*~*~*
CJ watches a lot of C-SPAN, and few people find anything wrong with this. In fact, only one person finds anything wrong with it.
She sets a lot of store by this person, but not enough to stop watching C-SPAN, especially considering that he’s the main reason she does it. And he’s a worrier born, anyway, so he finds things wrong with all sorts of things that, in fact, have nothing wrong with them. Like the countryside, and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, and math.
At any rate, she is the press secretary, and all of that, and C-SPAN is important for a press secretary. Have to know what the American government is up to, because sure as hell the American media is going to ask about it. It makes her smile, almost, watching the press corps rush around after little clues of leads, like Encyclopedia Brown hot on the trail of the neighborhood bike thief.
That’s not why she watches so much C-SPAN.
CJ watches a woman with long, dangerous red hair and long, dangerous legs, a woman who can tear a man in half by speaking his name, and who would never consider tearing another woman in half but does so, every day, by being who she is. By being. CJ watches for clues, not so unlike Encyclopedia Brown herself.
“Andi is not, is not a puzzle, CJ!” Toby says, pacing around her office and throwing his hands in the air and looking like a much bigger man than he is trapped in a much smaller space than it is. “She is a United States Congresswoman.”
“She is your ex-wife.” CJ says, tapping her foot on the floor and waiting for the camera to pan around again.
“Are you – how can you be jealous?”
She snorts and picks up a pen, though she’s got nothing to write. “I’m not jealous, Toby. You seem to – it’s not the ‘wife’ part that interests me. It’s the ‘ex.’”
He huffs and rubs his forehead and pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
“Your divorce, my friend, was long and painful and involved a lot of flying crockery, and I for one would like to avoid making the same mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“Whatever mistake it was that whichever one of you made that led tio a long, painful divorce full of flying crockery.”
And she convinces herself that this will help.
If she only stares at enough footage of Andrea Wyatt, only looks enough times at the photo album Toby doesn’t remember he has in the back of his hall closet, that she will be able to unlock this mystery, that just looking at Andi will tell her everything she needs to know about why the marriage collapsed. She will make an equation: Andi did these things, which CJ will call A, B, and C, causing these reactions, which she will call A-prime, B-prime, and C-prime, and that if therefore CJ can avoid doing things A, B, and C, she will avoid provoking reactions A-prime, B-prime, and C-prime, and Toby’s relationship with her will succeed where the one with Andi failed.
Love is just like math.
*
This is the most ridiculous thing she’s ever had to do. That’s saying a lot.
There was, in a briefing, a comment made against Texas. There was return fire from the OEOB, and suddenly it became...it became this thing, this stupid, ludicrous, ridiculous thing they have to spin. Bruno says it’s important that people around the Beltway perceive that they all get along, which is insane, because it’s been four and a half years, when you include the campaign, and they’ve never gotten along, and it’s never mattered before.
This lunch, of course, is Bruno’s idea. Lunch in a highly visible place, and CJ’s mind is busy sticking long pins in the eyes of a little Bruno doll as she stands to greet her lunch companion. “Mr Vice President.”
“CJ.” They shake hands and sit. “I’m sorry about this.”
“So am I,” she says honestly as they sit.
Hoynes looks around this restaurant full of the people Bruno says need to think that the administration is a big, cuddly family. “This should be public enough for Bruno’s tastes.”
She nods and sips her water. “Yes, sir. I just hope they’re all watching this, because I’m not about to do it again.” Realizing what she’s said and to whom she’s said it, CJ blushes. “That is – not that I find spending time with you to be a chore, sir—“
He laughs, waves it off. “CJ, I probably want to be here even less than you do. I’m doing this for the campaign, and I know you are, too. Not that I think it’s going to do the campaign any good, but…anything to avoid having Bruno Giannelli up my ass.”
CJ swallows a mouthful of water too hard, because there was an image she most assuredly didn’t need, but she nods and smiles as best she can, and the lunch proceeds more smoothly than either of them would have predicted.
All the powerful people – and the ones who like to pretend – come to this restaurant. Players and pawns in the game of running the country. Lawyers, federal appointees, interns and aides.
The Vice President and the White House Press Secretary.
A congresswoman and her ex-husband.
Hoynes is cutting his porterhouse and telling some inconsequential story about something that happened when Josh still worked for him. CJ is chasing a small glob of candied almonds around her plate and not particularly listening. This is when she spots them, and stiffens, and then tries to hide it by going into a faked coughing fit that’s meant to serve as an apology for her strange behavior.
But Hoynes is not a stupid man, and he twists in his seat to see. When he turns back, his smile is smug, which she expects, but also genuinely sympathetic and understanding, which she does not. “You didn’t know they were meeting here.”
CJ’s jaw sets. “No, sir. I did not.” She didn’t know they were meeting at all.
There’s a column positioned just so; Toby and Andi won’t see them. But CJ’s view of them is fairly unobstructed, and she adds variables to the equation again. She watches the way Toby leans slightly towards Andi when she speaks and slightly away when he speaks. She watches the way Andi’s fingers never stop moving: tapping the side of her glass with her index finger; polishing the handle of her soup spoon with her thumb, smoothing four perfectly manicured nails (CJ can’t see Andi’s nails from here, but she knows they’re perfectly manicured, because they always are) across the tablecloth.
“It seems like it should be so easy,” Hoynes says quietly, regarding the piece of steak impaled on his fork. “You think the answers should be there, if you stare long enough.” He eats his bite of steak.
CJ blinks at him, her fingers flying to her lips as though she’s said something aloud, given something away. She thinks of Hoynes’s ex-wife, a creature who glittered too brightly to look at. He was her third husband.
“It came to such an ugly end,” she says softly.
Hoynes swallows. “But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t superimpose yourself over her.” He crosses his knife and fork at the top of his plate. “You can’t put a ‘y’ variable in the ‘x’ part of an equation and expect it to work out the same.”
Now CJ does gasp, because it shouldn’t be this easy. It shouldn’t be as implausible, as unexpected, or as clichéd as sitting across a table from John Hoynes and having him explain it to her, using exactly the words she’s sought for nearly a year. She shouldn’t be sharing extended metaphors like this.
Hoynes smiles slightly and raises his glass to her in a silent, challenging salute before downing the rest of his iced tea. CJ picks up her fork, realizes there’s nothing on it, and returns it to her plate.
Over at that other table, Toby’s telling a joke, and Andi’s not laughing. CJ notices that, but she doesn’t add it to her equation. She swears she doesn’t have an equation anymore.
*
Back in her office, Toby is waiting for her, waiting to smirk and revel in her terrible lunch. He will not, she predicts, mention his own. She doesn’t hold it against him.
“How was Hoynes?” he asks, sprawled out on her couch as on a throne, and he surveys her as a king does his domain. She tastes his cynicism more sharply than the raspberry vinaigrette on her salad.
CJ settles in her chair and turns on the television, sound off. She pushes some papers around until she finds the one she needs. “Great.”
“Great?” He scowls. She’s not following the script.
She nods, looking for her good pen. “We talked math.”
Toby frowns. He doesn’t get it, and he’s not meant to. “Math?”
“Did you need something, Toby?” She doesn’t mean to be short-tempered, but she got herself a little bit liberated at lunch today, and she’d appreciate maybe fifteen minutes more to think about that.
He stands and sways uncertainly beside the couch. She knows she’s done something that will leave him adrift for hours. But she also knows he’ll come back before he leaves tonight and ask if she’d like to come with him, rather than assuming she will, like he has for the past three or four months.
Toby passes his hand over his forehead, takes half a step towards the door, and then half a step back towards her. “I guess I’ll just...”
“Okay.” She smiles at him.
He blinks slowly and turns to leave. His gaze catches the TV set, and he turns his head, though not his body, back to her. “No C-SPAN?”
CJ’s equation, with actions A, B, and C, and reactions A-prime, B-prime, and C-prime, was just in her head. She never wrote it down, and now she wishes she had, so she could rip it up, or crumple it up and throw it in her trash can, or burn it.
The set is turned to CNN. CJ shrugs. “Congress hasn’t done anything today that I don’t already know about.”
END