Undertow

by Warren Adler

  “I don’t like it,” Jack said.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “It’s the word ‘outing.’ They could have done it without the word ‘outing.’ The sons of bitches.”

  Christine handed the paper to Don. He was slumped in a chair. He let the paper fall. Karen picked it up.

  “How wonderful,” Don said. He crumpled the paper and threw it on the floor. It had to hurt to see it on paper like that, so blatant. The telephone rang again. Jack and I ran into the living room. Jack reached the phone first.

  “More on the ticker,” he said. “You sure—they’ve got Marlena’s name in the story? Here, give it to Christine.” She took the phone from him and began to get it down into her shorthand book. When she finished, Barnstable grabbed the phone from her.

  “Henry. Bring Al Simon and Joe Kessler and come on down to the house.” He gave them directions.

  “Step on it. Leave Steve at the motel and stand by. No. Call Washington. Put out a staff bulletin. No comment. No one is to comment. Tell the whole staff simply to clam up. Get it?”

  XVI

  When I got back to the screened porch, Don was still slumped in the chair, sipping a drink. He looked slightly catatonic.

  “I’m beginning to worry, Lou,” Karen said. It was the first remark she had addressed specifically to me since arriving. “Now, I’m getting scared.”

  “How the hell do you think I’ve been feeling?” I said.

  “Do you think he can take it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “That’s a question to a question.”

  “— don’t know, Karen,” I said.

  Her jaw seemed firm, her lips pursed, as if she was gathering her forces for some sudden resolution. There is a mystique about marriage. Something does pass between two people in a marriage that is not articulated, that only a threat of extinction brings to the surface. With Karen and Don, it was down to the nitty gritty now. We both looked at him. He must have caught our expression of despair.

  “I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine,” he said, his voice shaky. “Just let me get over the shock of it.” He stood up, turned white, seemed about to faint, then sat down again.

  “How about lying down for a while, Don?” Karen asked.

  She helped him up and took him to one of the bedrooms. He lay down heavily and closed his eyes. He was, quite literally, physically and emotionally exhausted. She covered him with the bedspread and shut the door.

  “He might as well get some sleep. Things are going to get a hell of a lot worse.” Then she looked at me. “I’m going to call the boys. I’ll try to explain. What can I say?”

  She went to the other bedroom to make the calls.

  By the time Jack’s staff assistants arrived, bedlam had broken out in front of the house. The press had begun to descend, and a little knot of mangy men and women stood across the street, just watching. Photographers were shooting pictures of the front of the house. One had even tried to break inside from the rear, but Jack Barnstable had thrown him out. Soon we heard sirens again, and two carloads of state police arrived. They took up posts at all sides of the house. We were besieged. The price of fame!

  As if by instinct, the staff men pulled up chairs and sat around the kitchen table. Jack sat at the head of the table. I was beside him, and Christine, pad ready, sat next to me. There was Henry Davis, greying early at thirty-two, a kind of public relations theorist, intense and humorless; Al Simon, research and polling expert, twenty-nine, Ph.D., Harvard, balding; and Al Kessler, AA to Barnstable, the next link in the chain.

  “All right. Here it is,” Jack said. He looked over his shoulder into the other room. “Where’s Karen?”

  “On the phone,” I answered.

  “You all know what has happened. Marlena Jackson was drowned. I’m not going to bore you with the facts. There will be hundreds of interpretations and opinions. None of them will matter. We’ve got to construct a rebuttal—one that holds water, one that gives us a chance to recover. Frankly, I don’t expect miracles. It may take years to gain the same momentum we had before yesterday. We have one job, and one job only, to prevent the political assassination of Senator Donald Benjamin James.”

  I assumed that it was my turn then. I outlined the strategy that Don and I had agreed on last night. I stressed the importance of being vague and the need to control, as much as was feasible, the outflow of information. They all agreed that we had picked the most persuasive options.

  “All right, Lou,” Jack said. “We’ve been brought to this point. The opening story, unfortunately, had a bad smell to it.”

  “I think,” Davis said, “we’re going to have to learn to roll with the punches, at least at this initial stage, and milk enough out of the peripheral details to work out a ‘let’s wait until all the facts are in before I judge’ kind of reaction. Naturally, our opening statement has got to have the seeds of the entire scenario.”

  “Like what?” Jack asked.

  “We’ve got to give them something to rationalize, an ‘out’ for the senator. One: we’ve got to imply that this is a monumental tragedy, not only the loss of a human being, but the potential loss of a brilliant mind. Note the emphasis on the mind. Really gush over this one. And two: express extreme confidence and bullishness over the senator’s political future. Any doubts here will plant bad vibes. There will be plenty of commentators who will write us off summarily, just to overdramatize. That point is essential.”

  “Any comments?” Jack asked.

  “I think we’ve got to stress a moral position,” Al Kessler said. “I mean moral, not in the sense of values but in the old-fashioned sense, as opposed to the immoral. Somehow, we’ve got to get the point across that the senator was acting within the bounds of traditional morals—in a sexual sense.”

  “By all means,” Davis agreed. “We’ve got to blunt the inference that the senator is an adulterer.”

  “We are hoping that there won’t be any hard facts to go on,” I said. They all looked at me, waiting for me to continue. I thought better of it. My silence confused them.

  “Hard facts?” Al Kessler asked.

  “You mean evidence,” Al Simon pointed out.

  “Evidence of intercourse. That would mean an examination of the body,” Davis said.

  “I think we should assume at this stage that such an examination won’t take place,” I said. “If there is an autopsy, we’ve got to change the strategy.”

  “That means there won’t be any hard facts—hard facts of adultery,” Davis said.

  “Unless there’s admission,” Simon said.

  “Admission?”

  “On the part of the senator.”

  “That would be political suicide,” Jack Barnstable said. The thought agitated him. “That would be the end. We couldn’t recover from that one.”

  “You’re undoubtedly right,” Davis said, “but for reasons that are far more complex, in my opinion, than the simple fact of adultery. It is adultery with a black girl. Then there is death connected with it. Drowning—a death by violence. Then consider the other aspect, the lag of time in reporting the incident. That implies two things rather vividly. One: panic. Two? Foul play. We’re talking here of the presidency, a presidential election. There is an instability of character that reflects itself in these two points; at all costs, we’ve got to checkmate that kind of thinking.”

  “That’s laying it on the line,” Barnstable said. “You seem to be saying that the challenge is insurmountable.”

  “I’m saying that we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Davis responded. “Some people, you know, might excuse adultery. Lots of people would feel genuine compassion for the senator; the capacity for forgiveness is enormous in us sentimental Americans. But will there be enough to forgive? How many votes will we lose from those who will not forgive? And how many votes will we lose from people who do forgive? And how many are there in this country who won’t forgive the fact that the girl was black? Then there will be th
ose who have lingering suspicions of murder. Yes—murder. We grow up on a diet of murder and conspiracy. There are still voices that won’t be stilled on the matter of the Kennedy brothers. Besides, doubt sells. People write books about doubts, and other people buy them and believe the books. Above all, we can’t look or smell conspiratorial. And then, suppose we cross all those hurdles and get the kind of ratios we need; what about those who will simply lose confidence in the ability of the senator to act in a stress situation, one that requires quick, decisive action. You see the problem?”

  “We’ve seen the problem from the beginning,” I said. “We chose to wait until we had come up with a plan. We deliberated. Deliberation takes time. We didn’t shoot from the hip.”

  “Calculating,” Henry Davis said. “Substitute calculation for deliberation. That makes it something sinister.”

  “What the hell are you getting at, Davis?” Jack said. “Somewhere along the line, we’ve got to grasp the threads of optimism. I appreciate your being the devil’s advocate, but we have committed ourselves to saving the senator’s career. We wouldn’t be spending this much time on the problem if we had meant to surrender.”

  “I am completely aware of the problem. That’s why I have been the devil’s advocate. I’ve just put into words what we are all feeling. We’re not fools, any of us. Neither is the senator. Least of all the senator. Our one hope, as you must already have doped out, as your initial strategy suggests, is to befuddle the public with vagaries, platitudes and bullishness. I’m with you one hundred percent. But, let’s not kid ourselves. Let’s not pretend among ourselves that the senator didn’t have an affair with Marlena Jackson; nor can we deny that he waited until he had worked out a plan before he acted.”

  “He’s still the same person he was before all this happened,” I said. “He’s got to have collected some brownie points with the American people.”

  I was conscious of saying something not quite in the league of the men around the table. These were the pros. Who was I kidding? The American people? That was a phrase that one didn’t use in this company; that was only for the consumer. Who the hell were the American people? They were the one hundred twenty million who voted, the mixed bag of conflicting demography that lay out there like the animals of Noah’s Ark, all greedy for their own particular brand of nourishment. The cows ate grass. The pigs ate corn. The monkeys ate bananas. The giraffes ate leaves. Relate it to ethnic groups, young and old, black and white and yellow, union workers, farmers—menageries.

  “Okay,” Barnstable said. “Let’s convert all this talk to practicalities, to a course of action.”

  While we were talking, Kessler and Christine were busily taking notes.

  “The way I see it,” Davis said, “we’ve got to write a statement, the initial statement—short and sweet, along the lines originally suggested. I’ll write that. But that will only be the initial counterattack. It’s got to appear in time for tomorrow morning’s papers and the six o’clock news. For TV, we’ve got to have another dimension. The cameras will be coming down here as fast as they can.”

  He looked out the window.

  “They’re not here yet. That’s because we’re a little removed from the big markets. Probably, the Washington guys will get here shortly. We have got to give them some footage of the senator and Mrs. James. That’s essential. Hopefully, the body will be found either before the cameras arrive or after the deadline for the six o’clock. The juxtaposition of the body and the senator and his wife would be unfortunate. The footage has got to imply that there was no adultery, that senator and Mrs. James are as one, true to each other beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt. That’s a tough order but it will help.”

  “That makes a lot of sense, Davis,” Barnstable said. “Christine, get that down.”

  “Do we all agree?”

  None of us was certain that this was necessarily the right course of action, but Henry Davis was persuasive and logical.

  I tried to put myself in the role of the viewer on the Monday night news. I had just gotten home from work. I was tired. The mortgage was bugging me. My wife was bugging me. The kids were costing me a fortune. Then, looming up at me, momentarily, was the juicy story of America’s shining knight, Senator Donald James. What would my reaction be? Well, the son-of-a-bitch finally got caught. How does he pull out of that one? You poor bastard. You poor bastard. You poor, dumb bastard. But I would have some doubts, seeing that pretty wife of his with him, standing by him. Maybe . . .

  “Naturally,” Davis continued. “That wouldn’t be the whole story. There’d be sidebars. Interviews with the police chief, possibly with the girl’s father, with her friends. Hell, if they catch the father at the moment of his fresh pain, that will make one hell of a visual. And it won’t be very good for our team. A good TV editor and the networks are masters of this; they will be able to practically pin a murder rap on the senator. Tht’s why I say that our first counterattack can only be the statement and the husband and wife footage. We’ve got to let the story blast off fast, all the flack out of the way as quickly as possible. Leave ’em with the image of family solidarity and condolences for a member of the staff. That’s providing we can maintain control. We have only two factors to worry about; statement and footage. The senator simply says nothing. He looks serious, but not remorseful. With the right breaks, we would muddle through, depending on what else is presently traumatizing the American people.”

  “Then what?” Barnstable asked. “What happens tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow, hopefully, we make contact with the father. This relationship is crucial. We have got to make contact with the father. He has got to be persuaded that the senator is genuinely bereaved. That is essential. If this doesn’t work, we’ve got problems. The visuals of the relationship have got to be genuine. The senator must establish his humanity and concern for the feelings of the father. People will understand that. And, of course, Mrs. James has got to be present while the cameras work. If we’re clever enough, we can get the father in the middle of a group shot, perhaps at graveside. It must remove the cloud of guilt. It must clean up the story as much as possible.”

  “Suppose the father doesn’t cooperate?” Al Simon asked.

  “He has got to cooperate.”

  “There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip,” Jack Barnstable said.

  “This is not an exact science,” Davis said.

  “But please understand we are dealing with media only, the extension of the mind. We create only what we wish to create. The media will help us expand the dimension of our actions. I’m not saying that this course of action is foolproof. In any event, the impact of the follow-up is also essential.”

  He paused and looked about the table. He appeared neither confident nor arrogant, always coldly logical, speaking in terms that we all could understand, hammering out a course of action that seemed to lead us through a minefield.

  “The follow-up is equally important. By the third day, the story will have begun to run its course. It will have dropped from the number one story of the day to two or three, depending on what is happening in the world. Hope for a declaration of war, an assassination, something cataclysmic. But don’t bank on it. Now we’ve got to get a syndicated columnist to write a sympathetic review that will appear to be inside dope. You know, throw open the human side, explain anguish—a kind of philosophical look into the senator’s psyche.”

  “What columnist?” Al Simon asked.

  “Someone with a good sense of justice. Not a liberal. I’d pick a conservative on this one. Someone with a noblesse oblige point of view. Liberals tend to be rather snotty and holier than thou. You know, they don’t think their shit stinks.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “The big danger, it seems to me, will come from left field.”

  “Left field?”

  “Some obscure, investigative type of reporter determined at all costs to search out the truth. He’s probably just a few years out of c
ollege and just burning to sock it to the system. The big reporters will never get off their fat asses. They’ll spout philosophy and write about the whole affair with broad abstractions. But keep a sharp lookout for that scrupulous, thick-lensed, eager-beaver who’ll sneak up on you and get the whole chain going.”

  I watched Davis’s eyes when he talked. They were ice blue under wire frame glasses, giving him a look of uncommon intensity, like some overzealous one-track idealogue, a fundamentalist preacher exhorting the gullible in some dimly-lit tent in Kansas.

  “I suppose we can also expect a flood of magazine copy,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Davis agreed. “That’s why those stills taken during the next day or so are so important. A bad picture in a magazine could damage us. There’s something about the magazine environment that has a lot more integrity than a newspaper.”

  “Okay,” Jack Barnstable said. “Suppose we follow the script and get all the breaks, how can we expect to come out?”

  “I think that’s a fair question. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a fair answer. I don’t really know. I’m not clairvoyant.”

  “Well, then speculate,” I said.

  He was such a smart-ass that I had to hear his prognosis. We all had to.

  “Do I have to?” he asked, smiling, enjoying his expanding role.

  “I think you owe it to us.”

  “Well, in the first place, I think he will slip considerably in a presidential preference poll if it were taken within the next seven days.”

  “How badly do you think he’ll slip?” Barnstable asked.

  “Badly.”

  “Permanent damage?”

  “Nothing is permanent in our business. We’re in the manufacturing business. If our product loses some demand potential, we’ll give it a new wrapper. Add some exotic ingredient.”

  “Like beefed-up toothpaste.”

  “I would hate to put it on that level,” Davis said. “That makes us so damned—crass. But, in terms of television, I’m afraid it’s true. Television, as the kids say, is where it’s at.”