Manny didn’t say anything. He’d known Stephanie Pilgrim long enough to know she didn’t want an answer. Known her back when they were young and dumb and undergraduates. He was a freshman and she was a senior, and she went by Steph, not Madam President, and she liked to torture him in certain inappropriate moments by telling him she wasn’t wearing panties under her skirt. Not that she was particularly promiscuous. Even then she was careful about watching her reputation. She was already planning to be in the spotlight. But they had clicked immediately, and she had not only been attracted to him, she had trusted him. They hadn’t exactly dated, but before Manny met and married Melanie, he and Steph had had a sort of understanding that went beyond their professional working relationship. They’d come to that understanding again since things had imploded with him and Melanie. Well, not imploded. Dissolved was a better word. But finding himself free and uninterested in dating, and with Steph having to be careful about maintaining the illusion that she was in a happy marriage, it had been easy to fall back into their old pattern of occasionally sleeping together. For him, there’d been a bit of guilt. The guilt wasn’t about Steph. They were attracted to each other, reasonably decent in bed, and loved each other, even if they weren’t in love with each other. They respected each other and liked each other and didn’t have any secrets from each other. Neither of them was going to end up hurt. No, Manny felt bad about George. He genuinely liked Steph’s husband. Dr. George Hitchens was a nice guy. He was certainly an asset when it came to electability. Handsome and well-spoken, content to let Steph do her thing in the political arena, content to be a politician’s husband. He was blue blood, old money from Texas, smart enough to go to an Ivy League university and to graduate from medical school without having to pull any strings, or at the very least, without having to pull them hard enough that they unraveled in embarrassing ways. He’d practiced as a dermatologist right up until Steph won the big one. Since they’d gotten to the White House he’d jumped feetfirst into being “the First Hubby,” as the press liked to call him. He could cut a ribbon with the best of them. He was as close to a dream husband as a female politician could have.
That was the problem, though. Stephanie loved George, but only in the way that you love somebody who is decent and good and whom you’ve known for fifteen years. She loved him, but wasn’t in love with him. Never had been. The politician had married him, not the woman. Probably if she’d gone for a different kind of career, done something other than pursue law school as the shortest route to politics and then the presidency, she would have already divorced George. But that wasn’t an option now.
Manny was not a modest man when it came to his talents: he was a straight-out fucking genius in the political sphere. And although Stephanie Pilgrim was a machine—effortlessly attractive and likable, smart and witty, good background, better luck, fierce and determined—even Manny knew there were limits. Nobody had given her a serious chance when she declared, but Manny had hit it out of the park, and here he was the White House chief of staff. If they wanted to stay in power, however, Stephanie was going to have to do what she’d gotten good at, and that was walking the razor’s edge between being female and being president of the United States. The country might have been ready for a woman president, might have been ready for that woman president to be forty-two and the youngest commander in chief ever elected, beating Teddy Roosevelt by a measly four days, might even be ready to reelect that same woman after three solid years of economic growth and peace, but they sure as hell weren’t ready to reelect a woman in the middle of a divorce.
Stephanie rolled her chair back from the table and rubbed her eyes. “You know as well as I do that these things are just a bullshit waste of time. Let the military run their exercises and war games, let them have their simulations, and the next time something happens we’ll do what we always do, which is assess the situation—one that is certain to be different from this imagined clusterfuck with China—and deal with it. The only reason we’re doing this, as far as I can tell, is for the military to figure out if I have the balls to order an attack. So let’s give it to them. Let me just order a nuke. Bomb the whole fucking country. We’ll call it a day and get some real work done. Besides,” she said, “this is scheduled for what, three hours? We end now and we’ll have an extra two hours in the day.”
She didn’t say it, couldn’t say it in the room full of suits and uniformed people, but Manny knew she was hinting that they could take half an hour of that extra time to themselves. He remembered the way it was in college. She was three years older than he was, and he’d still been a virgin when they met. At eighteen, he’d always been more than content to spend an entire afternoon lounging in bed with her. Now, in his early forties, he’d still be content to spend the afternoon lounging in bed with her, but that wasn’t going to happen. The most important commodity the president of the United States had now was time.
“Madam President, if I may.” It was Ben Broussard, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ben was the one man in the room guaranteed to rub Stephanie the wrong way. Manny tried to stop himself from cringing at the sound of Ben’s voice, but it was hard. Things had been going downhill with Ben since the second he was appointed, and sooner or later—sooner was better—Ben was going to find himself neatly retired. “I know it can seem like we are wasting time with these regular exercises, but it’s important to run through plausible situations so that we can react quickly when there is an event that does call for military response.”
Stephanie glanced up at Manny, and he knew she’d already said as much as she was going to say about the matter. It was his time to speak. That was one of the reasons they worked so well together. As much as it was bullshit, they both knew the truth, which was that a woman, even if she was the president of the United States of America, was judged differently. Perception was reality, and she couldn’t be perceived as a complainer. Of course, Manny didn’t have the same worries.
“Come on, Ben,” Manny said. “This simulation does seem a little outdated. Might it not make a little more sense to be running this in response to a mock terrorist attack, or a conflagration in a place that is more of a hot zone? Obviously there have been some serious tensions with China, but we all know we aren’t even close to exchanging shots with them. Not like we are with a country like—”