by A M Homes
“What movie are we in?”
“We’re not in a movie right now, this is real,” she says, moving his dinner tray out of the way, reaching out to hold his hand.
“What time does the flight get in?”
“You’re home,” she says. “This is your home.”
He looks around. “Oh yeah, when did we buy this place?”
At eight, Soledad comes in with her knitting, trailed by Philip with a plate of cookies, four glasses of milk.
Philip flips on the game and the four of them settle in on the king-sized bed, Philip, the President, she, and Soledad, lined up in a row, postmodern Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. When the game begins, the President puts his hand over his heart and starts to sing.
“Oh say can you see…”
“Did you see that?” Soledad asks him. “He had that one on the rebound.”
Philip, wanting to practice his reflexology, tries it on the President. He slips off the President’s bedroom slippers and socks.
“Hey, quit tickling me.” The President jerks his feet away.
Philip offers his services to her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “My feet aren’t in good shape. I haven’t had a pedicure in weeks.” She pauses. “What the hell,” she says, kicking her slippers off. He is on the floor at the bottom of the bed. “That feels fantastic,” she says after twenty minutes.
Soledad is crocheting a multicolored afghan to send to her mother for Christmas.
“What color next?” she asks the President. “Blue or orange?”
“Orange,” the President says.
At night she is happy to have them there; it is a comfort not to be alone with him, and he seems to enjoy the company.
He sits on his side of the bed, picking invisible lint off himself.
“What are you going for there?” Philip asks.
“Bugs,” he says. “I’m crawling with bugs.”
Philip uses an imaginary spray and makes the spraying sound. Philip sprays the President and then he sprays himself. “You’re all clean now,” Philip says. “I sprayed you with disinfectant.” The President stops picking.
At a certain point he gets up to go to the bathroom.
“He’s getting worse,” she says when he’s gone.
They nod. The slow fade is becoming a fast forward.
He is gone a long time. After a while they all look at each other. “Are you all right?” she calls out.
“Just give me a minute,” he says. He comes out of the bathroom with black shoe polish all over his face and red lipstick in a circle around his mouth. “My father used to do this one for me,” he says, launching into an old Amos ’n’ Andy routine.
“What did you use?” she asks, horrified.
“Kiwi,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” she says to Soledad, mortified that she is having to watch. Luckily, Soledad is from the islands and doesn’t quite understand how horrible it is.
At eleven, Philip puts the rail on his side of the bed up, turns on the motion detector pad on the floor, tucks him in, and they call down to the gatehouse and tell them that the package is down for the night.
“Good night,” she says.
“See you in the morning,” Soledad says.
She stays up for a while, sitting next to him reading while he sleeps. This is her favorite part of the night. He sleeps and she can pretend that everything isn’t as it is, she can pretend this is a dream, a nightmare, and in the morning it will all be fine.
She could remove herself, live in another part of the house and receive reports of his progress, but she remains in love with him, profoundly attached. She doesn’t know how to be without him, and without her, he is nothing.
The motion detector goes off, turning on the light by her side of the bed. It is six-thirty in the morning.
“Is this conversation being taped?” He speaks directly into the roses, tapping his finger on the open flower as if testing the microphone. Petals fall to the floor. “Who’s there? Is someone hiding over there?” He picks up the remote control and throws it into the billowing curtains.
“Hey, hey,” she says, pushing up her eye mask, blinking. “No throwing.”
“Go away, leave us alone,” he says.
She takes his hand and holds it over the vent.
“It’s the air,” she says, “the air is moving the curtains.”
He picks up the red toy telephone that he carries around everywhere—“just in case.”
“I can’t get a goddamned dial tone. How can I launch the missiles if I can’t get a dial tone?”
“It’s early,” she says. “Come back to bed.” She turns the television on to the morning cartoons, pulls her eye mask down, and crawls back into bed.
He is in the bathroom with the water running. “There’s someone around here who looks familiar.”
She pops her head in. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yes,” he whispers. “That man, I can’t remember that man’s name.” He points at the mirror.
“That’s you,” she says.
“Look, he waves and I’m waving back.”
“You’re the one waving.”
“I just said that.”
She notices an empty bottle of mouthwash on the sink.
“Did you spill your mouthwash?”
“I drank it,” he belches. Hot, minty-fresh air fills the bathroom.
In the morning, she has to locate him in time and space. To figure out when and where he is, she runs through a list of possible names.
“Honey, Sweetheart, Running Bear, Chief, Captain, Mr. President.”
He stands before her, empty, nonreactive. She sticks a finger first into one ear and then the other, feeling for his hearing aid, they’re both in, she plucks one out, cranks up the volume until it squeals.
“I’m checking the battery,” she yells. “Can you hear me?”
“Of course I can. I’m not deaf.” He takes the hearing aid from her and stuffs it back into his ear, putting it into the ear that already has one.
“Wrong ear,” she says, fishing it out. She starts again. “Mr. President, Sir, Rough Rider, Rick, Daddy, Dutch.” There is a flicker of recognition.
“Now that sounds familiar.”
“Do you know who you are?”
“Give me a clue.”
She continues. “Mr. P. Junior, Jelly Bean.”
“Rings a bell.”
“Jelly Bean?”
“That’s me.”
“Oh. Jelly Bean,” she says, relieved to have found him. “What’s new?” She hands him his clothing one piece at a time, in order, from under to outer.
Soledad rings a bell.
“Your breakfast is ready.” She urges him down the hall. “Send the gardener in when he gets here,” she instructs Soledad as she steps into a morning meeting with Philip and the agents.
“Don’t call him Mr. President anymore—it’s too confusing. It’s best not to use any particular name; he’s played so many roles, it’s hard to know where he is at any given moment. This morning he’s responding to Jelly Bean and talking about things from 1984.”
“We’re not always sure what to do,” the head agent says, “how far to go. Yesterday he cleaned the pool for a couple of hours, he kept taking the leaves out, and whenever he looked away we just kept dumping them back, the same leaves over and over.”
She nods.
“And then there were the holly berries. He was chewing on the bushes,” the agent says.
“Halle Berry? George and Barbara?” Philip asks.
“The shrubbery—like a giraffe he was going around eating—” The agent stops in mid-sentence.
Jorge, the gardener, is standing in the doorway. He has taken off his shoes and holds them in his hand. He curtsies when he enters.
“Thank you,” she says. She takes out a map and lays it on the table for everyone to see. “We need a safer garden; this is a list of the plants—they’re all nontoxic, edible.”
In the distance there is a heavy thump. The phone rings. She pushes the speakerphone button.
“Yes?”
“The President has banged into the sliding glass door.”
“Is he hurt?
“He’s all right—but he’s got a bump on his head.”
She sends Philip to check on him and she, Jorge, and the agents go into the yard and pace off where the wandering garden will be.
“Everything poisonous has to come out,” she says. “Azaleas, birds of paradise, calla lilies, and daffodils. No more holly berries, hydrangea, tulips, poppies. No wisteria. No star-of-Bethlehem.”
Jorge gets down on his knees, ready to begin.
She stops him. “Before you get dirty. I need you to put a lock on my dressing room door.”
He is in the sunroom with a bag of ice on his face.
“Are you in pain?” she asks. He doesn’t answer. “Did you have a nice breakfast?”
Again he belches, mint mouthwash.
“It won’t happen again,” Philip says, using masking tape to make a grid pattern on the sliding glass door, like a hurricane warning, like an Amish stencil in a cornfield, like the bars of a cattle crossing. “For some reason it works—they see it as a barrier and they don’t cross it.”
“Soledad, may I have a word?” She refrains from saying more until they are out of the room. “We need to make a few changes.”
“I will miss you very much,” Soledad says.
“It’s time to get the house ready,” she says, ignoring the comment, taking Soledad from room to room, pointing out what’s not needed, what has to go in order to make life simpler, less confusing, safer.
“Put it away, send it to storage, keep that for yourself, this goes and this goes and this goes. Up with the rug, out with the chair.”
They put safety plugs in every outlet, toddler latches on every cabinet. She moves quickly, as though time is limited, as though preparing for a disaster, a storm front of some sort.
“Send someone to one of the thrift shops and get a couple of Naugahyde sofas and some chairs.”
“But you have such nice furniture,” Soledad says.
“Exactly.”
“Are we expecting a hurricane?” he asks, passing through. “I saw the boy taping up the window.”
He knows and he doesn’t know.
Jorge is in the bedroom, putting a huge combination lock on the dressing room door.
“Do we have any white paint?” She asks Jorge.
“No, Señora.”
“We’ll need some,” she says. “Until then use this.” She hands Soledad a bottle of Maalox. “Paint his mirror with it. Use a sponge if there isn’t a brush. Put it on thick, so he can’t see himself. It may take a couple of coats.”
He is alone with Philip. They are in the kitchen, making chocolate chip cookies—slice and bake. The President plays with a hunk of dough, molding it into a dog.
“There are a couple of things I wanted to ask you, if you don’t mind.”
The President nods. “Go ahead, Tom.”
“Who were your heroes?”
“Tarzan and Babe Ruth.”
“Who was the most exciting person you ever met?”
“That would have to be Knute Rockne. I used to play ball with him. One hell of a guy.”
“And in that whole Iran Contra thing, what was the bit about using the chocolate cake as a bribe?”
“Funny you mention it.” He tilts his head, adopting the interview pose of careful consideration. “I was just thinking about her last night.” He pauses. “You know, Bob, America is a country of families, companies, individuals who care about each other. This is another of those unavoidable tragedies, but in the end…It’s them I worry about, the people who are out there.”
“Any regrets?”
“I never walked on the moon. I was a little too old, they gave the part to another fella.” He eats a clump of dough. “Listen,” he says. “When I come to, everything will be fine, we’ll get back on course. We’re strong people, Mike, we’ll get through.”
She is online, catching up. The king of Toda has died and all the first ladies are going to the funeral. She can’t leave him alone. “Now’s not the time,” she e-mails her secretary. “Tell them I have the flu, so no one gets suspicious.”
She checks into the Alzheimer chat rooms.
—Her life must be a living hell. Imagine having everything in the world, all that help, and still you’re on a sinking ship.
—She’s an inspiration, how gracefully they handled it, and that letter he wrote about going off into the sunset.
—Do you think she even sees him? Does he recognize her? What condition is he in? We never hear a word.
They are talking about her. She is tempted to chime in, to defend herself. She wants to say, I am N.R. and you know nothing about my life.
—Think of all the people she got to meet and all the free clothes. She got a good deal. It’s more than enough for one life-time.”
—Got to go, Earl just wet himself. It’s one thing when it’s a twenty-two-pound infant the size of a turkey, it’s another when it’s a two-hundred-forty-pound man the size of a sofa.
She pedals faster. She’s gone about thirty miles, when EZRIDER sends her an instant message.
—Where did you disappear to, EZ wants to know? Hope I didn’t scare you.
—Telephone rang. Long distance.
—Where did we leave off?
—You were taking me for a ride on a Ferris wheel, we were high above it all…
There is a knock at her door. She ignores it. It comes again, harder.
“What the hell is it?”
The door opens. It’s one of the agents. “Sorry to interrupt, but the President has disappeared.”
She continues pedaling.
“We can’t find him. We’ve searched the house, the perimeter, and Mike and Jeff are going up and down the block on foot.” Mike and Jeff, he says—it sounds like Mutt and Jeff. “Should we call the police?”
She logs off, calmly gets off the bike, and punches the panic button on the wall. They all come running.
“Who last saw him, where, and when?”
“We were baking cookies about twenty minutes ago, the last batch just went into the oven, he said he had to go to the bathroom,” Philip says.
“He was in the yard,” one of the agents says, “relieving himself against a tree. That was maybe twenty-five minutes ago.”
“He’s eloped,” Philip says. “It happens all the time, they have the urge to go, and then, as if summoned, they’re gone.”
“How many cars do we have?” she asks.
“The sedan, the van, Soledad’s, and mine,” Philip says.
“Divide into teams. Philip, you go on foot, I’ll go with Soledad, does everyone have a cell phone?”
They quickly get their phones and exchange numbers.
“Those lines aren’t secure,” the agent says.
“No hysterical calls,” she says. “Code name Francine.”
She hurries out to the driveway and into Soledad’s old red Mercury.
“We can’t send you without an agent.”
“Your agents can’t find my husband,” she says, slamming the door, missing the man’s fingers by an eighth of an inch.
“We should call the police.”
“The last thing we need to do is draw attention to what Keystone cops you are,” she says, signaling to Soledad to start the engine.
“I think we’re required to by law,” one of the younger agents says. “We’ve never had a President disappear.”
“Oh sure we have,” one of the older men says. “We just don’t talk about it. John Kennedy was gone for seventy-two hours once and we didn’t have a clue.”
She and Soledad take off. They see Mike down the street, talking to the Bristol Farms deliveryman, and Jeff following the mailman from house to house.
“Take a right,” she says, and she and Soledad go up the
hill, looking for signs.
Philip moves from door to door with an old glossy head shot. He rings the bell and holds the head shot in front of the electric eye. “Have you seen this man?” he asks, and then repeats the question in Spanish.
It can’t end here, with him disappearing, the Amelia Earhart of politics. She is in the car with Soledad, imagining stories of mysterious sightings, dinner parties with him as the prize guest, him being held hostage in a Barcalounger in some faux paneled recreation room. She imagines him being found months later, when they get tired of taking care of him and pitch him out of a car in the Cedars-Sinai parking lot in the middle of the night, dirty and dehydrated.
They come upon a dog walker with eight dogs on eight different leashes, each dog a statement of sorts.
“Have you seen anyone walking around here? We’ve misplaced an older white man.”
The dog walker shakes her head. “No one walks—if they want to walk, they get on the treadmill and watch TV.”
They climb up St. Cloud, higher still. She remembers when she first came to Hollywood in the late 1940s as a young actress. She remembers going to parties at these houses, before they were married, when they used to spend evenings with Bill and Ardis Holden, when Jimmy Stewart lived on Roxbury Drive. She recalls the first time she visited Frank Sinatra’s place on Foothill Road. She is reading it all now, like a map of the stars’ homes.
The air is unmoving, smog presses down, hanging like a layer of dust waiting to fall, sealing them in. Soledad’s car doesn’t have air-conditioning; they drive with the windows down, it’s the first time she’s been in real air in years. She is sweating, there’s a clammy glow to her skin.
Mike and Jeff wind downhill toward Westwood, UCLA, and Beverly Hills.
“Have you seen Ronald Reagan?”
“You might want to check on the quad—a lot of people were going over there, there’s a puppet show or something.”
“Ollie-ollie-oxen-free,” Philip yells down the street. “Come out, come out, wherever you are. Come on down, The Price Is Right.”
The Bel Air police pull him over. “Where do you belong?”
“At 668. I’m the President’s personal trainer.”
“You’re the trainer?”
Philip pulls out his card. “Yes, the trainer. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He walks on, singing loudly, “hi-de-hi, hi-de-ho.”
