Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  There was a standing ovation, and just before I walked onstage to embrace Misty and give my stump speech, Clyde leaned toward me. “Wow,” he whispered. “That was intense.”

  * * *

  —

  Once, I’d have believed it was impossible for a ten-person fundraiser to generate $2.5 million, and I’d have been correct in that it would, until 2010, have been illegal. But after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, campaign fundraising had basically become a free-for-all, and if I disapproved—I’d also have thought that extracting $2.5 million from ten people was obscene, legal or not—I was, as I’d told the question asker at the Iowa City event, a pragmatist.

  This particular dinner was in Truro, on Cape Cod, and Theresa; Kenya; the agents; my national finance director, Emma Aguilera; and I flew into the tiny Provincetown airport, gliding over the Atlantic in the early-summer afternoon. Sometimes on rope lines, I shook hands with voters for whom I was the most famous, perhaps the only famous, person they’d ever meet. At fundraisers that were $250,000 a head, the guests were accustomed to fame. The host of this dinner, held at an oceanfront vacation house worth $10 million, was a thirty-eight-year-old hedge fund manager named Harris Fulkerson. I’d met him before, in New York, and for this visit, he’d invited me to spend the night in a private wing of his home, but, citing a scheduling conflict, I’d declined. I knew Bill relished such opportunities, establishing the bonds that arose when you shared scrambled eggs in your pajamas, but the thought of sharing scrambled eggs in my pajamas with an extremely rich person that I was only pretending to be friends with exhausted me.

  The house was vast but minimalist, a shingled rectangle with a driveway of crushed white clamshells. As my team and I climbed out of the SUV that had transported us from the airport, Harris was waiting to greet us, and holding a cocktail that, he announced after kissing my cheek, was a Hillarytini. He was tall and wore a green-and-white seersucker blazer over a white T-shirt. He led us on a path around the side of the house and up a half flight of steps onto a deck that displayed a breathtaking view of the ocean. The nine other guests were all waiting. Harris said, “I present Hillary Rodham, the first woman president,” and they applauded.

  I held my Hillarytini aloft and said, “Harris, from your mouth to God’s ears.” Even given the small guest list, I then segued, as it was understood that I would, into an abbreviated and slightly juicier-than-usual stump speech; the slightly juicy part, where I was far franker about my opponents than I’d be in public, was why no press was allowed. And in fact the setting, with the distant crashing waves and lovely light, was too elitistly beautiful for Ellie to document for social media, which was why she wasn’t in attendance, either.

  After I spoke, there was a Q and A session with all the guests, during which a man around my age named Albert Boyd asked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. At dinner, I was seated between Harris and Albert, and Albert said, “I have to tell you that my wife, Marjorie, was a great fan of yours.” Being told by a man that his wife was a fan was something I heard as frequently as I heard that I was prettier in person, though I heard the former almost exclusively from white men and the latter almost exclusively from women, gay men, and people of color. But then Albert added, “And it was through her that I became such an admirer. Marjorie passed away in 2011, after ten years with lung cancer.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Thank you. She was wonderful and quite politically active. In the hospital, she liked to have me read out loud to her, and one of the books we read was your autobiography. I know there’s an audio version of you reading it, and I’m sure your version is far more proficient than mine, but I really enjoyed it.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said. “I’m honored.”

  “Political memoirs get a bad rap for being propaganda, but I find them very interesting. How a person constructs their life, who they’re influenced by, and that sort of thing.”

  “I agree,” I said. “Although there’s a chance I’m a tiny bit biased.”

  He laughed. “Impossible!”

  “Do you have ties to the Cape?” I asked.

  He was still smiling as he said, “I’m glad that I do tonight.” Was he flirting? And was it a coincidence that this was the first time it registered with me that he was handsome? He was mostly bald, with a closely cropped ring of silver hair, and had lively hazel eyes. He added, “Marjorie and Harris’s mother were roommates at Vassar, and he’s my godson. I visit Harris every so often, but I live outside New York. If this doesn’t sound too appallingly WASPy, my own family has gone to Maine in the summers for several generations, to Biddeford. Have you been there?”

  “I haven’t,” I said. “Though I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many appalling WASPs.”

  “I’m curious—does running for president feel like a variation on running for Senate or is it its own animal?”

  “Some of both. The scope is broader, obviously, the whole infrastructure of the campaign. But, and I’m not just saying this, it’s fascinating. I mean, apart from getting to participate in the great democratic experiment, we saw a whale as we flew in today.”

  “Oh, I love when that happens,” he said. “Did your pilot swoop down?” He really was strangely easy to talk to, or I was strangely comfortable. It was somewhat unusual, at this point in my life, for a person I’d just met to talk to me normally, with give-and-take—my prominence made it hard for most people to fathom asking me a question that didn’t relate to them or something they wanted, hard to fathom that I had a self separate from their impression of me, our fleeting interaction. “Now, would it be appropriate or inappropriate,” he was saying, “if I made a criticism of Bill Clinton?”

  “Since we’re far from any media, I think it’s permissible.” Was I attracted to him? If so, was it due to the fact that I was on my second Hillarytini, or was it hormonal? Which hormones was I even still in possession of?

  Albert said, “He could shut down the chanting.”

  “He absolutely could.”

  “I know politics have always been cutthroat, and nostalgia for a more decorous time is a bit delusional, but the chanting really seems barbaric.”

  And then Harris said, “Uncle Albert, you’ve got to share her with the rest of us. After the entrée, everyone is going to change seats except the senator.”

  Albert looked into my eyes and said, “How regrettable yet understandable,” and the next thing I knew I was between the COO of a tech firm in Cambridge and his wife. But I kept glancing at Albert, who was sitting three guests to the left of me. I wondered, as I almost never did anymore, if I had kissed a man on the lips for the last time. How could I have, but how could I not have? Setting aside the impossible logistics, who would want to date a woman whose likeness was replicated in nutcrackers?

  My team and I were the first guests to leave, but I shook hands and posed for photos with everyone before we did. When I got to Albert, he said, “I didn’t have the chance to mention earlier that we know someone in common. Your Wellesley friend Nancy was also a friend of my wife’s.”

  “Small world,” I said. “Do you know that Nancy’s son just got engaged?”

  “I’ll be at their party in October. Will you?”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t make the engagement party because it’s just before the first debate. But I plan to be at the wedding.” This would be in April.

  Albert smiled. He said, “I’ll very much look forward to seeing you there.”

  * * *

  —

  I did my best to practice good sleep hygiene, and not to check devices in the middle of the night, but around 2:00 A.M., in a hotel room in Boston, I made an exception. In an email to Nancy, I wrote, I just met Albert Boyd at a fundraiser. Not to sound like we’re back in the dorm at Wellesley, and please don’t tell anyone I’m asking but…does he have a girlfriend? Or whatever the word i
s when we’re in our sixties?

  No girlfriend that I know of, Nancy had written back by 7:00 A.M. But I will discreetly do some sleuthing. For the record, I loved Wellesley Hillary and I love 2015 Hillary even more.

  * * *

  —

  Greg called me that afternoon. “Trump’s not gonna run. He’s afraid that if he does, everyone will think it’s because a girl told him to.”

  “Does he not get that the way it works is that others enlist you? Or at least you pretend they did? Hillary for America, anyone?”

  “I don’t think we can overestimate the magnitude of the dude’s insecurity, and it seems like there’s something about you in particular that he’s intimidated by.”

  “My X chromosomes?”

  “My hunch is your credibility,” Greg said. “If you tell people his presidential run was your idea, they’ll believe you.”

  “First of all, it was his idea! He’s been talking about it for, what, thirty years? And my God, I’d lose easily half my base if they knew I’d encouraged him.”

  “Yeah, but if you could spend your days sitting on a gold-plated shitter, fucking hookers, and getting paid millions to appear on TV for a few minutes, would you run for president? Did you know The Apprentice films in Trump Tower? If that was my setup, I wouldn’t run. Here’s where things get weird. You ready?”

  “Probably not.”

  “He wants to be your surrogate. It’s not clear he knows the word surrogate, but he wants to appear at your events and talk you up to the press.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “He has the attention span of a flea, so he might forget about it, but you have to admit it’s intriguing.”

  “I’m absolutely not allowing Donald Trump to appear at my events.”

  “Let’s say you’re never on the same stage. I thought you wanted to fight testosterone with testosterone.”

  “No,” I said. “There’s just no way. Besides, what’s in it for Donald? Clearly, he’s never done anything out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “You know how he owns the Miss Universe pageants? It sounds like he has visions of cross-branding dancing in his head, but we—”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “I’m not saying it would happen. I’m saying we’d string him along.”

  “Maybe after I’m elected I can judge the swimsuit competition during the State of the Union,” I said. “Just spitballing here.”

  “Tell me you see the irony of the two of us having switched positions.”

  “I wanted him as Bill’s foil! Not as my sidekick. For Christ’s sake, Greg, no.”

  “Would you do it if you knew it would work? He supports your candidacy, a little of the rancid smell of Donald Trump rubs off on you, but you beat Clinton in the primaries and go on to win the general?”

  “How would I explain to Barack that I’m accepting Donald’s support?”

  “Those of us from Chicago know Barack isn’t as pure as we all pretend. Besides which, none of it is personal, and he’d rather elect you than Jeb Bush. The latest polls—”

  I interrupted. “I realize Bill and I are neck and neck, but this is insane.”

  “No,” Greg said. “We just got new numbers a few minutes ago. Bill is two points ahead of you in Iowa.”

  * * *

  —

  By the light of day, I focused on the concrete: what was actually happening as opposed to what might happen, what I could do to affect outcomes. I sometimes envisioned the events that unfolded in a day or a week or a season as a wave washing over me. The water wasn’t nothing. But it also was only water. Even if it knocked me down, I could stand again. I was always still myself, and resilient.

  Sometimes in the night, however, in an unfamiliar hotel room, I’d wake with a start and wonder if running for president was a bad idea. I didn’t doubt my ability to do the job. After all, I understood the way government worked. I was able to listen to other people, was respectful of cultures and countries not my own. I could endure stress. I was, especially for a sixty-seven-year-old, healthy and energetic.

  But the bullshit and ugliness, the battles with journalists and Republicans, the idiocy of social media—that, I questioned. I knew from reading Wellesley’s alumni magazine that many of my classmates, including the ones who’d led interesting lives and been professionally successful, were now retiring, moving from bigger houses to condominiums, relaxing in gardens or with grandchildren or by taking trips to, say, China to visit the Chengdu Panda Research Base. Whereas if I traveled to China, it would be on a forty-eight-hour state visit in which I met with President Xi to discuss trade and North Korea and human rights. I would, while massively sleep deprived, attend late-night ceremonial dinners and early-morning meetings and pose for thousands of photos shaking the president’s hand. If I visited the Forbidden City, it would only be for as long as it took to get footage showing that I had visited the Forbidden City.

  Might someone else, someone more extroverted, be better suited to such tasks? Might Bill Clinton? Policy-wise, Bill and I were more similar than different, so didn’t it come down to temperament, to which of us was more presidential? Or was it which of us was more electable? Or was it which of us was more likable?

  Was it possible that, if elected, he’d be less divisive than I was, likelier to bring back into the Democratic fold the rural and working-class white men who had been defecting to the Republican Party? On the other hand: Was appeasing rural and working-class white men more important than inspiring women and girls? I’d once heard that little girls would read books and watch TV shows that featured either girls or boys as the main character but that little boys preferred male main characters, and that this phenomenon influenced the creative decisions of authors and TV producers. How were such patterns anything but self-reinforcing? How likable did a woman need to be in order to earn the right to run and not be accused of undermining her party?

  And really, wasn’t this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do? Did Bill—or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul—ever ponder their likability, or did they simply go after what they wanted? Did Bill ever stop to think about which of us was more qualified, did he question his own motives for entry into the race? The idea was laughable. And for God’s sake, his history with women would be a national security issue.

  But more than one thing could be true at the same time. It could be true that I knew in my heart I was more qualified to be president than Bill, and it also could be true that, for reasons that had nothing to do with this election, a part of me despised him.

  * * *

  —

  Back in 2005, after Bill and I had run into each other at the magazine soirée, he had indeed followed up on dinner plans for when I’d be in the Bay Area two weeks later. His assistant had made a reservation for us at a restaurant, then Bill had emailed just me: You know what, fuck that stuffy French food, I’ll make you dinner at my place. Healthier and more intimate.

  I was in my office in Washington and had just greeted a fourth grade class from Danville, Illinois, when I received the email. There was a jolt I experienced on reading that one word—not fuck—that was both distant from my present life and deeply familiar. Was it possible that this was to be a date? That we both were putting out feelers, reassessing each other?

  In the thirteen years I’d been in the Senate, I’d experienced little in the way of dating or sex. Though I suppose it’s not a widely applicable tip, becoming a female senator is actually a decent method to take the pressure off romantically. Although I met men constantly, few were appropriate. I did have my admirers: I’d regularly receive letters from constituents, felons, or, in the case of parolees, both. Dear Hillary, you are such a beautiful, special, and attractive woman, I know we’d really get along if I can take you out for dinner. Unless they posed a security threat or wer
e deemed outlandishly hilarious by my staff, I didn’t see the majority of such letters. Sometimes I felt a flare-up of attraction to, say, another senator’s sixty-something chief of staff who’d made insightful points in a meeting without grandstanding, then I’d notice the wedding band on his left hand. Or an unexpectedly handsome photographer would be sent by a magazine to take my picture at my desk, we’d banter, then it would occur to me that he was twenty-five years younger than I was.

  For New Year’s Eve in 1996, I’d traveled to Bitsy Sedgeman Corker’s vacation home in Hobe Sound, Florida—not to be confused with Bitsy’s other vacation home in Taos, nor with her other other vacation home in northern Wisconsin—where, among the dozen guests celebrating New Year’s Eve, was her divorced cousin Charles, who lived in Minneapolis. Charles was a tall, slender man with thinning blond hair and a penchant for pink Oxford cloth shirts. I can’t deny that the idea of dating a Sedgeman was both odd and intriguing—would I never need to fundraise again?—and we ended up kissing at midnight, and, after a few weeks of emailing, sleeping together when he visited me in Washington. This was my first postmenopause sex, and I was delighted to discover I still had the knack, as long as there was lubricant nearby. Over the next few years, Charles and I saw each other every three or four months for a night or two, which was infrequent enough for it not to matter that I quickly realized I found him boring. We tried to talk on the phone, but in one of our early conversations, I fell asleep while he was describing the exquisite design of classic Bugatti cars and woke up again without any indication that he’d noticed. Though, if I were being honest, Charles’s monologues about vintage cars were less objectionable than his seemingly apolitical outlook. Once when I referred to Slobodan Milošević, Charles appeared not to know who he was. When I delicately expressed to Bitsy that I suspected things between her cousin and me wouldn’t last, Bitsy said, “Oh, Charles is dull as dishwater. None of us could believe it went on this long.”