Eighteen Acres: A Novel (6 page)

Not that the presidency was what had come between Charlotte and Peter. They’d begun to drift apart years before, but the formality of life in the White House had made their distance official. His living quarters were separate from hers. She didn’t even know when he was in the residence. And since he was the first-ever first man, he was afforded more latitude to maintain dual roles as first husband and working spouse. No one expected him to host teas for visiting spouses of the leaders Charlotte met with. She had hoped that the move to Washington would be a new start for them, that they could laugh together and re-create the chemistry that had drawn them to each other nearly twenty years earlier. He’d always been keenly aware of the roles that spouses played in the success of politicians such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Charlotte’s predecessors, Presidents Martin and Harlow. But instead of bringing them together, the move to Washington and the new and inflexible demands on Charlotte’s time extinguished any hope for the recovery of her marriage.

She passed the East Room, where all major White House events and ceremonies were held, stopping briefly to scoot Mika along. She greeted everyone on her personal staff with a smile and a wave and entered her suite of rooms. She had an hour to kill before the motorcade would take her to Roger and Stephanie’s.

She turned on the television and flipped around looking for
Dog Whisperer
. Sometimes she heard something helpful, and the dogs
always stared intently at the television when it was on. She looked at her elliptical machine and contemplated a quick workout but decided against it and called the twins instead. She tried Harry’s cell phone first. When he didn’t pick up, she tried Penelope.

“Hi, Mom,” Penelope said on the first ring.

“Hi, honey. Are you with Dad?” Charlotte asked.

“No, he left after lunch for a meeting in New York tomorrow,” Penelope said.

“Oh,” Charlotte said.

“There’s another storm coming in, and he didn’t want to drive in the snow, which is smart, because there were a lot of accidents last week because of black ice,” Penelope said.

She always worried about her father. Charlotte didn’t realize that Peter was spending Monday in New York, but he didn’t tell her much of anything these days.

“Did you have a good time with Dad?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes, we went skiing yesterday afternoon and out to dinner. I brought Rebecca, and Harry brought Jason. We went to fondue.”

“That sounds great, sweetie. Where’s your brother?”

“He’s at study hall, but he’s probably just listening to his iPod,” Penelope said.

“Tell him to call me before bed,” Charlotte said. “I love you.”

“Love you, too, Mom.”

Charlotte thought about calling Peter, but she didn’t want to bother him. She’d check in on Monday to ask him about the kids. Then, thinking she was being ridiculous, she changed her mind and decided to call. He was still her husband. Surely, she could call him without worrying about bothering him. She dialed his cell phone. After five rings, he picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Peter, it’s me.”

He paused.

“Charlotte,” she said.

“Of course, I know. Is everything OK?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I just wanted to see how the kids are doing. Penelope says you went skiing and then to fondue,” Charlotte said.

“Yeah, they are getting really good, and if they learn to ski out here on the sheets of ice that pass as ski runs, they’ll be incredible when they get out to Tahoe later this season.”

“I’m so glad they still enjoy skiing. I was afraid they’d lose interest when we pulled them out of ski team.”

“Me, too.”

There was an awkward silence, and then they both spoke at once.

“Go ahead,” Peter said.

“I was just going to say that I’ll, uh, see you when I see you, and, um, I hope you have a good week. Penelope said you have a meeting in New York tomorrow …” Charlotte drifted off, not sure what else to say to the man she’d been married to for nineteen years.

“Yeah, I will be in New York tomorrow, and then I give a speech Wednesday in Chicago with two players from the Bears about the importance of staying in school, and then I’m in the San Francisco office for the rest of the week,” Peter said.

“That’s great. Anyone I would have heard of?” Charlotte asked.

“Two rookies—I’m sure you haven’t heard of them. I signed them last year while you were crazed with the midterms.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve tried to block out that period in my life completely,” she said. Her party had lost twenty-four seats in the House and two Senate seats in the midterm elections the year before.

“A president’s party always loses seats in the midterm,” he said.

“I know, I know—the old ‘history was against you’ excuse. I’ve got that one down,” she said.

Peter laughed. “I will be at the state dinner next week,” he offered.

“Fantastic,” Charlotte said, a little too cheerfully to sound genuine. “Three hundred and fifty of our closest friends all gathered to honor the great nation of Panama,” she added.

He laughed. “Ralph wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Charlotte laughed, too. “Have a good week, Peter,” she said.

“Thanks, Charlotte.”

She hung up and felt lonelier than before. She wished she hadn’t called at all. Confronting your husband as the stranger he had become was a lot more depressing than remembering a time when he wasn’t a stranger at all.

She changed out of her clothes, now covered with dog hair, into an identical pair of black slacks and a black turtleneck. She slid into low heels and made her way downstairs. The three dogs walked a few steps ahead of her to where the twenty-car motorcade with flashing lights and men with automatic weapons hanging out of SUVs was waiting to escort her the two and a half miles to Roger and Stephanie’s house.

Melanie

Melanie passed the motorcade and waved at the agents as she pulled into the White House. Sunday night work sessions were Melanie’s secret weapon. They allowed her to start Monday mornings on the offense, as they’d say during the campaigns. Late Sundays, she’d distribute what the staff called Melanie-grams.

To the White House press secretary, she sent an article from the Sunday paper about how calls seeking comment on Friday night went unanswered. Melanie circled the comment and wrote, “This is what interns and the night-duty officers are for!” To the domestic policy council, she sent an article from
Science Times
about organ transplants in cloned sheep, with a note asking them to schedule a policy time on medical ethics for the president. To the national security advisor, Melanie attached her own comments to Charlotte’s notes from a classified memo on the increased use of women and children as suicide bombers in Afghanistan. And to Vice President Neal McMillan, Melanie sent a recipe from
Cooking Light
for a jerk spice rub for ribs, which the vice president was famous for making at his ranch in New Mexico.

She had a separate stack for Ralph, most of it responses to things he’d sent in her direction. His strategy was to bury her in paper, but she didn’t have time to engage in the bureaucratic infighting Ralph
had mastered in his fifteen years on the Hill. Ralph was a student of Lee Atwater, James Carville, and other great political gurus, and he saw in himself the same genius. All Melanie saw was his insecurity and overly partisan instincts. From Ralph’s perspective, Melanie monopolized Charlotte’s time and marginalized him. What Ralph didn’t understand was that Melanie didn’t need to monopolize the president’s time. She had something Ralph would never have: naked time in the steam room with the president.

Charlotte wasn’t a fan of the gym, but she loved the steam room. She said it helped her get out of her head and tap into her gut. It was there she told Melanie what she wanted done at the White House. The problem for Melanie, besides her aversion to nakedness and heat, was that it was impossible to take any notes in a steam room. Melanie was convinced that was why Charlotte gave her most important orders there.

Melanie glanced at her call log from the previous week. There were seventy-eight unreturned calls. She scanned the names. At least half of them were probably birthday calls, she thought.

One name stuck out and gave her a job in the pit of her stomach: Michael Robbins. He was an investigative reporter at one of the newsmagazines. She had become well acquainted with Michael during the Harlow administration. His specialty was breaking the news when a high-ranking government official was about to get indicted. Every press secretary in Washington, D.C., cringed when his name showed up in the inbox. The message for Melanie simply said, “Call ASAP.”

Melanie looked at the Boston cell-phone number and recognized it as his personal number. She lifted the receiver of the phone on her desk and dialed. Her call went straight to voice-mail.

Of course. I called from a blocked number
, she thought. Michael didn’t pick up his phone on Sundays unless he knew who was on the other end.

She dug her personal cell phone out of the Dior bag and entered his number quickly.

“There you are,” he answered on the first ring. “I knew you’d call.”

“Michael, is everything OK?” Melanie asked.

“I need to see you. Your girl’s in trouble, Melanie,” he said.

Dale

Dale always knew when Charlotte was on the phone.

It was the only time Peter ever looked as if he felt guilty.

Charlotte was lonely, and if she wasn’t the president and he the first husband, they would have been the type of couple who would have divorced and remained friendly enough to meet for lunch once a month. But they were not a normal couple.

Dale jumped out of bed when she heard Peter speaking in the tones reserved for his wife. She pulled on a robe and started separating their tangled clothes from where they’d been flung hours earlier.

Dale and Peter never took stupid chances. They were careful not to tempt fate. She never traveled to Washington, Connecticut, when his kids planned to sleep at his rented house. She refused his pleas to stay with him at the residence when Charlotte was out of the country. He never went to her apartment or her hotel room. But they were both growing anxious. Charlotte hadn’t set up a reelection campaign yet, and Dale sometimes wondered if she knew about their affair. Part of her would be relieved to have things out in the open. Peter could move out of the White House. They could have more than secret meetings and private moments. They could have a life together.

As she stepped into the shower, she heard him laughing at something Charlotte said about the state dinner the following week. Dale
had been invited. In itself, that wasn’t strange. The White House always invited one or two members of the press corps to each state dinner. But because of her aggressive reporting on several of Charlotte’s Cabinet appointees and a general unease with her frequent scoops, Dale wasn’t exactly high on their list of favorite reporters. She was invited to bring a guest, and she planned to invite Brian Watson, the new Pentagon reporter. Dale made a mental note to e-mail him first thing in the morning.

Just as she was starting to worry that Peter was still chatting with Charlotte, the shower door opened, and he joined her.

She smiled all the way back to the airport the next morning. She planned to spend her day off getting organized and shopping for a dress for the state dinner. Brian had replied immediately to her invitation and was thrilled about coming to the dinner.

She hoped he wouldn’t get the wrong impression. For the most part, her friends had stopped trying to set her up after their efforts all ended without success. She often agreed to go on first dates—to dinners with other correspondents or producers on the White House beat or daytime dates to museums or baseball games. She felt she had to maintain some charade of life as a single girl, but she never accepted invitations to second dates. She had few female friends, so no one did much prying about her status. Her mother was the only person she’d confided in about her affair with Peter, and only because she’d begun to worry when she couldn’t reach Dale over the weekends. Her mother was so concerned about what would happen to Dale if word of her affair ever became public that she didn’t even share her daughter’s secret with Dale’s father.

On the night of the state dinner, Dale met Brian at the network’s Washington bureau. He was known as the “male Dale” for being just as much of a workaholic as she was, but that didn’t bother him.

Dale wore a long, sleeveless red silk dress with an open back—a little sexy for a night out in Washington, but everything else she’d seen at Neiman’s was black or beige and looked like mother-of-the-bride garb. The dinner was to honor the president of Panama, but it fell on Valentine’s Day, so Dale figured she could get away with wearing red.

Heads turned as Dale walked through the newsroom dressed for
the formal affair. In a business suit or jeans and a T-shirt, Dale was a striking woman whose good looks rarely went unnoticed. With her hair swept off her face in a loose updo, her makeup expertly applied, and her elegant evening gown clinging to her petite curves, she was traffic-stopping gorgeous. She’d inherited the best of her mother’s Greek genes and her father’s Irish genes. She had olive skin, bright green eyes, and long, straight chestnut hair.

“You clean up pretty well,” Brian said to her.

“Thanks. You, too.” She laughed. “Ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

They entered the White House residence through the East Wing with the other dinner guests. As Dale and Brian passed through the entrance and walked toward the coat check, a military aide greeted them and directed them to the receiving line. Every guest was invited to have a picture taken with the president and Peter. Dale smiled at the members of Congress as they snapped pictures of the residence. Official White House functions had a way of turning even the most cynical Washingtonians into starry-eyed tourists. Dale spotted members of Charlotte’s Cabinet, a few Hispanic celebrities, and members of the diplomatic corps jockeying for spots in the photo line.