It is a curious moment in history when the steamiest literature you can get your hands on is a Congressional investigation and the male protagonist is no Fabio, no stablehand on the Chatterley estate, but the President of the United States. For despite what Ken Starr might have us believe, his Report was written as, and is certainly meant to be read as, a love story. It has all the components of the pinkest romance novel: the oblique promise of l'amour propre is continually proffered in the resiliency of Monica's naïve optimism. And bad Bill's responses are marked by the diffidence and resignation of a man who sees the writing on the wall. We see him committing the classic error of forgetting that there was a mind behind the convenient lips, a heart within the heaving chest, of seeing Monica Lewinsky not as a person, but as an appliance. Thus the abstraction of his responses, as if what was transpiring involved historical chessmen or universal allegories, not flesh and blood humans. When she suggested she might tell if he didn't treat her better, he rejoined, "It is illegal to threaten the President of the United States." Now this is a phrase I could never imagine saying to a lover (and not only because I might have inhaled); it confuses self and office, man and symbol. Lovers' quarrels are not resolved by consulting the Constitution. Bill, stick in hand, was clearly trying to scrape off the unfortunateness he had stepped into. And Monica, meanwhile, persisted in her hopes, questioning if he really knew her, asking him if he wanted to, only to be silenced by his kisses. Kisses that said, in effect, Dear girl, don't you know that real emotions are not permitted on the stage of a Trauerspiel? Identity is unimportant here; a hand is moving you. I am that hand . . .
I myself have come to fear such encounters, where an atavistic urge or momentary impulse leads me into temptation, or into tempting, a woman but a decimal of my years. And, like decimals, it is hard to remember that they are also wholes, and harder still to remember that they might see you as larger than life, or larger than you are. The easily won, never asked for heart is worn like a lodestone, a mantle of lead we try to wriggle out from under. I feel for Clinton because it's hard not to wield power, to not feel and lust for the very act of wielding, and then to shrink beneath the burden of its consequences. Power scripts its own abuse. And thus I feel for Lewinsky too. For it is all too easy to come under its spell. To say, as she did again and again, "Even though he's a big schmuck . . ."
And we, the American people, will we not in the end permit this to pass, murmuring to ourselves the very same sentiment?

* * *

From The Starr Report

December 31 Sexual Encounter
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had their third sexual encounter on New Year's Eve. Sometime between noon and 1 p.m., in Ms. Lewinsky's recollection, she was in the pantry area of the President's private dining room talking with a White House steward, Bayani Nelvis. She told Mr. Nelvis that she had recently smoked her first cigar, and he offered to give her one of the President's cigars. Just then, the President came down the hallway from the Oval Office and saw Ms. Lewinsky. The President dispatched Mr. Nelvis to deliver something to Mr. Panetta.
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she told the President that Mr. Nelvis had promised her a cigar, and the President gave her one. She told him her name -- she had the impression that he had forgotten it in the six weeks since their furlough encounters because, when passing her in the hallway, he had called her "Kiddo." The President replied that he knew her name; in fact, he added, having lost the phone number she had given him, he had tried to find her in the phonebook.
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, they moved to the study. "And then . . . we were kissing and he lifted my sweater and exposed my breasts and was fondling them with his hands and with his mouth." She performed oral sex. Once again, he stopped her before he ejaculated because, Ms. Lewinsky testified, "he didn't know me well enough or he didn't trust me yet."

January 7 Sexual Encounter
     [W]e made an arrangement that . . . he would have the door to his office open, and I would pass by the office with some papers and then . . . he would sort of stop me and invite me in. So, that was exactly what happened. I passed by and that was actually when I saw [Secret Service Uniformed Officer] Lew Fox who was on duty outside the Oval Office, and stopped and spoke with Lew for a few minutes, and then the President came out and said, oh, hey, Monica . . . come on in . . . And so we spoke for about ten minutes in the [Oval] office. We sat on the sofas. Then we went into the back study and we were intimate in the bathroom.
     Ms. Lewinsky testified that during this bathroom encounter, she and the President kissed, and he touched her bare breasts with his hands and his mouth. The President "was talking about performing oral sex on me," according to Ms. Lewinsky. But she stopped him because she was menstruating and he did not. Ms. Lewinsky did perform oral sex on him.
     Afterward, she and the President moved to the Oval Office and talked. According to Ms. Lewinsky: "[H]e was chewing on a cigar. And then he had the cigar in his hand and he was kind of looking at the cigar in . . . sort of a naughty way. And so . . . I looked at the cigar and I looked at him and I said, we can do that, too, some time."

January 21 Sexual Encounter
     "I was feeling a little bit insecure about whether he had liked it or didn't like it . . . I didn't know if this was sort of developing into some kind of a longer-term relationship than what I thought it initially might have been, that maybe he had some regular girlfriend . . . "
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she questioned the President about his interest in her. "I asked him why he doesn't ask me any questions about myself, and . . . is this just about sex . . . or do you have some interest in trying to get to know me as a person?" The President laughed and said, according to Ms. Lewinsky, that "he cherishes the time that he had with me." She considered it "a little bit odd" for him to speak of cherishing their time together "when I felt like he didn't really even know me yet."
     They continued talking as they went to the hallway by the study. Then, with Ms. Lewinsky in mid-sentence, "he just started kissing me." He lifted her top and touched her breasts with his hands and mouth. According to Ms. Lewinsky, the President "unzipped his pants and sort of exposed himself," and she performed oral sex.

February 4 Sexual Encounter and Subsequent Phone Calls
     The President telephoned her at her desk and they planned their rendezvous. At her suggestion, they bumped into each other in the hallway, "because when it happened accidentally, that seemed to work really well," then walked together to the area of the private study.
     There, according to Ms. Lewinsky, they kissed. She was wearing a long dress that buttoned from the neck to the ankles. "And he unbuttoned my dress and he unhooked my bra, and sort of took the dress off my shoulders and . . . moved the bra . . . [H]e was looking at me and touching me and telling me how beautiful I was." He touched her breasts with his hands and his mouth, and touched her genitals, first through underwear and then directly. She performed oral sex on him.
     After their sexual encounter, the President and Ms. Lewinsky sat and talked in the Oval Office for about forty-five minutes. Ms. Lewinsky thought the President might be responding to her suggestion during their previous meeting about "trying to get to know me." It was during that conversation on February 4, according to Ms. Lewinsky, that their friendship started to blossom.
     When she prepared to depart, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President "kissed my arm and told me he'd call me, and then I said, yeah, well, what's my phone number? And so he recited both my home number and my office number off the top of his head." The President called her at her desk later that afternoon and said he had enjoyed their time together.

March 31 Sexual Encounter
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, the President telephoned her at her desk and suggested that she come to the Oval Office on the pretext of delivering papers to him. She went to the Oval Office and was admitted by a plainclothes Secret Service agent. In her folder was a gift for the President, a Hugo Boss necktie.
     In the hallway by the study, the President and Ms. Lewinsky kissed. On this occasion, according to Ms. Lewinsky, "he focused on me pretty exclusively," kissing her bare breasts and fondling her genitals. At one point, the President inserted a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky's vagina, then put the cigar in his mouth and said: "It tastes good." After they were finished, Ms. Lewinsky left the Oval Office and walked through the Rose Garden.

Ms. Lewinsky's Frustrations
     Continuing to believe that her relationship with the President was the key to regaining her White House pass, Ms. Lewinsky hoped that the President would get her a job immediately after the election. "I kept a calendar with a countdown until election day," she later wrote in an unsent letter to him. The letter states: "I was so sure that the weekend after the election you would call me to come visit and you would kiss me passionately and tell me you couldn't wait to have me back. You'd ask me where I wanted to work and say something akin to 'Consider it done' and it would be. Instead I didn't hear from you for weeks and subsequently your phone calls became less frequent."
     Ms. Lewinsky grew increasingly frustrated over her relationship with President Clinton. One friend understood that Ms. Lewinsky complained to the President about not having seen each other privately for months, and he replied, "Every day can't be sunshine." In email to another friend in early 1997, Ms. Lewinsky wrote: "I just don't understand what went wrong, what happened? How could he do this to me? Why did he keep up contact with me for so long and now nothing, now when we could be together?"

February 28 Sexual Encounter
     According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a sexual encounter on Thursday, February 28 -- their first in nearly eleven months. Wearing a navy blue dress from the Gap, Ms. Lewinsky attended the radio address at the President's invitation (relayed by Ms. Currie), then had her photo taken with the President. Ms. Lewinsky had not been alone with the President since she had worked at the White House, and, she testified, "I was really nervous." President Clinton told her to see Ms. Currie after the photo was taken because he wanted to give her something. "So I waited a little while for him and then Betty and the President and I went into the back office," Ms. Lewinsky testified.
     In the study, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President "started to say something to me and I was pestering him to kiss me, because . . . it had been a long time since we had been alone." The President told her to wait a moment, as he had presents for her. As belated Christmas gifts, he gave her a hat pin and a special edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
     Ms. Lewinsky described the Whitman book as "the most sentimental gift he had given me . . . it's beautiful and it meant a lot to me." During this visit, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President said he had seen her Valentine's Day message in the Washington Post, and he talked about his fondness for Romeo and Juliet.
     Ms. Lewinsky testified that after the President gave her the gifts, they had a sexual encounter: [W]e went back over by the bathroom in the hallway, and we kissed. We were kissing and he unbuttoned my dress and fondled my breasts with my bra on, and then took them out of my bra and was kissing them and touching them with his hands and with his mouth.
     And then I think I was touching him in his genital area through his pants, and I think I unbuttoned his shirt and was kissing his chest. And then . . . I wanted to perform oral sex on him . . . and so I did. And then . . . I think he heard something, or he heard someone in the office. So, we moved into the bathroom.
     And I continued to perform oral sex and then he pushed me away, kind of as he always did before he came, and then I stood up and I said . . . I care about you so much . . . I don't understand why you won't let me . . . make you come; it's important to me; I mean, it just doesn't feel complete, it doesn't seem right.
     Ms. Lewinsky testified that she and the President hugged, and "he said he didn't want to get addicted to me, and he didn't want me to get addicted to him." They looked at each other for a moment. Then, saying that "I don't want to disappoint you," the President consented. For the first time, she performed oral sex through completion.

As a final note, I want to mention in passing the similarity between the section of the Starr Report quoted above and my excerpt from Garcia Marquez' Autumn of the Patriarch from some time back. I'm not saying that Clinton gets his sex ideas from his confessed favorite author, nor am I suggesting that he even read the book. It seems much more likely that a man in his position wouldn't have time to read entire novels and would have to resort to abbreviations, brief selections that would highlight his favorite bits . . . Now I wonder where he'd find those?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Jack Murnighan's stories appeared in the Best American Erotica editions of 1999, 2000 and 2001. His weekly column for Nerve, Jack's Naughty Bits, was collected and released as two books. He was the editor-in-chief of Nerve from 1999 to 2001, before retiring to write full time and take seriously the quest for love.