How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,146
amazing,” and I said, “You're amazing.” I told him he was awake, and he said, “I feel like I'm dreaming, actually,” and I said, “No, I mean you're awake in the Buddhist sense. You're aware and you see yourself reflected in other people. You see beauty and the goodness in other people because you have it within yourself. I felt that about you the minute I looked across the restaurant. I could see you were awake. And it was like everybody else in the place wasn't.”
It wasn't really like I taught him anything he didn't already know: I just made him more aware of his own powers. Officially, I was listed as a media consultant, but really I was more like his spiritual adviser. Not in any formal sense, and of course he still goes to the Methodist church when he's home, the same one he grew up going to with his parents. But, like, the other day, I quoted him the sutra that says a person who doesn't aim for enlightenment is like a spoiled child who plays obsessively with a toy while the house is burning down around him. And that night he was on CNN, and the sound bite is Tom saying the president is like a child playing with his toys while the house is burning down around him.
I was on staff for almost three months, mostly on the road, before I met his wife, three months before the Iowa primary. She took one look at me and didn't like what she saw. Even though she doesn't really love him, that doesn't mean she wants to look like a fool. And there are the kids to consider. So that was it; I was off the bus. I understood, of course. I didn't like it, but I couldn't really see that he had much choice. If he hadn't loved me, that would have been the end of it; he would have had the perfect excuse to just dump me.
They haven't had a real marriage in years, and even in its heyday they weren't exactly setting the sheets on fire. I mean, this is the kind of southern girl who wore a surgical glove when she finally gave him a hand job. The last time they had sex was during the Clinton administration.
Twenty years ago it wouldn't have been possible to run for president under these circumstances, but I guess we've come a long way since Bill Clinton creamed on Monica's dress. Not that Tom or anybody on his staff thinks that we've come far enough to elect a president who's getting divorced and fucking a younger woman with—well, let's just say a colorful past. We're not living in France, dude. Which is why I'm here, in the cabin on the pond. Well, actually, I'm here because rumors started to spread, and reporters started coming around to my house. There was a story in the Star about Tom and an unnamed former female staffer. Lots of innuendo and a claim by an unnamed source—true, actually—that we'd been caught in the shower together. Basically it was decided that I better just drop out of sight for a while.
I try not to get attached to any particular outcome, but it's a struggle to stifle my desire. Once Tom's in office, I can come out of hiding and he can get a divorce. If he doesn't get elected, then everything's that much easier, really. Not that we allow ourselves to consider that possibility. Tom wants to be president more than he wants anything in the world, except for maybe me. That's what he said one night, and you won't hear me contradicting him. But it's hard being this far away and knowing that it will be months before we can really be together. Sometimes I get frustrated. Just now I tried to call him, but he's not picking up, so I call Rob, his right-hand guy, who's also not picking up, which is pretty weird.
The cabin belongs to a buddy of his, a big supporter. I don't know why they call it a cabin, because for all its down-home rustic pretensions, it's pretty damn luxe, the kind of place you see on a hillside in Aspen or Telluride, with that sort of Daniel Boone meets Frank Lloyd Wright look. A kind of contempo mission theme inside, with big leather club chairs, Navajo rugs, and lamps made out of antlers, paintings of English setters and ducks in flight on the walls. Très