by Jeff Soloway
“Who was that?” I asked.
For the first time, Chomp glanced upward. “Nobody.” His eyes plummeted to the stack of papers on his desk. “Those papers were moved.”
I said nothing. I hadn’t even breathed on them. Or had I?
“Were you touching”—he lifted one hand in the air, thumb and forefinger together, as if he was plucking just precisely the right word—“my shit?” His voice rose to a squawk. Was it loud enough to bring the bodyguard?
“No.” How did he know? Somehow he had detected the imprint of my eyes. “What do I care about papers? Papers are useless. I care about action. That’s why I’m here.”
I sounded like a nerd trying to imitate Captain Kirk. How did Chomp make stupid manly platitudes sound so sincere?
He knew a faker when he heard one. His face turned as orange as his hair. He pulled out his phone. He was going to have me killed.
“Jacob.” My mother stepped out of the bathroom.
The ex-president’s face froze mid-snarl. My mother gave him a look of ironic amusement, just the thing to buy time. A man like Chomp would want to puzzle out the irony on the face of a woman like her.
“Eleanor Smalls,” I said. “My writing assistant. She was just freshening up.”
“So it’s a tag team.” Chomp grinned, to indicate he had once again seen through me. “Smart. Always a good idea to pick a beautiful assistant.”
“She’s my mother.”
“Then no credit for choosing her. In my experience, which is vast, beautiful women make the best reporters. They know where to dig for your secrets.”
“Secrets are a waste of time.” My mother perched on the edge of the desk, just beside the papers, as if to nudge them out of his mind. “Who cares what people hide? Jacob’s right. All that matters is what people do—especially important people. What are you up to, Mr. President?”
Chomp looked delighted. From her, platitudes always sounded convincing. As long as I could remember, my mother has understood not just what people want to hear but how they want to hear it. Her manipulative talents work even on me, when she bothers to use them. Her social skills enabled her professional success. Throughout my teenage years, she worked part-time at Swinging Steve Sanovich’s dentist office, greeting patients, haggling with insurance companies, and graciously but firmly fending off invitations to the doctor’s monthly nitrous parties. After she left my father, she had nothing to build a career on but that experience, a fifteen-year-old bachelor’s degree in business administration, and her social powers. She used all three to land a bookkeeping job, and from there eventually became a regional sales director for a hospital supply company. Sounds boring, but her annual bonus was four times larger than any book advance I’d ever earned. Many of my creative friends consider the phrase “success in sales” to be as oxymoronic as “life in death” but I know that what my mother accomplished was success on the grandest scale. Halfway through her life, she had transformed herself. At an age when so many people are flaming out after early triumphs, she was just starting to soar.
“Ah. Now I know you.” Chomp nodded, pleased at having solved a puzzle worth his time. “You don’t write people’s secrets; you keep them. If I’m talking to anyone, I’m talking to you.”
He twitched his eyebrows at me and nodded toward the door in dismissal. But there was no way in hell I was leaving him alone with my mother.
“What I am up to,” he said, “to be honest, is having doubts. Last thing you need when you’re facing down a North Korean dictator aiming his nukes at Waikiki Beach, as I have done, but in an operation like this, when one is surrounded by bozos, doubts are unavoidable. I’ll get over them, I always do.”
“Jacob, this is what’s called being forthright and unafraid. Women find it highly attractive. You might try it.”
“I should also try being president,” I said. “Women seem to like that as well.”
“This president was a married man,” my mother said.
“You want to be president,” said Chomp, “you need to start with fifty million Twitter followers minimum, and you don’t get those writing personal essays about your girlfriends in Men’s Adventure or The New Jerk Times.” He grinned again. “We Googled you, Jacob Smalls.”
The shout from above was louder than ever, and for the first time, comprehensible. “You tell them the truth!” A man’s voice again.
“What was that?” my mother asked.
“Who knows?” The ex-president’s shrug was unconvincing.
The female voice cried out in response: “Please!”
I shot up the spiral staircase before Chomp could react. At the top, a short hallway led to an open doorway. The broad back of a bodyguard slid out from the doorway like a slab pushed out from a cave. He turned; he was the fat-bellied guard I’d seen outside. His lumpy face first flushed in anger and then sagged in dismay. Both of us heard heavy footsteps coming up behind me.
Chomp was ascending with the slow, uncomplaining agony of a big man past middle age. When he finally arrived, the guard said, “We were waiting for you, Mr. President.”
“Yuh.” Chomp needed a moment to catch his breath. My mother tripped up the stairs behind him.
The guard zipped his eyes back and forth among the three of us. His hair was jet-black but his eyebrows were salt-and-pepper. On the side of his neck, almost hidden by his collar, was an old puckered scar, shiny as wrinkled satin. I imagined him impressing Chomp with tales of knife fights. This was the trusted veteran bodyguard, never caught out of position—until now. “All under control. We found her.”
“Great,” I said, as curtly as Chomp would have, and slipped past the guard’s protruding gut through the doorway.
The bedroom inside was as large as a normal cruise ship stateroom. At the back was another open door, this one leading to a bathroom, where a woman was kneeling by a toilet. A male steward stood over her and shouted, “You make it fucking shine!”
“Who’s she?” I asked.
The guard hustled in behind me. “Terrorist suspect.” He assumed I was someone important.
“Why is she cleaning the bathroom?”
“Figured she should do something useful. We’re holding her while we wait for the president.”
“There! There!” The raging man standing over her wore a chief steward’s vest. I could see his name tag, which gave his first name and country of origin: FERNANDO / EL SALVADOR.
“What did she do?” I tried to sound official. Chomp had entered too. Luckily he seemed still to be catching his breath. Perhaps he had tried too hard to impress my mother on the stairs.
“We found her sneaking around the president’s personal space,” the guard said. “Still not sure how she got in. Harvey called security.”
The woman in the bathroom turned her head to us. It was at the level of the steward’s knees. Her eyes, narrowed by her close, detailed labor, widened in surprise at all these intruders, and maybe in hope. “No,” she said. “I was cleaning.”
“Keep cleaning! Then you’re fired! Lucky they don’t kill you.” The steward, in his fury, was aware of nothing but the offending woman.
“Hey, bud,” said the guard.
The steward quickly woke from his revenge dream. His glare was both guilty and defiant. Then he saw Chomp.
“What happened,” the guard explained, “was everyone had left. But she came back.”
The cleaner kept staring up at me. Maybe I looked more reasonable than these other men. “They say it’s dirty. I have to come again.”
The steward stomped one foot, just missing her knee. “We tell you one hundred times, never enter the president’s room! Not without special permission! Which I give, no one else! We are very sorry, Mr. President,” he added.
“The door upstairs was open,” she said. “I clean the shower.”
�
�No one told you clean the shower!”
“Inés tell me.”
“Who’s Inés?” the guard demanded.
The woman looked bewildered.
“Hey, Jimbo.” Chomp gave a little, Queen-of-England wave. “Shouldn’t you be downstairs? Guarding something? The front door maybe?”
Jimbo the guard stood straighter, inflated his chest, wiped sweat from his graying eyebrows, and said nothing.
“Was there something wrong with the shower?” my mother asked.
Chomp snorted. “Just a stain the size of a turkey wing.”
“I see,” my mother said. “So you called to complain.”
“Harvey called. What else could I do?”
My mother nodded without agreement or approval. I knew that nod. Chomp’s face hollowed out in a way I had never seen on TV. He too knew nods like my mother’s.
“I am very, very sorry, Mr. President,” the steward said. “Everyone will be disciplined. Or fired. You do not have to worry. She is not dangerous, just stupid and a terrible worker.”
Jimbo, whose job was also at risk, tried to reassert his own authority. “Not so fast, buddy. Harvey wants to interrogate her. He went to find you, Mr. President, in case you wanted in on it. It was this guy here who decided to make her work while we wait. These little guys, you got to watch out for them. They’re the ones jump down your shirt and eat your guts out while big guys are tying their boots.” He offered up a grin, and quickly dropped it. “No discipline around here. I don’t know who’s running this show.” As if he had just come from Kandahar.
Jimbo’s apologetic frown encompassed not just Chomp but also, briefly, me and my mother. We were all teammates here. Those two were the enemy.
Were they all on edge because of the credible threat? Or just because of the worker’s accent and skin tone?
“I doubt she’s a terrorist,” my mother said.
The steward nodded violently. “That’s right! Absolutely no!”
“Tell her to stand up,” said Chomp.
The steward barked a quick, incomprehensible (to us) syllable. The woman crawled backward, away from the toilet. She paused and, still on her knees, took in the forest of faces around her. With a little grimace that hinted at what she thought of us, she rose up. Her skirt, blouse, and nylons were black, with a yet darker tongue of black over her abdomen, to represent an apron. Her name tag read CARMEN / DOMINICAN REPUBLIC.
The steward exhaled very slowly. In his ornate vest he looked as absurd as a matador, yet his face had nobility that even the clothes couldn’t undermine. Carmen, his subordinate and scapegoat, met his eyes. For a moment, the two crew members shared thoughts the five Americans failed to comprehend.
“Your bathroom is now cleaned, Mr. President,” the steward announced. “With your permission, we now go and do discipline.”
“Fuck off,” the guard said. “We’ll take care of her.”
“Did you find any weapons on her, Jimbo?” Chomp asked. “I mean, besides a mop and a bucket.”
“Chemicals,” Jimbo said.
“What kind?”
“Ammonia.”
“In a spray bottle?”
“Yeah.”
“With a label? Like, say, Mr. Clean?”
“Something like that.”
“Anything else?”
“Windex.”
“I’m thinking maybe we can take a chance on releasing this woman. I’m thinking maybe she’s not the terrorist we’re looking for.”
“Just what I was thinking!” My mother did her best to sound relieved, triumphant, and even a little turned on by this Solomonic display of wisdom.
Chomp beamed at her. “Yeah, she’s obviously innocent, not to mention extremely hardworking, which I respect tremendously. What I do not respect is bullying women. You, my friend”—he pointed at the steward—“would not last five minutes at a Chomp property. You want maximum effort, you treat people with maximum respect. Especially around your guests. Especially around your special guests. This is the presidential suite. Maybe you heard, but I am a guy who is intimately familiar with presidential treatment. Your employee here deserves a medal. Don’t thank me,” he added to the cleaner, who was now gazing at him in some amazement at her change of fortune. “Thank her.”
The cleaner knew a polite command when she heard it. “Thank you,” she said to my mother.
“You two can leave. No punishing her with the toothbrush-toilet treatment behind my back. I want her to have the best treatment. The best!”
“Of course, Mr. President,” said the steward.
Chomp waved them both away. Adjacent to the bedroom was a door to the twelfth-floor hallway, which the steward gallantly opened for Carmen. He scalded her with a hellish glare as they both escaped.
“It’s women like you”—Chomp nodded at my mother—“watching out with eagle eyes for injustice, that we should all be thankful for. You could learn from this,” he added to Jimbo. “You call those eagle eyes? More like chicken eyes. You flew the coop. Left your post. This lady and her son here might have rolled up on me with a knife. She’s smarter than all of us. Get downstairs. Harvey’ll chew you out later.”
The guard lowered his head and tromped past us to the spiral stairs, knocking my shoulder with his elbow as he went.
“I’ll need to see you again.” Chomp stared with awkward intensity at my mother. He was better at intimidation than seduction. “You’ve got compassion, plus unlike most do-gooders you’re not a moron. I value that. You have a place in the new world. So does your son,” he added politely. “And maybe your husband?”
“I’m between husbands, ha-ha.”
“Huh?”
“I’m not married,” she clarified.
“Good. Then it’s you alone on this cruise. Very good. See, I can’t do this all by myself. My trusted advisers are suck-ups, and why not? They’ve ridden me a good long way. We could use some new blood. You and I absolutely need to see each other again soon.”
“I’d love to.”
“Done. Right now I have to prepare for my appearance at the Sailaway Party and then my speech this evening, which is probably the most important and complicated of my life, and that includes the convention and inauguration. Not the resignation, that was easy. The whole world’ll be watching.”
“I heard the networks canceled,” I said. “Even Fox.”
“Fox’ll be there, believe me. I’ve got a call with Rupe in thirty. And the loser networks”—presumably that included all the rest of them—“will wish they were here. This speech is once in a lifetime. Mine and everyone else’s. Just wait. But I’ll see you before I make history.”
He nodded at my mother and headed down the stairs, pulling out his cellphone yet again as he went.
My mother and I left via the upstairs door. We were back in the ship’s hallway, one floor higher than where we started. An overhead voice announced that staterooms throughout the ship were now ready. We caught up to Carmen, who was pushing a tray of cleaning supplies toward the elevator. I thought I could hear its wheels squeaking, but then I realized she was softly whistling.
“What’s that song?” I asked her in Spanish.
She looked at me, smiled, and obligingly lifted her voice. “I’m gonna be fired,” she sang.
“He promised not to,” I said.
She spoke in Spanish too. “Fernando said I have to take Inés’s job on the deck downstairs. She’s replacing me on the presidential suite. Then I’ll be fired.”
“Maybe not. Will you be cleaning suite 1103? That’s my friend.”
“I suppose so.”
So she’d go from cleaning Chomp’s suite to cleaning Clark’s. Quite a falling off. She sighed. Her eyes were red-rimmed and sunken. She looked exhausted. Cruise workers are always exhausted. Cleaners especially. They work tw
o grueling shifts every day and are lucky to sleep four hours a night. Whenever I travel, I can never quite shake the suspicion that I should be the one changing the sheets and scrubbing the toilets. In another few years, when the Internet has fully crushed the travel-writing industry, maybe I will be.
“My sister will kill me,” Carmen went on. “She recommended me for this job. She’s a dancer, the best dancer on the ship. Everybody loves her. I wish I had her job.”
“You can’t dance?”
“I can’t speak English that well. She grew up in New Jersey with her father. I grew up in Santo Domingo. Where soon, very soon, I will return. They’ll drive me straight to the airport. I don’t mind. I’ll see my little boy.”
Even if I were scrubbing toilets, at least I wouldn’t have to live in Santo Domingo.
My mother spoke no Spanish, but she understood well enough what we were discussing. “I’d like to make Mr. Fernando polish something,” she said.
Carmen giggled politely.
“Do you know any secrets about Mr. Chomp?” I asked her.
“He hates stains. It’s not my fault! They gave me ten minutes in his bedroom, and it was dirty like a zoo, from the six kids sleeping there on the last cruise. This ship is ancient. Everything smells like mildew or Clorox. They say our jobs will be easier on the return from the island. I hope so. Maybe they’ll forget to fire me. Listen. I have a question.”
“What?”
“Is that old man really the president?”
“He used to be,” I said.
Chapter 8
Our stateroom would have fit nicely in Chomp’s bathroom. At least it had a balcony, unlike many of the rooms on our low-rent deck. We also received one unmistakable travel-writer perk: a bottle of champagne in a cloudy plastic bucket, the ice unmelted in the blast of air conditioning.
I poured some into a plastic water cup and gave it to my mother. “Here’s the plan, Mom. When you talk to Chomp—”
“I’ll never see him again, Jacob. Men like him get sidetracked very easily.”
“Did you see how he looked at you? He’ll be back. Flatter him. Get him to show off. Make him explain what he’s up to. You should’ve seen his speech. He thinks he’s Winston Churchill. It’s some kind of declaration of war.”
