The next morning, Mary-Beth ducked under the front gates and jogged up the driveway to the lake house. It was raining again and her clothes were soaked through. Her sneakers made a squishing sound each time they hit the gravel. But it felt good to be out of breath, to be away from the house and alone with her thoughts. The wet nylon of her running shorts was sticking to the parts of her thighs that she’d long ago decided were too abhorrent for the world to see. As of this trip, those parts were declassified again, and Mary-Beth was enjoying the sensation of wet air on tender pink flesh.
When she got to the top of the driveway, she stopped and stood still in the rain, watching through the window as her husband and his brothers moved around inside. A television was on, set to one of the cable news networks...the soundtrack to their summer.
A light glowed upstairs where Cameron and Lucas were playing video games. Neither Mary-Beth nor her husband had pursued the idea of the boys finding something constructive to do in those weeks, which she regretted now. She felt like she was losing the boys to the force of the Brights. Ever since returning from Spain and going on national television, they had come to fancy themselves as young internet celebrities. They spent most of their time adding content to their multiple social media platforms, which Mary-Beth knew she should police more aggressively, but she didn’t have the will. Most of what they posted was harmless and stupid: videos of the boys arguing about soccer players or trying to teach tricks to the puppy. They had tens of thousands of followers—most seemed to be girls—and Mary-Beth cringed to think about how that was changing them, inflating their egos and warping their understanding of their role in the world. Most disturbing to her was that they never even asked to leave the lake house. They were teenagers with no apparent desire to drive around, or buy booze or talk to live girls. All the things Mary-Beth had feared about raising teenage boys had become the things she most wanted for them now.
Not that the boys were entirely to blame for it. No one seemed to leave the house since the campaign began. For all the Brights’ love of being recognized, sometimes it felt as if they were afraid to leave the compound. Mary-Beth wondered if perhaps the world itself had become something frightening for the family, not because they were too famous, but because there was always the possibility that they weren’t really famous at all. These people weren’t Hollywood starlets or Red Sox players. They weren’t recognizable faces to most Americans. They were just political stars, which made them barely stars at all. And to face that truth—to go out into the world and walk freely, unmolested by the public—might be the most emotionally catastrophic fate they could meet. Their isolation was a kind of self-preservation.
Mary-Beth took her soaked shoes off on the front steps and went inside.
JJ was at the door. “How was your run?” He kissed her wet forehead.
“It was great. I’m going to take a shower. Everything good here?”
“Yeah, huge day so far.” He looked back toward the study where Spencer was talking loudly. “Dad’s already done four interviews about yesterday’s terror attack, and we just got invited to a national security forum in New York for next week.”
“Next week?” Mary-Beth squeezed the rain from her ponytail. “I thought we were leaving next week.”
“Babe, we talked about this. We might need to be a little flexible on timing for the rest of the month.”
She sighed. “Okay, but the boys need some time at home before school starts, so we can’t stay much longer.”
“Of course. Don’t worry about it. I only bring it up because things are really picking up steam today. This campaign actually feels viable now, you know?”
“I guess so.” Mary-Beth shook her head and left JJ in the kitchen.
Upstairs, she peeled her clothes off in the bathroom and stepped into the shower. It was good to see her husband so energized. It was what she’d hoped for from this trip. Usefulness! He’d been suffering without it, and she understood why. Motherhood is, even at its worst moments, the living embodiment of usefulness. It’s the lowest you can expect of someone—to be useful—and yet it’s as essential as oxygen. The only place Mary-Beth felt starved for usefulness happened to be here, in the place where JJ had found it.
As the hot water rained down on her, there was a knock on the door.
“You have clean towels in there?” Patty yelled over the clatter.
“Yes, thank you!”
“Okay, dear.”
Mary-Beth could see from the shower six white towels stacked neatly in a cupboard above the toilet. She had the feeling that Patty knew they were there, that Patty couldn’t resist intruding on her moment of privacy to remind her whose house they were in. Or maybe she was wrong about that and being unfair to her mother-in-law. Maybe it was just a thoughtful gesture from a gracious host. That was the problem with being there: she could never tell if it was she who was losing her mind or them.
Mary-Beth washed her hair and shaved her legs. She lay naked in bed for ten minutes while she checked her email. And then she dressed and wandered downstairs with a ferocious appetite.
The kitchen was buzzing with lunchtime family energy. Cameron and Lucas were filling their plates with sushi rolls from a large take-out platter on the counter. Ian and Spencer were laughing beside them. Farah filmed it all. And everyone else was at the table already eating—everyone but John Senior and Patty.
“Where’s the candidate?” Mary-Beth asked as she helped herself to seaweed salad.
Spencer nodded toward the lake. “He and Mom are outside with a photographer from Redbook. They’re doing a feature on political spouses.”
“She might be on the cover,” Ian added.
Cameron got a seltzer from the fridge and carried it out of the room with his full plate. Lucas took the puppy and followed him. Mary-Beth knew she should tell them to eat in the kitchen, with the rest of the family. Instead, she let them go, and took her own plate to the table and sat down beside Charlie. As she ate tuna rolls, Mary-Beth watched her in-laws through the window. John was holding an umbrella above his wife while a photographer moved around them. With her own camera, Farah watched them all from a greater distance. Everything was soggy.
John looked down at his much shorter wife and kissed her forehead. She put her arm around the sturdy trunk of his body, and they smiled in the way that they’d been practicing for decades, two perfect magazine-spread smiles. They knew just what to do, but it still looked remarkably real to Mary-Beth. If they were acting, they were happy to be acting. It wasn’t the version of love that Mary-Beth aspired to, but it was a version. There are worse ways to be in a marriage, she supposed.
“This will be helpful,” JJ said from across the table. “Putting Mom out there will be good for the campaign.”
“They look good,” Mary-Beth said.
Charlie nodded. “I think they are. They seem fine.”
Philip swirled a cucumber roll in soy sauce around and around on his plate.
Chelsea looked away from the window and back at all of them. “How do you think it works?”
“How does what work?” Philip asked.
“One married person having an affair with another married person... Like, how does it start, I wonder. You can’t just proposition someone, right? You have to somehow know that they’re in the market for it. How do you make that first move?”
No one said anything. Mary-Beth wished she would stop talking, but Chelsea went on. “Like, do you actually tell someone that you’re planning on cheating on your wife, and that’s why you’d like to invite them out for a drink? Because sometimes a drink is just a drink. Is there some kind of code so the other person knows what you’re after?”
For a moment, no one spoke.
“I think you know if it’s you,” JJ said finally.
Mary-Beth looked at her husband. “What does that mean?”
He made a strained throat-clearing sound. “I just think there’s probably a way to say to another married person, ‘I see you.’ I don’t know this, obviously. I’m guessing.” JJ spoke slowly and cautiously. He looked like he wished he’d never set out on this path, but for some unknown reason, he continued. “I think that’s how you send the signal to another person, by making them feel seen. Because that’s what affairs are about, probably. Am I here? Do you see me? Have I disappeared?”
The room was silent. Ian and Spencer, who’d been talking quietly at the counter, were watching now, too. Mary-Beth could feel her face turn red.
JJ went on. “And if the other person says ‘I see you, too,’ well then, you’re defying invisibility together.”
“And that means sex?”
“Maybe. I don’t know, but maybe.”
Chelsea shook her head and went back to her sushi. “Jesus, that bums me out.”
It didn’t offend Mary-Beth to hear her say it. JJ’s argument would have bummed them all out before they were married, before they knew what they knew now. It was impossible for Chelsea to see it all from where she sat. Their lives were something denser, more complicated and less sexy, but immeasurably rich, too.
Charlie stood up first from the table. He went to the sink and started the dishes, granting all of them permission to end the tense moment.
Mary-Beth carried her plate to the sink. JJ followed her and did the same. They stopped together at the counter and looked at each other. JJ was amazing in this way, his ability to stop and look at her. He had somehow always known that this was what Mary-Beth needed. She looked at her husband and smiled. And to her surprise, he reached for her hand and led her out of the kitchen. They walked hand in hand to the door, down the hall and up the stairs. The camera’s lens, probably, followed for as long as they were in sight.
The sound of Mary-Beth’s bare feet on the wood steps was louder than she’d ever heard it before, and she wondered if the rest of the family thought so, too.
Through a closed window at the top of the stairs, Mary-Beth could see John and Patty outside. They were sitting in a small rowboat at the water’s edge, side by side, in a manner that you’d never actually sit if you needed to navigate. High above their heads, a professional umbrella had been set up to block the drizzle and create the illusion of clear skies. Months from now, Mary-Beth thought, no one looking at that photo in a magazine will ever know that it was raining on this day, which made her strangely sad.
JJ led her to the bedroom and locked the door behind them.
Inside, they sat down on the neatly made bed, and he began to take off his wife’s clothes, one article at a time. He looked at her face while he did it. And sometimes he looked at the parts of her body where the clothes had been. He kissed her knee and her shoulder. He bit down gently on her hip bone, which used to be more prominent than it was now, but wasn’t hidden entirely, either.
It was midday and the room was bright. Their children were mere paces away, and his siblings were talking loudly downstairs. These were things that Mary-Beth had to acknowledge as she lay naked across the bedspread her mother-in-law had selected for them, because normally they would deny her the ability to enjoy the moment. But she was enjoying the moment, and she didn’t care about those things today.
JJ saw her. And in seeing her, he was asking to be seen. He was giving her the things he wanted to be given because it was easier to do that than to ask for them. Mary-Beth knew how to bear witness to her husband’s quiet suffering, which had become their shared suffering. Through professional failings and his father’s relentless presence in everything, she could lose the place where his pain ended and hers began. They had become so entangled that it was impossible to know with whom each sadness originated. But when he bit down on her hip bone, hidden below the flesh of her foreign adult body, she knew how to salve them both simply by bearing witness to their shared pain. And they found each other.
Always, they could find each other.