Jennifer Oko - Gloss

Sitting there, back straight, chin up, eyes searching around, Mark reminded me of the guys in high school that I had been too terrified to talk to, the thin, chiseled waspy ones that had landed at my progressive private school only after being expelled from a string of blue blood boarding schools or Upper East Side preps. He had floppy, straight brown hair, an aristocratic profile and a slightly smug countenance reminiscent of a British movie star. Totally out of my league. But then again, sometimes guys like that actually liked girls like me—thinking girls like me (with small bones, light olive skin, oversize eyes and the surgically altered residue of a prominent nose) to be somewhat exotic. Mark was trying to push down his cowlick when he looked up and saw me. He smiled (those dimples!).

“Hi,” I said as I walked over to him, grateful that the Persian carpet snuffed out the graceless clop-clop of my high-heeled shoes. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.” I was only a few minutes late, but I hate when people aren’t punctual. It’s the producer in me—time sensitive and tightly scheduled.

“Just got here,” he said, but he was probably lying. He was already halfway through whatever it was he was drinking. “Coffee?” he said, holding up what appeared to be a tube leading to a hookah pipe.

“That’s coffee?”

“It actually is. Some strange coffee martini they make here. These are actually straws. Try it. It’s good.”

“Odd.” I sat down and took a sip. “And clever.”

Basically, the bowl was made to look like one of those Egyptian water pipes, but the proprietors had created a way to drink from them instead.

We bantered. We sipped our alcoholic coffee through straws.

It was like a lot of first dates, the kind where you talk and talk to avoid any awkward silences. Until the inevitable.

“So.”

“So.”

Silence.

“How about we order another one?” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

I was surprised to find that I wasn’t self-conscious and squirming next to a guy like him, but there I was, comfortably slouching into the pillows, gently touching Mark’s arm after he accidentally spilled a little of the drink on the table and tried to mop it up with his sleeve without my noticing. I had noticed and I thought it sweet.

He told me about working in the White House, about how every day he had to pinch himself because he couldn’t believe he was actually there, in the most powerful place on earth.

“What’s he like?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The president, silly.”

Mark laughed and said that, because I was a member of the press, he couldn’t really give me a straightforward answer. And anyway, he said, he worked more directly with the vice president. So I asked about him.

“Off the record?” He gave an exaggerated snarl and then held up our now empty hookah. “Waiter! Can we have another one?”

Hookah or no hookah, Mark did not need much lubrication to tell me that the VP was an ass. It was common knowledge that he was a screamer, a phone thrower, a man in dire need of mood stabilizers but too macho to take any. At one of his first press conferences (not that there were many), the VP took off his shoe and banged it on the podium in a manner reminiscent of a certain Soviet leader circa 1960. In fact, that was the perception—that the VP fancied the savior of America would come in the form of an iron-fisted, quasi-totalitarian, Soviet-like regime, just with a nice capitalist overtone. Since Mark was about as far as you could get from a gray, bland, perfunctory Soviet apparatchik, they didn’t really get along on a personal level. That said, the vice president was preparing to run in the next presidential election, and Mark did have issues of professional longevity to consider.

“I figure I don’t have to like him. And he doesn’t have to like me,” he said. The waiter returned and Mark leaned forward to take a sip from our refreshed bowl of caffeinated elixir. “As long as he likes what I write.”

“But do you believe in what you write? I mean, do you believe in his policies?”

“His policies are based on the polls. So there isn’t much to believe in. It’s like that with any politician.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I didn’t say I respect it.”

I sat back and crossed my arms, like a disappointed schoolteacher. “How can you live with yourself, working for something you don’t respect?”

“Oh come on, people have lived with a lot worse. Especially in Washington. You just have to learn not to personalize the political.”

“But that’s not why you got into the business, is it? Just to rub elbows with power? I mean, you could have done a lot of things, I imagine. Why work in politics if you don’t really think you’re doing some good?”

“I didn’t say we weren’t doing any good. We are doing some good.”

“Like what?” I said, and then immediately hated myself for being so argumentative.

Mark laughed. “You just can’t suppress that hard-hitting reporter inside you, huh?”

“Yeah, right,” I said, hiding the fact that I was blushing by sucking up some more of our drink. “But seriously, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I’m just curious about what it is about your work that moves you, you know, gets you out of bed in the morning?”

He fumbled with his straw. “I know it sounds clichéd, but I guess a lot of what we do is just simply better than the alternative. It’s not that anything is so great, but we could be doing a lot worse. It probably sounds like moral gymnastics or defensive reasoning, but I do believe that.” He took another sip. “At least I like to believe that I believe that,” he said, looking up from the hookah with a full dimpled grin.

“What a mental menace,” I said, citing the words Mark had infamously coined referring to the Fardish president before he was, also Mark’s words, effectively eviscerated.

He smiled again.

“You like those alliterations, don’t you?” I said.

“This is a luxurious libation, don’t you think?” he said, changing the subject with a wink.

An ambrosial aphrodisiac, I thought to myself as I lifted the straw to my mouth once again. And that, basically, is how, a couple of hours later, I wound up in the hotel suite of a People magazine certified eligible bachelor.

And that’s where he leaned forward across the plush velvet couch and gave me a soft, gentle kiss on my mouth. He had soft, full lips, warm and, oh…this is hard for me to write, even now. One doesn’t get many kisses like that behind bars.

“I should go,” I said, not really wanting to, but proud of myself for saying so.

“It’s okay,” he said, “we can just talk if you want.”

I wanted to kiss him. “It’s just, well, I don’t want to do anything stupid, and you are one of the most coveted guys in the country and I really don’t want to be another conquest and…” I went on like this for a bit too long, embarrassing myself more and more with each word. I grabbed a water bottle from the coffee table and finished it off, because if I was drinking I couldn’t talk.

Mark laughed. His eyes closed when he laughed. It was incredibly sweet.

“You know the stupid thing?” he said, sitting back into the cushions, away from me. “Because of that People article, sure I can get laid, but no woman will trust me enough to take me seriously.”

I shot him an impish grin. “Poor you.”

“No. Seriously. I really like you, Annie. And I know it sounds like a line, but I would really like to get to know you. See what happens.” He crossed his arms, giving himself an uneasy little hug. “Is that okay?”

“Okay,” I said, wanting to believe him. I told him that if we really wanted to get to know each other, he had to trust that I understood that everything he said was off the record, and that made him smile, as if there was a lot he wanted to tell me, which, of course (I later found out) there was.