The First Lady

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this note would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt of having a sexual relationship with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aid waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do what would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we didn’t anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him, and it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time. Yet I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she may have been in her underwear, she may just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, I don’t remember, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, an act I have no visual memory for, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two opposite interpretations. That was the last thing I remember clearly from the dream. I think we came out of the bedroom in the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could actually acknowledge it. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. I must have been left in the log cabin alone then, though I have no memory of this.