The Third Child (16 page)

She almost hated to leave the house evenings or weekends, when it felt like everybody in Washington her age was out on a date in Georgetown. Everybody was having fun, everybody was arm in arm except her. Finally he arrived. He called her cell phone from his room in the lawyer’s house. “I’m getting unpacked. Can we get together tomorrow?”

“With me at home and you at some guy’s house, how are we ever going to hook up?”

“They go to the Eastern Shore every weekend. No problem. Plus, don’t your parents ever go away?”

“Merilee’s in New York. Billy’s off at camp. Dick goes back and forth
every week to Pennsylvania, to keep in touch. But Rosemary hasn’t budged yet. Potomac Fever. Maybe when Congress recesses, she’ll go with him to Philly.”

The lawyer and his family did take off Friday night for the Eastern Shore, where they had a cottage and a boat. The house was brick, multileveled, the downstairs one huge wandering room surrounded by decks, all on a rather small lot. Blake’s room was a nondescript guest room filled with his computer equipment. They did not bother with supper but fell into bed, both mumbling how much they had missed each other before lapsing into incoherent sounds of desire and relief. Afterward they dozed. Then Blake went downstairs to order a pizza. Once they had eaten, they fell back into bed. By the time she got home, she was sore but relaxed. They were together again.

A SATURDAY
two weeks later, her parents went to Philadelphia overnight for some important function and media stuff. Alison actually scheduled dinner and a movie with a female friend. It was too good to be true. As soon as the house was clear, Melissa called Blake. In half an hour he was with her. Out of his backpack he pulled a Toblerone bar. “Got it for you yesterday. I know you love them.”

She thought they would go up to her bedroom, but he wanted to look around. “So what’s downstairs?”

“That’s my father’s study. Some staff offices. The kitchen.”

“What’s in there?”

“That’s Rosemary’s sitting room. Alison has the office beside her.”

He tried the doors. “They’re all locked. They don’t trust you, do they?”

“It’s just habit. So many people come through here. Aides, interns, speechwriters, his legislative assistants, drivers, caterers, the cook and her daughter, the cleaning service…. But if you want to see what the offices look like, I know where Rosemary keeps a set of keys.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “Let’s go.” He was right behind her, bounding up the steps.

“She’s so organized, she has a second set for everything, and she keeps them in her underwear drawer.” Silk garments, wispy and smelling of Opium, the perfume Rosemary always wore. “Here.”

He grabbed the keys and returned to the steps, almost flowing down them. Sometimes the way he moved made her catch her breath. Was it racist to think of big cats, of panthers, of jaguars, of leopards? She did not mind putting off making love for a bit. This was like the games she had played with Billy when they were younger, prowling the governor’s mansion, going through their parents’ things, finding her mother’s birth control pills and filmy negligees. She had no idea what they were looking for, but that only made it more of an adventure.

“Let’s look over your father’s office first.”

“Just remember, he has his primary office in the Senate Office Building and another in the Capitol itself. That’s where his interns and aides mostly work. What are you looking for? What’s the point?”

“Just to see if I can hack in. Like Everest, it’s there. But also to understand him. Isn’t that something we need to do? It should give you insight into him—right?” He drew a disc and a portable hard drive out of his backpack. “It needs a password,” he announced.

“Try ‘Senator’ or ‘Rosemary.’ Dick is not too imaginative.”

“No luck. Any more suggestions before I start deriving it randomly?”

“He calls her Pumpkin. Try that.”

“We’re in.”

She sat beside him as he rapidly typed in commands, scrolled through files. “Doesn’t empty his recycle bin, does he? Here we go.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Just exercising my god-given curiosity. Too bad he hasn’t had this computer longer. It’s only two years old.”

“They change the system every two years. Alison does it all for them.” She tried to look over his shoulder, but he was scrolling too rapidly.

“Still, somebody transferred a lot of old files for him. They’re on here, even though some of them he thought he erased. People always think when they hit delete that things actually go away. But they don’t.
Computers have retentive memories. Everything is there somewhere if you know how to look for it.”

“So, I repeat, what are you looking for?” She wanted him to pay at least a little attention to her, and she felt uneasy with him fooling with her father’s computer. What did Blake really want?

As if he were reading her thoughts, he turned and kissed her. “A sense of who he is. What he wants. What’s important to him. Do you realize that you could go through just about everything on his computer and never know he had a family?”

“You’d know he had Rosemary. Rich has the most contact with him. They can talk shop. He’s always been Daddy’s favorite. I was golden when I was little, but I grew out of whatever I had. He would make an occasional request—get Billy a haircut before Friday. But us kids were more props than intimates. There are hundreds of pictures of our big happy photogenic family, taken on days when that would be the only time we’d see him. I felt I’d just plain lost him somewhere along the line.” She felt blue just thinking about it.

“But he’s had a huge impact as governor. If a man can be measured by the shadow he cast, your father is quite the man. It’s that impact that fascinates me. And it’s the best way for you to figure him out yourself—to understand what he did and what he refused to do.”

“But that doesn’t tell us what he was thinking, what goes on inside him.”

He smiled at her, touching her cheek. “You forget, I was raised a Jew. It’s what you do that counts. The intention, the kavanah, is for you and the Eternal. The act is what counts.” For a long while, his fingers played over the keys. Sometimes she felt he was really a musician, and the computer was his instrument. She liked that conceit. She half dozed in her chair while he played his keyboard instrument. “Your father seems to be a grateful man. He keeps his promises to those who maintain him in office or help him get there. He’s a very giving man to those who give to him.” At long last he was done. “Let’s put everything carefully back. Then let’s go upstairs and try out your bed.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

He gave her butt a little squeeze as she preceded him up the three
flights of stairs from the ground floor to her top-floor room. “No, you didn’t.”

It was like the culmination of a daydream to make love in her bed. During the weeks they’d been separated, she had imagined this so many times. Now their cast clothes lay on the floor—or rather hers did. Even now he carefully folded his over a chair. She had the air-conditioning on low to be comfortable naked. She put a towel under them so the sheets wouldn’t give her away. His skin was as sleek as she remembered, satiny, honey-colored, warm, always warm. “How long do we have?” he asked.

“Alison’s movie began at nine. So she couldn’t be back here before eleven thirty. We should figure eleven for a deadline.”

“That gives us hours…hours.” He was tonguing her breast. They made love hard and fast and then again more slowly, making up for lost time. Afterward she dozed off, replete. She could hear him showering in her bathroom. She’d take a shower soon, soon.

She woke with a start. It was after ten. Hurriedly she showered, cleaned up the bathroom, made her bed roughly. “Blake? Where are you?” she called.

“Come down,” he called back.

Quickly she got back into her rumpled clothes. He was in Rosemary’s office.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she apologized. “I don’t know how it happened. What are you doing in here?”

“You were tired. Don’t feel bad. Come, this is fascinating,” he said. “Look at the dossiers she keeps.”

She read over his shoulder.

“Rosemary is nothing if not thorough.” Melissa perched on the desk next to the computer. “Where Mrs. Senator McCloskey gets her hair done, the caterer she uses, the names of the children and the baby grandchild. Where she buys shoes. Now I understand how Rosemary got to be pals with McCloskey’s wife, what’s her name—Pamela. They see each other a couple of times a week. Plus, note, call up Rosemary’s schedule. See, they’ve been eating at the same restaurants at least once a week for the last six weeks. My mother leaves nothing to chance. I bet my father has been playing golf at the right course too. She surrounds her victims. She’s relentless.” She felt far less queasy about him reading Rosemary’s notes.

“It’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “Now let’s put everything back.”

Before eleven, he left. She hastily rinsed their glasses and plates. Then she checked her room again, sniffed at her bed and sprayed it with room deodorizer, got into her pajamas, turned on her TV and waited for the reoccupation of the house. It was good he had left, because Alison returned at eleven twenty and immediately checked on her. She felt like an undercover agent in a movie. She could scarcely wait until they had the house to themselves again. She told herself that it was okay for him to snoop around—he wasn’t doing anything bad. It was a crash course in the hidden life of her parents. If it wasn’t for Blake, she would be bored to death this summer. She remembered the weeks before he came, with nothing to do but work at her empty job and travel back and forth, fend
off her mother’s occasional questions, sit around eating and gaining weight and watching TV and writing endless e-mails. Now she was alive again, because she was with him. He even made her house interesting. They would play many games this summer, wonderful games together. It made being trapped here almost fun. She had always adored spying on her parents. The knowledge gained made her feel less weak. Like Blake himself, information was something she had that they did not, could not know about. I am coming to know you, she thought, and you may be my parents, but you don’t really know me. I am more than you think I am. It was all just a game, almost sexy in its secrecy. Just a household game.

M
elissa was delighted that Blake was in Washington, where she could manage to see him two or three times a week, besides occasional brief times for lunch, so glad that she wanted to give him something. “I’m ready to brave my family. We can figure out when to introduce you. We can do it.”

“That’s sweet, babes. But you’re having a hard enough summer. Crappy job. Your mother on your back.” He stroked her cheek. “Only brief times we can snatch. Why make trouble? I’d like us to be together more, but as long as we can see each other the way we have been, it’s cool. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

She was relieved. She did not look forward to the scenes that would follow her parents’ discovery of Blake. Her parents were out many evenings, and most weekends they went to Pennsylvania. Sometimes Alison saw a girlfriend. Once Rosemary took Alison to Philadelphia with them overnight. Blake’s hosts went to the Eastern Shore every weekend. It was late July already. She said she was going to the library or to the drugstore or sometimes she could just sneak out from the subfloor, unless one of Dick’s underlings was working late. With so much staff in the house, slipping out was easy sometimes, hard other times. She stayed in contact with Blake via cell phone till they could hook up and look for a private place.

One night they made love on the far side of the canal, in a dark spot downriver from where the tourist canal boats docked, near where it spilled into Rock Creek, then the Potomac. He padded across a narrow wooden gate that separated two locks. She started out, then panicked. On her left was a drop of fifteen or more feet, with the gate scarcely wide enough for her feet.

“Don’t look down!” he said impatiently. “Come on. It’s just like walking across a floor.”

Slowly, putting one foot in front of the other, she edged across to the dark bank by an office building. The Potomac side of the canal was a different neighborhood, the Whitehurst Expressway, the old no-man’s-land under it and new office and residential buildings that had been springing up regularly the past few years. On the Potomac side, everything was contemporary or decrepit.

Another night they walked for blocks along the canal where the tow-path the mules used to pull the replica boats hugged an old stone wall. By the Key Bridge, they descended a rickety wooden staircase from the canal to a small park on the river, by a place that rented canoes. There they made it in the damp grass. That became their favorite spot when their houses were occupied. The smell of somewhat polluted water slowly flowing was coming to mean sex to her.

“NO, I DON’T WANT
to go to Maine,” Melissa said. She was standing in her mother’s office before Rosemary’s ebony-topped desk. “This is the first real job I’ve ever had. I want a good recommendation. To feel I’ve done what I set out to do. I think it would be good for me to be alone. The house has a security system. I’ve been here alone overnight this summer, and I wasn’t scared.”

“But wouldn’t you rather go up to Colonel Workman’s house? It’s on an island. It will be cool instead of the steamy heat we’re suffering here. You can go sailing with their grandson.”

“He’s sixteen, Mother. Anyhow, I don’t like sailing. Lower this, raise that. I endure enough orders at work. Billy can hang with him. They’ll just ignore me.”

Rosemary did not drop the subject. Melissa doubted that her mother was eager to bring her but rather was probing why Melissa did not want to come.

“I’m nineteen, and I’ve never been alone more than overnight. It’s like I’m still a child—”

“You’re still our daughter. You’re not as much an adult as you seem to think you are…. I could ask Alison to stay with you.”

“I need to be responsible for myself. I don’t even know what it’s like to be lonely.” She was lying: how often had she been lonely in her own family? “I’ve never had to manage my own meals, my own time. It’s only a couple of weeks, but it could be a real learning experience. I’ll be at work every day anyhow. You know how crushed Alison would be if you went off without her.”

“We’ll see,” Rosemary said, but Melissa suspected that she had won. If she were going to quit her job early, she would have to give notice now. Melissa knew better than to push harder. She would just let it rest, hoping for two whole weeks seeing Blake. Whole days, whole nights. Blake was already building up a story about a buddy from school who had an apartment where he could stay. It was like a honeymoon waiting, the promise of precious time together. They were counting the days toward the morning her parents would leave for Maine, where Billy would join them from hockey camp. Melissa knew from her mother’s e-mails that Merilee too was trying to skip Maine. She claimed her internship in New York prevented her, but Melissa suspected that Merilee was enjoying autonomy. It would be cool in Maine, crisp by comparison with the jungle fetor that lay over Washington as the temperature edged into the high nineties and hung there, day after day, scarcely cooler by night. She was living in a tropical fish tank, just one more harried guppy milling around with a ragged tail in a swarm of hungry fish, most of them bigger than she was.

THEY HAD BEEN
planning to get together Thursday evening, but he e-mailed her that morning before she went to work.

Phil had some weird fascination for Blake he didn’t have for her. She considered whether she should join them. But Blake and she weren’t going to get any private time, and Phil would dominate the conversation the way he always did. He would be pushing her to do something she didn’t want to. She would put in time with her family, instead of making a lame excuse for escaping. Gloom thickened the air-conditioned atmosphere in the house these days, as Dick had been handed his first senatorial defeat. His transportation bill had not come to a vote before the Senate adjourned. It would have to come up for a vote in the fall. Senator Dawes would cosponsor.

She had heard her father talking with Rosemary. “In some ways, it’s hard to get used to, pumpkin. When I was governor, I could just sign an executive order, give a command, promise some patronage and it was done. Now fifty other egomaniacs have to vote my way. This Senate thing is wasteful.”

“But you’re in for six years, and incumbents have a huge and measurable advantage,” Rosemary said. She was stroking his hair, kneading his shoulders. “You’re a freshman. As time goes on, you’ll gain power. And the power is very real. You could be in there for life, till you’re absolutely dinosaur ancient like Strom Thurmond. You were governor as long as you could be governor. But there’s no term limit on senators.”

“All that effort, all that kowtowing to McCloskey and his insipid wife…”

“It’s not wasted. He’ll get the bill voted on in the fall, and we’ll have the opportunity to work on key people for their votes. Dawes will help.”

“Still…it felt, I don’t know, more important to be governor. Governor was the top of the heap.”

“President is the top of the heap, darling.”

They were both silent, contemplating the golden mountain of their goal. They would never allow her to overhear anything shady. When they
talked in the livingroom, it was vetted by both of them to be safe. She thought that they talked about the dirty stuff in bed—not sexually dirty but ethically, politically dirty. Occasionally when they had been visiting Grandpa at the farmhouse, she had heard the murmur of their voices long after they retired, as well as the rustlings and little soft moans and whispers that, as she entered adolescence, she had identified as lovemaking. No matter what she might think about Rosemary and Dick, they were a real couple, fixated on each other emotionally and sexually.

FINALLY IT WAS
time for her parents to leave for Colonel Workman’s island. He was always addressed as Colonel, although he had retired from the Army a decade before and gone into oil. His home was in Texas, but he had bought a small island off the Maine coast where his family spent summers and he came for August to host influential friends. It was beautiful, but she would have been closely monitored. Plus, the water up there was way too cold for swimming. She had never appealed to the sons of rich men who backed her father, but now she had her own real boyfriend, and even sailing or playing tennis with those spoiled creatures would be a drag. She didn’t dare ask if Alison were going, but she kept an eye on her. Finally she noticed Alison packing her laptop and a bulging briefcase, then bringing down a carry-on of clothes.

Hot and stickily humid as it was in Washington, the house was air-conditioned and so was her job. So was the lawyer’s house where Blake was staying. In the meantime, Blake’s monitoring of Rosemary’s e-mail netted her the information that Merilee had caved. Rosemary had gone over her head to one of the partners who seemed in some way bound to Dick. Merilee would be heading for Maine. Melissa felt superior to her older sister for once, since Merilee hadn’t wanted to go but had been out-manipulated by their mother.

“Look at this list,” she complained to Blake as they ate Middle Eastern takeout at the kitchen table. Yolanda and her daughter had two weeks off, so Melissa was left to fend for herself. “There’s a whole paragraph about
the garbage disposal. Two paragraphs about laundry, as if she ever does it herself. One paragraph about the answering machine.”

“She’s thorough, we’ve said that. Your mother has a very organized mind.”

“And she thinks I’m a blithering idiot.”

He grinned, dipping Syrian bread into the hummus. “That too. But to be fair, this is the first time she’s ever left you alone longer than overnight. She thinks you haven’t the faintest what to do. Remove tissue from box. Blow nose. Wipe carefully. Toss into trash.”

Melissa giggled. In spite of her sense of outrage at her mother’s five-page list of dos and dont’s, she was in bliss. Two weeks together. Two weeks to play. Two weeks away from her mother’s judging gaze. Two weeks in which everything in this house was hers and Blake’s, theirs alone. It was the most wonderful present of her life. If they never came back, would she bother returning to school? Or would she just stay here with him, living in luxury and working some half-assed job and hanging out? That would be the ideal life.

They saw movies Blake brought from the video store. They sat and people-watched through the windowless windows of cafés on M, nursing cups of cappuccino. They played the music they liked really, really loud, and twice they went out to a club that let underage students in to listen or dance and stayed till two in the morning. They moved overstuffed chairs and the glass coffee table into the diningroom—which they never used—so they could dance in the livingroom. They ate pizza and ice cream and Chinese takeout and burgers. They tried out every bed in the house. “I don’t like so much being together in here,” she said to him after they did it on her parents’ bed. “Instead of feeling like I’m getting off on them, I feel too reminded. I want to put them out of my mind. We’ve escaped. I don’t want to remember they exist.”

“Oh, they exist. And a lot of people can’t ever forget that.”

“Why can’t we just let them slip into oblivion for this time we’ve been given? Dropped in our laps to enjoy.”

“Because, Lissa mine, this time is a gift to explore not only each other but all the secrets of your powerful father. At our leisure, we can investi
gate, we can prowl and examine and learn. When will we ever have an opportunity like this again? Maybe not for a year. Maybe not ever.”

“You mean because once they find out about us—”

“You bet. The shit will hit the fan big time.”

“I won’t give you up, Blake. No matter what they do or say.”

“I hope not. I pray not. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

Alison kept an inventory of the wine cellar on her desktop computer, making it simple for them. Whenever they drank a bottle, they eliminated it from the inventory. Blake made sure that they got rid of any incriminating trash. It was part of the fun of their clandestine life in the house that had never before felt hers. Blake made the neighborhood and even the house someplace she belonged and enjoyed. It was their kingdom of pleasure.

Sometimes she imagined they were married. When she dared to tentatively share that with him, he began to play too. It did not scare him. She was astonished and delighted. They played the Mr. and Mrs. game at supper, when they were loading the dishwasher, when they were doing laundry, when they were shopping. He was Mr. Timothy Flapdoodle. She was Mrs. Gina Flapdoodle. They had two children: Annette was precocious and a ballerina; Edgar was a math genius and a champion chess player. They had three dogs and three cats, a parrot and an iguana. The names of the pets changed almost daily, as did their breeds, or lack of them. The Flapdoodle family expanded or contracted at will. They had a second son, Harley, who played soccer and got in trouble at school; then they dropped him. He was too much like Billy for her to enjoy.

“Everybody needs a future,” Blake said. “Even if it only extends to the end of the week.”

“But we can have a real future, if we’re strong with each other,” she said. He was too fatalistic. It went along with his invocation of destiny in their meeting. She didn’t believe anything was fated. If Jonah had been a nicer person, she might have followed him to William and Mary instead of going to Wesleyan with Emily. Then she would never have met Blake. But she didn’t argue. He was a romantic, and she appreciated that. She
was the pragmatist in their couple. “There’s no way I’m going to let my parents break us up. I can swear that.”

“We’ll see” was all he would say. But he promised, “In the fall, when they come up to visit me at school, you can meet my folks. We can get that started.”

“Does that mean you want to meet my parents this summer while you’re in D.C.?” Her stomach clenched hard on itself.