Q Clearance

by Peter Benchley

  Sarah stood across the room and watched, wishing she wouldn't, incapable of not, mesmerized as thoroughly as when she saw the frog on the dissecting table in biology class.

  He used to have to look at the prescription, to be sure of numbers and dosages, but now he sorted the pills as rapidly as a pharmacist:

  Three thousand milligrams of vitamin C; 500 micrograms of B-12, 100 milligrams of B-1; 400 international units of vitamin E; 25,000 units of vitamin A; 500 milligrams of dolomite; 30 milligrams of zinc; 10 milligrams of manganese; 500 milligrams of magnesium gluconate; two 200-milligram capsules of B-6; one large yellow capsule of Zimag C, and one large mustard-colored capsule of B-complex.

  Each day's pills went into one Pyrex dish. Burnham closed the cabinet door, dumped the dish of pills into his palm and swallowed them, all at once, with water.

  "Does the President know he's got a vitamin bomb working for him?" Sarah asked. "He could light your fuse and blow nutrition all over Russia."

  "Chemically," Burnham said, chasing the pills with a last gulp of water, "I'm the most finely tuned member of the White House staff. My body is a temple of chemical balance."

  "Have you told the President?"

  "Why bother?" Burnham chuckled. "You know what he'd say: 'Son, that's about as much use to me as tits on a canary.' "

  Burnham tightened his tie and brushed some Froot Loop crumbs off his loafers. "Do you need the car?"

  "Yes." Sarah started to say why, but she intercepted the words before they could escape her mouth. She blushed.

  "Let me guess," Burnham said, grinning. "A fund-raiser at Hickory Hill. James Taylor'11 be there. And Warren Beatty. And . . . let's see . . . Dick Cavett."

  Sarah's silence confirmed Burnham's guess. "D'you know what the President said the other day? He said, 'How can anybody take Ted Kennedy seriously, when he has people working for him who are all named Didi and Muffie' " —Burnham waited a beat—" 'and Sarah.' "

  "The hell he said that. Not to you. He doesn't say anything to you."

  "He said it."

  "To whom?"

  "Evelyn Witt."

  "Doesn't that woman have better things to do than call you with gossip? Why doesn't she erase tapes, or—"

  "She was doing me a favor. Warning me."

  “Tough. He's not running again."

  "He thinks, fuddy-duddy that he is, that just because he pays me fifty-seven thousand dollars a year—No! Fifty-nine thousand, as of last Friday—he has a right to expect some loyalty."

  Christopher said, "You got a raise?"

  "Sort of. A formality. Not really a—"

  "Can I get a new box? Mine sounds like puke."

  Burnham glanced at Sarah and saw her staring at him. He tried quickly to answer Christopher, but she spoke first.

  "Why were you promoted?"

  "I wasn't! I mean, it was a—" He cursed himself for a fool. He envisioned suspicions rearing their heads like garden eels in the sands of Sarah's mind. A promotion at the White House had to mean the approval of the President for a job well done, and, to her, a job well done for this President was, by definition, a blow against peace, fairness, decency and the School Lunch Program. "It was a time-in-grade thing. Routine."

  "What else does it mean besides money?"

  "Nothing! Forty-eight dollars every two weeks. That's it." Why was he lying? He was a terrible, transparent liar. His skin changed color, his eyes refused to look at the person he was lying to, he always protested too vehemently. Why hadn't he concocted a credible evasion? "Increased access," maybe. Something like that.

  It was too late. The lie was in place and would soon fester.

  He felt that he was beginning to rot.

  Evidently Sarah decided not to challenge him, for she looked away and said, "Who does he want you to be loyal to?"

  "Whoever he picks. He still has over a year to go."

  "You're supposed to hang around, wait for him to pick some . . . orangutan . . . like the Vice-President?"

  "I am."

  "Well, I'm not. If he thinks I'm about to support that cretin . . . The man who said ERA is a bunch of dykes with penis envy."

  "One of Ben Klammerer's lines. I think he's gone on to greater heights, like chief writer for the Teamsters Union."

  "I don't care who wrote it. The Vice-President said it."

  "It got a laugh."

  "From a pack of hyenas."

  Burnham could see that Sarah's irritation was ripening into true anger. The hand that held her coffee cup was trembling, and the sinews in her long neck pulsed against her pale skin as, subconsciously, she worked the muscles in her jaw. She wanted to maintain control, but the effort was as futile as trying to stop a shaken soda bottle once the cap has been started. The pressure had momentum, and it would be released.

  "You'd quit," she said tightly, "if you had the guts." She set her cup down so hard that the handle snapped off.

  "Noble. And what would we eat?"

  "There're other jobs. You're not a complete incompetent, you know, no matter what you think of yourself."

  "Look ..." Burnham said, stalling, praying for the doorbell to ring, or the telephone, or for the living-room couch to combust spontaneously—anything to move the conversation away from this sore and tired subject. "The job is a matter of simple economics, not principle. Fifty-nine grand is not bad pay for—"

  "Crap!" Sarah said. "That's crap, and you know it!"

  Derry's head popped up from the funnies. "Hey, gimme a break!" she said, employing one of the multipurpose adolescent tools that could be interpreted as intended to convey amazement, annoyance or admiration.

  Sarah interpreted it as reproach, and she lowered her voice to the octave of reasoned discourse. "It's power. You just love the power."

  "Me?" Burnham tried to laugh, but what emerged from his mouth and nose was more of a hollow bark. "How can I love power? I don't have any." He reached again for the paper and opened it and pretended to read.

  Sarah was right, of course. Even at his level, employment in the White House was strong drink. Power seeped down from the summit and intoxicated everyone from the janitorial staff to the telephone operators. It was power-by-association, the implicit (and usually untrue) suggestion of access to the throne, of the possession of secrets. In the amorphous, indecipherable middle-level ranks where Burnham resided, where everyone was a staff assistant, a special assistant, a deputy special assistant or (most mysterious of all) a plain assistant to the President, it meant restaurant reservations when all tables were full, the instantaneous return of phone calls from the

  most power-crazed snobs in the capital, and entree (at least once) to redoubtable Georgian manors where the glassware tinkled with clarion clarity and no wine was served before its time.

  "You know what?" Christopher said, closing the Lampoon and sliding it into his L.L. Bean canvas tote bag.

  "What?" Burnham looked at Christopher eagerly, gratefully.

  "I think you guys are heading for a divorce." Christopher's tone was flat, unjudgmental, but he did not look at either parent. He made a show of arranging his books in his tote bag.

  His sister looked at him as if he had just shouted "Fuck!" In church.

  "Wha . . . gck ..." was all Burnham could manage. He had prayed for detente, not escalation. He glanced at Sarah, whose face was purpling as if prior to a major stroke.

  "You fight all the time these days," Christopher said, standing up and slinging the bag over his shoulder. "About everything."

  Derry stood up, too, still eyeing her brother as something from The Twilight Zone.

  "We do not," Burnham said, adding with a weak smile, "WASPs don't fight. We discuss."

  "Yeah, well ..." Christopher brushed past him and headed for the living room. He stopped at the front door, turned and waited for Derry.

  "I mean, it may seem like fighting," Burnham admitted amiably, "but really it's just. . . ah . . . intense conversation."

  Derry shouldered her bag and step
ped around her father, avoiding him by an unnecessary four feet, as if he had suddenly been exposed by Christopher's words as contaminated and contagious.

  "Did you feed MacNeil?" Sarah asked Derry.

  MacNeil was Derry's fish. Burnham had to admire Sarah: Christopher had unleashed a monster, and Sarah was concerned about a fish.

  " 'Course," Derry said, as she left the kitchen. "We're out of fish food, so I gave him Grape Nuts."

  "Wait!" Burnham shouted, panicked, realizing that he was about to be left alone with Sarah to deal with the monster. The monster could not be confronted, not now. It must be avoided. Burnham didn't know how real it was, from his perspective or Sarah's, but he sensed that if confronted, the monster would become undeniably real, and he wasn't ready for that. Maybe later. Maybe never. Certainly not now. "I'll walk you out."

  He sprang to his feet, tightened his tie, feigned searching for something so that he wouldn't have to look at Sarah, who, cherry pink, stood as still as Lot's wife. Burnham scurried into the living room.

  His children had gone, leaving the front door open, but he spoke to them anyway, to keep Sarah from calling him back and forcing him to face down the monster.

  "Right. Here we go. I'll walk you up to the bus stop. Bye, hon!" He stepped outside, pulled the door closed behind him and leaned against it, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

  After ten seconds or so, his pulse slowed so that he could no longer hear it. He opened his eyes and looked to the right, saw that his children were out of sight and stepped off his doorstep onto Prospect Street.

  Back in the Kennedy days, and even into the first Johnson years, Georgetown had been clean, elegant, quiet, safe, tolerably uncrowded and discreetly expensive. It was even spared the carnage of the Martin Luther King riots in 1968 that burned down a large part of the District of Columbia. The government simply stationed troops on all the bridges going in and out of Georgetown, and if you couldn't prove you lived there you stayed outside.

  Georgetown's decline had begun in the Nixon years, but not only because the President knew it to be a fortress for his enemies, a redoubt of bleeding-heart assholes, knee-jerk liberals and media preppies who could not abide the thought that Nixon had been savvy enough and tough enough to hang in there until finally he found a way to tweak the public's reflex into giving him the White House.

  No, Georgetown had been beset by discovery, celebrity and prosperity.

  Tourists had always liked Georgetown, but the Kennedy myth—especially as it flowered in comparison to the hard, mean, grayness of the Nixon crowd—made Georgetown a shrine. There's the house he lived in. There's where the press waited (see the plaque?) all through election night and were served hot coffee and cocoa. There's where Jackie lived after the assassination. Harriman. Kay Graham. Joe Kraft. They all lived here. This was it. Camelot of a thousand days.

  The tiny house Burnham lived in had sold for $30,000 in 1967. Ten years later, it went (to the current landlord) for $220,000. Included in Burnham's lease was an option to buy the house. For $350,000.

  Neighborhood stores couldn't afford to keep up with the rents, so the groceries and shoe-repair places and cheap restaurants and drugstores and haberdasheries on Wisconsin Avenue gave way to boutiques and Haagen-Dazs parlors and leathercraft shops and saloons with brick walls and sawdust on the floor and movie posters and a cucumber rind in your Bloody Mary for only $4.95, plus tax. Wisconsin Avenue became the place to hang out, and that, of course, attracted peddlers—of belts, Indian necklaces, hot wrist watches and scarves and umbrellas and several controlled substances.

  Since the controlled substances cannot exist without people to buy them and people to prey on those who have the money to buy them and on those who get money from selling them, soon society's predators came to call Georgetown home.

  Not all of them lived here, just enough to make it exciting.

  Early one morning, Burnham had gone around the comer to 33rd Street to get the car and had found a couple asleep in it, male in front, female in back, though he would have had hell to ascertain the gender of the creature in the back seat if one of her jugs hadn't flopped out of her shirt when she stirred. He had waited and watched for a few long moments before determining that it was probably safe for him to wake and chase them rather than trudging all the way back to the police station and getting a cop and coming back, by which time something else would have spooked them anyway.

  They hadn't broken into the car. They had used a "popper" (he saw it on the floor), a thin strip of metal that fitted between the closed window and the door, and was slipped down and maneuvered to pop up the lock. A good sign. They were professionals—in that they did it every night in order to have a place to sleep—not car thieves, and they weren't looking for a fight. Burnham had no doubt that if he had come by at 8:30, his normal time, instead of 6:15, he would have seen no trace of their occupancy and wouldn't have noticed anything at all until he got in the car and was led by his nose to wonder if something had died under the front seat.

  He hadn’t yanked open the door and bellowed. He knew enough about junkies to know that if you surprise one in its sleep, depending on what it's been taking and what dreams it's in the grip of, you run the risk of setting off a hysterical, explosive awakening. So he tapped softly with his knuckles on the closed window. Nothing. The young man on the front seat slept with his hands between his knees, curled up in a fetal ball, which was as close as he had been to primal innocence in a couple of decades. Burnham rapped again, harder, and, with the speed of a striking viper, the man uncoiled, thrashed around in a grimy blur and ended up crouched, facing Burnham, weaving from side to side and tossing from one hand to the other a kukri —one of those nasty curved knives that the Gurkhas carry to decapitate the enemy.

  Burnham took an involuntary step backward on the sidewalk, raised his hands to show he was unarmed, smiled vulnerably, opened his palms as if to say, "Golly, I'm sorry to disturb you, but can I have my car?," tapped his watch for some absurd emphasis, then spread his palms again, begging.

  The man in the car scowled at him and pulled an antique gold pocket watch from his vest. He opened it, snapped it closed and rolled down the window.

  '*Hey, man," he said, "it's only six-fuckin'-twenty."

  "I know. I'm sorry . . . I . . ."

  "We didn't get to bed till four o'-fuckin'-clock."

  Don't say it, Burnham told himself. He could hear his pulse thrumming behind his ears. Don't say anything about whose car it is, or what right do you have, or any of those nice middle-class things. You are dealing here with an alien. So what he said was, "I gotta go to work."

  "Yeah, well I work all fuckin' night, is what."

  Again Burnham spread his hands: That's the way it goes. He wondered what he would do if the man rolled up the window and lay back down on the front seat. Find a cab, that's what he would do. And be late. And explain to the President of the United States, the Leader of the Free World, the most powerful and preoccupied individual since the dawn of time, why he had been unable to prepare last-minute jokes for this morning's Leadership Breakfast. "Y'see, there was this couple crashed in my car . . ."

  But the man did not go back to sleep. He reached over the back of the seat and shook the woman awake. She sat up, tucked her breast back inside her shirt, scrubbed the hair out of her eyes and yawned.

  Burnham felt he should look away, that he was intruding upon the matutinal ablutions of this couple. But he was fascinated, and they paid him no heed at all.

  The man opened the glove compartment and withdrew four hamburger-sized glassine bags of white powder. One he dropped down inside his shirt. Three he held out to the woman, who, to Burnham's horror, hiked her ragged, stained batik skirt over her hips. She wore no underwear, and for a three-beat Burnham was sure she was going to pee in the back seat of the car. But no. There were pockets with zippers sewn into a lining of the skirt where it would fall down the front between her legs, and she stashed the three bags in them.

 
Detachedly, Burnham admired the hiding place. No police officer would dare shake the woman down in public. Not only would he be aware that the cache was in such proximity to the woman's naughty bits that he would run a real risk of being slapped with a charge of sexual fiddle-de-dee, but once he approached within whiffing distance of the harpy, horrid visions would come alive in his mind of wasting diseases and running sores, and he would touch her with nothing shorter than his nightstick. By the time they reached the station house, zippers would be zipped and the skirt would be empty.

  The couple got out of the car on the street side, left the front and back doors open, and shuffled off up 33rd Street.

  He never saw them again.

  The Burnhams had been able to move to Georgetown only because Sarah had met Muffle Cogan at a Kennedy thing, and Muffle dabbled in real estate and knew that her office was about to list an off-beat rental, a tiny Georgetown house that was available for a piddling $1,750 a month because (here was the catch) it was for twenty-one months, no renewal, which happened to be the precise number of months left in the President's term. No matter who was elected next, Burnham would be out of a job, and he had no intention of remaining in Washington. Three-and-a-half years was quite enough, thank you very much, particularly for a person who had no business being in government—let alone in the White House—in the first place.

  He walked to the end of Prospect Street, turned right onto Wisconsin and headed for M Street and the bus stop. An empty cab was idling at the comer of Wisconsin and M, and he veered toward it. But the light changed, and the cab began to roll away. Burnham made no effort to pursue it. He told himself that his reluctance was economic: To spend five dollars just to avoid a fifteen-minute bus ride was profligate. In fact, his reluctance was purely neurotic: He could not make a spectacle of himself, running down a public thoroughfare, waving and shouting to attract the attention of a surly Kenyan (or so he envisioned the driver) who would, he was convinced, wait until he was two steps from the cab and then ram the pedal to the metal and squeal away, leaving this Anglo-Saxon relic in his rumpled seersucker to be the butt of sneers and snickers from the world at large.