Red, White, page 28
Alex nearly crashes into Zahra’s back as she skids to a stop in front a door.
He pushes the door open, and the whole room goes silent.
His mother stares at him from the head of the table and says flatly, “Out.”
At first he thinks she’s talking to him, but she cuts her eyes down to the people around the table with her.
“Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now,” she says. “I need to talk to my son.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Sit down,” his mother tells him, and Alex feels dread coil deep in his stomach. He has no clue what to expect—knowing your parent as the person who raised you isn’t the same as being able to guess their moves as a world leader.
He sits, and the silence hovers over them, his mother’s hands folded in a considering pose against her lips. She looks exhausted.
“Are you okay?” she says finally. When he looks up in surprise, there’s no anger in her eyes.
The president stands on the edge of a career-ending scandal, measures her breaths evenly, and waits for her son to answer.
Oh.
It hits him with sudden clarity that he hasn’t at all stopped to consider his own feelings. There simply hasn’t been the time. When he reaches for an emotion to name, he finds he can’t pin one down, and something shudders inside him and shuts down completely.
He doesn’t often wish away his position in life, but in this moment, he does. He wants to be having this conversation in a different life, just his mother sitting across from him at the dinner table, asking him how he feels about his nice, respectable boyfriend, if he’s doing okay with figuring his identity out. Not like this, in a West Wing briefing room, his dirty emails spread out between them on the table.
“I’m . . .” he begins. To his horror, he hears something shake in his voice, which he quickly swallows down. “I don’t know. This isn’t how I wanted to tell people. I thought we’d get a chance to do this right.”
Something softens and resolves in her face, and he suspects he’s answered a question for her beyond the one she asked.
She reaches down and covers one of his hands with her own.
“You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.”
Alex is silent.
But the debates, he thinks. But the general.
Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it.
“So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?”
And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along.
“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”
Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County.
“Then, fuck it.”
THE WASHINGTON POST
As details emerge about Alex Claremont-Diaz’s affair with Prince Henry, White House goes silent
September 27, 2020
“Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess,” First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz writes in one of the many emails to Prince Henry published by the Daily Mail this morning. “And you too.”
It seems the answer to that question may have come sooner than any anticipated with the sudden exposure of the First Son’s romantic relationship with Prince Henry, an arrangement with major repercussions for two of the world’s most powerful nations, less than two months before the United States casts its vote on President Claremont’s second term.
As security experts within the FBI and the Claremont administration scramble to find the sources that provided the British tabloid with evidence of the affair, the usually high-profile First Family has shuttered, with no official statement from the First Son.
“The First Family has always and continues to keep their personal lives separate from the political and diplomatic dealings of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Davis Sutherland said in a brief prepared statement this morning. “They ask for patience and understanding from the American people as they handle this very private matter.”
The Daily Mail’s report this morning revealed that First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has been involved romantically and sexually with Prince Henry since at least February of this year, according to emails and photographs obtained by the paper.
The full email transcripts have been uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker “The Waterloo Letters,” seemingly named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one email composed by Prince Henry. The correspondence continues regularly up to Sunday night and appears to have been lifted from a private email server used by residents of the White House.
“Setting aside the ramifications of what this means for President Claremont’s ability to be impartial on issues of both international relations and homosexuality,” Republican presidential candidate Senator Jeffrey Richards said at a press conference earlier today, “I’m extremely concerned about this private email server. What kind of information was being disseminated on this server?”
Richards added that he believes the American voters have a right to know everything else for which President Claremont’s server may have been used.
Sources close to the Claremont administration insist the private server is similar to the one set up during President George W. Bush’s administration and used only for communication within the White House about day-to-day operations and personal correspondence for the First Family and core White House personnel.
First rounds of examination of “The Waterloo Letters” by experts have yet to reveal any evidence of classified information or otherwise compromising content outside of the nature of the First Son’s relationship with Prince Henry.
For five endless, unbearable hours, Alex is shuffled from room to room in the West Wing, meeting with what seems to be every strategist, press staffer, and crisis manager his mother’s administration has to offer.
The only moment he recalls with any clarity is pulling his mother into an alcove to say, “I told Raf.”
She stares at him. “You told Rafael Luna that you’re bisexual?”
“I told Rafael Luna about Henry,” he says flatly. “Two days ago.”
She doesn’t ask why, just sighs grimly, and they both hover over the implication before she says, “No. No, those pictures were taken before that. It couldn’t have been him.”
He runs through pros and cons lists, models of different outcomes, fucking charts and graphs and more data than he has ever wanted to see about his own relationship and its ramifications on the world around him. This is the damage you cause, Alex, it all seems to say, right there in hard facts and figures. This is who you hurt.
He hates himself, but he doesn’t regret anything, and maybe that makes him a bad person and a worse politician, but he doesn’t regret Henry.
For five endless, unbearable hours, he’s not allowed to even try to contact Henry. The press sec drafts a statement. It looks like any other memo.
For five hours, he doesn’t shower or change his clothes or laugh or smile or cry. It’s eight in the morning when he’s finally released and told to stay in the Residence and standby for further instructions.
He’s handed his phone, at last, but there’s no answer when he calls Henry, and no response when he texts. Nothing at all.
Amy walks him through the colonnade and up the stairs, saying nothing, and when they reach the hallway between the East and West Bedrooms, he sees them.
June, her hair in a haphazard knot on the top of her head and a pink bathrobe, her eyes red-rimmed. His mom, in a sharp, no-nonsense black dress and pointed heels, jaw set. Leo, barefoot in his pajamas. And his dad, a leather duffel still hanging off one shoulder, looking harried and exhausted.
They all turn to look at him, and Alex feels a wave of something so much bigger than himself sweep over him, like when he was a child standing bowlegged in the Gulf of Mexico, riptide sucking at his feet. A sound escapes his throat uninvited, something that he barely even recognizes, and June has him first, then the rest of them, arms and arms and hands and hands, pulling him close and touching his face and moving him until he’s on the floor, the goddamn terrible hideous antique rug that he hates, sitting on the floor and staring at the rug and the threads of the rug and hearing the Gulf rushing in his ears and thinking distantly that he’s having a panic attack, and that’s why he can’t breathe, but he’s just staring at the rug and he’s having a panic attack and knowing why his lungs won’t work doesn’t make them work again.
He’s faintly aware of being shifted into his room, to his bed, which is still covered in the godforsaken fucking magazines, and someone guides him onto it, and he sits down and tries very, very hard to make a list in his head.
One.
One.
One.
* * *
He sleeps in fits and starts, wakes up sweating, wakes up shivering. He dreams in short, fractured scenes that swell and fade erratically. He dreams of himself at war, in a muddy trench, love letter soaking red in his chest pocket. He dreams of a house in Travis County, doors locked, unwilling to let him in again. He dreams of a crown.
He dreams once, briefly, of the lake house, an orange beacon under the moon. He sees himself there, standing in water up to his neck. He sees Henry, sitting naked on the pier. He sees June and Nora, hands clasped together, and Pez on the grass between them, and Bea, digging pink fingertips into the wet soil.
In the trees next to them, he hears the snap, snap, snap of branches.
“Look,” Henry says, pointing up at the stars.
And Alex tries to say, Don’t you hear it? Tries to say, Something’s coming. He opens his mouth: a spill of fireflies, and nothing.
When he opens his eyes, June is sitting up against the pillows next to him, bitten nails pressed against her bottom lip, still in her bathrobe and keeping watch. She reaches down and squeezes his hand. He squeezes back.
Between dreams he catches the sound of muffled voices in the hallway.
“Nothing,” Zahra’s voice is saying. “Not a thing. Nobody is taking our calls.”
“How can they not be taking our calls? I’m the goddamn president.”
“Permission to do a thing, ma’am, slightly outside diplomatic protocol.”
A comment: The First Family Has Been Lying To Us, The American People!!1 WHAT ELSE Are They Lying About??!?!
A tweet: I KNEW IT I KNEW ALEX WAS GAY I TOLD YOU BITCHES
A comment: My 12 y/o daughter has been crying all day. She’s dreamt of marrying Prince Henry since she was a little girl. She is heartbroken.
A comment: Are we really supposed to believe that no federal funds were used to cover this up?
A tweet: lmaoooo wait look at page 22 of the emails alex is such a hoe
A tweet: OMFG DID YOU SEE somebody who went to uni with Henry posted some photos of him at a party and he is just like Profoundly Gay in them i’m screaming
A tweet: READ—My column with @WSJ on what the #WaterlooLetters say about the inner workings of the Claremont White House.
More comments. Slurs. Lies.
June takes his phone away and shoves it under a couch cushion. He doesn’t bother protesting. Henry’s not going to call.
At one in the afternoon, for the second time in twenty-four hours, Zahra bursts through his bedroom door.
“Pack a bag,” she says. “We’re going to London.”
June helps him stuff a backpack with jeans and a pair of shoes and a broken-in copy of Prisoner of Azkaban, and he stumbles into a clean shirt and out of his room. Zahra is waiting in the hall with her own bag and a freshly pressed suit of Alex’s, a sensible navy one that she has apparently decided is appropriate for meeting the queen.
She’s told him very little, except that Buckingham Palace has shut down communication channels in and out, and they’re just going to show up and demand a meeting. She seems confident Shaan will agree to it and willing to physically overpower him if not.
The feeling rolling around in his gut is bizarre. His mom has signed off on them going public with the truth, which is incredible, but there’s no reason to expect that from the crown. He could get marching orders to deny everything. He thinks he might grab Henry and run if it comes down to that.
He’s almost completely sure Henry wouldn’t go along with pretending it was all fake. He trusts Henry, and he believes in him.
But they were also supposed to have more time.
There’s a secluded side entrance of the Residence that Alex can sneak out of without being seen, and June and his parents meet him there.
“I know this is scary,” his mom says, “but you can handle it.”
“Give ’em hell,” his dad adds.
June hugs him, and he shoves on his sunglasses and a hat and jogs out the door and toward whatever way this is all going to end.
Cash and Amy are waiting on the plane. Alex wonders briefly if they volunteered for the assignment, but he’s trying to get his emotions back under control, and that’s not going to help. He bumps his fist against Cash’s as he passes, and Amy nods up from the denim jacket she’s needling yellow flowers into.
It’s all happened so quickly that now, knees curled up to his chin as they leave the ground, is the first time Alex is able to actually think about everything.
He’s not, he thinks, upset people know. He’s always been pretty unapologetic when it came to things like who he dates and what he’s into, although those were never anything like this. Still, the cocky shithead part of him is slightly pleased to finally have a claim on Henry. Yep, the prince? Most eligible bachelor in the world? British accent, face like a Greek god, legs for days? Mine.
But that’s only a tiny, tiny fraction of it. The rest is a knot of fear, anger, violation, humiliation, uncertainty, panic. There are the flaws everyone’s allowed to see—his big mouth, his mercurial temper, his searing impulses—and then there’s this. It’s like how he only wears his glasses when nobody’s around: Nobody’s supposed to see how much he needs.
He doesn’t care that people think about his body and write about his sex life, real or imagined. He cares that they know, in his own private words, what’s pumping out of his heart.
And Henry. God, Henry. Those emails—those letters—were the one place Henry could say what he was really thinking. There’s nothing that wasn’t laid out in there: Henry being gay, Bea going to rehab, the queen tacitly keeping Henry in the closet. Alex hasn’t been a good Catholic in a long time, but he knows confession is a sacrament. They were supposed to stay safe.
Fuck.
He can’t sit still. He tosses Prisoner of Azkaban aside after four pages. He encounters a think piece on his own relationship on Twitter and has to shut down the whole app. He paces up and down the aisle of the jet, kicking at the bottoms of the seats.
“Can you please sit down?” Zahra says after twenty minutes of watching him twitch around the cabin. “You’re giving my ulcer an ulcer.”
“Are you sure they’re gonna let us in when we get there?” Alex asks her. “Like, what if they don’t? What if they like, call the Royal Guard on us and have us arrested? Can they do that? Amy could probably fight them. Will she get arrested if she tries to fight them?”
“For fuck’s sake,” Zahra groans, and she pulls out her phone and starts dialing.
“Who are you calling?”
She sighs, holding the phone up to her ear as it rings. “Srivastava.”
“What makes you think he’ll answer?”
“It’s his personal line.”
Alex stares at her. “You have his personal line and you haven’t used it until now?”
“Shaan,” Zahra snaps. “Listen up, you fuck. We are in the air right now. FSOTUS is with me. ETA six hours. You will have a car waiting. We will meet the queen and whoever the fuck else we have to meet to hash this shit out, or so help me God I will personally make your balls into fucking earrings. I will scorched-earth your entire motherfucking life.” She pauses, presumably to listen to him agree because Alex can’t imagine him doing anything else. “Now, put Henry on the phone, and do not try to tell me he’s not there, because I know you haven’t let him out of your sight.”
And she shoves her phone at Alex’s face.
He takes it uncertainly and lifts it to his ear. There’s rustling, a confused noise.
“Hello?”
It’s Henry’s voice, sweet and posh and shaky and confused, and relief knocks the wind out of him.
“Sweetheart.”
He hears Henry’s exhale over the line. “Hi, love. Are you okay?”
He laughs wetly, amazed. “Fuck, are you kidding me? I’m fine, I’m fine, are you okay?”
“I’m . . . managing.”
Alex winces. “How bad is it?”
“Philip broke a vase that belonged to Anne Boleyn, Gran ordered a communications lockdown, and Mum hasn’t spoken to anyone,” Henry tells him. “But, er, other than that. All things considered. It’s, er.”
“I know,” Alex says. “I’ll be there soon.”
There’s another pause, Henry’s breath shaky over the receiver. “I’m not sorry,” he says. “That people know.”
Alex feels his heart climb up into his throat.
“Henry,” he attempts, “I . . .”
“Maybe—”
“I talked to my mom—”
“I know the timing isn’t ideal—”
“Would you—”
“I want—”
“Hang on,” Alex says. “Are we. Um. Are we both asking the same thing?”
