fic: a violent yet flammable world
a violent yet flammable world
the west wing. it's not like it's foreign for her, bringing men down to their knees; it's just that it's never supposed to be reciprocated. amy; amy/john hoynes, amy/josh, josh/donna. 2877 words. rated pg-13. spoilers through entire series.
the cure for boredom is curiosity. there is no cure for curiosity.
(dorothy parker)
-
“I’ve got a proposition for you.”
“Pretty big words coming from that mouth of yours.”
She smirks. He doesn’t. He’s still watching that mouth of hers.
“Nothing I haven’t heard before.”
Amy is craving something acidic, unsettling, something that’s going to go down hard like a shot.
But then again, John Hoynes already expected that.
-
The record will never state, Amy Gardner fucked the Bartlet Administration Vice President John Hoynes, not only because profanity and textbooks don’t belong together, but also because neither did they.
So there’s that.
-
She snaps a canapé in her mouth and scrambles for a napkin to spit it back out.
A hand attached to a wrist decorated with cufflinks, JH emblazoned there, offers one, a square of blue cloth.
“Spit,” he says.
She arches an eyebrow and she swallows.
“Mr. Vice President. Sir.”
He tucks his chin and little lines stretch around his eyes, his mouth draws in a parody of a closed-mouth smile.
“And Miss Gardner.” He holds a glass of water, seltzer, something clear with ice that doesn’t smell of anything and he looks so normal, so proper, pin-stripes and shined shoes and carefully parted hair.
“I liked you better before you went all reformed, born-again, what-the-fuck-ever on us.” She quirks her lips to the right and shakes her head briefly. “Look really doesn’t suit you. Sir.”
“I appreciate the honesty,” he says on a nod, but that’s always been the problem with him, hasn’t it?: John Hoynes has the easy ability of crafting lies into truth and even more impossibly, of truth into lies.
She’d ask Helen Baldwin but Amy doesn’t think her own ego could handle it.
She’s probably right.
That’s the problem too.
-
Every love story is the same when you boil it down - boy meets girl or girl meets boy and somewhere along the way hormones inflate to something real like feelings and before you know it sex isn’t enough anymore and you need less tangible things, validation, affirmation of reciprocation, heartfelt yet unenforceable promises. And then boy will disappoint girl or girl will leave boy and one or both parties (if you’re lucky) will pine for the other in absentia and maybe (if you’re lucky, but then again, perhaps not) they’ll come back together again, in the rain, in the street, in front of a crowd, on a wedding day, like () always said - a car crash, but in a far more elegant fashion.
She meets him again, later. Her mouth tastes like cranberries and his like empty tonic water. She will not come to learn this fact at this particular juncture; there are certain things Amy likes to forget and the idea that John Hoynes can remain true to his word in a very syntax-dependent rendering is just one of them.
There will be a chandelier hung from the ceiling and she will stare into its glow instead of at him. He won’t be insulted.
The Bartlet administration stalks behind them, similar to each only as a specter, familiar in it persistent haunting form.
-
It’s like this: She’s sort of become the Pattie Boyd of this goddamned administration - fucking all the right men in the wrong succession.
She’s not even Yoko. She doesn’t even get the credit of breaking this party up.
That’s a good thing, she reminds, not gentle. She’s trying here, right. Trying to remember there are things beyond herself, a city, principles, American democracy, not her sex life. Not Josh, fuck Josh. Not John, she only ever called him Hoynes, private or otherwise and there’s something sick and abstract to be found in that, but she isn’t looking, she isn’t.
She swears it.
-
She slurps an ice cream cone in the lobby of a hotel and Josh watches her like maybe she might just melt away too.
She won’t.
He knows that.
He watches anyway.
They’ll eat dinner together at some point.
He’ll watch her there too.
-
They’re all going to need therapy eventually. At the close of this it will read like every pulp novel not read in this generation, no one getting away clean. Jed Bartlet will slip away without legs to stand on, Leo lost his heart in the most literal sense, the former Vice President will be in search of his honor, lost or perhaps never fully owned before. Josh will stamp for the candidate it takes the least amount of energy to convince himself is right for the job and Sam will soak up the California sun. Donna will leave, Toby will disappear, CJ will take stock as it all comes down, piecemeal, to final days, lame ducks.
Amy doesn’t know where she runs to, which yellow brick road she is supposed to chase down.
-
“I’m doing good things but I’ve got a bad name,” she says and spins a damp cocktail napkin in semi-circles then pauses.
“Welcome to the club,” he offers on a rueful smile, but he doesn’t open his arms wide. He doesn’t invite her in this time and maybe she should be grateful. Maybe if she was a good woman doing good things she would be, but the problem might extend farther than Amy Gardner and that’s just too terrifying of a concept to grasp.
She isn’t going to ask him though. She isn’t going to grab him by the wrist like she wants to and watch the way his eyes would flutter down to closed, if only for a minute, because it’s American History 101 - it can be repeated, it will be repeated and the results will be more disastrous than the first go round.
So she doesn’t do it. She doesn’t play earnest (the same as playing honest) and ask if she’s just a bad person trying to do good things and that makes her irredeemable, it makes her a contradictory mess of a person. She thinks she knows the answer. She knows he knows the answer.
She watches him drink seltzer and watches him watch her, vicarious living singing between them, as she sips slow at a Jack and coke.
“So you’re going to run for president?”
“I’m going to try.”
“That’s the wrong answer.”
“True. But it’s the honest one.”
“Lesson number one. Don’t you ever fucking say that in front of a camera. New Hampshire will be nothing more than a pipe dream if you pull that kind of shit.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” and he smiles.
-
Josh talks all through dinner. It takes the waiter three pointed clearings of his throat before Josh pauses for a breath and says something like, “oh yeah, just give us a moment,” and still doesn’t bother to open his menu after the waiter slips away.
Amy kills a bottle of wine over the three hour dinner and even fuzzy-brained and distracted she still can’t project some kind of interest on Josh. The ex-boyfriend bracket is supposed to be fraught with far more tension and desire and passion, not this. Not a rehashing of Josh’s day, life, political aspirations and idolatry of Leo, of Jed, of old men and New England. Frankly, it’s boring.
On her last glass she considers breaking in with a, “I fucked the Vice President, I fucked him a lot,” just to see what would happen.
Josh pauses to consider her. His eyebrows are all still furrowed and there are lines bisecting the expanse of his forehead, stretches of concentration or whatever. She raises her own brows expectantly and then finally asks, “what?”
The dimples deepen. “Why did we ever break up?” Amy’s eyes wander towards the door.
“To be completely open and honest with you, the sheer number of possible answers to this question astounds me. I don’t even know where to begin, Josh.”
At this point, she is blaming the wine. She is blaming that bottle of Pinot Noir, and she doesn’t even like Pinot Noir but Josh ordered it, and at first she drank it to be polite and then she drank it to be drunk and now she is and now real, candid answers are appearing and Josh really only has himself to blame. Circular logic, it trumps all.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? What ‘possible answers’?”
She thinks Donna, she thinks every cause she ever adopted as her own; she thinks late hours and his loosened tie and the way they used to each try to pull the other’s hair out. She thinks a lot, but all she answers is with a shrug, the word, “time.”
It doesn’t matter.
She’s effectively fired the next day.
Josh has a campaign to run.
-
Years ago:
“You sleeping with him?”
She doesn’t look up. Her thumb scrolls through her BlackBerry. She’s not reading the headlines, she ignores an email, two, left her glasses on her desk. She squints.
“With who?”
“Him.”
“Elaborate.”
“Joshua Lyman.”
She looks up at him. His face is sort of blank, but his eyebrows are drawn, knit tight. She thinks there’s a small triumph to be found in that but she doesn’t take the time to look.
“I hardly think that’s any of your business. Sir.”
“You seemed fine with the idea of it being my business a view seconds ago.”
“I was merely humoring you.”
“So. Are you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Don’t play naïve. Doesn’t look good on you. If possible, you’ve been in this city for just as long as I have, which means that we both know sex always matters.”
She sighs and a strand of hair cast over her face flutters out and then back down. “Spare me the civics lesson. That wasn’t what I was asking.”
“What were you asking then?”
She lets her eyes fix on him then. Every book she has ever read on the subject of power not written by Machiavelli or Sun Tzu names eye contact as one of the most powerful weapons. He doesn’t look away and she thinks he must have read all the same books she has and for a moment, tight mouth and black suit and plain tie, she almost likes him.
“Does it matter to you whether or not I am sleeping with Joshua Lyman?”
He leans forward and his eyes cast dark. But the room is dark. It could be the room, it could be her, it could be him. It’s far too complicated to think in simple romantic, lustful terms.
“I wouldn’t have asked if it didn’t.”
She shivers a little and his hand hovers near the bare crook of her elbow but he doesn’t touch her.
“I was,” she hisses. No, she concedes. She concedes but it’s not like he’s the victor here, it’s not like he takes pride in the fact she used to fuck Josh Lyman, that she maybe tried to make an honest man of him, but that’s a real contradictory clusterfuck of a situation, isn’t it? You can’t make an honest man of anyone unless you can do the honesty thing yourself. That might not be true. She thinks it should be. She can’t look him in the eye anymore.
She finishes her drink with the kind of showy flourish that closes down a conversation, a prelude to an exit. John Hoynes knows these sorts of symbols, can read these theatrics.
It’s why she does them.
-
When she kisses him, she wishes he would start drinking again. All she tastes is tongue and spit and there is nothing to distract from skin and wet and pink, the slide of him against her and the softness of his inner cheek. She wishes he would start drinking again. He’s the kind of man who should reek and slip of whiskey, of mistake coupled with disgrace.
It’s a terrible thought.
So she bites his lip.
He likes it.
That’s not a surprise.
It is that he doesn’t bite back.
He just holds her jaw in place, a wide hand against the side of her face.
She opens up beneath him.
-
“These are special times,” Josh says when she sees him next (after he fires her, she reminds herself, reminds him, later), a Santos for President banner waving close at hand and in the distance. “These are really special times, Amy.”
And they are. She knows this, she can read the signs and the headlines served up from across the world.
“What are you going to do when you run out of horses worth backing and riding?” she asks abruptly, and there are cheers from down the street. She wonders why Josh isn’t down there watching, why he doesn’t want to be there, all smug smiles, as Matt Santos says the right thing with just the right amount of edge. She doesn’t really care, but she wonders. Josh looks old. His hair’s too short. He looks old, not just older, but old, tired, old.
“That’ll never happen,” and there’s that smile, maybe that reason they never worked out each time they tried.
He sounds so sure.
She isn’t.
These are special times, but Josh and her have always carried rival definitions of these things.
-
“I liked you better like this,” she says on a shrug. She clutches her coffee mug tight and he almost smiles.
A separate grin shines up from tabloid news coverage and closed captioning smears across the screen.
When he bites, “get out,” she already saw it coming.
She does on a shrug, without a backwards glance.
-
She lets her fingers twist with his, once, in passing, and it’s the most romantic thing the two will ever do.
Sometimes, she might tap her fingers idly and her cheeks will kind of flush.
-
Matt Santos wins the election.
It’s the kind of thing Frank Capra would make a movie about.
It’s really not the kind of movie she would ever rent.
Josh Lyman calls. She ignores him. He doesn’t leave a voicemail, not once, not ever, and as the months pass gossip stirs in the shape of matrimony and Donna Moss. She thinks Josh’s mom must be really happy, proud, whatever. She never liked Amy, Josh never liked that.
John Hoynes doesn’t call.
She’d say she expected that.
What she wouldn’t say: she’s waiting for him.
In the meantime, she thinks she’ll run for office.
-
“I really don’t even like you,” she told him once. It had rang in her apartment like the most natural thing ever, like work was okay or my mom called or don’t forget to call your brother back, or something.
She had been naked. He had been fixing his cufflinks, letting his eyes wander from her face down to her bare legs, crossed one over top the other, the arm of the couch beneath them.
He had smiled, smiled like he was sad and it took her months and the gift-cum-curse of retrospect to recognize it.
“That make it any easier?” he had asked.
She had smiled then.
The answer is still no.
-
She wins the House race, and it’s weird.
She’s not used to this, this being on the inside, no longer the renegade, the marginalized, whatever.
She wears a black suit her first day.
So does he.
He visits at lunch time.
“I knew I always liked you,” he grins, like old, like he’s old, she’s old, too many years and not enough, and it’s the White House all over again.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she drawls. Lines crease at the corners of her eyes and a phone rings in the anteroom; someone answers with a “Congresswoman Gardner’s office.”
He steps over the threshold.
“You wear the office well, kid.”
She thinks, “I’ve missed you,” and she clasps her hands behind her back. He doesn’t look below her chin, or at least she doesn’t catch him at it. He’s tanner, his hands still wide, long, firm fingers, but they look worn, used.
She shuts the door behind them.
But this is later.
First there is a White House. First, there are other men to attempt to conquer, to name, maybe to fail, whatever.
She’s got things like expectation on her side this time.
So there’s that.
-
They only had one morning.
It’s not like either of them had slept, but they had lay there, in silence, her leg wrapped around his hip, hair spread out across his chest. He had cradled her head; she had pressed a hand flat against his lower abdomen, felt it rise and fall, in time with her own breath.
She’d say it was nice, but that would be a lie. It’s not that it was domestic, or sweet, or the sort of thing expected of lovers.
It was the most terrifying moment of her life, laying there.
Maybe she loved him at four in the morning, city lights and sheer curtains and his own wide open eyes.
Maybe she loved him.
She’s busy these days. Sometimes she forgets.
-
That’s a lie too.
-
fin.