Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  He said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, shit.” He stepped back from the woman, who was now looking at me, too—she was young and pretty—and she said, “Oh!” and I realized she was the daughter of my boss. She was Margaret Howard, the Stanford student.

  She said, “But I thought—” then didn’t finish the sentiment. She seemed to be in a daze, which made me consider what induced such a daze. What was it that had already happened?

  In a quiet but firm voice, Bill said to her, “You need to go.”

  Even given the circumstances—my own shock and distraughtness, her confusion—I sensed her wish for some more ceremonial farewell from him.

  She said, “But—” and he said, “Now.”

  Bill had turned toward me, and neither of us spoke. “Bye?” the girl said then repeated, “Bye.” I was conscious of her walking away, but I didn’t watch her leave.

  Bill closed the space between us and set his mammoth palm on my shoulder and upper arm. His voice was thick with emotion as he said, “Hillary.”

  I shrugged off his hand and glared up at him. Without speaking, I turned and walked inside and down the hall to our unit, which wasn’t locked. Bill followed me to the bedroom. Although whichever of us got up second, usually Bill, made the bed each morning, the sheets on the mattress were in disarray, and one of the four pillows was on the floor. I felt nauseated and shaky. I dropped my satchel, walked into the galley kitchen, leaned my back against the sink, folded my arms, and said, “You just had sex with her in our bed.” It wasn’t a question.

  He was standing at the kitchen’s threshold, and he stepped toward me. “Sweet baby,” he said and brought his face close to mine. I pushed him away.

  “You were kissing her thirty seconds ago, and now you’re trying to kiss me?” I shook my head. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It wasn’t—I didn’t—” He paused.

  “You didn’t what?”

  “Even while it was going on, I regretted it. She flirted with me, and I had a moment of weakness and gave in to temptation. I regret it with all my heart.”

  I was so upset that it was difficult to speak. Several seconds passed, and I said, “I saw the two of you kissing, and it didn’t look like you were regretting anything.”

  “No.” He seemed to be on the brink of tears. “It was just physical gratification. It was nothing compared to what we have.”

  “Did you run into her or did you make a plan to see her? Did you call her at Phil’s house?”

  He didn’t respond.

  Dumbfoundedly, I said, “You called the house of my boss to ask his daughter on a date?”

  Still he didn’t speak.

  “Have you seen her before today?” I asked.

  He sighed deeply and finally said, “A few times.”

  “How many?”

  “Four?”

  Again, a silence descended on us. At last, I said, “This is such a betrayal.” I waved a hand at myself then at him. “I don’t know what the point of this is.”

  “You’d throw away our love just like that?”

  “I’d throw away our love?”

  “I’ll swear on my Mammaw’s Bible that I’m passionately in love with you,” he said. “I’m a horny bastard, and sometimes I can’t help myself. But there’s no question that you’re the love of my life. I want to be around you forever and ever.”

  “Then why the hell did you just have sex with that girl?”

  He looked pained.

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “we did it last night. Am I not enough for you?”

  He looked down as he said, “There’s definitely something wrong with me. Because yeah, you and I made love last night, and it was wonderful. And I could have done it again right when we woke up in the morning and again before you left for work and again at lunch and again now. It’s the way I imagine it is for people who drink too much. It’s a rarer moment that I’m not overwhelmed with how much I want to have sex than when I am. I’m thinking about doing it right now, with you.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I just meant it’s constant, and I hate this about myself. My male urges—they make a fool of me. That’s been true since long before I met you. But if I wreck what you and I have, I’d rather die.”

  I did still feel furious, and stunned with hurt, but I also felt some slackening; he was telling me something that didn’t exactly surprise me but also wasn’t something I’d known.

  I said, “How long have you been like this?”

  “Since I was ten or eleven. I—” He hesitated. “As soon as I figured out it was a thing I could do, I touched myself a lot. And I mean a lot. Later, with girls, at first I was shocked any of them were willing to have anything to do with me, but I discovered they were.”

  “How many women have you slept with in your life?”

  He bit his lower lip.

  “Just to be clear,” I said, “if you tell me the truth right now, I might forgive you, and if you lie to me, I never will.”

  “I don’t know the exact number,” he said. “It could be over fifty.”

  “Did you cheat on your earlier girlfriends?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “If you’re going to be evasive, you might as well pack your suitcase and start driving to New Haven tonight. I can fly back next week. It’s not as if I need you here while I finish my job.”

  “I’ve never been faithful to any girl,” he said.

  It felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

  He said, “But from now on, I want to be faithful to you. I want to be worthy of your love.”

  “If you’re saying that it’s like a compulsion, how can you change that?”

  “With willpower,” he said. “And prayer. And with your help, if you’ll give it to me.”

  “Does that mean us having sex three times a day?”

  “Maybe—what if—if I wanted it and you didn’t, would you think it was disgusting if I lay next to you and touched myself?”

  I considered it, then said, “No. I wouldn’t think it was disgusting.”

  “Would it bother you if I looked at magazines?”

  “I need to think about that. It doesn’t seem like it’s my right to try to stop you, but I don’t know if I want to see them.”

  “That’s fair.”

  Mapping out the future, coming up with strategies and plans—these were things we were good at, things we’d practiced. In a way, strategizing made me feel as close to him as sex.

  Again, he took a few steps toward me and when we were less than a foot apart, he dropped to his knees. He looked up at me, took both my hands, and said, “The flesh is weak. Lord knows how weak my flesh has been. But, Hillary, my spirit is yours. My soul and my spirit and my heart—they’ll always be yours, no matter what.” And then he began to cry, and I don’t mean he got choked up like he had in my parents’ basement. This time, his face crumpled and tears streamed down his cheeks in a way I’d seen in my brothers in their youth but never in a grown man. Pulling his head toward my navel—it was instinctive, not a decision, as so much about Bill was for me instinctive. Still on his knees, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed his torso and face against me, and I petted his hair. I didn’t reassure him that my spirit and soul and heart were his, because wasn’t it obvious? Instead, softly, I said, “Bill. Oh, Bill, what am I going to do with you?”

  * * *

  —

  At the office the next day, I finished a brief and ate lunch with the other associates, but my mind wandered. If Bill had met up with Margaret Howard four times, when had the other three been, and where? Did the admission of four really mean eight, or twelve? Had sex occurred the earlier times? If so, had they used birth control? On the days they’d seen each other, what conversations had he and I ha
d that night over dinner, and had he felt uncomfortable with his lies of omission? I tried to recall evenings when he’d seemed preoccupied, and I couldn’t.

  His apparent talent for deceit—it was so disturbing, so insulting. How could I stay with a man like that? How had I been such a poor judge of character? And yet I believed what he’d said about his spirit and soul, I believed he wanted us to be together forever. I believed that he adored me and—remarkably—that he adored me while understanding not only who I was but who I wished to be. But if that was true, how could he so easily take off his clothes with someone else? Sex was a physical act for me, yes, but what made it precious was that he was the other person; my bond with him felt singular.

  There was an odd familiarity to this affront, a variation on the men who’d admired my mind without taking any interest in my body. Was it that all along Bill had taken an interest in my body only because he wasn’t picky, because he took an interest in almost all women’s bodies? This was crushing to consider; it was devastating. I thought of the stupid, smug postcard I’d sent to Phyllis; I thought of when I’d asked Bill if he’d be bored not working and believed him when he’d said he’d be satisfied reading and wandering the streets of Berkeley. I’d believed this of Bill, the most gregarious person I knew.

  As the day wore on, I developed a headache, and I was tempted to leave the office early. But what if I went home and walked in on him with Margaret? Or with someone else? Then I thought if I did, the situation was hopeless, and if it was hopeless, at least I’d know.

  He was sitting in the living room reading the Robert Frost biography. He stood when I entered and said in a warm voice, “Hi, baby. I’m so happy to see you.” When he embraced me, it was comforting in a way I hadn’t anticipated; I wouldn’t have thought the same person could cause and assuage my pain. I just wanted to relax with him, to sit close together on the couch and read or talk, but not to talk about the subject that had gripped me for almost twenty-four hours. The questions that had been spinning in my mind—I asked him none of them. I’d told Bill that I wouldn’t tolerate evasion, but it wasn’t true.

  * * *

  —

  We had planned to drive back along the southern route, stopping in Hot Springs, but there was a tenderness with which he treated me during those weeks in August, an extra deference, and I think he understood that visiting his home, meeting his mother and brother and stepfather, wasn’t something I could do at that point. After he’d called his mother to say that we needed to get back to New Haven sooner than expected because of his obligations to the McGovern campaign, Bill said to me, “Just promise me this. Promise you’ll come to Arkansas another time.”

  Perhaps he realized that if his long-term goal was to persuade me to move there, it was smarter to postpone our first visit so that it wouldn’t be tainted.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes in the night I awakened with a sense of dread, a nebulous apprehension, and it took a few seconds to pinpoint its source. And yet there was a less predictable emotion that at times accompanied my hurt and disappointment. It took until after we’d left Oakland, until our second day on the road, as we were turning in to a motel parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska, for me to admit to myself that it was relief—a strange, perverse, sincere relief. The reality was that I was a hardworking and not beautiful middle-class Midwestern girl with a mean father. I had never believed the world existed for my enjoyment. I’d believed instead that every situation was a trade-off, that there was always a catch. I didn’t yearn to be envied by others, and wasn’t a great love affair with Bill Clinton enviable? Hadn’t it been thrilling and also made me slightly uneasy? Now the catch had made itself known. Bill could be genuinely devoted and at the same time struggle to remain faithful. We had been a couple for five months, and he’d already cheated. Surely this meant that at best, I’d live with the fear that he’d cheat again, and at worst, that he would cheat. He wasn’t too good to be true. But discerning his flaw meant that if I could live with it, I could keep him.

  There also was this: Our relationship was still new enough that the idea that I’d have to exert myself in order to sexually satisfy him, that we’d need, together, to be imaginative and thorough—this was not a wholly unpleasant challenge. It didn’t seem like the worst burden. There was an extra intensity to our couplings in those weeks after I’d found him kissing Margaret. And both in and out of bed, I’d think of what he’d told me about himself; his secret had become something else we shared.

  On August 23, 1971, we pulled up in front of the apartment on Edgewood Avenue in New Haven, and, as the landlord had agreed to, a key waited beneath a brick in the small backyard. We entered an apartment that did indeed feature a charming living room fireplace and, less charmingly, uneven flooring and such an absurdly small bathroom that the toilet seat touched the bathtub.

  Walking through the empty rooms for the first time, I felt older than I’d been when Bill and I had departed from New Haven in May. A certain giddiness between us had been punctured, in part, of course, by his infidelity, but that wasn’t the only reason. Having lived under the same roof for three months, shared a bed, driven across the country and back, we knew each other in a far deeper way. We weren’t bound only by conversation and chemistry, which can be at once seductive and misleading or at least incomplete. We now knew each other’s extended habits and moods, knew each other awake and asleep, not as a novelty but as a daily norm; the way he smelled when he woke up in the morning wasn’t a bad smell—I liked it—but it also wasn’t the public version of him. We knew each other’s animal selves. Berkeley had been practice, a probation from which our survival as a couple hadn’t been guaranteed. The return to New Haven felt like the true beginning of our lives together.

  Later, I thought about the fact that both Bill’s infidelity and my discovery of it had occurred in California—how geography had seemed to contain the sorrow and conflict, allowing us to leave them behind. The only person I confided in about the infidelity was Maureen, with whom I exchanged long letters that I took care never to read or write when Bill was in the apartment. Did I tell Maureen because we’d recently seen her in Park Ridge or because there’d have been too much shame involved in telling anyone at Yale? My reasons, I suppose, were not mutually exclusive.

  The episode with Margaret took on the quality of a bad dream—vivid and unsettling but also ephemeral and discrete.

  CHAPTER 3

  1974

  THE GREENBERGERS LIVED CLOSE TO the Yale campus, in a brick house with a front porch. When I arrived there at seven-thirty on a hot Sunday morning in August, all four members of the family were outside: Gwen and Richard sat on the porch steps, both of them holding coffee mugs, while the twins, who had recently turned six, stood in the yard in matching Spiderman pajamas. Otto was eating a piece of toast, and Marcus was running a toy car over a red vinyl suitcase set upright on the path that led from the porch to the sidewalk.

  As I emerged from my car, I said, “Hi, everyone,” and Marcus said, “I am a flying Camaro and I go seventy thousand trillion miles an hour.”

  “Hillary, it’s a shame you can’t drive Marcus’s Camaro to Arkansas,” Richard said.

  I laughed, and Gwen said, “But then Hillary and I would miss out on the pleasure of each other’s company.”

  Richard rose to wedge Gwen’s suitcase in the back of my car—it was a new used Buick—among my clothes, books, records, and favorite frying pan. I’d left Washington, D.C., a week before and been driving around the Northeast on a kind of farewell tour, including attending the Boston wedding of my Wellesley friend Nancy, who was out of the Peace Corps and had become a social worker. One morning in Jamaica Plain, I’d pulled clothes from the trunk and discerned that during the night, a back-door lock had been jimmied open, my belongings had been rifled through, and nothing had been taken; I’d been both relieved and a little insulted.

  I
went inside to use the Greenbergers’ downstairs bathroom, and when I came back out to the yard, Gwen hugged the boys.

  “Thank you,” I said to Richard. I meant, for giving Gwen his blessing to drive with me while he was left alone with their kids.

  “Just so long as you know she’s acting as a double agent,” Richard said.

  “I guess now I can’t claim I wasn’t warned,” I said.

  Gwen shook her head at Richard, but then she hugged him and kissed him on the lips, and he looked at me and said, “Drive safely with my favorite passenger.”

  When Gwen and I were both in the car, she rolled down her window and called, “Boys, be good for Daddy. I love you all. Richard, we’re almost out of milk.”

  “Mommy, will you bring us a present?” Otto said.

  “That depends on the reports I get from Daddy about how helpful you are.”

  “Where are you stopping tonight?” Richard asked.

  Gwen glanced at me, and I said, “Indianapolis.”

  To Richard, Gwen said, “I’ll call you from the motel.”

  * * *

  —

  We hadn’t yet reached Pennsylvania when Gwen said, “I understand why you love him. I promise that I do. I just think he’s asking so much of you. You sacrifice your professional future, and what does he sacrifice?”

  “But I’m the one who made this decision,” I said. “And it’s not like I won’t have a job.”

  “Being a professor in Fayetteville, Arkansas—” She was speaking slowly, seeming to choose her words carefully. “You can do anything you want and live anywhere. You—you, Hillary Rodham—if you’re not the beneficiary of the women’s movement, who is? More than any other young woman I know, you have the freedom to choose your own path.”