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“I probably did need her around a bit more. I had to turn to my friends for guidance on birth control when I was with my high school boyfriend, and there was a brief moment when I considered getting a chain of roses tattooed around my ankle, but I went with a tiny rosebud on my right hip where no one can see it. I’ve never mentioned it publicly.”
“A First Lady with a visible tattoo would make a statement. Do you think any of the other First Ladies have been hiding ink from us?”
“Oh sure. I think Lady Bird Johnson had a giant eagle on her back. Maybe its talons were made to look like they were leaving trails of faux blood down her spine.” Ruby curls her hands into talon-like claws as she says this.
Dexter chuckles at the image. “So is this off the record—about you having a tattoo that no one knows about?”
“On the record,” Ruby says decisively. “I’m about to share a whole hell of a lot more with the world than a little story about a tattoo I got at Woodstock ’94.”
“You definitely did not mention that this happened at Woodstock ’94,” Dexter says, surprise written all over his face. “Did you camp out? Were you one of the mud people?”
“I camped, and I got muddy, though I didn’t dive right into it like the people you’re thinking of. True story: the porta potties overflowed and mixed with the mud, so that wasn’t just mud.”
Dexter gags. “No wonder it was mostly young dudes popping up in front of cameras looking like swamp creatures.”
Ruby shakes her head, remembering. “It was a different time. I was twenty and in college. I took the trip with a couple of girls I knew from doing commercials in L.A. at that time, and we actually had a lot of fun until one of them took a massive hit of acid from a guy with waist-length dreadlocks and ended up on a bad trip.” Ruby frowns as she recalls the girl, whose name was Summer, passed out in the grass while everyone around her body-slammed to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and raged to Nine Inch Nails. “She was fine though,” Ruby adds breezily.
“So, in your misspent youth, you got a teeny tiny tame little tattoo at a giant music festival, smoked a wee bit of weed, and cruised the mall for hotties, but I want to know more about your internal life. Was the high school boyfriend your first heartbreak?”
Ruby gives a soft laugh. “Isn’t the high school romance always your first heartbreak? I mean…yeah. His name was Paul. He was my first, as you’ve gathered, and he was a nice enough guy in general, but he went to a party with some friends during our first year of college, met a girl, and then bing, bang, boom.”
“Bing, bang, boom?”
“Yeah,” Ruby says with a shrug. “He fell in love with her, apparently, and decided he couldn’t live without her.”
“So now they’re married, living in Van Nuys, and their oldest son is about to make them grandparents?”
“I wish things had turned out that way—I really do. But actually it’s a much more tragic story than that, so I’m going to have to ask you to keep it off the record because it isn’t my story to share with the world.”
“Done.”
“Okay.” Ruby takes a deep breath. “Paul and I went down completely different paths. Things didn’t work out with that girl from the party—I don’t even remember her name—but he started dating anything in a skirt, and within two years he found out he was HIV positive.”
Dexter blows out a loud breath. “Wow.”
“Yeah. This was the early-90s, remember. AIDS was everywhere, both literally and figuratively. It felt like the whole world knew about the dangers, but a lot of people had the ‘it will never happen to me’ mentality of youth.”
“And Paul…damn.”
“Yeah, and Paul.” Ruby sits quietly for a minute, her eyes glistening with tears. She hasn’t thought about Paul in a long time, and when she does, it’s always fondly. He’d treated her well, and when they broke up she’d been crushed, but with time those sharp edges have softened a bit and it’s easier to remember the good things. Senior prom. Kissing on the beach. Laughing. She sniffles and swipes at both eyes. “He died in 2002,” Ruby says, forging ahead. “I went to the funeral and hugged his mom, and she said she blamed me for his death because I let him go and he went crazy.”
“No way,” Dexter says loudly. “Are you serious? She said that?”
“She did, and it was a great lesson for me in the years ahead, because I really understood that people can project onto you basically anything they need to project in order to get by. The American public can see you and project their fantasy of a perfect, well-behaved woman standing next to the man who leads their country. A man can see you and project his dreams of ending up in the White House with a photogenic, smiling, Stepford wife sleeping prettily beside him in bed. A woman you don’t even know can project her fantasy of having a relationship with the President of the United States behind your back because she thinks you’re nothing more than a political partner, a wife on paper, and a woman with her own agenda.”
“Is this still off the record?”
“This part is on. You want to know me and how I feel, so anything I tell you about me and my life is fair game unless I say otherwise.”
“Got it.”
Ruby sighs and leans her head back against the tufted, cornflower blue headboard. “I hate to cut us off for the night, but I really need to get some sleep.”
“Same time tomorrow?” Dexter asks, resting his tired looking face on his hand, elbow propped on his kitchen table. He has a pencil tucked between his fingers and his glasses reflect the glow of his own laptop screen.
“Same time,” Ruby confirms.
Dexter sits up straight and closes his notebook. “One more thing, Ruby.”
