Another Feminist

Author: amerella
Feedback is muchly appreciated.

*

He buys a road map at a diner; America laid out flat, all neatly graphed and shaded. It flies out of the car window on some highway somewhere, and he doesn't really know where he is, but he doesn't go back for it.

*

He was supposed to call her yesterday.

Wyoming is wide and naked. There are a few dead trees and nothing else for miles and miles except for flatness and no shade. Steam rises from the heat-baked road and he can smell tar. The dust makes him cough.

"CNN's saying there's a heatwave rolling in, " Andi says on the phone with the bad connection.

"I can vouch for that," Toby agrees, trapped in the glass phone booth with no air. He was supposed to call her yesterday and he can't remember why he didn't.

"It seems like you're always going to California," she says, after a few moments. Her voice sounds tinny and the sun is boiling red, like looking at Mars.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah. Listen, I was just checking in. I've gotta- "

The line hums.

"I'm not a California girl, Toby," she says then. He isn't sure what she means. He's not sure, but he thinks he probably knows.

"Andi, I'm just going to a conference. To a conference." The window oven hot beneath his palm.

"I can't make you happy," she says and it isn't like her, or maybe it is.

Toby moves his palm to his forehead. "This isn't, this isn't a good time to be that kind of woman," he says, and knows that he shouldn't have. "Look, Andi. Look. You shouldn't say that. It isn't you. I mean, I wouldn't be happy anywhere."

"You're a son of a bitch, Toby."

"Yeah," he agrees, and isn't at all surprised when she hangs up on him. He climbs back into the sweltering car and listens to a radio announcer who sounds like Walter Cronkite talk about extreme fire hazards. Forests are burning down, everywhere. It's a dry season.

*

He's in Big Sur and he doesn't know why. It's been this way ever since Salinas, with its too small motel rooms and its Sunset pigs. He's always somewhere new, and he never knows why. Some aspect of it is about politics, about the Real Thing, capitalised. Or it used to be.

He's always thinking about words because they’re something he invariably understands. He watches the slope of a woman's throat in Salinas and feels the poetry of her. The Real Thing still looks good written on paper. Words, they're everything.

He was in New York when he met Andi, and it was getting old. The snow on the sidewalks was black from car exhaust, the tips of his fingers were numb, and his pen was frozen. She slid up next to him at the bar as he scratched invisible words onto a napkin. She handed him a bic.

"You're a writer," she stated, and at once he was the dark and mysterious one, the one with the beautiful woman and the past. He felt like he was in a movie, except she was too vivid. She was always moving her hands, had her own language, all pale slim fingers and expression.

"I'm a speechwriter," he said, toeing the floor. He'd forgotten what he was writing, which pissed him off, but then she put her hands on her lap and he couldn't see them anymore. He had to see her hands again.

"You're from Washington?" she was asking.

"No," Toby said, "I'm from here, I'm from Brooklyn."

"I mean, you're from Washington?"

And he was, of course he was. Later, she demanded that he give her his number, like she didn't give a damn he was an almost forty year old man who drank too much and smoked too much and yelled too much, and had never won an election in his life. He printed the numbers onto her palm in his small angular scrawl and he'd seen her hands again.

"Is this a six?"

"Yeah." Four mornings later and he was smoking a cigarette in her bed. Her radio alarm blared out Sisters are Doing it for Themselves. She sang in his ear. Can you see - can you see - can you see. There's a woman right next to you.

"Just what the world needs," Toby said dryly, "Another feminist." He wondered at that, and tried not to. Another feminist.

*

He lost her pen in the snow and watched it swallowed into nothingness. Andi laughed.

*

"I'm in Big Sur," he says, instead of hello.

"I'm in Los Angeles," CJ says gamely, "The City of Angels, and everything."

"Well, okay." Toby goes to the conference and thinks about jumping out the window and then he drives too fast all the way to LA. The ocean is stretched out, still and blue.

"People drive like maniacs around here," CJ says, hopping into his car like a teenager. "You were okay getting here?"

"I rose to the occasion," Toby agrees.

"You've got to take me somewhere to eat," she says, kicking her shoes off and putting her feet up on the dash. "Anywhere with air conditioning, I'll be, like, a happy camper or whatever." She wiggles her toes. They go for Greek, and Toby finds himself watching the exposed portion of CJ's throat as she sucks on a black olive.

"So, how's New York, New York?"

"New York's a lot of things," Toby says. "And I hate them all."

"How self-pitying of you," CJ says, stealing another one of his olives. "Anyway, it's nice around Christmas time."

"It isn't Christmas," Toby tells her. "And I'm Jewish."

"All those lights," she continues. "A city of lights."

"That's Las Vegas," Toby says.

CJ kicks him beneath the table. "You're a real son of a bitch there, skippy."

Toby coughs and laughs and says, "Yeah."

CJ swallows an olive. "Self deprecation isn't your thing, Toby."

"It isn't?" He almost smiles, thumbing a bit of tahini dip from the corner of her mouth.

She kicks him again, and he likes it. "No. And you should listen to me, because I'm always right."

"What about when you're wrong?"

"I'm right then too."

"Arrogance isn't your thing, CJ."

"Go to hell," CJ says mildly. He can't stop watching her throat, like Andi's hands.

"I think, I think Andi and I, we're going to get a divorce," Toby says then, and realises that it's true. He fingers his wedding band as CJ presses her shoe up against his and doesn't say anything. And there are a lot of things about LA too, and he hates them all, except for the ocean and except for this. CJ.

"CJ-"

"No, Toby," she's saying. "No."

"CJ-"

"Because I'm always right," she says, and maybe she is. Because Toby thinks that the ocean is the most beautiful thing that he's ever seen, but he thinks that CJ is a close second, and he's never known what to do with that.

*

CJ had cried at the wedding, but she wouldn't admit it. He loved that; he loved her like crazy. She and Andi hugged goodbye like they were sisters. CJ winked at him. "Moral support," she said.

*

He thinks he should buy Andi something, be a good husband. Buy her something as if that can make up for always yelling about free trade and always going to California, for kissing her in the mornings, just because. People do that, kiss each other good-morning.

People buy each other things. She's always wanted an oak table, a family table. The one he wants for her has four chairs and it's too expensive, but he buys it anyway. When he's finished assembling it, Andi presses her perfect hand to her mouth.

"I went to a boutique, can you believe that? A boutique."

He kisses the top of her dandelion head as she stares at the empty chairs.

*

Toby hates smoking Kools, but he's making his way through an entire pack of them, because they were the first ones that he saw on the shelf and because he's decided that he doesn't care about Marlboro Lights or Kools, just about having something to do with his hands. His divorce has been finalised for three days and CJ won't let him smoke inside her house and she won't let him touch her.

"If you're gonna overdose on nicotine, or whatever," she says, poking her head out the screen door, "You should at least be smoking something decent." Toby's beside the pool, becoming a chain smoker. "I'd suggest some sort of thin aromatic French cigarette."

He squints at her, thinking about CJ wearing a red cocktail dress and smoking expensive French cigarettes.

"I have to placate too many egos tomorrow," CJ says, "I, uh, I found some pillowcases, somewhere, and I made up the spare bed. So." Toby waves the Kool at her, and the smoke is wispy against an ink-black sky. "I'm going to bed." She waits. He lights another cigarette.

She's there and then she's gone.

Thirteen years ago in Salinas he had kissed CJ's wrist, where the veins were spiked blue and critical to life. She'd left him with a wrecked bed, and she'd left him wanting to return the favour, and he had. They're always leaving each other, and he doesn't know what he would do, if they weren't. He thinks about it all night.

"I can't get over California," he says to her in the morning, over too strong coffee.

CJ's peeling the skin off of an orange with her teeth, and she stops. "Toby."

"No, I mean, I think that I'm still mostly in love with Andi, but I can't get over California." He takes her hand, squeezes her citrus sticky fingers. "I just, I can't get over it, is all."

CJ goes to work. He kisses her later, pressed up against her on the L- shaped sofa. They're older now and he'd like to say that they're different people, but they're not. He kisses her and she sighs, but she lets him. He leaves the next day.

*

1983. There was a man-boy wearing combat boots and smoking a joint beside the bus station. CJ and Toby stood back to back on a Greyhound, and her hair smelled like pot. Her shoulder blades cut into his back. He turned and so did she, always turning towards the other.

*

It seems like you're always going to California, Andi had said.

"It seems like you're always falling into pools," Toby says, back in LA, and CJ hisses something at him, dripping water all over the floor. "Three years, CJ," he continues, "This place still looks unlived in."

"Yeah, you've caught me. All this time I've been renting, but I really, I live with this guy. This guy called Brian who keeps telling me he's completely and desperately in love with me." She wrings out her hair over the sink with her hands. "Why should I do this?" she asks.

"Well, you've been fired. Which means that you're currently unemployed. Jobless, if you will. Without work."

"Oh, shut up," CJ says, and leans against the counter, shirt sticking to her skin, all ungainly limbs and narrow hips.

"You were fired because, because why?"

"Because I told him that his movie was an-- an abomination, or something. I said something bad about it, a lot of somethings, actually, but let me tell you, Toby, it was all very true." She rearranges her arms, and points at him and she's sexy as hell. He hasn't allowed himself to think about what it will mean, seeing her every day, this woman who breaks something inside of him, whose legs just seem to go on forever.

"We want you for Press Secretary, CJ. We want you to talk. We want you for that."

"You and Leo McGarry. Or--"

"Leo and I. Leo. And I." He draws a hand across his beard.

"There is a guy," CJ says, "Who says he's completely and desperately in love with me. A Brian."

Toby gives her a measuring look that he knows she wouldn't tolerate from anyone else. He hates that this other man, this Brian, can just say things like that, like 'I'm in love with you', so freely.

"You think you want to give that up?" he asks, "I mean, it'll be eating at a steakhouse every other night when you don't even like steak. It'll be living on caffeine and nerves and politics, but it'll be for-"

"When you put it that way, you know-"

"For the Real Thing, CJ," he says, and probably she's never heard him talk about anything like this before.

"Jesus, Toby," she says, leaning back on her elbows. "He's completely and desperately in love with me." And it would be so easy to say it, to just slide it in and see her mouth soften. So am I. Instead, he watches her throat work. "Josiah Bartlet," she says, and tastes the name.

"I think," Toby says, "What I think is, you and I should book a flight to New Hampshire and then we should rent a car." He comes around the kitchen table and leans against the counter beside her and she smells like chlorine and that crazy red bubble bath she's always buying in bulk. He knocks his hip with hers, abruptly certain that he'll be able to work with her, because they're always leaving one another, but they're always coming back, and that's the most that he can say of anyone.

And CJ turns towards him now, and Toby nods.

"We should buy a map and make sure we don't lose it," he says. "And you should come to Nashua with me."

*

Home.