Rodham
Page 13
* * *
—
I went immediately to Barbara’s office. I said, “Something so embarrassing happened that I might need to leave the state of Arkansas and never return.”
“This sounds good.”
After I’d told her, I added, “The Venus of Willendorf has nothing on me in showing off her womanly figure.”
Already, I was half as distressed as I’d been before arriving in her office, and wasn’t this the alchemy of friendship, to mutually transform the humiliation of life into private jokes? Barbara said, “Once when I was teaching Civil Procedure, I went to sit down during a student presentation and missed the seat. Apart from the mortification, it hurt so badly, I thought I’d broken my tailbone. I nearly burst into tears.”
“That sounds awful.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“Should I say something in the next class?”
“It meets again Thursday?”
I nodded. “The irony is that I’ve been so concerned about them taking me seriously and showing me respect as a woman.” I closed my eyes and pressed my hands over them. “Do you ever wish you could just excise a chunk of your brain?”
“Once a day,” Barbara said. “At least. I don’t think I’d say anything on Thursday. They may have forgotten by then.”
* * *
—
When I told Bill that night, he said, “And here I like to think I’m the only one who gets to see your beautiful bottom.”
“I still can’t believe that I couldn’t feel that my skirt was bunched up.”
“Remember when you told me Mark Twain said bravery isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the mastery of fear?” We were eating potato chips at 10:00 P.M. on the secondhand sofa in my apartment. Bill took my hand and squeezed it. “Maybe life isn’t about the absence of embarrassment, it’s about the mastery of embarrassment.”
* * *
—
On Thursday, I entered the classroom for Trial Advocacy after having stood in my office and run my palms over the back of my skirt no less than eight times. I said, “Hello, everyone. We’ll be talking about chapter one in your casebook today, but first I understand there was a little awkwardness on the first day of class. I trust that’s now behind us.” I paused and smiled, pretending I was as charming as Bill, and the odd part was that I could feel it working. Or at least several of them smiled back at me. I said, “Now onward.”
* * *
—
I had steeled myself for culture shock, and certainly there was some. The tradition of calling the hogs at the Razorbacks football games made me feel like a visiting anthropologist, and I was constantly reminded of the smallness of the town—the cashier at Chouteau’s Market announced as I was paying for cereal and frozen vegetables that her nephew was one of my students, and when I went to open a bank account, the teller told me that his ex-wife lived in my apartment building. Quickly, I developed the habit of looking over one shoulder before discussing anything sensitive in public.
But I liked the quirkiness of Fayetteville—it was an artistic and progressive mecca within the state, and far less influenced then than it would eventually be by the nearby presences of Tyson Foods and Walmart—and the natural beauty of the rural areas was remarkable, especially in late summer and early fall. Highway 23, which Bill and I routinely rode along as he campaigned, was known as the Pig Trail. This less-than-beautiful name notwithstanding, the road curved among dense trees whose leaves turned, during my first weeks and months in the state, from bright green to vivid yellow, orange, and red, the foliage opening at intervals to reveal dazzling vistas of the Ozarks. I also was charmed by the small towns, their awnings over shops and restaurants, their fountains and elegant banks and churches.
Even with preparing for classes, holding office hours, and running the legal aid clinic, I had plenty of time to campaign for Bill. Though I’d been a believer on past campaigns, it was different to work to earn votes for him. When I knocked on doors, I never identified myself as his girlfriend, but I’d beam when people already knew who he was and praised him. And I loved hearing his stories after he’d spent a day traveling around the district and meeting voters: Once while he was going door-to-door in the town of Harrison, a woman noticed his shirt was missing a button and sewed one of hers on right there in her living room. Another time, he entered a barbershop to shake hands and emerged with a haircut.
One evening, as I drove to Barbara Overholt’s house to have a glass of wine, I thought to myself that when Bill and I bought a home, we ought to live in the same historic neighborhood where she did. I then realized the implications of this thought, but I wasn’t bothered; I felt a stirring of excitement. How curious it was that most people who knew me assumed my move to Arkansas was a narrowing of my world when I was experiencing it as an expansion. But I also understood this assumption because I once had shared it.
* * *
—
Sometimes on weekends, Bill’s mother drove up from Hot Springs, often with a friend or two, to volunteer at his campaign headquarters, which was in a one-story house he’d rented near campus; Bill and a friend had painted CLINTON FOR CONGRESS in red and blue paint on the outside of the house. Virginia and the other women would put together yard signs or would phone bank, usually while playing a radio station that featured Elvis Presley songs in heavy rotation. Whenever Bill stopped by, he’d heap praise and affection on his mother, and though she still was clearly grieving Jeff, Virginia would beam.
On a Saturday morning in early October, I entered the headquarters with him to find Virginia, her friend Judy, and a dozen other volunteers stuffing envelopes at the folding tables and chairs set up in the house’s living room, dining room, and sole bedroom. A spontaneous cheer arose, and the volunteers clustered in the living room, where Bill greeted everyone individually, hugging and thanking them. I kept looking at my watch—it was after nine, and we were due at eleven at a harvest parade in Boone County.
We finally extricated ourselves and were standing in the driveway, along with a sophomore named George who’d be driving us that day, when Judy reappeared and said to Bill, “I almost forgot.” She passed him a brown paper lunch bag, then puckered her lips. He obediently bent for her to kiss his cheek, and she said, “Drive safely, darlin’.”
George drove a Chevy pickup, and I sat in the truck’s second row. We were still on College Avenue when I said, “What’s in the bag?”
“Just a little present from an ardent fan in Hot Springs.” Bill chuckled strangely.
I’d imagined he’d say that it was biscuits or cinnamon rolls. I said, “It’s not money, is it?”
From the front passenger seat, Bill turned around and smiled. “Is that a question you do or don’t want to know the answer to?”
I leaned forward and grabbed the bag off his lap. When I unfolded the top, I saw many—probably hundreds of—twenty-dollar bills. “What the hell is this?” I said.
“Do you remember meeting Dickie Kinnaman? He’s a close friend of Judy’s who’s made a killing at the racetrack, and he hates Hammerschmidt. He told her to tell me to use it as I see fit in Sebastian County.” Bill glanced at George, who was impassive.
I was genuinely stunned. “You can’t mean you’re planning to buy votes.”
“I’m shocked—shocked—to find that gambling is going on in here!” Bill said in his best Claude Rains accent. In his normal voice, he added, “I’m not planning to do anything with it besides hand it off to my guy in Fort Smith. What he does with it is up to him.” Bill glanced once more at George before saying to me, “You do know that Sebastian County is the biggest, most conservative, and most corrupt county in the district?”
“My God, Bill!” I said. “This is a terrible, terrible idea.”
“Then we won’t do it. Calm down, baby.”
“What are you thinking?”
For the first time, George reacted, but not by saying anything. He reacted by laughing.
* * *
—
The parade was just a few blocks long, and instead of walking in it with Bill, waving at spectators and handing out flyers, I spent the entirety, as floats passed and a marching band vigorously played John Philip Sousa, standing on a street corner talking to Lyle Metcalf. Lyle was in his late thirties, a bald, slender, married lawyer, and a man of few words who clearly had Bill’s respect. He ran his own law practice, and Bill had told me that Lyle went to the office at 6:00 A.M., worked ceaselessly for three hours on his client business, then spent the rest of the day on campaign duties.
“Did you know about this?” I asked.
“No,” Lyle said.
“Does Jim?” Jim was the campaign treasurer.
“I can’t speak for him.”
“This could destroy Bill’s campaign,” I said.
“Unlikely,” Lyle said.
How were intelligent men blind to the damage they could sow? “It’s unacceptable,” I said. “It can’t happen, and it’s not going to. Do you hear me?”
Lyle smiled, and his smile was reptilian. “Have you told Bill that?”
We were headed next to a sale barn—a farmer’s market, flea market, and livestock auction rolled into one—and I said, “I’ll tell him in the car.”
When I did, Bill acted as if he were a little boy, and I was scolding him for sneaking extra cookies from the cookie jar.
“Fine,” he kept saying as we arrived at the sale barn and climbed from George’s truck. “Fine. Can we stop talking about it?” And then Bill had walked away and was shaking hands with a farmer who’d grown a seventy-five-pound watermelon.
* * *
—
One Friday in October, when Bill had gone overnight to an AFL-CIO event down in Hot Springs, Barbara and I went together to hear jazz in Walker Park. That afternoon, I’d received a letter from my friend Maureen in Park Ridge saying she and her husband Steve—he worked at LaSalle Bank, and they had married in the spring of ’73—were expecting their first baby.
Barbara had brought a blanket, cheese, and crackers, and I’d brought a chilled bottle of wine, a bottle opener, and two paper cups. As I poured, and the ensemble down the hill played a Dizzy Gillespie song, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
My voice was far more tentative than usual—with Barbara or in general—as I said, “I suspect you know that Bill can be flirtatious with women.”
“Ah,” Barbara said, “I was wondering when we’d discuss this.”
“When he and I are together, I feel very confident in our relationship, that what we have is real. But when we’re apart—well, I’m not even sure what he does when we’re apart.” After our agreement on the shore of Ennerdale Water to date other people, the only follow-up had been a year later, during a midnight phone conversation when I confirmed I’d join him in Arkansas as soon as the impeachment inquiry wrapped up. I’d said, “If there are other women—” then I’d started over. “If I’m moving there, there can’t be other women.”
“You have my word,” he’d said.
During the previous year, there had not, for me, been other men. One of my colleagues on the impeachment inquiry was a recent graduate of Columbia Law School named Roland Osborne, a quick-witted guy on whom I might have had a crush if Bill weren’t my boyfriend. Would that crush have been reciprocated or, as with the others, unrequited? The question was irrelevant because Roland was pleasant, and Bill was a meteor. Roland was a version of other people I knew, and Bill was unique.
But I did not pretend to myself that Bill had been similarly impervious. During those early weeks in Fayetteville, the women he’d probably touched, kissed, and then some in my absence were often spectral—I knew they walked these streets, perhaps this campus, even if I couldn’t pinpoint who they were—and sometimes vividly corporeal. Any young, attractive woman who attended one of his events and seemed to already know him caught my attention.
I said to Barbara, “Do people think I’m a fool?”
She made a dismissive sound. “Who are people? There’s no monolithic opinion. Though don’t forget I got divorced when my kids were in grade school, so I’m used to ignoring gossip. But I think people understand perfectly why you’re dating him.”
“He proposed to me about a year ago, and I said I needed more time.”
We both were quiet—the song ended, and the audience clapped—and as a new composition started, she said, “If I’d known the things that I know now about marriage when I was your age, my head would have popped off. I had such a conventional idea of how it all worked—that you said ‘I do’ to a man and loved each other forevermore. Back then, you had to get married in order to have sex so I guess it’s no surprise lots of marriages of my generation have failed.”
“Do you think infidelity doesn’t matter?”
“If he’s your husband, you decide what matters. Besides, men aren’t the only ones who can be unfaithful.” I absorbed this, wondering if she was referring to herself, and she said, “Ned and I—and keep in mind this is the marriage I’ve stayed in, not the one I left—we’ve had good weeks and bad weeks, but we’ve also had good years and bad years. At some point, your spouse will absolutely make you angry and absolutely drive you crazy. Those are givens. I would never be so bold as to tell you what to do, but it seems to me you and Bill have something special, in addition to facing the universal ups and downs—that you find each other interesting, that you’re intellectual equals. Those qualities would be hard for both of you to find in someone else. The excitement of sex comes and goes, no pun intended, but great conversations make life worth living. Don’t they?”
Her advice mattered because Barbara filled a similar role to the one Gwen had occupied for me; her open-mindedness balanced out Gwen’s opprobrium.
“There are two kinds of marriages,” Barbara said. “The ones where you’re privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you’re not.”
* * *
—
The Arkansas Gazette, which had by this point endorsed Bill, hosted a debate between him and Hammerschmidt just a week before the election. I caught a ride home with the Overholts and Ginny Richards, who was the wife of the law school dean; Bill was driving to Clarksville for a prayer breakfast the next morning. When I’d hugged him goodbye in the parking lot, I’d said, “Please get some sleep.” He was averaging three or four hours a night, fueled by caffeine and euphoria.
He had done an excellent job in the debate, focusing on real problems and legislative solutions yet still seeming upbeat while Hammerschmidt chose to disparage him personally. At various moments, Hammerschmidt had implied that Bill’s fancy education and years away meant he no longer understood the state; that he was too young to lead; and, most preposterously, that in a 1969 newspaper photo of a man protesting Nixon’s visit to an Arkansas football game by sitting in a tree, the man was Bill. Bill had laughed at this accusation, explaining that he’d been at Oxford at the time the photo was taken, which may have been the trap Hammerschmidt was laying. Still, I thought Bill had performed superbly.
Afterward, as I sat with Ginny in the back of Ned Overholt’s Cadillac, Ginny said, “When people say Bill will be president someday, I really and truly believe it.”
“I’m worried about this race,” Barbara said, “but there’s no question that the sky’s the limit for him in the long run.”
Ginny was smoking a Pall Mall as she said, “Hillary, you must think he’ll be president.”
Surely it was a sign of Bill’s influence that, though I was among the people I was closest to in Fayetteville, I still said, “Oh, I’m sure h
e’ll serve in whatever capacity he’s needed most.”
* * *
—
The cupboards in both Bill’s house and my apartment had been empty for weeks when I decided on the Sunday evening prior to the election to make a quick stop at Chouteau’s Market. The store would close at six, and I arrived at five-fifty and hurried through the aisles. Near the cereal shelf, I became aware of a woman watching me. I made eye contact with her and smiled, but the woman quickly turned her head and pushed her grocery cart away. A few minutes later, when I was back in the parking lot and setting my two paper bags in the trunk of my car, I heard a high, hesitant female voice say, “Miss Hillary.”
When I turned, I saw the same woman. Though I’d purposely parked by a light pole, it was a dark night and the parking lot was mostly empty. I felt a wariness, a wish to already be in my car with all the doors closed. Still, I was not prepared for what came next. The woman said, “I need to tell you something about Bill Clinton.”
She was probably a little older than I was—in her early thirties, I’d have guessed—and pretty. Definitely, for Bill, pretty enough. I felt a familiar exhaustion. This again. But it wasn’t this.
In her Arkansas accent, which struck me as thick even though I’d become accustomed to Arkansas accents, she said, “He forced himself on me. I was volunteering for him, and we were alone one night at the headquarters, back in April. When he started kissing my neck, I told him no, no, no, but he forced himself on me.”
Some instinct kicked in, a shift from girlfriend to lawyer, and I said, “What’s your name?”
She shook her head. “I’m a married woman with two babies. I don’t want my private business out there.”
I said, “I think you’re confusing Bill with someone else.”