Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  We drove directly there, and he parked on the street. The house was very small but pretty, a brick Tudor near campus. Before we climbed from the car, I said, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  He must have recognized my unusual tone, because he looked at me with apprehension.

  “Last November, right before the election, a woman approached me in the parking lot of Chouteau’s Market and said she’d been a volunteer for your campaign and that you’d”—I hesitated but only for a split second—“forced yourself on her.”

  Immediately, he said, “That didn’t happen.”

  “She said it was in April—April of ’74, obviously.”

  “Did you hear me? I just said it never happened.” He seemed irritated, which was mildly reassuring.

  “Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  “How the hell would I know who made a false accusation against me? Once you run for office, you’re a public figure. Anyone can say anything. I just can’t believe that you think I’m capable of this.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you’ve been mulling it over for the last six months. Jesus Christ, Hillary.”

  A part of me felt the impulse to soothe him. But we needed to get to the other side of this by walking through it. I said, “Did you ever have sex with anyone at the headquarters?”

  He bit his lip, and I could tell he was moving from irritation to anger. I understood the question I should have asked instead. I said, “How many women did you have sex with at the headquarters?”

  “I wasn’t the one who wanted to spend a year apart,” he said.

  “Do you know why I suggested dating other people?” I realized as I spoke that this was true. “Because I knew you’d screw around, and this way we could both pretend I was all right with it.”

  He glared at me. “What’s the point of all this? If you can’t trust me, what are we doing?”

  “If I can’t trust you,” I repeated, and I could hear my voice rising, “it’s because you’ve done everything short of taking out a billboard telling me not to. You have no right to act like I’m paranoid when you’re the one who betrayed me. I move to fucking Fayetteville for you, and you can’t even keep your pants zipped.”

  There was something horrifying and refreshing in this bluntness. Since Berkeley, we had only talked around the subject of infidelity.

  He said, “It’s interesting that you’re so sure you’re not the problem when plenty of people would think it’s your expectations of me that are absurd. Kennedy had liaisons. LBJ had liaisons. Everyone knew it and just turned a blind eye. Maybe I’m a normal man, and it’s your self-righteousness that’s the problem.”

  “You’re not normal,” I said. “You’re also not the president.”

  “And if you keep sabotaging me, I probably never will be.” There it was, at long last—the allusion to the bribe money I’d prevented him from using.

  “I sometimes question whether you have any ethical standards,” I said. “I’m not sure you do.”

  “You know what you are?” he said. “You’re a smug bitch who drives people away because you think you’re smarter than everyone else. Of course you don’t find it hard to be faithful when you don’t have other options.”

  There was just enough truth in these accusations, or at least enough of our deepest and most private fears about ourselves, to truly sting. Neither of us spoke for close to a minute, then I looked over and said, “And you wonder why I don’t want to marry you.” I got out of the car and slammed the passenger-side door, and he drove away with my suitcase still in the trunk.

  * * *

  —

  He knocked on the door of my apartment three hours later, and when I opened it, he said, “Hillary,” and then his face contorted grotesquely and he was sobbing. He stepped into my apartment, took me in his arms, and held me tightly. I began sobbing, too. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  He said, “If I don’t have you, I have nothing.”

  We hugged and hugged and cried and cried and then we had glorious sex and when I was on top of him, sitting up, and both of us were close but not finished, I said, “I’ll marry you. I want to marry you so badly. I love you so much.”

  He smiled in exactly the way I’d anticipated. He said, “Do you really mean it?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, Hillary,” he said. “Oh, baby.” He pulled me toward him so that we were even closer, without space between us, as close as we could be.

  * * *

  —

  In the middle of the night, he woke me by tapping my shoulder. It sometimes happened that while I was asleep, he’d rub my breasts or below my navel and at the slightest shifting toward him on my part, or when my breathing became ragged, he’d slide into me. But in those circumstances, we didn’t speak, and on this night, he was saying my name, asking if I was listening. Finally, I said, “Yes. I’m listening.”

  “I’ve never, ever forced myself on a woman. Never.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I never would. But you shouldn’t marry me. You should leave. I’ll drag you down. The thing that’s wrong with me is incurable. Do you hear me?”

  My eyes had already filled with tears. “Yes,” I said.

  “In the morning, I’ll try to talk you out of it, but what I’m telling you now is the truth. You know your rule about two reasons? One reason is you won’t have the career you deserve here and the other is that the problems I have will never go away. When I try to convince you to stay, it’s me being selfish. Us staying together is good for me and bad for you.”

  “Bill,” I said. “Baby.” But I couldn’t say more, and it wasn’t because I was too sleepy. It was because I was too sad.

  * * *

  —

  What he’d said during the night was wrong in two ways. The first was that he didn’t try talking me out of it in the morning. In the daylight, we treated each other soberly and gingerly. There was between us a careful energy that had never previously existed, an awkwardness, and this energy made me understand that an eventuality I had never truly considered could come to pass. I had never truly planned to break up with Bill because I wasn’t capable of it; I just hadn’t yet figured out how I’d justify his contradictions.

  We drank coffee together and were reading The Northwest Arkansas Times, and he said, “I’m going to go home and shower because I have a meeting at ten with Norm Pulaski.”

  “You don’t want to shower here?”

  He shook his head. Before he left, he patted my shoulder, which was strangely heartbreaking.

  In his absence, I looked around the apartment, which I’d furnished with a few other secondhand items besides the bed and sofa—a coffee table, a rocking chair. If I was going to leave, I needed to do so quickly. Almost immediately. Now? I thought. Then I thought, Not now. Tomorrow morning.

  There was, of course, an alternative. I could call Barbara and ask if she was free to have a glass of wine that evening—it was a Saturday—and I could tell her about the woman in the parking lot and about Bill’s warning, and she could help me find a way forward, a way to stay. Or I could pretend that I’d leave in several weeks, by the end of the summer, then not do it. I could escape very quickly, it seemed, or never, and I wanted to do both.

  In a state of disbelief, I began packing. I was finished by noon, and because I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, I had a bowl of cereal. Was I supposed to call Bill? Was he supposed to call me? If he called, would he act like everything was normal? If he did, I doubted I’d have the strength to contradict him.

  Another few hours passed, and I called his house, not expecting him to pick up, but he did. I said, “I’m leaving in the morning.”

  “Where will you go?” He sounded subdued, perhaps shakily so
.

  “I guess Washington or New Haven.” There was a silence, and I said, “Do you want to get dinner?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  When he came back to my apartment, he looked at the two suitcases by the door and the cardboard boxes I’d brought up from storage in the basement, and he bowed his head and exhaled deeply.

  “Would you want to take over my lease?” I asked.

  “Oh, God, no,” he said. “Living here would be too painful.”

  As we walked to a barbecue restaurant, I wondered if I should hold his hand. I didn’t reach for it. A half block from the restaurant, which appeared even from that distance to be crowded, he stopped and said, “I can’t do this. I can’t be around other people.”

  Back in my apartment, he lay on his side in the bed, his shoulders shaking. I spooned him, and we stayed like that through the night. Around four in the morning, we had sex. Was this the last time? How could it be the last time?

  The second way he was wrong was that there were more than two reasons. The first reason was indeed Arkansas, and the second reason was indeed his compulsive infidelity. But he didn’t seem to recognize that the infidelity gave rise to multiple other reasons. One was that cheating and political ambition were a risky, if apparently common, combination. Another was that already he’d been accused of assault. And the last reason was that he’d warned me. By my calculations, this added up to five, when all I’d ever required was two.

  Yet even so, the margin between staying and leaving was so thin. Really, it could have gone either way. Sometimes I think that my years of diligent schoolwork and political idealism had given me the erroneous notion that if one choice, one plan, was hard and the other was easy, doing the hard thing was inherently better—worthier, more upstanding.

  Until the moment on Sunday morning when my car was loaded, it all seemed like it might go the other way. It didn’t seem possible we’d had sex for the last time, eaten a meal together for the last time, slept in the same bed for the last time. His voice was almost dispassionate as he said, “I can’t believe I ruined this. You really are the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said.

  We both just stood there, facing each other, holding hands, by the driver’s-side door of my Buick. In order to stay, I needed him to ask me to, to tell me to. And he had made the decision that, for my sake, he wouldn’t.

  “Oh, Hillary,” he said, and his eyes welled.

  It was unfathomable that we were hugging a final time, that I was climbing into the car, starting the engine. I was so stunned that I actually wasn’t crying then, and when I got on the road, I experienced the profoundly strange wish to talk to Bill about having just broken up with Bill. Or maybe it wasn’t surprising; Bill was the person I always wanted to talk to about everything.

  Fayetteville was far enough north that I hit the Missouri border less than an hour later, and for some reason, this was when I began to cry. I cried in a way I haven’t cried since and perhaps hadn’t cried before except as a baby, heaving and wailing. I could hardly see out the windshield, but I was afraid to pull over because what if that led to turning around?

  What was I doing? How, metaphysically speaking, was this possible? For twenty-three years, I had been myself, alone, and then I had become his and he’d become mine. And I did believe that for all his dalliances, he really had only ever been mine; he had never truly belonged to anyone else. Now that I knew what it was to be adored by him, to blend my life with his, how could I live in the world not being the person Bill Clinton loved the most?

  The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have gone either way.

  PART II

  The Woman

  CHAPTER 4

  1991

  I SOMETIMES KEPT PUBLIC RADIO on in the background while I worked, and, during a morning in late June 1991, as I was revising the fourth chapter of the casebook I was writing with a professor at another law school, I heard that Thurgood Marshall was about to hold a press conference; the news of Marshall’s retirement from the Supreme Court had broken the previous day. I hurried into the hall and, because its door was open, knocked on the doorframe of the office next to mine. When my colleague James looked up from behind his desk, I said, “Do you get C-SPAN? Thurgood Marshall is going to speak.”

  Unlike me, James maintained a meticulously neat office, and also unlike me, he kept a small TV in it, on a table by the door. The only other object on the table was a gold-framed photograph.

  As James stood, I said, “I hope I’m not interrupting.” I didn’t know him well. He’d joined the faculty of Northwestern’s law school just a year before, and during that time, we’d interacted amiably but fleetingly.

  “Come in,” he said. “And yes, I do have C-SPAN.”

  But as he turned on the television, it occurred to me that I was unaware of his political leanings—James might not view Marshall’s retirement as heartbreaking because of what an inspirational figure he was and also alarming because of who President Bush was likely to appoint in Marshall’s stead. And, frankly, James dressed like a Republican. I had never, including on this day, seen him in anything other than a suit and tie. Such formality wasn’t unusual during the school year but was rare among faculty who came to the office during the summer; in fact, coming to the office during the summer period was rare. On this ninety-degree Friday, I wore a short-sleeved blouse, a denim skirt, and sandals.

  Onscreen, Marshall was entering a room in the Supreme Court Building, where he was greeted by sustained applause. As he crossed a maroon carpet, Marshall used a cane but walked steadily. “Just in time,” James said to me. He moved two chairs that faced his desk—they were cheaply upholstered, with metal legs—so that they were facing the television, and gestured in a way that made me suspect he was a man who wouldn’t sit first if a woman was present. Maybe he wasn’t Republican but just very polite? Though, as anticipated by Barbara Overholt back in my University of Arkansas days, some of my colleagues who were probably chivalrous to women in social settings weren’t particularly so around me due to my being an honorary man.

  Marshall had taken a chair facing dozens or maybe hundreds of reporters. He wore tan plastic glasses, and his gray mustache was neat.

  “How do you feel, Justice?” one of the reporters called out, and, deadpan, Marshall said, “With my hands.” Raucous laughter and more clapping followed.

  As other reporters shouted to him and cameras clicked audibly, Marshall was good-naturedly uncooperative. Among the topics he declined to comment on were pending legislation, the current state of civil rights, and the definition of patriotism. He blithely scowled and squinted, in the way of a man who either knows the audience is on his side, is past caring, or both.

  “I can’t imagine the court without him,” I said.

  “Have you seen the picture of him with Autherine Lucy after he won the case for her to go to the University of Alabama?” James asked.

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “It’s from ’55 or ’56, when Marshall was with the NAACP. It’s just one of those classic images where they all look very purposeful and brave. Not that my life has been like that, but it might have been the reason I became a lawyer.”

  James! I thought. You’re most certainly not a Republican! I said, “It’s always the pictures of Ruby Bridges that get to me—how young she was in her little dress, with her bookbag.”

  Onscreen, Marshall’s chest rose and fell with what appeared to be labored breathing, and, alluding perhaps to this as well as to the health problems Marshall himself had mentioned at the opening of the press conference, a reporter asked, “What’s wrong with you, sir?”

  “I’m old,” Marshall said. “I’m gettin’ old and coming apart.”

  “Supposedly, he loves afternoon soap operas,” I said.
“One of my students clerked for him and said he watches them in his chambers.”

  James laughed. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  Marshall evaded a question about the future of school desegregation—“It’s obvious I’m not going to have anything to do with it so why should I be commenting on it?”—and said he didn’t know if he’d become involved in the civil rights movement again after retiring. Then a male who couldn’t be seen onscreen said, “Thank you very much, Justice Marshall.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Marshall said—apparently, the press conference was finished—and he scooted to the edge of his chair. Two aides, or perhaps security agents, approached to remove his mic and help him stand, and when the camera pulled back, I said, “Oh, gosh. Look at his socks.” They appeared to be white athletic socks, several inches of them visible below the cuffs of his pants.

  James said, “I guess he’s human after all?”

  As Marshall left the room, I glanced at the framed photo next to James’s TV, which I’d been glancing at intermittently during the press conference. The photo was probably six by eight inches and featured James; his wife, Susie, whom I’d met a few times in the last year, most recently at the law school dean’s end-of-the-year potluck in May; and their son, David, who looked to be about ten. The three of them sat close together on a log with autumn foliage in the background, the adults flanking the boy. They all wore rugbies that were striped, though not matching, and they all smiled broadly.

  I pointed to the photo. “So you have worn something other than a suit at least once?”

  He laughed again. “Only under duress. That picture was a Christmas card, but it was taken so long ago that David is now in driver’s ed. I know you don’t have children, but do you—are you—” I could tell what he was trying to ask. Many people thought that my single status was akin to a sensitive medical condition. Finally, he said, “Is there a special someone?”