Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

We were back at the mansion, and I’d parked when she said, “Mom, by the way?”

I turned to look at her.

“Nice face-lift,” she said.

THEY LIVE ON the first floor of a house on Adelphia Street. With my heart thudding against my chest, I climb the porch steps and knock on the door, though knocking is a bit of a formality given that both their apartment and the one above it, accessed through a door next to theirs, have already been inspected by the Secret Service agents. An airconditioned coolness, infused with cigarette smoke, comes out to meet me from inside when Dena appears behind her screen door. She is a lean woman with a stringy neck and thin lips, her face lined, her once light brown hair now blondish-gray and dry-looking, still wavy but clipped just beneath her ears. She is old, Dena’s old, but she’s also unmistakably herself, and I begin to cry. She opens the door, an amused look creeping onto her face, and she says, “Well, you don’t need to be a drama queen about it.” When we embrace, I cling to her.

We step into the living room, which holds a black leather couch and matching chair as well as a low coffee table, all facing an entertainment system—a triptych of shelves whose centerpiece is an enormous television set, flanked on one side by a stereo, speakers, and CD and DVD cases, and on the other side by several rows of propped-up collector plates featuring either horses (they gallop against the backdrop of western landscapes, their bodies at sharp sideways angles, their manes and tails blown fiercely by the wind) or else American Indians (a chieftain gripping a tomahawk with an eagle perched on his shoulder, a woman in long black braids and a fringed leather dress kneeling devotedly over a papoose). Has Dena’s taste changed, has mine, or have the times? Perhaps some combination. The walls of the living room are covered in wood paneling, the carpet is mauve, and a doorway leads to an overcast narrow hall at the end of which another doorway opens onto, from my vantage point, a strip of a sunny room with a black-and-white checker-board floor—the kitchen, I assume. The television is on, set to Dr. Phil.

“You thirsty?” Dena asks. “I’d offer you a real drink, but we quit years ago, so about the most interesting thing we have is Diet Coke.”

“That sounds perfect.” When she starts down the hall, I look around for tissue—there’s a box on an end table—and blow my nose. On the coffee table is a bowl of rose potpourri, an issue of People magazine, and a pack of Merit cigarettes. From the kitchen, I hear water running, and as Dena returns to the living room, she talks to someone in one of the rooms along the way, but I can’t make out the words over the television. It must be Pete; I know from my agents that I am now sitting in the same apartment as Pete Imhof. Outside, through the front window, I see José, one of the agents, standing on the porch with his arms folded, surveying the street.

Dena carries two glasses, one with dark, fizzy liquid in it and one with water; she passes the Diet Coke to me, turns off the TV, sits in the chair, and gestures for me to sit on the couch. “I’ve gotta say, when the girl from your office called to announce you were on your way, I thought someone was playing a joke.” Dena’s tone is neither cold nor fawning but simply normal; for the second time today, I am not Alice Blackwell but Alice Lindgren. Or I am both, because she says, “So what’s it like being married to the president?”

In what I hope is a light voice, I say, “It depends on the day.”

Dena crosses one leg over the other. She’s wearing jeans and a sleeveless black V-necked shirt that shows her cleavage to such flattering effect, I can’t help wondering if she’s either wearing a padded bra or has had implants. She also wears dangly silver earrings, a silver chain necklace, and two silver rings, neither on the ring finger of her left hand: One, with a moonstone affixed to it, is on her left middle finger, and the other, a band imprinted with tiny peace signs, is on her right thumb. The peace signs give an extra weight to what she says next, or maybe it’s my imagination. She says, “I never knew you were a Republican.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Yeah?” She smiles. “How’s that worked out?”

We are quiet, and I say, “I’ve thought of you a lot over the years, Dena. I wish—” I wish our friendship hadn’t imploded, I wish it hadn’t been three decades since we last spoke.

But she says, “I know. I wish it, too.” She laughs a little. “I’d say I’ve thought of you, but it’s more like I’ve seen you. That cashmere coat you wore at Charlie’s inauguration, at the second one, that was gorgeous. I thought, When I knew Alice, she was such a penny-pincher about clothes, but that must have cost a fortune. I was glad to see you’d loosened up.” Charlie’s inauguration— this is how the public refers to him, as Charlie, or more sarcastically, as Chuck or Chuckie B. In Washington, I am the only person who directly interacts with him who could get away with such informality. “That’s a nice suit, too. What designer is it?” Dena nods toward my increasingly wrinkled red linen jacket and skirt, which I donned for the breast cancer summit this morning—a lifetime ago. When I’m in the residence, I dress casually, much the way Dena’s dressed, albeit in more modest shirts.

“It’s de la Renta,” I say.

She nods approvingly. “I was gonna guess him or Carolina Herrera.” She gestures out the window at the agent on the porch. “Do those guys listen when you pee?”

I laugh. “They don’t go into the bathroom with me, no. They wait outside. A few of them are female—no one who’s traveling with us today but some of the others—so if there’s a situation where it might be awkward to have a man present, a woman can step in.”

Dena shakes her head. “Better you than me.”

“It’s a strange life.” I pause. “Dena, Pete’s here, isn’t he?”

“And I thought I was the main attraction.”

“No, you are, but if it’s possible, I’d like to talk to both of you at the same time.”

She turns her head toward the hall and calls out, “Babe, she wants to see you, too!” Looking back at me, she says, “He thinks you don’t like him. I told him you wouldn’t make a personal trip here just to scold us, the first lady has bigger fish to fry, but you know Pete.”

Not really, of course—I don’t know Pete Imhof anymore, if I ever did.

Again, more impatiently, she yells, “Babe!”

After another minute, he materializes: He, too, wears jeans, and a gray Badgers T-shirt and brown leather flip-flops. (The dark hair on his toes! With a jolt, I remember it from when I was seventeen. How strange that I once, briefly, was well acquainted with Pete Imhof’s body.) When I last saw him, after that infuriating pyramid scheme, he had gained a good deal of weight, and he has gained a good deal since then. He’s not enormous, but he’s more than big, and both his hair and beard are silver. He’s actually a handsome man in an earthily sexual sort of way. I stand, and we exchange a clumsy handshake; I don’t mean to be cruel when I say that the clumsiness is his, that his discomfort is clear. God knows I have many shortcomings, but at this point, managing a handshake isn’t one of them. “You sure surprised Dena today,” he says as he steps backward so he’s next to her chair. He perches in a not particularly comfortable-looking way on an arm of it while I sit back down on the couch.

“Babe, get a chair from the kitchen,” Dena says, and he does, setting it close to hers.

“I hope I didn’t pull the two of you away from other obligations,” I say when Pete has sat. I know, through Belinda telling Jessica, what their jobs are—Pete is a night security guard at White River Dairy, and Dena is a part-time massage therapist at a chiropractor’s office.