Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Do you think important work only gets done on the East Coast?”

  “Absolutely not. But you aren’t moving to Arkansas for the job. You took the job because you’re moving to Arkansas.”

  “Don’t you live in New Haven because of Richard’s job?”

  She sighed. “Maybe that’s part of why I’m saying all this.”

  * * *

  —

  Around Dayton, Ohio, Gwen said, “If the talk about him being president is true, can you imagine being first lady?”

  I’m sure it wasn’t her intent, but whenever people invoked Bill’s future this way, I felt pride. I said, “I’m more focused on finishing my syllabi before the semester starts than I am on a Clinton presidency.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Hillary. Have you really considered it? Hosting teas and talking about the dress you’re wearing?”

  I thought of Betty Ford, who had moved into the White House days earlier, following Nixon’s resignation. She seemed pleasant enough but was a woman of my mother’s generation, as was Pat Nixon, who came across as poised, traditional, and now tainted by association. Then again, I’d just finished seven months as a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry, and there wasn’t anyone in Richard Nixon’s orbit whom I considered to be unscathed.

  “At least imagine being the first lady of Arkansas,” Gwen said. “Southerners like women to have their hair, nails, and clothes just so.”

  I said, “But what if Bill and I are a team and after he’s elected, whether it’s to Congress or something else, I influence policy? There’s more than one way to have an impact.”

  “Why would you want to work behind the scenes when you don’t have to?”

  * * *

  —

  On our second day of driving, an hour outside Fayetteville, Gwen said, “Do you remember when Richard had Bill and some of his classmates over to our house for dinner?”

  This had been three years prior, and I hadn’t attended but definitely remembered; it had been the night Gwen and Bill met, when he’d liked her and she hadn’t liked him. I said, “Of course.”

  “There was a woman in that class, and I can’t remember her name.”

  “Audrey Belzer,” I said.

  “I don’t have proof of anything. But he was very attentive to her that night. Early on, he made an effort with me. He turned on the charm. But after dinner and a few drinks, he was very close to her on the couch, touching her arm. He didn’t act like a man who had a girlfriend.”

  The seizing in my stomach—this was a highly inconvenient moment for it. I said, “Bill is warm and friendly with everyone, sometimes to a fault. I know that about him, and he knows it about himself.”

  “You don’t worry that it could get him into trouble?”

  “He isn’t perfect, but show me who is. And his talents far, far outweigh his shortcomings.” Sitting in the front seat next to Gwen as she drove my Buick, I felt a flicker of resentment. Why hadn’t she mentioned this at the time, before my life was so thoroughly entangled with Bill’s? Years later, I read that patients in therapy routinely brought up the subjects they were most worried about in the last few minutes of a session, when there was limited time left to delve into them, and I thought of Gwen. She’d waited so long that we were in Arkansas; we were in the lushly green Ozark Mountains, the road rising and falling gently, curving through valleys and around rocky overlooks and shimmering lakes. The scenery was lovely—could Gwen not see how lovely it was? I wished to be out of her company, and the wish made me sad.

  “I hope I’m wrong,” she said. “Barring that, I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

  And really, my resentment of her was unfounded. Because even by the time Bill had eaten dinner at the Greenbergers’ house, by the time I’d known him for two months, it had already been too late.

  * * *

  —

  After graduating from Yale, I’d worked for the National Children’s Initiative full-time, while Bill finished his third year of law school. I’d interviewed the families of children in Connecticut who couldn’t attend school because of physical and cognitive disabilities, then I’d had the deeply rewarding experience of watching Gwen present my findings at Senate hearings that occurred in the spring of 1973. Among the other projects I’d worked on for Gwen was researching private schools that had been created to avoid complying with Brown v. Board of Education yet managed to maintain tax-exempt status. When I’d driven alone to rural Tennessee and pretended that I was moving to town and wanted to find a segregated school for my child, I had felt like a private investigator. Other times under Gwen’s tutelage, I felt like a journalist, and still other times, I felt like a social worker.

  Meanwhile, Bill had been away from campus as much as he was there, working for McGovern in Connecticut and also in Texas. I joined Bill in late October 1972, canvassing door-to-door, and I was in Austin with him, his young staffers, and his volunteers for McGovern’s disastrous loss on election night. By the time Bill graduated from Yale, the dean of the law school at the University of Arkansas had offered him a teaching position, an ideal arrangement given that the university was located in the district of the Republican congressman Bill hoped to challenge. On my first visit to Fayetteville, in the fall of 1973, the law school dean and his wife had us over for ribs and he told me if I’d like to teach there, too, he was sure they could find classes for me. On the ride back to Bill’s rental house that night, I said, “Did you put him up to that?”

  Bill grinned. “Of course not.”

  In January 1974, both Bill and I had been contacted by John Doar, a friend of one of our Yale professors and the lawyer leading the Nixon impeachment inquiry for the House Judiciary Committee. When John invited us to join his staff, Bill declined—he had just started telling people he was running for Congress—and I accepted based on my Rule of Two: The job was interesting, prestigious, and an opportunity to make important contacts, and it could serve as a transition from working for Gwen to joining Bill. That is, I wouldn’t have to tell Gwen I was quitting the National Children’s Initiative to move to Arkansas, though I would be quitting the National Children’s Initiative and I would be moving to Arkansas.

  I was mostly correct about the impeachment inquiry: It was often fascinating, though also sometimes boring as we pored over every word in a document or on the tapes Nixon had made of himself in the Oval Office. I and forty-three other lawyers—two besides me were women—worked up to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, in a federal office building where we kept the blinds closed and security guards stood watch. Based on our findings, Doar presented the proposed articles of impeachment on July 19, and on August 9, Nixon resigned. His televised farewell speech that day felt both surreal and belated.

  When Gwen had offered to accompany me on the drive to Fayetteville, I’d suspected she still had reservations about Bill but I hadn’t realized the extent of them; I’d hoped she was trying to understand why I was moving to Arkansas rather than trying to prevent it. Bill also had offered to fly east and drive with me, though clearly he was relieved when I declined. In June, he’d won the Democratic primary, and in the last few weeks, it had started to seem as if he might actually win the seat. Accordingly, his schedule was packed with visits to hardware stores and rodeos and fish fries, and the poll numbers between him and his opponent, whose name was John Paul Hammerschmidt, were so close that every encounter with even one voter mattered.

  And underlying all our plans and conversations as a couple was something that had happened a year before. Just after his law school graduation, Bill and I had flown together to England; it had been my first trip overseas. We wandered around London, visiting the Tate Gallery and Westminster Abbey and Trafalgar Square. We took the train to Oxford and ate fish and chips for lunch at a pub, and steak and kidney pie for dinner at the home of the man who’d been head porter at
University College when Bill was there. Then we took the train up to the Lake District and checked in to a rustic inn near Ennerdale Water, where the proprietor owned a slow-moving, heavy-breathing bulldog whom we decided resembled the Yale mascot.

  In the previous two years, Bill and I hadn’t done much purely recreational travel separate from campaigns or seeing family. I’d wondered ahead of time if either of us would feel annoyed or suffocated. In fact, spending twenty-four hours a day together was effortless.

  At twilight on our first night at the inn, we walked down a path that led to the shore of Ennerdale Water and found ourselves overlooking a placid lake with grassy, craggy mountains beyond it.

  “Hillary,” Bill said, and I turned. He reached out and took both my hands in both of his, and this gesture maneuvered us so we were standing face-to-face, albeit at different heights. As he looked down and I looked up, he said, “I love you more than anything, and I always will. Hillary Diane Rodham, will you marry me?”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I want to. But not now. I can’t now.”

  He seemed surprised more than wounded, though he seemed wounded, too. “We don’t have to have a wedding right away,” he said. “We can wait as long as you want.”

  “I love you more than anything, too,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Is it because you don’t want to live in Arkansas? Because I thought we said if I beat Hammerschmidt, you wouldn’t have to.”

  I had to look away as I said, “I can imagine moving to Arkansas, and I can imagine marrying you. But I can’t do both at the same time, and I don’t think I should do either one yet. It’s too—it would be—the combination just seems irrevocable.”

  “You mean you’d feel trapped?”

  “I need to be realistic about what I can live with. Once I get married, I want to stay married.” When I glanced at him, he was looking out at the water, biting his lip.

  Then he said, “How am I supposed to prove myself? How long will I be in the doghouse for what happened in Berkeley?”

  “There’s no doghouse,” I said. “But don’t you think you are who you are?”

  Even though we were alluding to the topic, not landing on it directly, this was closer than we usually got. The thing I’d failed to anticipate after I’d seen Bill kissing Margaret Howard was that henceforth I’d need to make a decision about my own level of vigilance. Bill and I had sex almost every night that we were in the same bed, but on a night that we didn’t, did it mean something? If we attended a campaign event or party together, was it necessary to monitor him and intervene if he talked to any particular woman for too long? If he traveled, was it appropriate to ask for an account of his time away? One night shortly after we’d moved in together, we went to Philadelphia for a youth conference sponsored by the DNC. Based on my role with Yale’s chapter of Law Students United for Change, I was one of three speakers at the dinner banquet. I was focused as I stood onstage and spoke into the microphone about the importance of registering young people now that the voting age had dropped to eighteen. But earlier that afternoon, I’d noticed Bill chatting cozily with a curly-haired girl in a halter dress, and after the speeches, when the crowd was mingling again, I tried to track his movements around the ballroom as various people approached me to introduce themselves or praise my speech. Even when a Wellesley classmate I hadn’t seen for a few years greeted me, I could hardly concentrate. And it was this experience that provided the answer to my question about monitoring him. I couldn’t do it. Even though I’d given the DNC organizers what they’d asked for that night, I’d been preoccupied, and my preoccupation left me exhausted and ashamed. I felt pathetic. It was clear that I couldn’t live like this and certainly not for decades. I had to either break up with Bill or trust him.

  Had he been faithful in the last three years? I didn’t doubt that he’d flirted—paying compliments, touching a woman’s elbow or the small of her back. But had he kissed another woman? Had he had sex with another woman? Had his erection been inside another woman’s body and then had he pulled out and come on her stomach, or had he taken the risk of coming inside her? Were there women who’d found themselves pregnant following a tryst with Bill, and, either before or after Roe was decided in January 1973, had they had abortions? I didn’t know. I didn’t like to think about it, and I usually didn’t and then every few months, at moments I hadn’t planned to, I did.

  And even if I’d decided to trust him, there were indications that others didn’t. Shortly before my graduation, when I told my former roommate Katherine that I was staying in New Haven to work at the National Children’s Initiative, she said, “If Bill Clinton was my boyfriend, I’d keep an eye on him, too.”

  It was for all these reasons that I said what I said next on the shore of Ennerdale Water: “Let’s see what it feels like to live in different states and discuss this again in a few months.” Then, surprising us both, I added, “And why don’t we date other people during that time? Just to be sure.”

  His expression was displeased. “Sure of what?”

  Sure that we can’t live apart, I thought. Sure that you really have ruined me for everyone else. Aloud, I said, “I don’t know what the rush is.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll agree to your terms, and you know why? Because I’m sure already.”

  * * *

  —

  On the day of my arrival with Gwen, Bill had late-afternoon and evening events in Bentonville, which was on the way to Fayetteville. If we got to Bentonville before five, Bill had said we should go to Don’s Cafeteria, where he’d be prior to giving a speech in the town square. At four-fifty, we parked a block off the quaint downtown and walked into a bustling restaurant, where, at a table covered in a red-checked oilcloth, Bill sat with eight men, all of them about the age of my father. Bill was facing the door, and as soon as we made eye contact, he called, “Hillary!” He added, “And Gwen!” He stood and embraced me, kissing me on the lips, then he wrapped Gwen in a similar bear hug. “I am thrilled to see both of you,” he said.

  When he introduced us to the men, I experienced a sensation I’d experienced before around Bill, which was their surprise. I was the girlfriend of Bill Clinton? They did not, probably, think I was ugly; it was more that they’d expected their talented native son to have a girlfriend who was notably beautiful. As it happened, before Gwen and I had left the Best Western in Indianapolis that morning, I’d set my alarm clock twenty minutes early to shave my legs in the motel room tub, and I was wearing the first dress I’d bought in several years, a wrap dress with a brown-and-white geometric pattern. I looked back at them, holding each of their gazes, one after the other. Yes. I was the girlfriend of Bill Clinton.

  Bill was talking to the men about coal miners in the Arkansas River Valley suffering from black lung disease. Before we all left, he got up to shake hands with other diners, and a chicken farmer told me he’d never met a lady lawyer before. I hoped the man talking to Gwen wasn’t saying anything racist.

  Maybe because it was a Saturday, or just because it was a sunny summer evening, there was a larger than expected crowd waiting in the town square to hear Bill—at least a hundred people. After being introduced by the mayor of Bentonville, who was one of the men from the cafeteria, Bill gave his stump speech, adjusted to acknowledge Nixon’s recent resignation. He promised that if elected, he’d fight for fairer taxes, better health insurance, additional funding for education, and price controls on gas.

  He spoke clearly and intelligently, his Southern accent stronger than when we’d lived in New Haven in a way that I found endearing, though it’s possible that after I’d been apart from him since May, anything Bill did would have struck me as endearing. But there was some particular magic in the air on that hot and beautiful night, the magic of Bill in his native habitat. He’d shaved off his beard just after finishing law school, and he was a little sunburned, which only made him handsomer, his
white button-down shirt rolled up to the elbows. The audience clapped and cheered at every opportunity. Afterward, dozens of people shook hands with Bill, and a sizable number took out checkbooks and made donations for ten or twenty dollars on the spot.

  Several people approached to introduce themselves to me, including an older woman who was volunteering on the campaign and said with a wink, “Sweet pea, he’s been counting down the days till you got here.”

  After almost everyone had cleared out, I rejoined Gwen, who sat on a folding chair with one leg crossed over the other. She was scratching at a bug bite on her forearm, not smiling.

  “I think he was great,” I said.

  Without enthusiasm, she said, “He likes when people listen to him.”

  * * *

  —

  Gwen rode to Fayetteville with Bill’s campaign manager, a man named Lyle Metcalf, and Bill drove my car. Even though it was over ninety degrees, the harsh afternoon sun had mellowed into a rich evening light that dappled the crop fields and forests beside the highway. As soon as we were out of town, Bill set his palm above my left knee, ran it up my thigh, and said, “You look beautiful in this dress. When you walked into Don’s, I couldn’t believe how beautiful you looked.”

  “Oh, baby,” I said. “You were amazing tonight. And you looked so handsome.”

  He still was rubbing my thigh as he said, “I can’t even tell you how much I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I said, and it was becoming hard to speak—I was weak with how much I loved him, how miraculous it felt that he loved me back. And the proximity of his hand was making me molten.

  Which perhaps he sensed, because he said, “Will you take off your panties and let me touch you while I drive?”

  I laughed.