by A M Homes
“Smoke and mirrors,” she says. “Hollywood magic.”
The agents look away, their eyes, ever vigilant, scan the room. In Los Angeles, the agents dress down. They dress like golf pros—knitted short-sleeved shirts, sweaters, and permanent-press pants. They keep their guns in fanny packs under their sweaters. Their ear buds are clear plastic, like hearing aids.
“That’s lovely,” she says. “I’ll take a jar.”
A woman comes rushing across the store toward her, the agents pull in. “I heard you were here.” The woman moves to kiss her on the cheek, they brush the sides of their faces, their hairdos against each other.
“You look fantastic,” she says, unable to remember the woman’s name—she thinks it might be Maude.
“Of course I do,” the woman says. “I’m like a time machine. Every year, I intend to look five years younger. By the time I die I’ll look like Jon Benet.”
“Could I trouble you for an autograph?” someone interrupts, handing her a piece of paper to sign.
A woman standing off to the side pushes her little girl in the First Lady’s direction. “Go and shake her hand,” she says. “She used to be married to the President of the United States.”
The First Lady, practiced in the art of greeting children, reaches out. The child extends a single finger, touching her like she’s not quite real, like tagging her—You’re it. The little girl touches the former First Lady the way you’d touch something that had cooties, the way you’d touch something just to prove you were brave enough to do it. She touches the former First Lady and then runs.
In Niketown she buys him a pair of aqua socks—they won’t fall off the way his slippers do, and he can wear them everywhere: inside, outside, in the bath, to bed. She buys the aqua socks and when she realizes that no one there knows who she is, she leaves quickly.
“That was nice,” she says when they are back in the car. She has started to enjoy these impromptu excursions more than official functions. At First Lady events, at library luncheons, disease breakfasts, she is under the microscope. People look at her, checking for signs of wear and tear. She keeps up a good front, she has always kept up a good front. She is careful not to be caught off guard.
“Removed from public view”—that’s how they describe him on his Web site. He was removed from public view in 1988, like a statue or a painting. She will not allow him to be embarrassed, humiliated. She will not allow even the closest of their friends to see him like this. They should remember him as he was, not as he is.
Meanwhile, the two of them are in exile, self-imposed, self-preserving.
When she gets home, he is in the backyard with Philip, playing catch with a Nerf football.
“Did you miss me?” she asks.
“Liz Taylor called,” he says. “She’s not well. I couldn’t understand a word of what she said.”
Is he making it up—getting back at her for having gone out for an hour? She turns to Philip. “Did Liz Taylor really call? Do I have to call her back?”
Philip shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t play games with me, Philip. He’s not a toy, he’s a man. He’s a man,” she repeats. “How am I supposed to know what’s real? How am I supposed to know what the truth is anymore?” She shouts and then storms off to her room.
Philip and the President resume tossing the ball.
“My grip is stronger than it ever was,” he says, squeezing the ball, squishing it, not realizing that it’s not a real football. “I could never have done that as a young man.”
Philip, running for a pass, stumbles over a lounge chair and plunges into the pool.
The President instantly dives in, wrapping his arm around Philip’s neck, pulling. Philip, afraid to fight, afraid he will accidentally drown the President, guides them toward the shallow end. Philip climbs out, pulling the President out of the water, the President’s arm still wrapped around his neck, choking him.
“They call me the Gripper, because I don’t let go.”
“I think it was Gipper, sir. They called you the Gipper, as in ‘win one for the Gipper.’”
“Seventy-eight,” he says.
“What’s seventy-eight?”
“You’re the seventy-eighth person I saved. I used to be a life guard,” he says, and it is entirely true. “Hey, does that count as a bath?”
She is in her dressing room. It started as a walk-in closet and kept expanding. They broke through a wall into one of the children’s bedrooms and then through another into the guest room, and now it is a dressing suite, a queen’s waiting room. The carpet is Wedgwood blue, the walls white with gold trim, calmly patriotic, American royal. It is her hide-away, her fortress, command and control. She’s got a computer, fax, private telephone lines, and a beauty parlor complete with a professional hair dryer. There’s a divan that used to belong to Merv Griffin, photographs of her with everyone—the little lady with the big head standing next to Princess Di, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Gorbachevs.
In her favorite velour sweat suit, she mounts the contraption—a recumbent bike with built-in screen—she can watch TV, go online, surf the Web, write e-mails, or pedal her way down an animated bucolic country lane.
She needs to be in motion—constant motion. That’s one of the reasons they call her the Hummingbird.
She logs on, checking in with her secretary—would she be willing to host a Los Angeles event with the head of the Republican Party? “OK as per N.R.,” she types. She reviews a proposed album of photographs and sends a message to the chief archivist at the Presidential Library. “Dig deeper. There is a better picture of me with Raisa, also a nice one of the President and me waltzing. That should be the closing image.”
She e-mails the lawyer, the business manager, the White House Alumni Office. Nothing happens without her knowledge, without her approval. She is in communication because he can’t be.
Using a series of code words, she moves in further, signing into the First Ladies’ Club, a project started by Barbara Bush as a way of keeping in touch; trading helpful hints about difficult subjects such as transition times—when you’re not elected, you’re not wanted—and standing by your man when indictments come down. They keep each other updated on their special interests, literacy, mental health, addiction, “Just Say No.” They all talk about Hillary behind her back—she’s a little too ambitious for them. And Hillary doesn’t update her weekly “What I Did for the Good of the Country” column, instead just sending impersonal perky messages like “You Go Girl!”
The communications man has her wired up, six accounts under a variety of names—virtually untraceable. This is her solace, her salvation. This is the one place where she can be herself, or better yet, be someone else.
Under the name Edith Iowa she logs into an Alzheimer’s support group.
“What do you do when they don’t recognize you anymore? ‘I know you from somewhere,’ he says, looking at me, worried, struggling.”
“He asked for more light. He kept asking more light, more light. I turned on every light in the house. He kept saying, Why is it so dark in here? Don’t we pay the electric bills? I grabbed the flashlight and shined it in his face—is this enough light for you? He froze. I could see right through him and there was nothing there. Am I horrible? Did I hurt him? Is someone going to take him away? Do I ever say how much I miss him?”
She reads the stories and cries. She cries because she knows what they’re talking about, because she lives in fear of the same things happening to her, because she knows that despite everything it will all come true. After a lifetime of trying not to be like everyone else, in the end she is just like everyone else.
When the doctor told them it was Alzheimer’s, she thought they’d deal with it the same way they’d dealt with so many things—cancer, the assassination attempt, more cancer. But then she realized that it was not something they’d deal with, it was something she would deal with, alone. She cries because it is the erasing of a marriage, the erasing of h
istory, as though the experiences, the memories which define her, never happened, as though nothing is real.
“How brave you are,” Larry King said to her. What choice does she have?
She orders products online, things to make life easier: plastic plugs for the electric outlets, locks for the cabinets, motion detectors that turn on lamps, flood alarms, fold-down shower seats, a nonslip rubber mat for around the toilet, diapers. They arrive at a post box downtown, addressed to Western Industries. She stores them in what used to be Skipper’s room. Like preparing for the arrival of an infant, she orders things in advance, she wants to have whatever he’ll need on hand, she wants there to be no surprises.
Under her most brazen moniker, Lady Hawke, she goes into chat rooms, love online. The ability to flirt, to charm, is still important to her. She lists her interests as homemaking and politics. She says she’s divorced with no children and puts her age at fifty-three.
—Favorite drink?
—Whiskey sour.
—Snack food?
—Caviar.
She is in correspondence with EZRIDER69, a man whose Harley has a sidecar.
—Just back from a convention in Santa Barbara—ever been there?
—Used to go all the time.
—U ride?
—Horses.
—Would love to take you for a spin in my sidecar.
—Too fast for me.
—How about on a Ferris wheel?
She feels herself blushing, it spreads through her, a liquidy warm rush.
—Dinner by the ocean?
EZ is asking her out on a date. He is a motorcyclist, a self-described leather man with a handlebar mustache, a professional hobbyist, he likes fine wines, romance, and the music of Neil Diamond.
“Not possible,” she writes back. “I am not able to leave my husband. He is older and failing.”
—I thought U were divorced?
She doesn’t respond.
—U still there?
—Yes.
—I don’t care what you are—Divorced, Married, Widowed. You could be married to the President of the United States and it wouldn’t change anything—I’d still like to take you to dinner.
It changes everything. She looks at herself in the mirrored closet doors, a seventy-seven-year-old woman flirting while riding an exercise bike.
A hollow body, an elected body, a public body. The way to best shield yourself in a public life is simply to empty the inside, to have no secrets, to have nothing that requires attention, to be a vessel, a kind of figurehead, a figurine like a Staffordshire dog.
She goes to the entertainment channel and gets the latest on Brad and Jennifer. They are all in her town, down the road, around the corner. She could summon any of them and they would come quickly, out of curiosity, but she can’t, she won’t. Like a strange Siamese twin, the more removed he becomes the more removed she becomes.
She changes screen names again—STARPOWER—and checks in with her psychic friends, her astrological soul mates. You have to believe in something and she has always loved the stars—she is a classic Cancer, he is a prototypical Aquarius. Mercury is in retrograde, the planets are slipping out of alignment, hold on, Cancer, hold on. The planets are transiting, ascending—she works hard at keeping her houses in order.
She is pushing, always pushing. She rides for three hours, fifty miles a day. Her legs are skinny steel rods. When she’s done, she showers, puts on a new outfit, and emerges refreshed.
Philip has taken him out for an hour. He still gets great pleasure from shaking hands, pressing the flesh. So, occasionally Philip dresses him up like a clown, brings him to random parking lots around town, and lets him work the crowd. In his costume, he looks like a cross between Ronald McDonald and Howdy Doody. It makes the agents very nervous.
“Mommy,” he calls when he’s back.
“Yes?”
“Come here.” He is alone in the bedroom.
“Give me a minute,” she says. “I’m powdering my nose.”
She goes into the room. He beckons to her, whispering, “There’s a strange man over there who keeps talking to me.” He points at the television.
“That’s not a strange man, that’s Dan Rather—you know him from a long time ago.”
“He’s staring at me.”
“He’s not watching you, you’re watching him. It’s television.” She goes to the TV and blows a raspberry at the screen. Dan Rather doesn’t react. He keeps reporting the news.
“See,” she says. “He can’t see you.”
“Did I like him? I don’t think I liked him.”
She changes the channel. “You always liked Tom Brokaw.”
At twilight, he travels through time, lost in space. Terrified of the darkness, of the coming night, he follows her from room to room, at her heels, shadowing.
“It’s cocktail time,” she says. “Would you like a drink?”
He looks at her blankly. “Are you plotting something? Is there something I’m supposed to know? Something I’m supposed to be doing? I’m always thinking there’s a paper that needs to be signed. What am I trying to remember?”
“You tell me,” she says, making herself a gin and tonic.
He wanders off, in search. She stands in the living room sipping, enjoying the feel of the heavy crystal glass in her hand, running her finger over the facets, taking a moment to herself before going after him.
He is in her dressing room. He has opened every drawer and rummaged through, leaving the floor littered with clothing. Her neatly folded cashmere sweaters are scattered around the room. He’s got a pair of panty hose tied around his neck like an ascot.
He has taken out a suitcase and started packing. “I’ve been called away,” he says, hurriedly going to and from the closet. He pulls out everything on a hanger, filling the suitcase with her dresses.
“No,” she screams, seeing her beloved gowns rolled into a ball and stuffed into the bag. She rushes towards him, swatting him, pulling a Galanos out of his hands.
“It’s all right,” he says, going into the closet for more. “I’ll be back.”
Soledad, having heard the scream, charges through the door.
The place is a mess, ransacked.
“Sundowning,” Philip says, arriving after the fact. “It’s a common phenomena.”
“Where the heck are all my clean shirts?” he asks. At the moment he is wearing four or five, like a fashion statement, piled one atop the other, buttoned so that part of each one is clearly visible. “I’m out of time.”
“It’s early,” she says, leading him out of the room. On one of the sites she read that distraction is good for this kind of disorientation. “It’s not time for you to go,” she says. “Shall we dance?”
She puts on an old Glenn Miller record and they glide around the living room. The box step is embedded in his genes, he has not forgotten. She looks up at him. His chest is still deep, his pompadour still high, though graying at the roots.
“Tomorrow, when Philip gives you your bath, we’ll have him dye your hair,” she says, leading him into the night.
“I don’t want to upset you,” he whispers in her ear. “But we’re being held hostage.”
“By whom?” she whispers back.
“It’s important that we stay calm, that we not give them any information. It’s good that I’m having a little trouble with my memory, Bill Casey told me so many things that I should never have known…Did I have some sort of an affair?”
She pulls away from him, unsettled. “Did you?”
“I keep remembering something about getting into a lot of trouble for an affair, everyone being very unhappy with me.”
“Iran Contra?”
“Who was she? A foreign girl, exotic, a beautiful dancer on a Polynesian island? Did my wife know?” he asks. “Did she forgive me? I should have known better, I should not have put us in that position, it almost cost us everything.”
She changes the record to something fa
ster, happier, a mix tape someone made her—Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer. She spins in circles around him.
He looks at her blankly. “Have we known each other very long?”
They have dinner in the bedroom on trays in front of the television set. This is the way they’ve done it for years. As early as six or seven o’clock they change into their night clothes: pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers for him; a zipped red housedress with a Nehru collar and gold braiding, like a queen’s robe, for her. They dress as though they are actors playing a scene—the quiet evening at home.
She slips into the closet to change. She always undresses in the closet.
“You know my mother used to do that,” he says while she’s gone.
Red. She has a dozen red housedresses, cocktail pajamas, leisure suits. The Hummingbird, the elf, the red pepper, cherry tomato, royal highness, power and blood.
“Why is the soup always cold?”
“So you won’t burn yourself,” she says.
He coughs during dinner, half-choking.
“Chew before you swallow,” she says.
After dinner she pops one of his movies into the VCR. A walk down memory lane is supposed to be good for him, it is supposed to be comforting to see things from his past.
“Do you recall my premiere in Washington?”
“Your inaugural? January 20, 1981?”
“Now that was something.” He stands up. “I’d like to thank each and every one of you for giving me this award.”
“Tonight it’s Kings Row,” she says.
He gets a kick out of watching himself—the only hitch is that he thinks everything is real, it’s all one long home movie.
“My father-in-law-to-be was a surgeon, scared the hell out of me when he cut off my legs.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks, offended. “Dr. Loyal never wanted to hurt you,” she said. “He liked you very much.”
“Where’s the rest of me?” he screams. “Where’s the rest of me?” He’s been so many different people, in so many different roles, and now he doesn’t know where it stops or starts—he doesn’t know who he is.
