Domestic Affairs (40 page)

Waking up had rarely been so excruciating. Olivia tried to reach for her BlackBerry to silence the annoying alarm that was trying to alert her to the fact that it was ten after six, but her arms felt as if they had been weighed down with dumbbells.
Mono of the arms
. She turned over, flapping her right wrist down off the side of the bed, attempting to talk her muscles into moving. The knowledge that there was no time in the foreseeable future to catch up on the missing hours of sleep made it even harder to succumb to the day's start. She remembered her brother telling her she lived every day like it was Wednesday, equally far from and to the weekend. He couldn't have been more right.

She pushed on the remote and the familiar voices of CNN started to register as she slowly forced her obstinate eyes to open.
Six eighteen. Okay, I'll just sleep until six twenty-five. Who am I kidding? I
won't wake back up in . . . How many minutes is that? Oh God, I can't do simple math anymore. Seven minutes. What difference is seven minutes going to make?

She looked begrudgingly at the clock.
Six minutes.
The figures on TV started to come into focus. Aubrey and Landon. The reporter pointed to the IHOP where the “perfect power couple” was having breakfast.
Good morning to me.

She rolled off to the side, feeling as if she were leaving her long-distance lover, and took her BlackBerry into her hand, aware that even it seemed heavy this morning.

She scrolled down through the twelve new messages, angry at the fact that there could be twelve new messages between the hours of two and six, and even angrier that none of them were red messages from Landon. It had been three weeks since Cartagena, also known, to no one but her, as the Best Four Days of Her Life. Life since then had changed drastically.

She hated to admit it, but the amount of work she had missed while away, as Jacob predicted, had taken an intense toll on the fundraising efforts. Two events had been dropped completely because the hosts had not heard from her, and the host committee for their New York gala event hadn't come together as it should have. This would undoubtedly leave an irreparable budget hole.

Getting into the shower, she felt her head spin. With every drop of water she seemed to remember a new thing to do. Fearing her memory would fail her, she leaned out, wiped off her hand, and typed notes into her BlackBerry. She tried to focus on the notes and the growing fundraising hole, but undermining everything was the wrenching feeling that her relationship with the love of her life, the one that had seemed to hit a peak of perfection just twenty-two days ago, was disappearing before her eyes.

She hadn't heard from Landon in three days. She thought nothing of it when she didn't hear from him the first twenty-five hours after they returned, but then his pins started to come in more sporadically. He had taken her on the trip to Iowa, but since then it had been nothing but bad news. No I-love-yous. Barely even a “sweet dreams.” Back and forth in her mind she swerved, trying to play it cool,
then wondering if everything was okay, and on and on. Last weekend he'd canceled his trip to New York with a
Sorry, Jacob says too many morning shows
pin. When she replied with a
Disappointed
, he sent:
Thinking about you, and you know what they say, it's the thought that counts.
She tried, as she had been doing since they returned, to figure out what had gone wrong.

Every time she spoke to her sister she longed to seek her advice. Surely someone would know what to do. But the secrets she had kept for months had walled her in isolation. The real shift, she decided as she entered her office, came when Aubrey decided to travel with him. She was everywhere, at the speeches, the dinners. And worse, when the Taylors were on the road and Olivia was back home, Olivia could count on each newspaper and TV channel to bring her a live feed of Aubrey and Landon's every move. Olivia knew Landon had to have been part of the decision to have Aubrey travel more. It felt like a dagger to the heart. And that made Olivia feel even guiltier. She reminded herself painfully that she was the dagger, not Aubrey. It was Aubrey's relationship she was ruining, not the other way around.

What am I doing? He
should
be with her, not me.
These thoughts were repeatedly interspersed with the chiding ones that screamed at her for her overdramatization.
So he's not writing you every minute or calling? He's running for president. He has a few other things on his mind.

Neither of these theories, nor the hundreds of other guilt-ridden, self-deprecating ones, did anything to alleviate the fact that she felt as if a jackhammer were going off in the middle of her chest. She tried to focus on the job ahead. With six weeks to go, she still needed to bring in seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

When she saw his number flashing on her BlackBerry that evening, she answered with irritation. “Hey, stranger,” she said.

“Hey, babe.” The sound of exasperation in his voice made her regret the way she had answered.

“You okay?”

“I gotta tell you, babe, I am tired. And I got this cold.”

He sounded hoarse.
Of course he hasn't called, he's sick!

“A cold? That sucks. You sound terrible. Sorry.” It was so annoyingly hard to stay angry with him.

As he spoke about Iowa, Georgia, and New Hampshire, she couldn't help but feel glad to be included, to feel like she still had a piece of him.

“Landon,” she said somewhat weakly as they neared the end of the conversation, “I miss you.”

“Oh, baby,” he replied. It sounded like reciprocal longing. “You don't know how much I miss you. I cannot wait to be back in that bed of yours. I'm coming in for the shows on Sunday.”

“Can you come Saturday night?” She hated sounding needy but she wanted him there.

“I can't, baby. I have this thing.” Olivia hated the sound of the excuse, not only because he wasn't making the same effort he used to make to be by her side, but also because he was being vague about the reason, and the only other times she remembered vagueness escaping his lips was when he was talking to someone else about time he was spending with her. She hated knowing how easy it was for him to lie.

“Okay,” she said, conceding, “see you Sunday then?”

“Yes, ma'am.” He added in a “Love you, babe” quickly. She hung up the phone, only minimally aware of how far out on a lonely limb she was hanging. She held her pillow close to her chest, fragile enough to feel comforted that the person she shared her secret with at least remembered there was a secret to share.

By the time Sunday came, Olivia was on her last nerve and his pin worked it further.

I'm just wrapping up, will be there in 20/25.

Olivia sat down on the couch.
Twenty, twenty-five minutes?
She had been watching the show. His segment had ended at least ten minutes ago.
It's a whole process
, she reminded herself.
He takes forever to get anywhere.
As much as she tried to reassure herself, she couldn't shake the feeling that he was lying. Maybe it had been pretaped. It had to be on a little bit of a delay, right? Which would leave him more than forty minutes. Her mind raced to theories of where he could be.
Maybe there's someone else. That clothing designer, Edie, was on the show too. She's so
Pretty. Maybe he's sleeping with her.
She seemed to remember Page Six saying that before she had even met him. Maybe he did this all the time. Maybe she was one of many.

Oh, Olivia, what are you doing?
She changed her shirt for the fourth time. She stood at her closet, hating the small, cluttered space. Clothes hung half on hangers, others fell down over the mess of shoes at the bottom so you could hardly see anything.

“Argh.” She threw a hanger down in disgust. “Why is it such a mess? Why can't I see anything?”

As she bent to pick up a few shirts, she thought through the absurdity of wanting exclusivity with a married man.
That would be classic. Hey, married man, do you want to be exclusive with me? I mean aside from your wife?

She shook her head. Everything had turned terrible. Even if Landon wasn't seeing someone else, the simple fact that she was questioning whether or not he was pointed to a problem. The fact that her mind instantly went to how many lies he could tell when she heard the phrase “be there in twenty minutes” was a problem. That wasn't the person she wanted to be and those weren't the thoughts she wanted to have. Unfortunately, it was consuming her mind. She was around so many secrets, keeping so many secrets, she couldn't fathom everyone not having as many. Twenty minutes later, expecting him to walk in, she heard the buzzing of a pin instead of a door buzzer.

Babe, got caught up here. Can we meet at Brinmore instead?

“Ugh!” she yelled again, to no one.

Another twenty minutes later she sat in the Brinmore restaurant waiting, feeling tired and annoyed that he wasn't already in the seat across from her, reassuring her that everything would be okay.

“Hey, Marco. Sorry.” She felt like a burden for tying up a table for so long without ordering anything. Even Jo's empathetic smile seemed to be waning.

“No problem. Can I get you something while you wait?”

“Sure. Ummm . . . a coffee would be great.” She stammered, “And . . . umm . . . the boss should be here any minute, so one for him would be great too.”

“Big-time!” Marco said happily, and disappeared.

She looked down at her BlackBerry, considering writing Landon a pin, and then heard his voice. She smiled at the familiar tone but looked up to see him walking in with another couple.

“Olivia!” He walked toward the table with the people, who were dressed as if they had just come from Sunday Mass. “These are my good friends Nora and Alex from Atlanta! We haven't seen each other in years and we bumped into each other right in the lobby. Is that a small world or what?”

“The smallest!” Olivia said, trying to sound enthusiastic and standing to shake their hands. She wished she had worn something more businesslike than her gray V-neck T-shirt.

“Nora, Alex, this is Olivia Greenley, my finance director. She works for me. She's one of the best fundraisers in the business.”

Olivia smiled, then looked down at her bag, wishing it, like her shirt, would have given even the slightest appearance of having business use. She kicked it slyly under her seat and tried to chime in gleefully as Landon explained the great trajectory of the campaign.

While he talked, she looked at Landon, wistfully remembering when they first met. She had been so proud to be in public with him then. She had been thrilled to be seen as his confidante in front of other people. She distinctly remembered seeing people staring, clamoring to get a moment with him and the total elation she felt at being the person by his side. So much of his persona that she loved had slipped away. Now she longed to be alone with him, to be sitting here or in her apartment, or anyplace where they could have that intimacy they used to have.
The one he got lost in.

“Oh, Olivia, you had to have seen their faces!” The governor slapped his knee loudly, bringing her back to the conversation. She wondered if he knew she was completely zoned out.

“I can just imagine!” she said without hesitation and without a clue of what they were talking about. “I can just imagine” was one of those great phrases that covered you no matter what the story was.

“I mean Aubrey and I . . . anyone who knows my wife . . . well, you know Aubrey.” The words in between “my wife” and “Aubrey” seemed fewer than those between “Olivia” and “works for me.”

Then it got worse. Landon started pulling out pictures of his kids from his wallet. Her stomach churned.
It's literally making me sick. Not it. Him. Me. This situation. I can't believe I'm doing this to kids.

When the four of them got up to leave forty minutes later, Olivia's cheeks hurt from her forced smile. She wished she had just stayed in the office to work. The minute the governor's friends walked around the corner and out the front door of the hotel, Landon leaned in toward her. “Sakes alive, baby, you look gorgeous.” He looked her up and down. “I thought they'd never leave us alone.”