The Book, When He Wrote It
Ellen Millholland
http://bluelikethat.com/radiance/mood.html
[West Wing, G, CJ/Toby]

*


The book, when he wrote it, was not about any of the things she 
expected. It was not a political thriller, wasn't political at all. 
It was not about human suffering, was not about loss, or falling out 
of love. It was not the travelogue he'd always threatened to subject 
her to, some long, painful thing about his spiritual journey in the 
backwaters of Mississippi. 

No, it was none of these things. 

The book, when he wrote it, was about her. 

Of course, it would be difficult for anyone else but her to notice. 
He was a master of subtlety, and he couldn't say, "I love you," 
easily, even after thirty years with interludes of marriage and 
crafting a presidency, he could just say, "Hand me the remote, would 
you?" and rub her feet while they watched old movies. He hadn't 
written the book for her, because he wrote only for himself. But she 
was there, clear as anything. 

The dedication page said only, "Because the shortest distance, 
sometimes, is a circle." 

He had written the pages on her back in her sleep, on her legs with 
the tip of his tongue. He had written about her with the butter on 
his morning toast, with wine spilled on the kitchen table, with muddy 
shoes in the foyer. He had written it for her in the afternoons, when 
she was away working, consulting work and public speaking and 
communications classes at Columbia, in the evenings when she sprawled 
across the couch reading murder mysteries, on the weekends over the 
New York Times and Le Monde, her guilty pleasure, and bacon, his. 

The book, when he wrote it, was called The Circumference of Circles. 

He had written the story of a boy and then a man, from Brooklyn, 
Jewish, and about the boy's grandfather, father, his mother, Miriam. 
She expected to see herself in the book as the pretty young shiksa, 
but no, she wasn't there at all, except for the smell of her perfume 
on page 43 and the shape of her smile on the face of a girl child on 
page 96. Her favorite brand of wine was served at dinner on 160, and 
her first boyfriend got beaten up on 106. The boy in the story fell 
in love, and this was his story for her, because the boy didn't fall 
in love just with a woman but with the sky, and the cars, and the 
Williamsburg Bridge and Borough Park and the Empire State Building. 

She read the book, dry-eyed, and put it on the shelf next to his 
political commentaries and her autobiography, between the Michener 
and the beat up Grisham. She went to his writing desk, took a black 
marker from the drawer, scrawled, "I love you, too," across his 
blotter before flipping the switch and following him to bed. He was 
sleeping, and she kissed the back of his neck and he didn't wake. 

She wrote her own story on his body in this way.