Half of What You Hear

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  “Understand, I love Greyhill, you won’t find a prettier spot in the nation, but the people in town . . . they didn’t know what to do with me there. And neither did my mother.” She winks. “I suppose I’ve always been a bit of an iconoclast, in my way. That’s why Teddy and I are such a good fit. We’re both a little kooky, you know? Though you’ll never catch me climbing down the side of a skyscraper,” she jokes, referencing the time her husband rappelled down the side of his company’s Park Avenue building to raise money for a children’s charity.

  The Lanes’ apartment reflects Susannah’s one-of-a-kind taste. While the decor is what one might expect for a family of their means and a woman raised in the South—a lot of brightly colored florals, an impressive silver tray overflowing with hors d’oeuvres (“My mother would roll over in her grave if I didn’t offer my guests an array of refreshments,” she says)—there is a touch of the offbeat. The lady of the house is dressed in Chanel, but she is barefoot, and a thin band of diamonds adorns the second toe on her left foot. She uses a stainless-steel straw to sip from a can of Sun Drop, a popular Southern lemon-lime soda that the Lanes have shipped up in cases from Charlotte. There are hot-pink feather pillows on the Queen Anne wingbacks. Over the buffet in the dining room, a framed T-shirt, sweat marks and all, worn by Robert Plant during Led Zeppelin’s first show at Madison Square Garden hangs next to the trophy that Mr. Lane’s grandfather won at the Royal St. John’s Regatta.

  “Let me show you my favorite piece of art in the home,” Ms. Lane says, leading me to another sitting room off the kitchen, this one done up in lavender and emerald green. It’s a Magritte, one of the paintings from The Lovers, the disturbing series believed to have been inspired by the artist’s mother’s suicide. It is a disarming piece: a couple locked in embrace, kissing through the heavy white veils that cover their heads.

  “What is it about it that appeals to you?” I ask her.

  “It reminds me of someone I used to know,” she says, her mouth agape, marveling at the artwork like she’s seeing it for the first time.

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “Who does it remind you of?”

  “It’s a secret,” she says, turning away from the piece and inviting me into the kitchen for lunch. “We’re having egg salad,” she says. “And rum and Cokes.”

  “Wow,” I mutter to myself, dropping my pen next to the legal pad where I’ve just absentmindedly scrawled and underlined iconoclast. I first read this article right before I’d gone to Esperanza for the first time. Now that I know her, I can see her in the story, the way she almost flirts with the author, with her jokes and one-liners, like the way she is with me. I stand up from my desk and stretch in front of the bay window that looks out over the front yard. All day, the wind has howled hard and fast, rattling our old windows, the bitter cold announcing the season that’s on our heels. I think of the kids, wishing that today of all days wasn’t the one we finally decided to let them walk home from school. This morning, as they were slouching into their backpacks, I’d begged them to put on their hats and mittens. “Mittens, Mom?” Max had said, laughing with his sister. “We haven’t worn mittens since, like, third grade.” So hats, I’m hoping for. Hoods, at least.

  I, meanwhile, wore out my tolerance to the cold during my first twenty-one years of life in New England, so I have spent the day huddled up inside. The past few days around here have been tense, and my mood reflects it. I’m still irritated with Cole for the way he didn’t back me up in front of his mother, and despite his apology in the moment, I just don’t want to be around him right now. I was thrilled a couple of nights ago when he texted to say he was going to meet Greg Barker and his poker buddies for drinks, and when he told me he was meeting his dad for an early breakfast this morning, I practically pushed him out the door.

  All afternoon, I’ve been salving myself by poring through the online archives of Mrs. X’s Diary, Susannah’s old gossip columns that ran once a week in the New York Observer. Now that I know her a little bit, I can’t help but notice how much the writing sounds like her—and I’m glad I was never on the receiving end of the pen she wielded like a skewer. When I read them, I picture her sitting at a gleaming antique writing desk in front of a window framing the Manhattan skyline, a fountain pen, like the kind my parents gave me on the day I graduated from Dartmouth, in her dainty hand.

  . . . A supermodel supermama wore a Gaultier minidress to the Sloan Kettering Gala at the Met—a bold choice for the Upper East Side, not to mention a new mother, though not nearly as bold as her decision to forego her undergarments! Ladies, if you drop something in public and there isn’t a gentleman nearby to retrieve it for you (and let’s be honest, is there ever these days?), BEND AT THE KNEES, NEVER THE WAIST!

  . . . A certain silver-haired actor—we all know he’s far more entertaining in those three-hour cowboy movies than he is at a party—was seen ducking out of Da Silvano with a woman who was not his saintly wife. Maybe she’ll finally divorce the bore and make it official with that young director who’s her meant-to-be.

  . . . A pint-sized Broadway powerhouse was dining at THAT downtown bistro with not one, not two, but THREE yapping furballs stashed in her purse. Sources say the canines enjoyed the steak frites more than their mother did, which, if you’ve had the displeasure of dining there, isn’t hard to believe . . .

  When Noelle called this morning to ask how the article was going, I told her it was hard to explain. I don’t know what to make of Susannah Lane, which is making it difficult to decide how I’ll approach writing about her. What I do know is that trying to explain her in two thousand words is going to be like trying to stuff an elephant into a paper lunch bag. I only have a few weeks, and as easy as it would be to stick to the surface-level stuff that Noelle mentioned on the phone—the nuts and bolts about her land sales, a sugary mention of some of her favorite sights in town—I feel like I want to say more.

  Despite everything I’m warned about around town, where everyone from the moms at school to the cashiers at the grocery store seem to regard Susannah with a mix of apprehension and intrigue, the expressions on their faces when her name comes up like they’ve just swigged from a bottle of vinegar, I find myself simply drawn to her, and at the most basic level really enjoying her. In fact, I look forward to seeing her more than most anyone else I’ve met in Greyhill. So what does that say about me? Susannah is a character, there is no doubt about that, but I’m starting to believe that the critics in Greyhill are just tough and that she is, in large part, misunderstood. Maybe if I write this story in just the right way, I could help her with that.

  The flip side is that I could be entirely mistaken. Maybe she is as awful as everyone says. What I do know for sure is that I’m gun-shy about my instincts, especially after the past year. You can pay a heavy price for trusting the wrong people.

  I turn away from the window, and my eyes land on the stack of boxes in the corner that we still haven’t unpacked. Every time I look at them, I feel a sense of dread, and it’s all because of the box that sits second from the top, WORK scrawled across the side in black Sharpie.

  Nine months ago, I’d had to pack the box quickly, gritting my teeth to keep from crying, a Secret Service agent looming behind me while I emptied the contents of my desk. Later that evening, a courier dumped the box on our front stoop, ringing the bell and driving off before I’d even answered the door. I shoved it into the bottom of the hallway closet in our rowhouse, behind the vacuum and the bin of cleaning supplies, as if I could forget about it.

  It’s time to rip off the Band-Aid. I drag the box into the center of the room and pull the tape, wincing as I do it. When I open the flaps, my heart feels like I’m squeezing it in my two fists.

  And just like that, there it is, the massive binder that I lived and died by for the three years that I was social secretary. We called it the bible, and inside is a chronicle of every event I executed, an itemized retelling of every detail, from the food that had been served to the fabric we�
�d used for the table linens to the names of the musicians who had played. The memories are so ingrained and so much a part of me that I can remember what I wore on each occasion, what the weather was like, whether my nose was stuffy or I was feeling especially stressed. I pull the binder out of the box, thinking of how we joked in the office that it held the same importance in the East Wing that the “football,” the briefcase containing the nuclear codes, did in the West.

  I open the front cover and run my fingers along a sample of the stunning multicolored embroidered linen we’d used as a runner for the state dinner for the Mexican president, one of my favorite events. The guests had eaten under the stars on the South Lawn, and the chef, a noted expert on Mexican cuisine who had a series of restaurants around the country, had kept the three hundred plates warm on the long walk from the White House kitchen to the lawn by having the waiters carry each plate in a custom-made insulated wooden box. A pergola drenched in twinkling white lights and a blanket of dahlias, Mexico’s national flower, canopied the president’s table, and after dinner, a twenty-year-old Mexican American jazz impresario provided the entertainment.

  I sit back against the love seat and unfold the press clipping I’d saved that had run in the Washington Post the following day. Pamela, the Style section writer who covered these events, had done a beautiful job in her usual way of explaining my vision for the decor—the lighting, the sophisticated menu, and the interesting and varied guest list, which included everyone from the president and First Lady’s close friends and advisers, to military personnel, to notable Mexican Americans, including a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, a hugely popular comedian and his talk-show-host wife, and a renowned architect. I study the photo of Candace, the First Lady, standing beside the Mexican president’s wife. She was impeccably dressed, in a long gold column by an up-and-coming Mexican designer.

  I crumple the newspaper clipping and toss it toward the trash can. It hits the edge and lands under my desk. I can feel the anger building up inside me, a burning pressure that feels like carbonation spilling over inside my chest. It’s not fair, what happened to me, but it’s still my fault—that’s what makes this so hard to get over. I had done good work, superior work, that I loved, and it had all disappeared in a snap. Or, to be precise, a few slips of the mouth. My mouth.

  I wasn’t thinking when I did it, that was my big mistake. Not thinking when you work at the White House is on the same level of stupidity as not thinking when you’re performing open-heart surgery. But the truth is that I didn’t even remember any of it until I heard the recording, which ran ceaselessly on the cable news shows over the course of a few days as a funny aside, a thirty-second “get a load of this” that the stations used to lighten the reel of tragedy that made up the daily broadcasts.

  The first couple are beloved by the country. Just a few days ago, I read that the president’s approval rating is almost 65 percent, nearly unprecedented in modern times. The Calhouns are young and good-looking, frequently compared to both the Kennedys and the Obamas, and they had run and won on their image as down-home “real folk” who’d been raised in the same “bitsy town” (Candace’s phrase) on the Georgia-Florida line. They’d married a month after their high school graduation and had three babies, each more adorable than the last, all now grown.

  But the thing about them, the exceptionally rare thing, is that they are also the real deal, each of them oozing genuine good-heartedness and brainpower. Candace may capitalize on her image, which, despite her long legs and long blanket of hair (“I’d be working in my momma’s beauty salon if I wasn’t up here in the White House!”), is “just a regular gal, trying to balance work and family!,” but she’s as smart as they come—chiming in on policy debates, writing op-eds for the papers. That said, what really wins people over is her demeanor. She makes jokes about her junk-food diet and her Spanx, teases her husband for leaving his socks on the floor, and laughs at herself frequently, like when she tripped on the tarmac outside of Air Force One or was photographed at a state dinner with lipstick on her teeth. “America’s Best Girlfriend,” People magazine called her. And I, unfortunately, became the unwitting mean girl. All thanks to Anna, my deputy, who was also my work wife and closest friend on staff. On late nights or particularly grueling days, we vented to each other, sometimes about our boss, who, despite her pleasing charm, could also be quite finicky and difficult to please. At any given time during my conversations with Anna, one or both of us would be typing on our phones. The usual multitasking, I assumed.

  How wrong I had been.

  While typing away with her thumbs, texting vendors and schedulers, communicating with staff, Anna was also swiftly hitting that bright-red button on her phone’s voice recorder. She recorded little things, like when I joked that the First Lady should make skin care her administrative priority since her collagen injections were the thing she was most passionate about, and she recorded bigger things, like the time I lost it after the First Lady tried to back out of a formal tea for veterans’ families because of a scheduling conflict and I said I wanted to give her a one-way ticket to Mosul.

  Anna filed these little snippets away. Quietly. Connivingly. And then she knitted them together into one poisonous forty-five-second piece of audio that she attached to an email and sent off to David Dunson, a bottom-feeding producer on one of the cable network shows whose sole mission in life is to find ways to embarrass the Calhoun White House. He aired the clip the next morning, and as Candace Calhoun herself would say, It spread like honey on a hot biscuit.

  * * *

  I was in the back of an Uber when I found out, heading to work after dropping the kids at school, something Cole usually did, but I was enjoying the rare leisurely morning. I’d had a late night the evening before—the president’s fiftieth birthday—and we’d hosted a few dozen of their closest friends and supporters and a smattering of celebrities for dinner and dancing. I was buried in my phone, answering emails and checking messages, when my driver exclaimed, “Oh, shit!” and turned up the volume on the radio, which was tuned to a local news station. What I heard when I tuned in to see what he was laughing at was my own voice.

  I panicked. I told the driver to pull over, worrying illogically in the moment that he would somehow know I was the voice coming out of his speakers—and ran into the bathroom of a Starbucks, where I promptly vomited before calling Cole. He talked me down, calming and consoling me in the same way that he would continue to do for the next several months. We both knew that there was nothing for me to do but deal with the consequences, so that’s exactly what I did.

  The First Lady herself fired me. She called me up to the residence shortly after I arrived at work, where Anna was nowhere to be found and the rest of the staff was doing their best to avoid me. Candace explained to me, over coffee and tea, that she had no other choice. She was incredibly gracious, given everything I had said, and I was completely humiliated, which she knew. “I know that we all say things we don’t mean when we’re frustrated, and I know that this isn’t who you are,” she said, before delivering the final blow. “But I am so disappointed.” The big D. There wasn’t anything worse she could say.

  I felt about two inches tall. I started to grovel, my hands shaking in a fist against my lap (I didn’t dare pick up one of the china teacups), desperately asking for forgiveness, although I knew they couldn’t keep me. Optics are paramount in the White House, and I no longer looked like a team player. She hugged me on my way out, telling me as she did that Anna would be leaving, too, a fact that should have made me feel better but didn’t.

  As Bruce, the chief usher, walked me back to my office, I tried not to cry. I loved my job. I reveled in it. And I couldn’t believe that a bit of private gossip with my formerly favorite coworker—jokes, venting—had cost me all of it. Bruce stood with me, his brow knitted, as I removed the lanyard with my badge from my neck. We shook hands, he bowing slightly, ever the gentleman.

  I close the binder and hold it in my hands, looking a
t the trash can across the room. You have to move on! Dimitria’s voice rings in my ear.

  I can’t do it. I stand up, walk to the closet, and shove the binder onto a high shelf. I know it’s hopeless, like keeping an ex’s T-shirt supposedly for the nostalgia of it when you know, deep down, that you’re really clinging to the possibility that you might get back together.

  I shut the door, pick up my coffee from my desk, and look outside. The light is changing, filmy brightness through the trees. The kids will be home any minute now.

  Those months after I was fired were the toughest of my life. It wasn’t just the public humiliation and the knowledge that I would go down in White House staff history with an asterisk beside my name. It was my disappointment in myself. Cole was unbelievable—he lay next to me in bed for hours, just holding me while I cried, and took on all the responsibilities around the house despite his own demanding job. My parents came down for a week—no small feat, given how they feel about taking time off from work—and told me every day that no matter how proud they’d been of me for landing that gig in the first place, they had worried privately about the pressure I’d put on myself. My new goal, they told me, should be to simply be happy.

  So why couldn’t I see it? Why couldn’t I do it? The thing about that job was that for the first time in my life, I felt like I really belonged somewhere. Not in the White House itself, of course—that was an absolute privilege—but in the role. I still don’t know who I am without it. I hate to admit that, but it’s true. I miss the charge, the fight, the big picture, the way I used to be.

  I miss that feeling. I miss it so, so much.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m folding laundry when I hear the side door open. “How was your day?” I say, stepping over the kids’ backpacks in the hallway and meeting them in the kitchen. The refrigerator door is wide open. Max (in his hat!) has his hand in a bag of Doritos. Livvie is cradling a bowl of leftover pasta salad in one arm and digging a fork out of the drawer with her other hand. They haven’t removed their coats.