The First Affair: A Novel - Softcover

McLaughlin, Emma

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451643438 ISBN 13: 9781451643435

Publisher: Atria Books, 2014

Synopsis

The #1 New York Times bestselling authors of The Nanny Diaries return with “a convincing portrait of a damaged young woman whose head is turned by the attentions of a dashing and powerful political figure....An utterly absorbing page-turner” (Booklist).

I was twenty-two years old only three weeks out of college.
I thought my whole life was beginning...then he kissed me.

Jamie McAlister has resigned herself to the fact that in this job market, her painfully expensive degree might only get her a position at Starbucks, when she suddenly lands a prestigious internship at the White House. Although she doesn’t hit it off with the other interns—who come from so much money that ten weeks without a paycheck doesn’t faze them—she is eager to work hard and make the best of the opportunity while it lasts.

An unexpected encounter late one evening with the charismatic President Gregory Rutland seems like just a fleeting flirtation, but when he orchestrates clandestine meetings and late-night phone calls, their relationship quickly escalates. Jamie knows what she is doing is wrong: he’s married, he has kids, he’s the President. Yet each time she tries to extricate herself, Greg pulls her back in.

With the conflicted desires of the most powerful man in the world driving her to her breaking point, Jamie can’t help but divulge intimate details to those closest to her. But she must have confided in the wrong person, because she soon finds herself, and everyone she cares about, facing calculated public destruction at the hands of Greg’s political enemies, and—perhaps no matter how much he cares about her—at the hands of Greg himself.

About this title

About the Author:

Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus are the New York Times bestselling authors of The Nanny Diaries, Citizen Girl, Nanny Returns, and the young adult novels, The Real Real and Over You. They are the cofounders of TheFinishedThought.com, a book coaching firm, and work together in New York City. For more information visit EmmaAndNicola.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

First Affair Chapter One

June 11

When I arrived at the White House the President was our shared responsibility, beyond also being the adjective attached to everything in the building. The Rutland administration. The Rutland agenda. The Rutland luncheon. He was the word in every fifth sentence, a ubiquitous stamped signature, a photograph over the royal-blue carpet on the way to the staff entrance. Under normal circumstances he would never even have known my name, but I unwittingly entered the White House at a time when we collectively sidestepped normal as a nation.

As a Vassar poli-sci major, my ambition had been for a job in urban development—before my scope rapidly widened to include anything without a name tag. My wealthier classmates had staved off the demoralizing hunt with grad school applications, but my debt already verged on not-get-out-of-bed paralyzing, so I applied for summer internships, the longest of long shots being for the White House. As much as I couldn’t afford it, I prayed the unsalaried credential might be the key line item to differentiate my résumé. I’d heard that was especially true at Starbucks.

I’ll never know for certain, but I assume it was the recommendation from Lena’s mom, Gail, a major political fundraiser, that tipped the scales. Whatever it was, one day I was resigned to moving home and picking up shifts at Chili’s, and the next I was sprung via Amtrak from Poughkeepsie to the West Wing.

I was assigned to the Department of Scheduling and Advance. Our mandate—which became my word of the day: my mandate, his mandate, their mandate—was to ensure that the President, the First Lady, and the traveling circus that is the press corps all got where they were supposed to go, be it New Delhi or Foggy Bottom.

The day this story starts, really starts, began with an absolutely insane marathon-length meeting. I’d been there only three weeks and was still getting used to the formalities; that morning the paid employees got to sit in cushy ergonomic swivel chairs around the conference table, while the junior staffers camped on the hard folding chairs behind them. And then there was us, the interns, standing pressed against the wall, with our practiced look of aggressive gratitude. I was wearing the black pumps I’d gotten at DSW that I thought epitomized the job, but of course were knockoffs of knockoffs and could only have been comfortable if I’d had Barbie feet. We’d been standing for maybe two hours by this point and I decided to surreptitiously slip a foot out and rest it on the floor.

To my right, Perfect Brooke sighed in slicing disapproval. If the interns had broken into a dance routine, Perfect Brooke would have led it. It would be the most boring dance routine you’ve ever sat through, but the show would be a hit anyway because that’s how Brooke’s life worked.

I’d naively thought this was going to be like the first days of college, where you form a ragtag clique with some kids on your dorm floor and go to the cafeteria together. Not that you’d hit it off with everyone, but usually there’d be at least one keeper and eventually you’d build a posse. After growing up just outside Chicago, being in a city like D.C. felt energizingly familiar, but my casual suggestions to Yelp a cool bar were met with suspicion. There was this slim hope hovering in the air that someone might be offered a permanent position at the end of the ten weeks, and my fellow interns were ready to club each other with their binders to get one. (It was basically a dowdily dressed version of the Hunger Games.) So, from what I could tell, the other interns went back to their Airbnb sublets, rubbed themselves with the Financial Times, and listened to NPR until they climaxed.

Leaving me to subsist on a constant stream of texts from my college friends, who’d scattered to take refuge in their C and D plans, while I spent way too much time in my own head. Hence, as the meeting entered its third hour, I was focused on my feet, on a potential job I was waiting to hear about, on Perfect Brooke’s derision—oh, and that I needed to pee. Badly.

Just to remind you, Congress was digging in against passing the President’s budget because they were still pissy about losing the election four years earlier. So America had been operating for months on a “continuing resolution,” not dissimilar, I thought, to the credit card making it possible for me to be there. It was set to expire in two days if his demands for social service funding weren’t met, which would effectively bring the government to a screeching halt.

A President and First Lady’s schedules are need-a-new-definition-for-it tight on a normal day, so the prospect of being up to a week behind had thrown us all into a wrestling match with the space-time continuum. “What are we telling the Prime Minister?” one of the staffers, whose name I could never remember, asked insistently as he squinted at the dry-erase board. It was a heated land grab for every minute—and it had come down to a standoff over Uruguay.

“What are we telling the Prime Minister?” the department head, Margaret, repeated blankly, a marker hanging limply at her side, the aroma of which was making all of us ever so slightly high.

“Yes,” the staffer repeated. “Am I removing POTUS from the teachers’ union on June twenty-second so they can meet?”

“The teachers’ union luncheon,” another staffer growled, tugging at his loosened tie, “is attended by four hundred members. Citizens of the United States. Registered voters. It cannot be moved for bullshit face time with Uruguay. Stop asking, Gerry.”

I reminded myself that Bushy Eyebrows was Gerry.

“Great!” Gerry threw up his arms, flashing dampened Oxford pits to the room. “I’ll just tell the Prime Minister of Uruguay that Chris thinks his country is bullshit.”

“It’s an election year, Gerry,” Margaret, whom I’d come to regard as imperturbable, reminded him with straining calm. But, capitulating, she put out a hand surgeon-style and the staffer closest gave her a fresh napkin to replace the saturated eraser. She wiped out the work of the last hour, eliciting frantic keyboard taps from those who’d yet to finish their transcription and a groan from everyone else. Except me; I was savoring a tiny prickle of pride because I’d brought that napkin. That napkin had no idea when it was stuffed in the metal dispenser at Capitol Bakery that morning that it was destined for greatness. I had grabbed a stack when I abandoned the coffee I was about to treat myself to in favor of two dozen oven-fresh sticky buns, which I ran in to work in hopes of making the day feel a little less cage-matchy—only to find the meeting that had been threatening for days was kicking off. So my buns were congealing into hardened globs in the kitchenette, but my napkins were there—they were helping.

“Okay. Potential government furlough scenario. Starting back at day one.” Really? Surely I couldn’t be the only one who had to chug a liter of water after commuting in the 95-degree heat. There had to be others desperate for a bathroom break.

The D.C. humidity and I were introduced when I stepped off the train with my life folded into two bulging suitcases. It’s what floating in the Dead Sea might feel like—if instead of floating you were trying to walk to the opposite shore. With luggage. It’s not as if Chicago doesn’t have heat waves, but at least there the lake air keeps things moving. In grade school we learned the capital was born on swampland, but hoofing it in your one Ann Taylor Loft suit is something else entirely. I spent a full five minutes a day admiring that the founding folks didn’t just say fuck it. Not that it wasn’t an enormous privilege just to be able to stand against that wall. It was. Huge. It was just hard to keep the wide-eyed expression of appreciation in place when one had to pee oh so badly. Brooke was probably wearing a catheter.

“Don’t you have to pee?” I whispered to Brooke.

She shot me another disapproving look. In retrospect, it would have taken more than a sticky bun to win over Brooke. Maybe if I’d spiked it with something—Xanax? Celexa? What’s the one that makes you a nice person?

I chewed the inside of my mouth and shifted my attention from the web of abdominal pain to the job offer I’d been waiting on from the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, an email that could already have been on the phone I had to leave at my desk. It was possible, as I stood there, that I already possessed an actual job with health insurance and everything. Which meant a place with Lena in L.A. And a paycheck. I was going to kiss that check and make a copy, frame that, and then cash the check and buy myself a proper bottle of wine.

Gail’s pied-à-terre, which I was staying in, with its White House view and uniformed doormen, was full of proper bottles of wine. The kind sommeliers study. I perpetually felt like I was failing it when I sat on its custom carpet and played omgpop or reheated a frozen burrito in its chef-grade oven. Weeks prior, I could have thrown back my shower curtain to find seriously anything—a hook-up, a moonshine contraption, a performance art rehearsal. Now I knew what awaited me—a wall of showerheads I couldn’t figure out and a shelf of Chanel products for the rare occasions when Gail swung through. I should explain that Gail still credits me with saving Lena’s life when Health Services misdiagnosed her appendicitis sophomore year. Lena’s never been entirely sure whether Gail was more thankful that I got her to St. Francis in time or that I took notes for all her classes.

Margaret threw her hands up. “We’re now just repeating options we ruled out an hour ago.” No one denied it. “Okay, lunch break.” I attempted the most dignified version of scrambling over everyone I could muster.

Peeing crossed off, I swung by the kitchen to reheat my goodwill tour. “Pecan bun?” I pimped, and a passing staffer nabbed one. “Thanks,” he said, blowing the heat off as he chewed. I held one out to Brooke, but she looked as if I’d taken it to the bathroom with me.

“Allergic to nuts?” I determinedly offered her the opportunity to soften her rudeness.

“No.” She covered the papers she’d just started to work from as if I might have wanted to filch her tedious assignment over my own tedious assignment.

“Oh my God, I’m so hungry I could eat your brain zombie-style. Seriously, cut your head open with this pen so I can eat it.” A slight brunette appeared, arms full, carrying a massive patent-leather tote she could easily have climbed inside of. She dropped her iPad and binder on Brooke’s desk to grab a bun as I took in her statement bangs, python-print wrap dress, and open-toed wedges. Definitely not one of ours. “It’s just wrong that these things have, like, a stick of butter in them.”

“A stick?” I asked. “No. Maybe half.” She wasn’t much older than us.

“Two halves,” she said as a man in a tight suit approached us and she scooped up her things with her forearms, licking a caramel string off her finger.

“Rachelle.” He literally snapped for her.

“Thank you,” she said to me. “You’re a genius. An evil genius.” I watched her leave, feeling like I’d just missed the last van pulling out for senior week.

Brooke picked up her brown leather bag. “Do you want to come?” she asked with a resignation that implied I was clinging to her ankles.

But maybe this was the moment. Maybe a friendship was about to form. Maybe outside this building Brooke became someone else entirely. “Uh, sure.”

I followed her brisk stride while I fruitlessly checked emails on my phone. I told myself it was okay. It was barely past ten on the West Coast; plenty of day left there to hire me.

I asked Brooke if she knew who Rachelle was here with.

“Some PR group getting footage for the campaign,” she answered as she walked.

“Funny, the thing she said about eating my brain,” I offered.

“I can see why you’d think so.”

Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me . . . “So, where are we going?”

“To buy lunch.”

“I have a peanut butter sandwich in my purse.”

She didn’t respond as we exited into the flattening heat. Everyone had initially assumed from Gail’s address that I was a fellow trust-funder, but the logo on my dad’s polo was definitely not a pony. As I was unable to share a favorite Hampton, memories of trips to Europe, or any opinion on my mother’s personal shopper’s taste, it became rapidly apparent we wouldn’t be exchanging friendship bracelets.

“Gross,” Brooke muttered, pulling her starched blouse away from her chest. I realized she was wearing The Shirt. It had an extra button between the cleavage and collar, designed for D.C. women to achieve neutral modesty on the four-inch drop from uptight to whore. I’d been debating sucking it up and buying one.

Brooke informed me that she had to get cash and, letting go of any hopes of banter, I followed her into the ATM while composing a text to my similarly inaccessible sister asking her advice about the purchase. Erica, whose Titian hair magically stays pin straight while the curl of mine is more reliable than a barometer. Whose nose is the thinner, perkier version. Who’s an inch taller, a size four to my six, and whose pores, even through adolescence, were never visible. She grabbed all the good genes and I got the leftovers. Four years older, Erica lived in Manhattan, where she continued to evade my lifelong attempts at preemptive consultation. Her opinions about my choices after the fact, however, flew like sniper fire. At our grandmother’s suggestion, around fourth grade, I was signed up for an Irish clog-dancing class, which I loved. The pageantry, hair ribbons, and rhythms were a revelation. But I was all of five minutes into rehearsing in our bedroom when Erica decreed that either the clogs went or I did. I gave it my best, slapping my bunny socks on the hardwood, but Saturday’s practice always found me queasily unsure of what I would produce once wearing the actual shoes. Needless to say, I quickly retired and was back to watching Nickelodeon with the sound down.

I imagined her reading my inquiry between stock trades, or whatever it was she actually did as an analyst. I’m certain that my missive was two sentences and three exclamation marks too many, that I reread it twice, and added a “you rock!” before hitting Send.

“Drugstore.” Brooke’s bag hit my arm as she pushed out the door on what was passing for our lunch date. Three weeks earlier, I had not had to trail people.

I texted Lena while I waited. “Nostalgic for shower vomit this morning.”

“Nostalgic for finals—3 term papers in 48 hrs—didn’t know how easy I had it.” She bemoaned the brutal pace of her new position at a wealth management firm in Beverly Hills.

Brooke signaled from the long line that I should go next door to the deli and start on that long line.

“When you get a minute (hahaha),” I typed as I walked, “find out how I can turn the AC down from your mom?”

“That shit is set at freeze. Menopause, bitch.”

“Aw, menopause—we DO have things to look forward to!”

“Don’t believe you,” she responded as I went inside the deli. “Am going to die at this conference table.”

“No word on job yet. Getting worried.”

The phone went quiet and I knew she had to jump.

I glazed over at the TV above the beer fridge—in D.C. even the delis are tuned to CNN. The blandly attrac...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1451643438
• ISBN 13: 9781451643435
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256