American Rhapsody Read Online Free PDF Page B

treat her like a woman he loved. She still kept baby-sitting for Kate. And, to get back at Andy, she slept with Andy’s younger brother, Chris. Andy had said Chris would never like her because he “only liked tall and willowy women.” Chris liked her. She made sure Chris liked her.
    She schemed with Andy to provide excuses to Kate so he could get out of the house to see her. Whenever Kate left the house, Andy told her that David Bliss, shop foreman of the Lewis and Clark theater department, had called to offer him a few hours or a full day’s work. Kate became suspicious of these calls coming exactly when she wasn’t there. Andy was panicked about Kate’s suspicions and came running to see Monica at her apartment. She knew what to do. She went down to the theater department and stole a piece of stationery. She wrote a letter to Andy, offering him work, and forged David Bliss’s signature at the bottom.
    While she was seeing Andy, she was also a teaching assistant in a course called Psychology of Sex. She was the group leader in a “sex lab.” When the others were shy about discussing their intimate lives, she charged boldly ahead, talking honestly about her weight problem and its effect on her sexuality. At the same time, she and a girlfriend paid forty dollars to hear a lecture entitled “How to Find a Mate.”
    The day after she graduated, she accompanied two friends who were going to do a bungee jump. At the last moment, without even giving it a thought, she jumped as well.
    Her father encouraged her to think about a career in the public defender’s office in Portland. Her mother, who knew about her continuing relationship with Andy Bleiler, had a better idea, an idea that would get her out of town, away from Andy.
    Her mother had a friend named Walter Kaye, a friend of Hillary Clinton’s, a big Democratic contributor, whose grandson had been a White House intern. It would, her mother said, only be a six-week summer job, unpaid, and she’d be one of two hundred interns, but it sounded like fun, didn’t it? What a thing to have on a résumé!
    Her mother was already living in Washington, to be near her sister, Monica’s aunt Debra. Monica could move in with her mother at the Watergate and have Bob and Elizabeth Dole for neighbors. Monica told her mother that it
really
did sound like fun. And her mother said she’d call her friend Walter Kaye, who perhaps would call his friend Hillary Clinton.
    .  .  .  
    She made out an application and . . . she was accepted! She would be working at the White House! She spent one final night before she left Portland with Andy Bleiler. She knew she still loved him.
    She had a couple weeks before her job at the White House began, and she and her mother spent it at her aunt Debra’s big, sprawling house in Virginia. Her Aunt Debra also had a small in-town apartment at the Watergate, so Monica was seeing a lot of her. But she couldn’t get Andy out of her mind. She called him and then decided, after only two weeks away from Portland, to fly back to see him on the Fourth of July. He was only able to sneak away from Kate and the baby for a few hours, but they enjoyed the little time they had together.
    On July 10, 1995, in room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building, she was given her White House assignment. She’d deliver sorted mail from the Old Executive Office Building to the West Wing, where the Oval Office was located. The first time she passed the Oval Office’s mahogany door (a Secret Service agent standing guard), her pulse raced. She called Andy and breathlessly told him about what she’d felt as she’d passed the mahogany door.
    The women at the White House, she soon discovered, were in awe of the forty-second president of the United States—not just as the president but as Bill Clinton, the horndog. She knew his reputation with women, but here she heard the