The Awkward Realm of the Personal
The president set a one-day record of tweets—half name-calling members of the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight committees, plus Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and various generals, and the other half bullying “Mad Melania.”
TV panels featuring marriage counselors and divorce lawyers agreed: the third Mrs. Trump was the mother of his fifth child. Very bad parental and presidential form!
I was sitting across from Kirby’s desk during what he liked to call our morning summit. Today’s sport coat was a replica of newsprint, black and white, with blaring headlines that weren’t actual words. The first worry on the agenda was his failure to reach his major White House source. What if she’d been fired?
“Can’t you call her?”
“She calls me from a phone booth. In the old days, I might’ve put a red flag in a flowerpot like Bob Woodward did to signal Deep Throat that he wanted to meet. Did you see the movie? Those two had a view of each other’s terraces. Maybe with binoculars, but that wasn’t shown. I need to find out how far Housekeeper One lives from here.”
I made a half-hearted note: Hskeepr’s address? then asked why he thought the woman might’ve been fired.
“She’s a maid! She probably helped Melania pack.”
I said, “I’m pretty sure that would be an unlawful termination.”
“Who’s she going to sue? Trump? Good luck with that!”
I pointed to his hand-written list and asked, “What else?”
He grinned. “Hold onto your hat . . . I heard back from the optometrist!”
“And . . . ?”
“We’re meeting for a drink, tomorrow at six-thirty . . . Remind me how much I’m supposed to know about her personal life—husband, separated, divorce, Trump?”
How was such a get-together possible? Very reluctantly, I said, “She thinks you guessed about her marital status because she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. You do know Melania bolted, because anyone with a TV knows it. You don’t know that Veronica and Trump are having an affair, or that she’s his optometrist, or that she drove the car that hit me.”
“That’s what I had up here, in my noggin,” he said, with a proud tap-tap to his temple.
I couldn’t say what I was thinking—that he must’ve gotten something wrong, that Veronica couldn’t possibly have agreed to meet him after our disastrous faux appointment. I watered that down to, “Amazing that she’s giving you another chance after throwing us out of the office.”
“No question: that phony patient act got me nowhere. She ignored the flowers and the masterpiece of an apology that went with them. So I called and introduced myself as . . . me. The name Kirby Champion does open doors.”
“Even after posing as a patient?”
“I haven’t told her yet that the guy who came for new frames was me! It was just Kirby Champion, calling out of the blue.”
Out of the blue except that her boyfriend’s wife was in headlines all over the world. “But she’ll know the second she sees you that you were the guy who did all that phony flirting.”
I waited for him to say Yes, true, the flirting was all an act, but instead he said, “I explained that to you, didn’t I? How I don’t have my bearings yet as a single man?”
We were back in the awkward realm of the personal. But he needed a flashing yellow light. I said, “Just in case you’re thinking this is a drink drink, don’t forget that she’s still married to one guy and has her sights set on the president. I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
“She agreed to meet me, didn’t she?”
“You just said it yourself: you’re Kirby Champion! She thinks she’s next in line to be First Lady. Either she’s wondering what dirt you have on her, or how to win you over for future worshipful coverage.”
“As if Trump is going to marry her! Like a guy with two ex-wives, going on three, wants to get hitched again? Trust me, that romance is doomed. Soon enough, probably it’s hit him already, he’s gonna realize he can meet new women, go out on dates. I don’t know why her husband doesn’t tell her she’s living in a fantasy world.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“I certainly am not. Not tomorrow, at least.”
I said, “I admire your confidence. I hope it’s rubbing off on me.”
“You? You’re coming along nicely. You speak truth to power—I’ve noticed that, and I like it.”
I said, “As long as that’s the case, can I say that I think you can do a lot better? There are tons of women out there who aren’t shagging the president of the United States and who’d appreciate a successful professional, who lives in this beautiful townhouse, whose kids are grown”—I pointed to the array of photos behind him—“and . . .” what else to add? “. . . is a sharp dresser.”
“Thank you, Klein. Not every woman I could meet has been close to the president of the United States. Does that sound like pure ambition on my part? Maybe she did file my invitation under ‘I’m meeting Kirby Champion to find out what he has on me,’ but I’m pretty good at making people come around after we get off on the wrong foot.”
I’d already expressed in six different ways that Veronica Hyde-White was a lost cause, journalistically, temperamentally, and romantically, so why should I keep nagging? I said, “Well, more power to you if you can wipe the slate clean and start over as Kirby Champion, author or suitor, after—no offense—the disastrous appointment.”
“You know what I’ll say if she leads with that? I’ll explain that it’s the downside of being famous. I’ll say ‘I needed new frames. My assistant Googled optometrists, found you, saw your five stars on Yelp, and made the appointment. Yes, I use a pseudonym so I don’t have to sign autographs in a waiting room. Or worse, sit next to a woman whose daughter wants to be an investigative reporter and what advice do I have for Samantha or Madison?”
“How will you explain the assistant who tagged along and taped the conversation?”
“That’s no lie. You are my assistant. I should probably tape tomorrow’s get-together so you can see how to reverse a wrong turn with the right dose of apology and flattery.”
“She didn’t strike me as a woman who’d be susceptible to flattery.”
To his credit, he winced before asking, “Do I have your permission to explain something personal? Well, not so much personal; more like cultural.”
“To me, you mean?”
“Yes. I’m always careful, employer to employee.”
I barely nodded, hoping he’d read that as please don’t.
“Okay . . . Very tall women—and the doc must be a six-footer—consciously or unconsciously are drawn to tall men. That might sound conceited, but it’s not. Guys my height get a second look and a second chance that short guys don’t. It’s biological. They want to put their head on a guy’s shoulder when they dance, and they don’t want to walk down the street or down the aisle with a shrimp. Plus, they want the tall gene in their kids’ DNA. Even if their child-bearing days are over, the preference still kicks in. And if it’s not about the genes, it might be—how to put this politely—what’s inside the jeans.”
I’d been bracing for exactly that narrative landing place. But what assistant in the second week of a three-month trial period was going to scold or sue? I forced what I hoped was a congratulatory smile. “And you’re even taller than Donald Trump,” I said.