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Two Rooms At The End Of The World
Violet
"I wonder if anyone's died in here," C.J. murmured, and flipped the light on.
Toby creased his forehead. "That's morbid."
"I always think that, when I walk into a place like this." She stepped inside and slung her handbag over the back of a chair. "Whether someone honeymooned here, or passed out here on prom night. Whether someone's died here."
"You could've tried to get the Nancy Spungen room at the Chelsea," he suggested dryly.
"I think I'd be nervous to go in there."
"It's not like there would still be blood on the sheets."
C.J. grimaced. "And I'm the morbid one?"
He studied her quietly. She was wearing something that seemed transparent and was, in fact, almost exactly the color of her skin. It was traced all over with a delicate, irregular design of black thread; it seemed like it could have grown that way. "You're drunk," he said.
"Mm." She tilted her head. "Are you coming in?"
He shuffled forward, letting the door close itself behind him, and loosened his tie. "Tonight was bad."
"It was bloody." C.J. sat down on the corner of the bed and removed her shoes, rubbing her heels gingerly.
"It was a massacre." Toby folded his arms. "We were upstaged by the damn mayor's mistress."
"Well, to be fair, she had on quite a dress."
"If I'd known that was all it took, I'd've been the one up there wearing a burgundy silk handkerchief."
"It wasn't real silk." Her eyebrows arched. "And I'd have paid a thousand bucks a plate to see that."
His face flushed around the cheekbones. He paced across the room to the small desk and scowled down at that morning's Post. "Bottom line, the President is supposed to be the top story and we're buried under a blurry picture of the lady in red."
"All news is local, remember?" C.J. reached for her briefcase and rifled through it. "Even here in New York. The big story's going to be whoever the mayor's schtupping."
"Whomever," he corrected her. "Nice pronunciation of 'schtupping,' though."
She glared over her shoulder at him. "Well, it's sexier than Haiti. It's sexier than the patients' bill. It's almost sexier than the MS was."
"This is the most inept attempt at adultery since Jimmy Swaggart went to the motel with the hooker." Toby whacked the paper with the back of his hand. "Most Boy Scouts could arrange an illicit liaison better than this."
C.J. flopped backwards on the bed. She reached beyond her head and handed him a scrap of paper. "Can you read that? It's illegible."
He paused to take in the impressive span of her arm, took the note and scanned it. "It's my writing. It says 'Maybe Cokie'."
"That says Cokie? Did you write that with your toes?"
"Who else did you think it was?"
"For all I know you were telling me we should have the President sit down with Cher." She turned onto her stomach, placing her chin in her hand. "I don't know, isn't Cokie kind of obvious?"
He glanced up from the box scores in the back of the paper. "It's not like planning a surprise party."
"I mean blatant. 'Here I am, watch my wife cry a single tear, now let's all watch Diagnosis Murder together.' It doesn't seem like that to you?"
"Everybody loves Josiah," he quipped, and sat down on the foot of the bed.
She blinked. "You did not, Toby, you did not just make a current pop culture reference."
"I've never seen it."
"You've been watching sitcoms in your office all this time. I can't believe it. And CBS, no less." C.J. chuckled. "This screws with my entire world view. I mean, I'll never be the same again."
"I've never seen it. I read about it." He turned his head and met her twinkling gaze. "In one of the stupid magazines you have in the rack in your bathroom."
She let this sink in and laughed, deep in her throat. "You're reading back issues of Entertainment Weekly? That's really not much comfort to me."
"It was the only thing within reach," he grumbled.
"So you're only high-minded when you're not in a compromising position." She lowered her head onto her forearms, muffling her laughter. "I'm drunk."
"I know." Toby ran one fingertip along the lace-edged diagonal where her dress swooped below her right shoulder blade. "You should stop drinking."
"Me?" she said incredulously, not looking up. "You're the poster child for 'should stop drinking.'"
"Sure." His fingers flickered over her bare shoulder. He fit his knuckles gently into the shallow ridges of her upper vertebrae.
"So?"
"But I won't." He swept the loose hair away from the back of her neck, reaching to unfasten the clasp of her necklace. "You might."
She turned away abruptly and faced him, catching his right hand in her left. "What makes you think I'm more redeemable than you?"
Toby pulled his hand away and rubbed the back of his head. "That was fast."
"What?"
"How you took that and turned it into a work thing."
C.J. looked puzzled. "I wasn't talking about work."
He sighed. "Yes, you were."
"No, I was trying to be cute and naughty." She gave him a small smile. "Didn't it work?"
"Now that you mention it," he said.
She sat halfway up, he leaned halfway down, and neither of them was particularly comfortable when their mouths met. He caught her lower lip between his teeth and fumbled for the zipper of her dress. He failed, gave up, settled for gathering the skirt around her hips. She moaned softly and lay back, allowing him to bear down on her as she gripped his hand, and rose, and fell.
C.J. said something, her lips still touching his. Toby couldn't make out her words over her breathing and his blood and the slur in her voice. "What?"
"It's no good," she repeated, and shoved him lightly aside so she could climb up from the bed. "You turned it into a work thing."
But he caught the glitter of her eyes as she stood. He went after her, and his hands beat hers to the tiny hook that held her zipper closed. The dress fell into a puddle around her feet; she stepped out of it as slowly as quicksand. Toby took a second to appreciate the luminous stretch of her legs. Then he found himself rushing her, tossing his tie in somewhat the same direction as her gown, pressing her back into the wall.
He kissed her and then covered her mouth with his hand. It was partly to stifle her sounds, as he half-remembered that Josh was in the neighboring room. It was partly to hold her steady. It was mostly so that he could feel instead of hear her, ragged gasps and slick tongue scalding his palm.
He had almost lifted her off her feet, was sliding a hand inside her panties when C.J. clenched her teeth warningly around the base of his other thumb. He pulled back instinctively, too fast, and she slid to the carpet in a giggling heap. After a moment, she pulled herself up. Her whole body was blushing and trembling, but she shook her head at his puzzled expression.
"It's no good," she said breathlessly.
Toby groaned involuntarily. "You're not--
"Oh, I am." She hugged herself. "But you're not."
"I hate you," he said fervently.
C.J. smirked and looked him over. "Don't worry, Toby, you can't actually die from that. It's just uncomfortable."
"So you say."
"You're also wearing altogether too many clothes."
He realized he was still wearing his jacket and his shoes, and looked more self-conscious than she did practically naked. He shrugged. "I could remedy that."
"No, I'm going to remedy this." She knelt and rummaged in her suitcase until she found a battered aqua sweatshirt with the word 'thirtysomething' printed in pink across the front.
Toby watched her pull it on with a mixture of irritation and amusement. "Where the hell did that thing come from?"
"Los Angeles. 1991. A gift from Edward Zwick to my boss, who hated it." Her head emerged through the collar. "I'm a pack rat."
He put his hands in his pockets. "And why'd you bring it here?"
"I thought my fairy godmother might turn it into a ball gown." She rolled her eyes. "I brought it in case it was cold at night."
"It's hideous."
"Yes." She smoothed the oversized shirt across her thighs. "And very comfortable."
"You're not thirty-something."
"I used to be." C.J. brushed past him deliberately and walked to the mini-bar. She looked inside and picked out a miniature bottle of Seagram's gin. "This is going to cost me like a week's salary, huh?"
"You're underestimating. And I should point out that you don't need to drink that."
"Don't I?" She took the bottle into the bathroom, poured its contents into a glass and cut it with water from the tap. "It's always about work, you know."
"Drinking?"
"Drinking, fucking, everything." She stepped back into the room. "I defy you to come up with something we've done in the last three years that wasn't about work one way or the other."
He shifted his weight. "I think I watched a baseball game at some point in April of '99."
"Sometimes I think it's sad that this is all we do." She swirled her drink and sipped it. "This is probably going to make me sick. I don't have the stomach I used to."
"Neither do I," he said, with a tiny, rueful smile.
She snorted and crossed to the sliding glass door, pulling the curtain aside to look across rooftops. "The last time I was in New York for longer than a day or two was during the campaign. Isn't that funny?"
"Not really. You knew then we'd be back in four years."
"Did I?" she replied, watching the rain falling outside. "So we're campaigning again."
"Yes."
"Except we're not, are we? We're not doing what we were doing four years ago, anyway. If I met myself four years ago I wouldn't even shake my hand."
"I'm going to take that drink from you in five minutes," he declared, taking a step toward her.
"We have these jobs now that get inside everything." She rotated her glass in her hand, and he noticed the shadows under her eyes for the first time that night. "We're running the country now. We can't fool around. We can't go out there and say, 'we're right and this is wrong.' We're not renegades, we're not cowboys; we're the man."
"There are benefits to being an incumbent," he began.
C.J. sighed. "Oh, don't act like you know that. You've never been in this position before and neither have I. We're like the old bull elephant in the documentaries on the Discovery channel. And I don't know if we're going to make it." She turned and yanked the door open, stepping onto the small concrete balcony and letting the rain hit her.
"C.J.?" Toby hesitated and then walked over to the opening. "So you don't know. Neither do I, neither does your psychic. A couple of months ago, you would have said we were already done."
She tilted her head back. "Yes."
"A couple of months ago, you would have said that the bell had tolled for this administration. You would have said we were fighting to recover enough face on the Hill and in the media, to salvage some portion of the agenda we hadn't been doing that well with in the first place."
"That was before."
He leaned against the wall. "And now?"
"I don't know if we're going to win this," she said carefully.
"Neither do I," he said. "I know you're about to go ass-over-teakettle on that railing, though."
She looked at the drop behind her and caught her breath. "Well, thank you, Madame Blavatsky."
He edged toward her, wincing slightly at the cold water falling on his bare head. "You know what most people do when it rains?"
"It's out of our hands now," she mused, moving a few inches away from the edge of the balcony. "That's the difference. Tonight went badly, but it wasn't really our show. It was Bruno Gianelli's. As much as we help and we try and we guide, we're not campaign staff anymore."
"We're campaigning by running the country." He held out a hand. "Give it to me."
Resigned, she handed him her half-finished, watery cocktail and turned her back to watch the view. "You know what else about Nancy Spungen?"
Toby looked at her oddly as he set the glass on the ledge. "No. No, I don't."
"Nobody liked her. Nobody ever loved her except Sid Vicious, and he killed her."
Her voice was brittle and unfamiliar. He bit back the automatic sarcasm. "Once in LA, I stayed in the bungalow where John Belushi died."
C.J. ran her hands over the railing. "Wasn't someone famous supposed to have been there?"
"I heard Robin Williams; I heard Linda Rondstadt." He took another step forward.
She nodded. "Whoever was with him, he died alone."
"Profound."
"Shut up. It's like being invisible, isn't it?"
"Being alone or being here?"
"New York." C.J. straightened her back and opened her arms to the night. "There are so many people you can't just look at one of them, or two of them, so no one looks at anyone. You can get away with anything here. You know, we could have sex right here and no one would be any wiser."
"Especially not us," he muttered.
She spun around, and it occurred to him that there might be more than rain shining on her face. "Toby, sometimes you have absolutely no imagination."
"Sometimes you have absolutely no sense," he retorted, but she had stopped listening, and she reached for him.
C.J. didn't think about how old she was, or the puddle that splashed her as she dropped to her knees. Her hands fluttered as she unbuttoned his pants, and then her mouth was on him. Toby found himself leaning back against the fire ladder, lightly grasping a rung with one hand while he tangled the other in her damp hair.
Her name was two simple syllables, but in the moment, even that was beyond his powers of speech. The initials were reduced to a sibilance, a hiss between his locked teeth. The rain pattered loudly around them, swallowing the sound, and yet she knew that he was calling her. He didn't look at her turquoise-covered shoulders, the tiny scattered squares of city light, the heavy clouds overhead. His eyes were closed, his grip tightened, and though there was no lightning, it flashed through him.
Afterwards, she looked up at him, which was unusual enough since she was usually at the higher eye-level. When she stood, her calves were muddy, and her eyes were hollow. He expected her to say something funny, or something that was supposed to be funny but was actually cruel. Instead, she bit her lip and reclaimed her drink. She downed the mix in one gulp, wrinkled her nose at the taste, and went back to watching the skyline.
Toby waited for a few minutes, but she continued to ignore him. He made significant motions in the direction of the door, and finally ran his hands over his face and went back inside. He turned the TV on, pulled up a wooden chair from the desk, and watched sports highlights without absorbing them. The door was still open, but C.J. didn't look at him. After a while, he made himself stop glancing toward her, and it was like being invisible.
The anchors traded witticisms and signed off. Toby was suddenly, acutely aware of how late it was, how long it had been since he'd slept. He trudged out of the room, across the corridor and spent a few minutes digging in all his pockets until he found his key card and got into his own room. He shed his suit and settled on the bed, half-heartedly editing a draft Sam had handed him before dinner. He didn't sleep, exactly, but he was jarred into alertness when the knock on the door came.
C.J.'s hair was wet, but it was combed smooth so he knew she'd come in and taken a shower. She had the bright sweatshirt on, and a towel tied around her waist to cover what the shirt didn't. "I brought your tie back," she said, and held it out to him.
Toby took it. "Thanks."
"I bet I looked really stupid," she said, indicating her makeshift clothes. "Darting across the hall like this, looking around like I was running drugs or something."
He dropped the necktie on top of his open suitcase. "Did you lock yourself out?"
She displayed her key card as the door closed behind her. "I sometimes manage to be less than a complete idiot."
"Sometimes," he said under his breath.
"My room is bigger than yours, but the paintings are uglier," she said, looking around and then straight into his eyes. "I'm not drunk anymore."
He could tell it was true from her voice. "You don't look stupid," he replied.
She looked at him quizzically for a long moment and then burst out laughing. "I'm sorry," she burbled. "I know you're trying to be nice, and I really don't want to step on that, but Toby. I'm forty feet tall and six years old -- and shut up!"
His eyes crinkled. "I didn't say anything."
"You know what I meant." She covered her face with her hands. "It's the middle of the night, my hair's wet, and I'm sneaking around in a towel. Of course I look stupid."
"Fine. You're not stupid," he corrected himself.
"Why is it we never both think that at the same time?" she wondered, leaning back against the door.
"Because you're..." Toby trailed off and gestured at her.
"Frustrating?" C.J. supplied playfully.
"Hmm. How much do you love this job?"
She furrowed her brow. "Sometimes I love it."
"Sometimes?" He turned and walked over to the bed. "How much?"
"It's not something you measure, you know. It's not like I can pour it into a glass and mark it off. It changes, and it depends on my mood and the weather and the issues at hand--"
"How much?" he interrupted, irritated.
"Oh, Christ," she sighed. "So this is why Sam hates you."
"Sam doesn't--"
"No, no, Sam doesn't hate you. But you make him crazy, and believe me, I feel his pain." She ran her fingers through her damp hair and looked at him steadily. "I love it a lot, Toby. And nights like this, where things don't go right, it makes me crazy. That's why--"
"Yeah." he frowned deeply. "Okay."
"I hate not knowing things."
"I've noticed." He turned the bedcovers down. "Here's the thing. During the campaign, the first campaign, we trained ourselves to swing for the fences. Now we wait for each problem to come along, and we solve them to the best of our abilities, with as much integrity as we can muster. And it's just singles, to continue with the weak baseball metaphor, we keep hitting singles. You can't have grand slams every time. You just keep going."
C.J. considered this in silence for a long time. Then she yawned. "Cokie might not be too bad. If we steer it to Social Security."
"It's really too late to talk about this," he said, glancing at the digital clock.
"We're always talking about this," she pointed out, with a trace of sadness.
Toby sat back against his pillows. "Turn off the lights, would you?"
It was too late to talk, and she had her key, and he thought she might go. Or she might keep them both awake, telling convoluted jokes with long-lost punchlines until the sun came up and another night had passed without rest or much logic. He pulled the sheets up, not realizing his eyes were shut until she slipped in beside him, and they opened.
"The thing about that sweatshirt," she said drowsily into his shoulder, "is that it's remarkably easy to remove."
He drew her closer, expecting very little. But she seemed to open under the subtle movements of his fingers, and soon her skin was against his, and she was floating somewhere above him. He put his hands on her waist to keep her from flying away and entered her smoothly, without worry, without closing his eyes. He hadn't realized how much he wanted to watch her.
They rolled against each other gently, not straining, not trying hard, just letting it carry them. She was as exhausted as he was, but she didn't want to sleep yet, didn't want anything except to hold him inside her. Toby touched her knees, her ribs, her breasts, reached a single finger up to her mouth. C.J. nodded, remembering their neighbors, and though it was dark, she was sure he was smiling at her. She came unexpectedly, with a small, delicious cry of surprise. Her body was drawing it out of him, pulling it through him; it was like being younger, it was like dying.
He was asleep even before sliding out of her; she sprawled across him and closed her eyes. It wasn't the most comfortable, but it was sleep, and it was sweet.
Toby wasn't sure whether it was the beginnings of daylight that woke him, or the weight leaving his chest as C.J. squirmed away to climb out of bed. He turned his head to check the clock and was dismayed, but not surprised, to realize they'd slept just over an hour. "It's five-thirty in the morning," he said hoarsely.
"We have staff at six-thirty." She flinched as she stood up. "Ow."
He tried not to seem amused. "Head rush?"
"Hangover," she whimpered, taking a wobbly step away from the bed. "Yes, I know, I brought this on myself. Are you going to put some pants on for this meeting?"
"Probably." Toby squinted. "Are you going to wear that sweatshirt?"
She knelt down to gather it up off the floor. "I have to get across the hall somehow. Watch, Josh'll be wandering around looking for an ice machine."
"It's early. He won't be conscious, even if he's mobile."
"Yeah." She put the sweatshirt on and looked down at herself with a crooked smile. "At least it's not an 'Everybody Loves Raymond' shirt. But the color's making my head hurt."
"We have an hour before Staff," he pointed out
"Yes, but I have to get cleaned up and find Visine and caffeine and a hairbrush. Even Josh isn't that oblivious, and I really don't need Leo and the President looking at me like they're my mother and father."
"Which gets us into all kinds of psychological territory."
"I have to get ready to spin the mayor's mistress," she said firmly. "And Sam will want red ink from you. Anyway, you have to straighten this place up."
"There's housekeeping."
"I always wonder what they think," she said, wrapping her towel around her lower body. "When they walk into a room and someone's clearly had sex, or there's been a fight, or bleeding. What do the maids think?"
"They think they have messes to clean up," he told her, stretching as he got out of bed. "Work to do."
She paused as she grasped the door handle. "Yes."
"I'll see you in an hour," Toby said, letting his eyes meet hers.
"Next time, we should stay at the Chelsea," C.J. told him, and laughed as she walked out the door.
Those were the reasons, and that was New York;
We were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song,
Probably still is, for those of them left...
- Leonard Cohen, "Chelsea Hotel No. 2"
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