The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  “Someone’s knocking.” He opened the door.

  A young man entered. His nose was short and red, like the beak of an osprey. The guards let their hands fall to their sides.

  “Hey, Harv.” The young man held up an envelope.

  “What is it?”

  “The president has a message.”

  Harvey reached for it.

  The young man whipped it away. “Not for you.” His eyes skimmed over my face and settled on my mother’s. “Are you Mrs. Smalls?”

  My mother nodded.

  He smiled. The osprey had found its prey. He shot forward and placed the envelope in her hands. “The president is inviting you for drinks before dinner.”

  “What a lovely idea.”

  “Fuck me,” Harvey muttered.

  Chapter 13

  Back in our room, my mother lay down on the bed. She draped her arm over her forehead, as if warding off some blow. “Poor stupid Clark. And I would have married him. I wish I was home. You handled that man very poorly, Jacob. You should never laugh at a man like him.”

  “I didn’t laugh at him.”

  “Can you believe that lieutenant called Clark a mystery? He was the least mysterious man I ever met. All his secrets were in his browser history.”

  “Clark had a lot of money, Mom. And friends in the Chomp administration. Maybe you don’t know all his secrets.”

  She sat up. “I’d rather learn yours. What were you doing in his room?”

  “I went to talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  “Dad. Clark told us he talked to Dad. Remember?”

  “Now I do. If only I’d shown Clark a little sympathy. You know that’s not my strong suit. Do you think that’s why he contacted Howard—to save himself?” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her use my father’s name.

  “How could Dad have saved him?”

  “Use your imagination, Jacob! I had just dumped him. He was destroyed. But he knew that, years ago, your father had suffered the same disaster and survived. Don’t look at me like that! To you, getting dumped is nothing more than a hassle, but to men like Clark and your father—just listen to me!—I mean men of little experience—it’s an overwhelming tragedy. It’s Hamlet. You and I are different. For us, love comes and goes, the same thing over and over again. To Clark and your father, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. Losing it—losing me—is the end of their world. It’s not our fault. You and I, we understand we’re nothing special. But they don’t. Is it so wrong that I pretended I was?”

  I sat down next to her. Was love really the same for her every time? Not for me. Maybe love’s predictability was one of the comforts of growing older. But if it was always the same for her, why did she keep searching for a better lover? Her dissatisfaction was a kind of blessing; it kept her from curling up in her sweatpants, relaxing on the sofa with the remote, and getting ready to die, as so many people seem to do.

  “I wonder if your father helped him. He was never good with human emotion. But I’m sure he tried. He’s always been doggedly, I might say relentlessly, helpful. He’s always out to save somebody.”

  She was wrong there. The only person he ever wanted to save was her. Too bad he turned out to be the person she needed saving from.

  She smiled. “Imagine their conversation! Clark suicidal, your father gruff. He would have hung up convinced he had talked Clark down from the ledge. Your father could never do anything horrible. But Clark could. He was a lawyer. If he had never met me, he would’ve still had his buddies, and his floozies, and his football games, and his bonuses. They would have been enough. He’d be alive.”

  “He didn’t kill himself, Mom. Trust me.”

  “Why? Haven’t you been lying to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “A mother knows! Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s about Dad.”

  She groaned. “Please, Jacob. Call your father sometime, it’s always the right thing to do, but I’ve had enough of him for today. There’s too much to think about. I have to call Clark’s sister.”

  “I’ll do it if you want.”

  “I’m not a coward. You never know what I want. I need to rest. I have to be sharp for this evening.”

  “When you call Clark’s sister?”

  “When I see the ex-president. Jacob, I have a request.”

  “What?”

  “Stay with me. We’ll talk later, about your father and everything else. Just not now. Maybe Clark didn’t die for me after all. Maybe the last straw was when his new little girlfriend rejected him. I mean the one we saw at the Sailaway Party.”

  “Ah.”

  She lay down again and closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed, then evened. She was asleep. I changed into the classiest clothes I could reach without unpacking entirely, and then I left the room, closing the door behind me as quietly as I could.

  * * *

  —

  Out in the hallway, a wave of weariness seemed to wash over me. I had to lean back against a wall to steady myself. A passing room steward, grinning, said, “Don’t worry, this is the rough part!” He meant the sea.

  The elevator area was crowded with cruisers. A little girl was jumping and pointing. I heard a rattle and a moan, and saw, approaching the pack from the forward hallway, the grim reaper. It wore a dark robe and a dark hat and moaned again as it drifted closer. It was coming for me as it had come for Clark, as it so often comes for elderly cruisers pushing the limits of their bodies to brave one last vacation. The strange purpose of this particular cruise meant nothing to this specter, because no purpose matters to Death.

  Then I recognized the thing for what it was, a woman costumed as the Witch in Chains, a favorite character at Chomp events. Her cheeks were painted snot green, her robe was long and black, her hat pointy, in the grand tradition of witches in thirties movie musicals, but she also had chains draped around her neck and arms, like Jacob Marley weighed down by his sins. Pinned to her gown was a button that read:

  Chomp returns

  Witch gets burned!

  The Witch raised her arms and shook her chains at me; instead of rattling, they bounced around her crinkly forearms. They were plastic. “Chomp’s coming back!” she cried. “Oh no! He’s going to lock me up.”

  A passenger stepped forward. “Can I have a selfie?”

  The Witch moaned and pointed to a smaller button that read PIX $5, HATS $10, SHIRTS $20.

  I took the stairs.

  * * *

  —

  My father’s text read “I’m on ship too saw you come by rm 653.” At least he made no pretense of celebrating the coincidence. Room 653 was not on the VIP floor, but it would have a balcony, which meant he must have spent a fortune—and this was a man who never replaced a pair of sandals before at least five years. I knocked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look through the peephole, Dad.”

  “Peephole? Oh. Hey. There you are.”

  The door opened just enough to reveal a few degrees of the thin arc of my father’s unnerving welcome smile. It had tricked more than one dinner guest into thinking they were at the wrong house. I was one of the only people in the world who understood that, on those rare occasions when my father smiled, he meant it.

  “I’m not ready,” he said. “You’ll have to come back. Where’s your mother?”

  “In our room.”

  “Good.”

  A family was passing behind me in the hallway. My father’s single visible eye tracked them as they went.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Taking a little holiday. You know, quick break from the old totalitarian regime. My company I mean. Not America.” The eye darted about nervously. “Nothing against totalitarians. I thought maybe we could chat. I mean the three
of us. The whole family.”

  The other family had formed a huddle three doors down. The father was stabbing his cardkey fruitlessly at the slot.

  “How did you get a ticket?” I asked.

  “The old story.”

  “What old story?”

  “A friend.”

  He didn’t have friends. “Let me in.”

  The floor tilted underneath us, a gentle motion perceptible mainly in our stomachs and our minds. The little girl shrieked and threw herself dramatically against the wall. The whole family collapsed into giggles, the best defense against fear.

  “You should’ve called first,” my father said, “or texted, like I did. But you have to shell out for that rip-off cruise-text system. It’s like five bucks to send a message. But hey, we’re family. We make sacrifices.”

  “Why won’t you let me in?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “What are they?”

  I immediately regretted the question. Appealing to rationality never worked with my father. He was a master at anticipating objection and always had a counterargument ready. If you objected to it, he would improvise a different counter on the spot, and further as needed. His arguments might be glib, foolish, or even contradictory, but they never stopped coming. He could exhaust or madden any opponent.

  “For one thing,” he said, “I’m not dressed.”

  The mother of the nearby family heard that. She flashed me an unsteady grin. She probably wondered whether we were being silly or being gay. She was skinny, with deep hollows on the sides of her neck, below her throat, and the inside of her elbow. Not all Chompians were flabby. Not all were incurious either. If our conversation grew much longer or weirder, she might report it.

  Now her oldest boy was taking a turn with the cardkey. Did anyone in that family know how to use a magnetic strip?

  “I won’t look,” I said. “Just open the door. We have to talk. Something happened.” What else could I say with that woman examining me?

  “That what’s things do,” my father said, in one of those flashes of humor I’ve always detested. “I’ll stop by your room later. I’ll show you photos I took of the protest. I’d post ’em on my site right now if the Wi-Fi here didn’t cost like forty bucks an hour.” He was a software engineer but he still hadn’t figured out Instagram.

  “You can’t stop by. I told you. Mom’s there.”

  I heard a tiny chunk beside me. With a lusty cheer, the family piled into their room. The mom lingered for a moment outside, watching me but pretending to fiddle with her lanyard.

  “I don’t mind. Got to go. I’ll text you later. What’s five bucks? It’s your inheritance.” He shut the door. I even heard him snap home the bolt lock.

  The boat rocked again, this time so hard I staggered. The world was wobbling on its axis. My father had always been the only person I knew who held absolutely no secrets. When I was a child, he always answered the most embarrassing questions I could pose, including how many girlfriends he’d had in high school (zero) and why (nerd). I’m sure he would have admitted how often he masturbated or picked his nose, if he thought I had a good reason for asking. He was unable to lie. At his job, he was admired—so he claimed—for telling colleagues exactly what he thought of them. He was never fired and never promoted.

  Growing up, I remembered him being happy and sometimes, though only with me and my mother, even pleasantly goofy. But as the years passed, her growing unhappiness caused his much steeper slide into depression. In the months before she left, he was silent at meals and in the car, sedentary on weekends, subdued even when I persuaded him to join me in a favorite pastime, like playing backgammon or watching Galaxy Quest. He never spoke of his unhappiness. He never had to. Staying home with him was about as much fun as a hangover.

  After I moved to the city, I never visited for more than a weekend at a time. In recent years I told myself he must have made peace with bachelorhood. Time may not heal all wounds, but old obsessions can at least make way for pleasanter preoccupations. He’d begun to read historical fiction. He went a few times a year to the Philharmonic. Maybe he had even found someone to share a subscription with. I was always afraid to ask outright how he was doing.

  I could hardly avoid the question now. Clearly he had changed—he was on a cruise—but not every change was for the better. What if his decline had actually accelerated in recent years? What if his orderly mind had finally blown up? America had changed. America had blown up.

  A week ago I had told him my mother’s boyfriend was about to propose marriage. And now that boyfriend was dead, and my father, for no obvious reason, was on the scene. He was the one person on board who had reason to hate Clark Wolfson. Besides my mother.

  She would be awake by now. It was five-thirty, and our dinner seating was at six-thirty. She’d be preparing for Chomp. She’d be wondering where I was.

  A whiteboard near the elevator listed upcoming entertainment events. The Stomp for Chomp Dance Mingle was coming up. My mother would have to wait.

  Chapter 14

  The Admiral Nelson Dance Hall was up on the forward end of the Mediterranean Deck, which the press packet described as “The World Headquarters of Fun.” Since I was at the aft end of the deck, I had to first pass by what appeared to be Satellite Offices of Fun, including the Kid Warehouse, with its cardkey-accepting video arcade and the Shoot Your Sister swivel-mounted sponge-dart guns; the Oxford Don Library, with its vintage collection of 1980s board games and water-soaked paperbacks abandoned by previous cruisers; and the Tea Tyme Pastry Bar, where fancy people, disdaining the pallet loads of free desserts at the buffet, could shell out an extra five bucks for a cappuccino enriched by a brick of fudge. The junior NRA crowd was loving Shoot Your Sister; the library and Tea Tyme were empty.

  Midship, things along the boulevard got funner. I passed the jazz-and-trivia bar, the sports bar, the martini bar, the whiskey bar, and the ordinary bar, all on the left side of the boulevard, to the ship’s interior. Windows overlooking the sea were on the exterior side. Chomp security guards were on both sides, standing erect by the entrance to every bar and in the gaps between outer windows. They were refraining, at this point, from checking bags or IDs or conducting frisks, but their suspicious looks at passing cruisers made clear that they reserved the right to do so.

  A few passengers were avoiding the fun to stare out at the sea. It was the same in every sparkling direction, out to the horizon: innumerable small waves were gathering, building, erupting into white spit, and then collapsing back into the common element, like human lives, briefly thrilling and then forgotten.

  “Make way!” someone called.

  A troop of Chomp security men were jogging down the boulevard. They bore no obvious weapons, but the exercise was still sufficiently military to get people cheering.

  “Go get ’em!” people shouted.

  I turned as they passed. The back of their jackets read MAKE OUR NATION NEW AGAIN.

  * * *

  —

  The Boulevard of Fun passed under a neon arch and alongside the casino. The prismatic insanity of the slot-machine clusters began just off the path and extended far into the ship’s interior, attracting the weak-minded with their chirping jungle of neuronal feedback exploiters. The classier and more social enticements of the table games were also temptingly near. The sight of well-dressed cruisers cheering one another on at craps was a common motif in cruise ship brochures. These tables were now mostly idle, though a few neophytes had gathered around the roulette table. Everybody knows how to bet red and green.

  A voice rose up from a group of young men along the back row of slots: “Did you just call the president a dick?”

  And another in response: “No! I said sort of a dick.”

  I stopped.

  “Are you joking?” the first voice demanded. “Are you making fun of us
?”

  “He wants to die,” someone else said.

  There was no security in sight. The casino’s entry point was too ill defined for bag checks.

  I veered from the boulevard toward the pack of men. As I passed a machine called Devil’s Due, a sweating Chompian raised his hands in victory, almost conking my chin with his Rolling Rock. Three devils’ faces had popped up on his screen. Their red wavy hair and satisfied smirks were like full-color caricatures of Chomp.

  The pack closed tight as I approached. The victim hidden within must have been backed against the slot-machine bank.

  “Take it back.” The Chompian who said this loomed above his posse. His gel-flattened head spoke of the careful preparation it took to be a leader. “Bitch lover.” This was a traditional pejorative, never approved by Chomp but never rejected either.

  “Why should I?” The victim’s voice broke at the end, which made me admire his courage all the more.

  “Take it back,” the leader repeated. “To start.” I heard a smack of fist against fist. The finish would be coughing blood.

  I glanced around for security, or at least a waitress, anyone in a uniform. I saw no one but the croupier at the roulette table, and she had her hands full explaining the various betting minimums.

  “How about I lay out my thinking?” The victim’s voice managed to achieve a tone of friendly cajolery, albeit a quavering one. Had I heard that voice before? I stood on tiptoe to try to get a look at him. “Let me tell you why I believe Mr. Chomp is a—”

  The leader grunted in warning.

  “—a dick,” the victim concluded, undaunted, gathering unwarranted confidence with every word. “Then you tell me why he’s not a dick. We have a back-and-forth. Get it? Maybe you’ll change my mind! Or maybe we’ll just agree to disagree, no hard feelings, I’ll buy the next beer. Whole round of beers, whatever, you just buy me one. Okay? I’ll start. First, everyone take one of these.”

  I couldn’t see what he was handing out, but I definitely heard first a smack and then the plop and splatter of something hitting the floor. I started circumnavigating the huddle. I found a gap between biceps, and could finally see the man’s face.