Just in time for Valentines Day, we now know much more about the First Lady’s formerly clandestine romance with the handsome Honduran swimming pool cleaner Jorge Luis Mejía.
There are three swimming pools at the White House, each with its own caretaker. There’s an Olympic-sized pool between the Millard Fillmore Bedroom and Chester A. Arthur Powder Room (it emerged only in 2012, and then with minimal publicity, to spare his ancestors embarrassment, that President Arthur was an avid crossdresser). There is of course a small endless pool in the president’s bedroom, in which President Trump, as contemptuous of exercise as of humility, hasn’t so much as dipped a toe. Jorge Luis Mejía, cares for the koi pond, a gift to the United States from Emperor Hirohito after World War II.
We are now able to confirm that he and Mrs. Trump met one evening in December when she skinny-dipped in the pool. In her bathing cap, Jorge didn’t recognise her, and scolded her for frightening the fish, and seemed no less indignant even after her Secret Service bodyguard, Everett “Thud” Langley, identified her. She was impressed rather than affronted.
Once Langley had dried her off, the First Lady pronounced herself peckish, and the threesome retired to the White House kitchen, where they found Executive Chef Cristeta Pasia Comerford in tears. “I am, without blowing my own horn, one of the most talented chefs in America. I have competed successfully on Iron Chef America. I have cooked for four presidents and their families, and countless heads of state, and shoulders! And what does that horrid orange nincompoop want for his dinner? Big Macs! Filet-o-Fishes! Did the great Escoffier have to withstand such humiliation? Marie-Antoine Carême, the originator of haute cuisine? Guy fucking Fieri?” As she ran wailing from her kitchen, Jorge Luis put on an apron and made Mrs. Trump the most delicious, (and first) bowl of sopa de caracol, a dish all Honduran are required by law to adore, but which she, being Slovenian, had never eaten. Langley liked it too.
They then retired to the White House library. She disclosed her special love of the magical realism of the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She recounted having asked her husband to rename Mar-a-Lago after Macondo, the utopian city José Arcadio Buendía establishes in 100 Years of Solitude, but the future president had mocked the idea, snickering, “Sure, and while I’m at it, maybe I should rename Trump Tower Sugar Mountain." She had felt so foolish!
“One as beautiful as you deserves gentler treatment,” Jorge Luis said with great sadness in his brown eyes. He read aloud to her from Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.
They talked about Melania’s son. She told him she’d wanted to name him Zdravko, after Zdravko Čolić. her favourite recording artist during her girlhood in Slovenia, but that the future president had insisted on Barron, thinking it would get him more favourable coverage in Barron’s, the financial investment newspaper. “I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t insist on Forbes,” Mrs. Trump laughed, for the first time in Jorge’s presence, and he’d never wanted a woman more. They kissed, and the universe blazed with glorious colour. Jorge said he would love to teach Zdrav, as he proclaimed he would call Melania’s son, all a man needs to know — how to hunt and fish and start fires, how to make his woman feel valued, how to make her sopa de caracol when her spirits ebb.
Fearing his answer, Mrs. Trump asked if Jorge were seeing anyone. He admitted he’d been dating Heather L—, an intern in the presidential tweeting pool, but had for weeks been trying to figure out a way to tell her he couldn’t envision a future with her. Should he point out they were two different people? Would saying that it was his failure, and not hers, cause her less pain? Mrs. Trump said she’d get Stephanie Grisham, her director of communications, or one of her Secret Service studs to do it. Behind her, out of her view, Langley rolled his eyes.
Jorge admitted to finding the name Secret Service comical, as everyone seemed to know about it. Mrs Trump giggled in delight — the misnomer had never occurred to her — and her girlishness melted that part of Jorge’s heart that had withstood her joke about Forbes. Even Thud Langley could see they were already in love.
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