Chapter Eight
I went home a bit later, feeling beat from the day. The mental and emotional fatigue from Jason’s continuous game was making me feel off my game. I slumped in the back of the taxi on the way back, not even bothering to laugh at the taxi driver’s jokes as we flew across the city.
“You White House people never laugh,” he murmured in his Mexican accent, driving swiftly.
I knew, in that moment, that I had turned into everyone else—even when all this time I had thought I was different. I knew that everyone worked for someone else; I knew that everyone was a pawn in someone else’s game. I just used to consider myself higher up on the food chain.
I arrived at my home and sat at the kitchen table, not wanting to get undressed after what I’d learned about Jason’s two extra cameras. I peered around the room as I poured a glass of wine. I began talking:
“Hello, Jason. How are you tonight? You’re doing well? Would you like a glass of wine? No?” I felt my quivering voice as it emanated through my throat. I felt like I was going insane.
I sat deeper in the chair and began to drink deeper, longer. I hadn’t bothered to turn on the television, and I could only hear the traffic as it coursed by my apartment building. “I have to move,” I said again. “I have to get out of here.” For a moment, I considered this with greater certainty. If I moved away, I would rid myself of these cameras that lurked like beasts throughout my apartment. I swallowed. The wine was so bitter, and I loved it; it made my blood flow looser through my body.
I stood, peering into the armoire once more. Perhaps there was another camera? I began to search for it, opening old teapots and peering into the old china, smelling old age and years and years of dust. I needed to clean, I knew. But I’d been too bogged down with work for the past—oh—seven years; I had completely forgotten how to be alive.
I set all the teapots against the wall and continued to graze through the armoire, searching for the small cameras. I felt like I was growing increasingly crazy as I went; I felt that I was on a mission to find something that could never be found—something that was futile. I swallowed and leaned back, feeling desolation take hold of me. I reached for the wine and closed my eyes, listening as the traffic dissipated as the people finally arrived home to their wives, their husbands, their children. For the first time in possibly ever, I wished I didn’t live alone. I’d always wanted my own place during college, even when I’d been the president of the sorority. I’d lived alone all throughout my 20s. It just seemed natural: it was my home. It was my place.
But I was nearing 30. I wanted to come home to something besides my wine bottle, my subtle hangover. I wanted to clean something besides years and years of dust and decay on my grandmother’s old teacups.
I stood, a thought lingering in my mind. A long, long time ago—back during the old campaign trail, I’d had a friend. I know. It seems crazy. Me with a friend. I’d been using people like my pawns for so many years, that I didn’t know what true camaraderie was like anymore. Rachel and I had begun as competitors, of course. She and I had had many of the same skills, and the same people on the upper-level staff had treasured us. But one evening, after a particularly terrorizing day at the office, she’d leaned toward me and asked me, off-handedly, if I’d like to get a drink with her.
“Me?” I asked her, laughing a bit.
“Yes. Amanda. I am asking you if you want to go with me. To get a drink,” Rachel said sarcastically, grinning at me. Her teeth were perfect; her red hair was immaculate. In many ways, in that moment, I realized I was jealous of her. I hated that feeling: the realization that everything I had been doing against her had been simply churned from a sense of jealousy. That I didn’t feel I was good enough for something: that was preposterous, back then.
I thought for a moment after her question, biting my lip. I looked at the paper and remembered the man I was meant to meet that evening—the congressman I’d been sleeping with at the time. I remembered his smoggy breath, the way he banged against me on the wall, fucking me out of my comprehension of myself, of my life.
I went with her. Of course I did. She was sending me an olive branch, and I wasn’t stupid. In many ways, I wanted to keep my enemy close. But that was just an internal vessel in my everyday life. If I was going to be the best, I had to know how the other people on the upper end behaved. Drank their whiskey. All that.
Rachel was hilarious. She brought such joy to my life. That evening, that very first time we were together, we laughed and giggled into the night over margaritas, our eyes flashing in the lights of the bar. She asked me if I’d ever been in love, and I told her I never had been. She told me it was good I was in this industry; this industry where lust and greed drove everything. We agreed on so many things.
After the campaign was over, she came toward my desk. This was several months later, and I already felt like we were sisters, nearly. I tossed my head to the right and placed my hand on my waist in sort of mock surprise. “Well, Rachel Gray. To what do I owe this pleasure?” This was my continual banter. I brought my purse over my shoulder and readied myself for the evening. “You going out celebrating with me, or do I have to go by myself?” I smiled.
But Rachel looked serious. “I need to talk to you about something,” she whispered.
I raised my eyebrows and leaned toward her, unsure. I felt my purse fall from my arm.
She had been crying. I knew that. We didn’t generally discuss our feelings, and I felt a bit uncomfortable with it: like she was standing before me, naked.
“I have to quit,” she whispered finally. Her voice was lined with such passion, such anger.
I drew my head back, surprised. “What? Quit? Quit what, Rachel? You missed the boat. The campaign trail is over. Xavier is in office.” Already I had that drive for the man in the presidential position. But he didn’t know it yet. He was out of reach.
But Rachel shook her head once more. “I have to quit politics. All of it. It’s too much for me. I’ve been—I’ve been pretending to be someone I’m not. And I can’t do it any longer.” She sniffed.
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t imagine how this incredibly smart, vivacious woman before me could suddenly quit her career like this. “You’re making a huge mistake, Rachel,” I blurted. I’d had these thoughts before, even by then. The workload was difficult, and sometimes it did truly feel that you had to sleep your way to the top. “You need to go home and have a glass of wine and get some fucking sleep,” I whispered curtly. I didn’t have time for this—for this abandonment. I didn’t have time for these childish feelings. Both Rachel and I had so much to do. We were going to work our way to the top, together.
But she shook her head once more. She bowed it, biting her lip. “I’m sorry, Amanda,” she stated then, sounding like a mouse. She spun around on her heels and she left, clacking down the hallway.
I waited for her after that. I waited for her to call. I was far too proud to make the call myself, of course. She’d been my best friend, but I didn’t actively miss her. I became swept up with my job, with my life. I assumed, in many ways, that she’d gotten over it all and found another job of her own. I assumed she was back on top, flipping her fine red hair from left to right and gabbing with her new girlfriends. I didn’t need her, I thought then. I didn’t.
But there on the floor of my kitchen, in front of my armoire, I felt that I needed a friend more than anything else in the world. I swallowed and reached toward my phone. I’d kept every contact in the thing since the dawn of my political career, of course. I couldn’t afford not to. People continually cropped back up, their smiles sure and their arms outstretched, needing something from you. You had to pretend you knew them; you needed them. They did the same for you.
I tapped her number into the phone and I held it against my ear, sighing. I couldn’t believe I was dipping so low.
Finally, on the last ring, I heard her voice: “Hello?” It still held that efficiency that I knew so well from those years before, but it was also a bit softer, a bit friendlier. Like she’d been waiting for me.
“Rachel?” I murmured into the phone. I heard my voice—so clumsy. Like it needed her. I hated that I needed her.
“Amanda. Is that you?” The voice was hesitant, unsure, and a bit confused. She didn’t know what to think of this call; I didn’t, either.
“Yes,” I said, laughing a bit too loudly into the phone.
“How do you still have my number?” she asked, laughing.
I was confused by this. Of course I had her number. “You know I keep all the numbers, Rachel. Just in case.”
“Ah, yes,” she murmured, chortling a bit. “I didn’t quite realize that you were still in the business. I stepped away all those years ago and I forget how things are.”
So she’d actually quit, just like she’d said she would. I felt befuddled. I cleared my throat. “What a thing.” This was something my mother used to say. I had hated it, always thinking she sounded like a plain woman. I supposed she was, truly.
“Why are you calling?” Rachel asked.
A pause hung between us. I let it go on too long, nearly forcing her off the phone. But then I spoke up. “Listen, Rachel. I just…you’re the only person I could call. I have a small emergency at my place. The gas is leaking, and—and they have to do some repairs.”
“That’s terrible!” Rachel lurched, still a bit confused. Why would I call her, I was sure she was thinking. I was sure she had a million people she could have called in this situation. But she had taken herself out of this game so long ago; she didn’t have to play with fire, like I did.
“Right. So I need a place to stay,” I whispered into the phone, cringing at myself. I could hear the desperation.
Rachel “ohhed” into the phone. “Of course you can stay here.” She glided into it easily, as if she hadn’t had an incredible, overexerted though process in the back of her mind. “I have everything for you. A guest bedroom, even. Please. Come.”
“Thank you, Rachel,” I murmured, leaning my head back with such relief. “You’re really saving my life.”
She had no idea just how true this was.