he didn’t let on, and Cleo resolved that he must be a very good teacher if he could convince Washington, DC, types to spend their evenings living out their misplaced dreams and not become jaded or judgmental, so she decided right then to let him take charge.

  “That’s OK,” he said. “I chose it because its history is born from strength and passion.”

  “Oh!” Cleo said.

  “I watched your video,” he said, and Cleo wondered if there would ever be a place that she could now go in the entirety of her life and not be defined by that video. “And you have both.”

  Cleo was not the type to blush, and yet she found herself blushing quite unexpectedly.

  “Strength, yes . . . passion . . . I’m not sure.”

  “Have you seen Dirty Dancing?” he asked. “That’s the mambo there too. I call this dance Dirty Dancing Lite or Mambo for Beginners.”

  Cleo had seen Dirty Dancing because who hadn’t? But not for years. She wasn’t the type to flip listlessly through the channels late at night and stumble upon a movie that rendered her nostalgic. If she were, she’d remember that MaryAnne had been obsessed with Patrick Swayze in seventh grade, while she, naturally, had gravitated toward Baby’s independent streak.

  “Wait,” Cleo said. “Please tell me we’re not doing that lift? There is no way I can do that lift.”

  “Dance isn’t about what you can’t do,” he said. “It’s about retraining your brain and your body to prove that you can.”

  Cleo started to point out that they had only six hours, and no miracles, in the history of life, had been pulled off in such time, but she was trying to be more trusting, so she decided to stay mum and leave it, literally, in Francis’s hands.

  Cleo had always been competitive, too competitive really. Just look at what she did to MaryAnne. So she was determined not to lose the competition, even if they were only playing for pride. Pride! What else could you be playing for? Wasn’t that ultimately the point of anything? Cleo was surprised that Suzanne Sonnenfeld even had to ask.

  By the time they broke for lunch, Cleo had a decent sense of the choreography, though Francis kept barking things like “Cleaner!” and “Hit that beat!” and “Come on, show me your paaaaassssion!” and she really didn’t know what that meant, much less how to show it.

  “All I want to do is not humiliate myself out there,” she said to him as sweat poured from her brow and her armpits and also her belly button and lower back. “I’m giving it my best.”

  “That’s not all you want,” he snapped. “You want to win!”

  “Well, sure.”

  “So then stop apologizing for yourself with words like humiliate! The body senses what the brain is thinking!”

  Cleo didn’t mean to apologize, so she reached for her water bottle, and they trudged back to the ballroom for a catered lunch of finger sandwiches and kale salad. Cleo checked in with Georgie, who reported that Lucas had perked up significantly at the notion of watching her perform on YouTube this evening, and then she checked in with Gaby, who had promised to stop by for moral support.

  “What’s your dance?” Bowen said, pulling up a seat at her empty round table, which later this evening would be adorned in gold and silver linens and crystal wineglasses and butter knives and rolls and a fairly average lobster salad followed by prime rib.

  “Mambo.” Cleo shrugged. “Like from Dirty Dancing.”

  “Ooh.” Bowen’s eyes went wide. “I had such a thing for Jennifer Grey.”

  Cleo wondered if there was a woman in the world Bowen wouldn’t sleep with other than her.

  “We’re doing a jive,” Bowen said.

  “Yikes.”

  “Yeah, it’s not gonna be great,” he replied. “I think they overestimated my abilities.”

  “Tends to happen with men,” Cleo said.

  “What does that mean?” Bowen stopped chewing his sandwich.

  “Just, you know, the producers probably took a look at you and thought: What isn’t he capable of?” Cleo knew she was being petty, but she didn’t feel like being kind.

  Suzanne Sonnenfeld slid up right at that moment, so Cleo dropped it.

  “You guys ready to taste blood?” she said.

  “Oh, eat shit, Suzanne,” Cleo snapped.

  Bowen, who had been sipping a Perrier, nearly choked.

  “Well, well, well,” Suzanne said. “Look who suddenly isn’t hashtag Team Woman.”

  “I’m not hashtag Team Woman for women who suck. ‘Not All Men’? Give me a break.” Cleo narrowed her eyes.

  “Oh, Cleo, lighten up. It’s all for show. It’s all for my show. I think your professor got what was coming to him,” Suzanne said.

  Cleo stood, dabbed her mouth with her napkin, and threw it on the table. “I’m a senator, Suzanne. You can address me accordingly.”

  The truth was that six hours was just not long enough to master the Dirty Dancing lift. Maybe for someone else who was not Cleo McDougal, it would have been. But there were a couple of issues in play, most of which revolved around trust—that Cleo didn’t trust that they wouldn’t topple over; that Cleo didn’t trust Francis (though she was trying), who was maybe four inches taller than her, to carry her weight; that Cleo didn’t trust herself to take the leap in the first place.

  The rest of the steps were mostly memorization. Once that was down, Francis kept screaming at her to “put some passion in your hips” and “feel the sway, Cleo, feel the sway,” but Cleo did not feel the sway, and she sadly worried that she had no passion left in her hips because, honestly, it had been so long since there’d been a reason for it to be there.

  With one hour to go before hair and makeup, Cleo was exhausted. She hadn’t worked her muscles this hard for this long in, well—she never had. Gaby, with her marathon training, would have been much better suited to this task, but it was too late for that. And besides, Veronica Kaye wasn’t showing up to see Cleo’s chief of staff leap into Francis’s arms.

  “One more time,” Francis said and pointed to the far corner. Cleo skulked back and turned around to face him, chastising herself for ever agreeing to this stupid thing in the first place. Georgie was right: revisiting your regrets was ridiculous! Whatever made her think that one stupid day of dance could make up for thirty-seven years of not paying attention to the arts? This wasn’t connecting with her mom or her past or anything of the sort. She’d been a fool to think that it would, and now she’d have to be a fool in front of five hundred of Washington’s elites, not to mention YouTube subscribers. (She hadn’t realized there’d be video until this morning—Arianna hadn’t put that in the email.)

  But Cleo McDougal did not like to lose. So she eyed Francis across the room and saw his outstretched arms and heard him shriek, “Now, Cleo
, now!” and so she ran, and then she leaped, and she was as surprised as anyone that she nailed it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Gaby ran into the greenroom, breathless, with just minutes to go before the show.

  “Shit, I’m sorry!” she said. “There were so many follow-up calls after Bowen’s show, and a second lawsuit has been filed because of this hashtag—don’t worry, it has nothing to do with you—and then Oliver FaceTimed . . .”

  She tilted her head and finally took Cleo in. Hair and makeup had tried their best to morph her into Jennifer Grey, but it hadn’t gone as well as anyone had hoped. Cleo had never in her wildest dreams envisioned wearing a shirt tied in a knot to expose her belly button, nor had she ever wished for wavy hair tied back in a bandanna or, frankly, false eyelashes and extremely pink lip liner, which the makeup artists said was necessary under the lights to make her features pop.

  “Yes.” Cleo sighed. “This is really happening.”

  Bowen joined them and double-kissed Gaby on the cheeks.

  “We’ve gotten so many hits from your clip. You’re welcome back anytime.”

  Cleo didn’t love the sound of that, not because she didn’t think that Nobells deserved to be dragged forever, and she was elated that #pullingaCleo was still a life force of its own, but because part of her worried that the longer this story stayed in the spotlight, the more the real rationale behind it—her long list of regrets—would be exposed. She knew this seemed paranoid. But still. She was sitting in the greenroom of the Grand Hyatt, set to do the mambo, dressed as a character out of a movie she’d loved in middle school, while her sister, with whom she had previously been more or less estranged, tended her son whose appendix had nearly exploded, so Cleo wasn’t about to be shocked at anything anymore.

  “You look extremely adorable,” Bowen said to her. “If that’s OK to say.”

  Bowen was in a vest with no shirt underneath, old-timey striped trousers, and a top hat, and somehow, though Cleo knew she and MaryAnne would have nicknamed him Mr. Peanut, she thought the getup made him even more attractive. She hated this.

  “It’s OK to say,” Cleo said. “But don’t worry—I won’t take it the wrong way. I won’t try to kiss you or anything.”

  “I wouldn’t . . . ,” Bowen started, then stopped. “Look, can we talk about this later?”

  “We don’t have to talk about it ever,” Cleo said and then saw Francis gesturing to her because he wanted her to stretch out before they went live.

  “Cleo, that’s not—”

  But Cleo was already halfway across the room, having mentally added Bowen Babson to her list of regrets. Two hundred and thirty-four now.

  Cleo’s nerves kicked in just as the lights went down and the emcee welcomed the crowd. Her intestines contracted and her hands started to shake, and honestly, she wished Georgie were here to talk her through some breathing.

  Gaby was seated at the table with Veronica Kaye, who was trailed by her staffer Topher. Gaby and Veronica said a quick hello once Cleo and the rest of the contestants emerged from the greenroom. Ostensibly, being graced by Veronica Kaye should have calmed her nerves, but it did not.

  “I just love that you are out here taking a risk,” Veronica said. Then she leaned in closer to Cleo’s ear and whispered, “No regrets,” which sent Cleo off into an entirely different anxiety spiral. Surely it was just a coincidence that Veronica had used such a common phrase, but Cleo—rational and pragmatic, her father’s daughter still—did not fully believe in coincidences, and she was unable to shake the sense that Veronica knew more about her than she wished.

  Suzanne was up first. She and her partner were doing the Sandy and Danny “You’re the One That I Want” scene from Grease, and while Cleo was not keen on her own belly shirt and clamdiggers, she was greatly relieved not to be wearing vacuumed-on black latex. Suzanne was in her early forties but rose each morning to hit the six a.m. SoulCycle class, and though Cleo didn’t want to appreciate one thing about Suzanne Sonnenfeld, much less objectify her because that felt wholly un-feminist, she had to admit that she pulled off that latex quite well. Suzanne loved the spotlight and played to the crowd, and even though she was a horrible bottom-feeder who catered to the lowest common denominator of politics, she received rousing applause. Washington was apolitical when it came to dominance, Cleo supposed. And as she bounced off the dance floor and past Cleo, she leaned over and said, “I’d never eat shit for you.”

  And then Cleo forgot about her nerves and her exposed belly button and Veronica’s odd encouragement, and she furrowed her brow and refocused and told herself that she was going to murder it out there. Cleo was quite good at willing. She was going to try to enjoy it too, she told herself, like her mother would have, but she was also going to murder it out there. Just to shut up Suzanne fucking Sonnenfeld.

  A handful of congressmen and women and a few prominent lobbyists did their routines, no one embarrassing him- or herself, yet no one coming close to Suzanne’s. Bowen was second to last, and Cleo saw him shaking out his hands and legs with his gorgeous young thing of a partner and then, as the emcee called his name, shedding any sign of nervousness and throwing his arms in the air, encouraging the crowd to cheer louder, then louder still. He took off his top hat and bowed as if he had already won, which was pretty rich, Cleo thought—like a subliminal message to the audience that he had it in the bag.

  His routine was not terrible. Quite a bit of flying elbows and snapping fingers, and there was one point when his kicks were totally out of sync with his partner, but he sashayed and shimmied and jived with everything he had, and Cleo couldn’t help but smile. It wasn’t that he was good; it was that he believed that he was good, much like Cleo had to believe she could nail the lift, and that went a long way in entertaining a crowd. Hell, Cleo realized, it went a long way in politics too.

  The crowd gave Bowen a standing ovation, and he bowed three times, soaking it up. He was clearly the one to beat, unless Suzanne Sonnenfeld found a way to rig the ballot, and honestly Cleo wouldn’t put that beneath her. Still, though, Cleo thought that hers could be a sweet, sweet victory, triumphing over Bowen and putting a nail in the proverbial coffin of the bourbon situation once and for all.

  Francis massaged her shoulders.

  “You ready?” he whispered.

  “Yes.” She wasn’t, but this wasn’t the first time she’d faked it.

  “You trust me? Because there can’t be any doubt out there. When you run toward me, the only way it works is if you’re all in. I’ll catch you. I promise.”

  “I’m all in,” Cleo said. She believed.

  And then the emcee called her name.

  Her routine went viral almost immediately. Cleo wouldn’t know this until the next day because she had other things to deal with, but she and Francis were trending within twenty minutes of the YouTube clip airing.

  She was doing well from the very beginning. Very well, in fact. Cleo thought that her hips were shaking with quite a bit of passion, as requested by Francis, and her sway was swaying as instructed as well. They were three minutes in, and Cleo couldn’t believe how much fun she was having. This must have been why her mother danced! This must be why people sang and acted and lost themselves to a rock concert! She felt at one with the music and at one with Francis, and she saw Bowen watching her and grinning like he was rooting for her as much as he was rooting for himself, and she felt, honestly, like she could soar. She thought that maybe she’d even take a class or two at Dance DC with Francis once she had more time, after she officially launched the presidential bid, after all the hubbub that came with it. Surely she could find a night or two per week to dance.

  There were only thirty seconds left to the song, and it came up so fast, Cleo hadn’t realized that they were nearing the end. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d lost herself like she had mamboing it out with Francis in front of five hundred of Washington, DC’s finest. Francis pulled her into a twirl and then spun her out toward the corner of the
dance floor and yelled, “You got this, Senator!”

  As the music quieted, then grew into a crescendo, Cleo quieted as well, then wound herself up, willing herself to run, willing herself to leap. To believe. She thought of her regrets list, and how she was so often alone, and how she now had Georgie and Gaby and Emily Godwin too, and how, if she didn’t just let go of her need to be in control and her need to win and have faith that Francis would catch her, when was she ever going to?

  She started running, just as they practiced, and Francis stood on the other side of the ballroom with his arms aloft, his eyes trained on her, and he screamed again, “Come on, baby—I got you!”

  And she remembered Georgie’s advice from just the day before, and so she ran, and then she leaped, and for a brief moment in time, she truly believed that she could fly.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Unfortunately for Cleo, that moment was short-lived. Halfway through her leap, caught up in the moment and the energy, she shocked herself and showboated and did not heed Francis’s immaculately timed instructions from rehearsal. And thus, she threw up her arms too early and made a face toward the crowd, and her momentum therefore was slightly askew and she somehow angled her torso toward him rather than straight to the ceiling and ended up flattening her poor instructor against the band’s drummer and drum set, which then knocked over the cellist and, subsequently, the violinist too.

  Bowen was the one who ran over first and helped Cleo to her feet. She thought that if it were possible to die of embarrassment (again), surely this would be the moment. Instead he leaned in close to her neck and said, “Go bow.”

  Cleo was dizzy from the fall and surely hadn’t heard him correctly. “What?”

  “Go bow. They won’t know the difference.”

  Cleo knew that of course they would know the difference, but one thing she’d learned in Washington was that you could frankly fart in an elevator and, if you were savvy enough, convince the person next to you that they’d been responsible. Politics was half policy, half illusion. So she patted her hair down and reached for Francis, who was not yet moving or ready to bounce to his feet, and then she marched solo to the middle of the ballroom and she took her goddamn bow.