All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Title from Margaret Atwood. Please send feedback. Songs About The Impossibility Of Singing Violet
She sends him the newspaper five mornings a week, and he reads her along with the words. Yellow highlighters on good days, warm days, and she'll circle a back page item about a crossdresser in a convenience store or a cop car chasing a doughnut truck. Asterisks in the margin like sunbursts, scribbled one-liners. Once or twice, a smiley face.
Monday mornings require an attitude of dread, one he has never had trouble maintaining. The chair in his office creaks when he sits down. A phone is ringing somewhere. It's going to be the kind of day when he'll argue with his assistants, fall half an hour behind his schedule, bend to the weight of the headache he's battled all week. Already he feels like his brain's been replaced with rough concrete. The first thing he reaches for is his coffee cup. He scalds his mouth and reaches for the newspaper next.
Most of the time she uses blue ink, straight streaks of it across important quotes. Red ballpoint arrows bleed through the newsprint and scar the reverse side. She only uses the pink highlighter on bad days. Distracted days. He's gotten tired of looking at the pink. Still, it's harder to get through the Sunday paper in naked black and white. Even though they talk a dozen times a day, even though he always knows where she is and who she's with, her absence drifts around him, a shadow, a colorless cloud.
This is something he thinks he should tell her. Not because she doesn't know, but because she's not sure he does. He doesn't introduce it into conversation. He's a speechwriter, not an orator, and not a poet. He's not sure he's a very good writer. Empty e-mail windows, blank documents, unmarked sheets of paper: these ghosts refuse to be dismissed. He needs to perform an exorcism.
He doesn't have the words.
He doesn't have words for the way she paints her moods over current events. He doesn't even have words for the color of her hair. This, he reasons, is not his fault; the color of her hair keeps changing. He watches her late briefings from his office and it occurs to him that she's a blonde now. And people see her on TV every day, admire her face, make jokes at her expense. She is always out there. It has scared him since Rosslyn, since Haiti, since Qumar. He thinks he has the right to fear for her, but he's never asked her permission.
The day of the Iowa caucus, she said, "I'm the wrong Democrat to talk to about affirmative action." For the rest of that day, he couldn't let it go. He knew that she wouldn't have confessed that opinion to Danny Concannon, to Josh, to Leo. He knew there was something wrong, and he pushed her. It didn't matter whether he changed her mind, whether it was silly that he was trying to convince a woman, a feminist, that the playing field was uneven. He called Ginger for research because he knew it would make her crazy. He's always known what makes her crazy. Now he knows how much it scares her that her parents are getting older, that they are aging, dying, as everyone is aging and dying. He does not have the words to empathize, to let her know how well he understands. He has tried to comfort her, but he sees the lines around her eyes and the pink highlights on the Post.
Somewhere in her head there's always been a nearsighted gawky teenager, taller than the rest of the class, always reluctantly right when called on, practiced at being the peacemaker among her brothers. Somewhere in his head the serious kid who played stickball and went to shul the back way is eternally smitten with her and eternally afraid of her. He's not sure how that's affected the adults they've become.
Since Iowa, she's mostly kept her distance. Ashamed, maybe. Frustrated. Tired of him. He can't blame her. It doesn't always work, what they're doing. Reporters and Republicans have looked at her as if they knew all her secrets, and the secrets are small. She has never failed to turn them away with a smirk and a toss of her hair. He wants her to know that he isn't fooled. He never promised her an easy job, never promised her that she'd always be able to be proud of this, only that she could succeed. She has.
The plight of the world's women is the cross she's taken up, with a murdered reporter as a spear in her side, and she's still got a perfectly calibrated spin for every sentence. He doesn't remind her of her victories. Instead, he writes speeches with rhetoric that sounds nothing like him, nothing like the Governor Bartlet for whom he recruited her. He can't pin down how these years have changed them, like coal beginning to deform under the weight of earth and stone. Most of the time he can't even see it--only here and there. The last time Andi looked at him he felt the pressure, faults forming in his bones.
He isn't sure who they'd be if they had met before Andi. He suspects that there would never have been an Andi. It disturbs him slightly less than the suspicion that there would never have been a Bartlet.
Iowa taught him more about her prejudices and her nightmares. He does not have the words for some of his dreams, for the way gunfire stutters into the buzz of an alarm clock, for the faces he always forgets even though they are etched inside his eyes. He can't talk about it, even when he wakes beside her and she's watching him, or sleeping, even when he wakes with his hand stuck to the top of her thigh. Which hasn't happened much in recent days.
He's never found the right words to describe her orgasms, slow-burn events that build from tremor to temblor, to describe the way her eyelids always flutter open and then closed. He doesn't think he ever will, and he can live with that. He wishes she knew that she's always more beautiful, after. More than beautiful.
She folds exhaustion around her, a blanket through which he can't reach her. He spends the time he isn't spending with her working, hating Doug Wegland, hating Rob Ritchie. He screws up with the President. He drafted his letter of resignation last May. He has revised it since, several times over, but it will never be a final draft. It will never be printed in triplicate, never handled, never seen.
He should tell her about the poems Tabatha Fortis has written. That they are small and precise and precious pieces of the world. She knows only that he thought Tabatha Fortis was brilliant and beautiful. He did; he does, and he was disappointed anyway. Tabatha cared about land mines because of something she saw, not a principle, just personal pain. He could accept that if she hadn't also folded like a cheap metal chair, backed right down from the pulpit. Truth belongs somewhere in art; he knows this and he's no artist. No laureate. So he doesn't try to articulate the ways that Tabatha was wrong. He doesn't think she'd care anyway; she doesn't have energy to waste on worrying about this.
His vocabulary is not adequate for her standing in front of the White House seal, sliced by the horizontal blinds, commanding the room. Her smile that covers everything that she's thinking and nothing at all. The mark her knuckles left on the molding in the hallway. The low dirty sound in her throat when he kisses the back of her left knee. The stumble in her step over cracked pavement. The fact that she hums Led Zeppelin songs in his shower and Tony Bennett songs in his kitchen. The slate-smoke-seawater color of her eyes. The half-empty, half-crushed pack of cigarettes she keeps in her coat pocket. The color of the unrelenting fluorescent light at George Washington Hospital; the feel of her tongue like hot wet velvet; the three millimeters her mouth falls open as she concentrates on C-Span. The seven running arguments they will never resolve. Their mutual terror of her death.
These are crucial, gospel truths that a better man would capture for her. A missive; a mission. He could tell her that he still feels guilty giving her orders, that he stared at her body as she splashed out of her swimming pool. A confession. He could tell her that he's kept the first stockings he ever tore off her impossible legs, that he will never throw them out, never give them back. A contract. Sign it in blood. Nail it to her door like Martin Luther. Expel all the near misses, half-truths, almost-promises. Live by his words. If he could find the words.
She sends him the newspaper five mornings a week, and he pays the most attention to the information he couldn't get from CNN's early news. Since the energy press conference, she's entered a new blue period. His eyes are relieved, studying the phrases she's picked out. He imagines that in a Tom Clancy novel, they would communicate in code this way, letters culled from headlines to pass illicit messages. Cut and paste for coup d'etat.
The intercom squalls and he picks it up for the morning schedule, for his assistants, irritable and desperate for caffeine. He downs some of his own coffee, pulls the newspaper over for a coaster. There's an article about a serial burglar who confessed to fifty crimes when the cops bought him a pepperoni pizza. He pauses, Ginger barking in his ear. The article is hastily written, nothing magical about the language. Just something the local desk dashed off, picked up by the AP for a chuckle.
He rummages in his top drawer and finds an orange highlighter. Haphazard, really; he just strokes it quickly over the headline, the lede, and 'If you buy me a pizza, I'll tell you everything I know.' He uses the inside of one hand as an edge, tears the corner out of the paper, ripping right through the Op-Eds and who gives a damn?
"Okay," he says to Ginger. "Okay! And run this down to C.J. for me, would you?"
"Run what down?"
"The thing I'm gonna hand you when you come in here and get it."
It isn't enough. It isn't good enough. Even though he speaks to her every day, he does not lie to her, and sometimes it's easier to say nothing. He may never master the skill to ease her pain, the power to liberate his ghosts. But this is somewhere between silence and speech. And there is truth in this somewhere, waiting, buried and compressed like coal.