The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

  Come on, let’s face it.

  Mrs. President was moved by this observation and brushed at a tear. Drill deep enough, you’re going to strike water. That may not seem in character for Mrs. President but it’s the burly sorts who faint when they get their booster shots.

  And no denying it, I was on that day.

  For the rest of the session I pretty well played Santa, told her she’d always be rich, and that was steadying. Tell them they’re going to lose all their money and you’d better have an inhalator standing by. We had to face a few things, her burden was heavier than most, but there was nothing there she wasn’t equipped to handle, and when she stood to go it was with the wistful lightness of the unburdened soul.

  I folded the cassette up in the graph paper and offered to see her back to the rear deck but no, she said, no, she’d rather be alone for a while. The steward would show Mrs. Rawlins in.

  “If there’s anything I can do, Mrs. President,” I assured her, but she moved off without speaking, cake-walking among the kitties.

  I went inside and sat back with my feet up, congratulating myself on another human heart well unlocked. I mean I get in there and make a little contact! Bestow a little recognition! What do you want?

  Ordinarily I’d certainly have called it a week but it’s all work at the top. And already my next seeker was at the bead curtain.

  I rose and made myself courtly and she shimmied in chewing gum. Her walk involved a little sway at the knees, possibly to minimize her height, and it was not ungraceful in a slutty sort of way. She parked her cup and saucer and sat, hooked an elbow on the chair and chewed gum on one side at me.

  I went around the table and got busy with my stuff.

  “I can tell what anybody’s like by their face,” she said.

  “That can work.”

  I inked her up. Her hands were archly submissive, held as for nail-drying, and when I pressed her palms down her eyes, Egyptian slashes in her tan, met mine.

  I blew the prints dry and made a show of studying them. She watched without interest.

  “You have,” I said, looking up, “a highly developed Venus Mount.”

  “Say what? Listen, cracker, who do you think you’re talkin’ to?”

  “On your palm,” I clarified.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah?”

  “Next to your thumb.” I circled the place.

  She squinted at it, nodded. “So?”

  “It’s indicative of a certain—aptitude.”

  “Yeah. Go on.”

  “Well, for sensuality.”

  “You got sumpn to say?” She looked at me hard.

  I held my ground. “Am I wrong?”

  She sat back and checked me out, put some chin in the chew.

  No, she reckoned I wasn’t wrong. She had an aptitude. She was a normal healthy woman with normal healthy desires and she was a little cheesed with all the innuendo she had to put up with over it, especially from Mrs. Queen of the Hop, with whom she was through, by the way, through, and the old kak-eater knew it, treating her like a class-A whore all the time, embarrassing her in front of everybody, and was I on her side?

  I had touched a nerve. Recky felt herself something of a country cousin among ruling circles and Mrs. President, who was rather a seamstress of the social fabric, had made her feel unclubbable.

  Mrs. President didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t fool around. Put that together if you can possibly. She didn’t smile much because it made wrinkles and if something happened to tickle her despite herself you could tell how funny it was by the number of teeth she showed. You could get a one-toother for a serious disease, maybe a two-toother if somebody dahd.

  Mice and yes-persons was what she surrounded herself with but you socialized with her anyway because you were afraid of her. All she seemed to want Recky to do was be a companion, of the can-I-tuck-this-rug-in-around-your-knees sort. Wanted to bring her to heel. Teach her her place.

  Now, was I of Mrs. President’s party on this?

  “Ritual prostration is such an act of pride,” I said.

  Whereas Recky’s idea of social decorum was showing up early and looking around for the soft chair? She had to take an animal tranquilizer just to get her through some of these evenings, which didn’t perk up her poise too good. Lawn parties she was apt to clap limply for sunset, shout encore. Last time she’d calmly taken out her gum and stuck it on her wine glass and puked her fishy-swaz all over the ice sculpture. Which ate the thing into almost immediate collapse and of course was construed as a gross inelegance, not that she cared.

  She was bored, was what it was. Bored. Boy was she bored.

  Had been ever since she left Cotton County. Since before she left Cotton County, come to that. Last time she felt any real interest in life was the first time she saw Reb. Her husband? The Vice President of America?

  As a young man about Hoot’n’Holler he’d had the big pickup-and-van dealership, had the powder-blue pants, the white shoes, the white belt. Slow times he’d stand out fronta the lot unhitchin’ the belt and retuckin his shirttail and of course she’d be watchin’ him from the Tastey Freeze across the street and she thought he was about the snappiest article she ever did see!

  Well they got married and she’d figured to settle down and baby out, being of an age and all, but Reb was always to town meetin’s and chamber-o’-commerce meetin’s and she never half saw him most of the time and when she did he was tuckered beyond all utility. Sundays she’d lie in kinda lazy, doodlin’ on the sheet with her finger and pointin’ her toes and he’d be downstairs puttin’ up dry wall! Ole Reb, he looked real good but, well.

  Then he made mayor and before you knew it he was sniffin’ around runnin’ for governor, but then the dealership fell down dead and his partner brought in some auditors. Auditors is people who come in after the battle’s lost and bayonette the wounded, ole Reb used to say, which made folks smile and slap him on the back but didn’t get him governor.

  So then he sort of changed directions and took to managin’ other people’s campaigns, figurin’ to learn from his mistakes, which was okay because she’d had about all the sittin’ around lookin’ like a wholesome and unbothered-by-the-general-lack-of-action candidate’s wife she could take?

  So then he was this pro-fessional campaign manager, which kept him gone as much as ever and wasn’t too boring, fairly mill-of-the run, and then this Vice-President thing come along and she was right back where she started! Course there was the prestige and all, you got to dosydoe around, wear the shaved ranch mink, sit up front at the the-aiter. Except for Mrs. Painus in the Anus of course but she was gonna get it stuck to her sideways one of these times now soon.

  But as for home life.

  She sat ruminating the unrealized possibilities of the flesh and took her gum out, looked at it with distaste and put it on her saucer, pinched her bra strap and worked her shoulder.

  Reb’s attention, never what you could call inspired, had dwindled into passing remarks on the aging process. While she lay there giving off heat he’d be in the living room making speeches to the applause machine.

  “Sounds obsessed,” I said.

  “He’s obsessively obsessed! It’s what gets him through the day! Otherwise he’d just lie there!”

  I nodded clinically. Let her get it all out.

  “I’m bored,” she sighed. “Bored, bored, bored. You know who’s boring? Diplomats. They’re trained that way. They can’t say nothin’, and after a few minutes you can’t say nothin’ neither. Then you got your army officers, your navy officers. Got kill in their eyes but it’s all inside. You just sit there with ‘em. Then you got your engineers, boring, and then fourth is your businessmen. Don’t want to talk securities-trading with no more businessmen.

  “Now, there are people who ain’t boring ay-tall.” She leaned forward and looked at me with one eye. “And they’re crooks.”

  She wasn’t smiling. Our eyes locked horns. She nodded slightly, taking my measure.
Her earring tinked on the teacup.

  Any second now the buzzer, the guard and I’d be dragged off to an interrogation room at the Better Business Bureau.

  “Well,” she said, “I been a good girl. Been a real good girl. But the election is over and ah am ready for some fun, are you receivin’?”

  Whew! I pulled out of my tailspin, checked my dials. I should have known she was coming on. I mean I am an unbearably compelling guy, I don’t know if I mentioned it. For a moment there I almost forgot it myself.

  “I guess you’re pretty immune to your lady customers like this, huh?” Her look suggested I might like to unzip her dress and rub the red marks.

  “I’m pretty mune,” I said. I was living dangerously, I was so relieved!

  “Jall come out here on the motorboat? I lahk the motorboat, gets me all goin’. It’s like this big vibrator?”

  Alberta had sort of thrown me over the pommel of her saddle and galloped off with me, of course. I wasn’t all that available. But one doesn’t like to make oneself entirely uninteresting.

  Still, I reeled in. “I came with somebody,” I said. “Besides”—I gestured at the prints—”you’ve got your hands full.”

  “Is that what it says there?”

  She had a love line like scar tissue over a gouge and I said so. Now that we’d broken through to this new intimacy she was ready to listen with a semblance of patience and we relaxed into a reading. I told her, I don’t know, something, and she followed with a series of not uninterested uh-huhs.

  This sort of transference can be vital to the therapeutic situation. It gives the subject a sense of involvement and an openness to direction that can lubricate the entire interview, make it easier to terminate before she makes any inconvenient advances. I mean this was hardly the place.

  And it was clear as I handed her her party prize that she remained determined to peel back the foreskin of life. Which was all to the good, return-engagement-wise.

  “Well,” she said, “if you change your mind.”

  I shrugged helplessly and she fluttered her fingers farewell. “Enjoy.”

  Keesh had his own pitch to make, if less of the aphrodisiac of raw power to hammer it home. I don’t know if he’d made it big after becoming Mrs. President’s retainer or if he’d already been a happening hairdresser but with me he was immediately welcome-to-the-chowline in manner and treated me as a colleague.

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said.

  I got him to put his cat down while we made the impressions. He gave me a let’s-trade-sweaters look as I held his hands in place. “I hope you’re not promiscuous,” he said, and did something obscene with his tongue.

  I looked the prints over.

  “Don’t tell me!” he said.

  After a minute I looked up and fixed him with my gaze. He wriggled nervously.

  “You’re going to meet a tall dark stranger,” I said.

  “I knew it!”

  “And you’re going to cross water.”

  “I absolutely knew it.”

  “I see you in silver lamé. Is that in the future or the past?”

  “That’s the past. I wore this silver jacket with black toreador pants for my coming-out party.”

  He told me about his life, his childhood, how his real name was Organdy, his mothered wanted a girl—

  “That’s here,” I said.

  —how he’d worked his way through beauty school, washed hair for years before they let him cut, built his following, saved for his own shop, suffered disastrous partnerships. It had been a long climb but now he had the chain plus the toilet-paper boutique on Rodeo and he still looked young, thank God. Didn’t he?

  “You have a strongly etched youth line,” I told him, circling something. In fact he was gaunt under the make-up. David-Bowie-on-a-vegetarian-high sort of thing is what I think he was going for, but it came out a little too lipstick-on-the-teeth.

  “You can get these sheep-fetus injections in Switzerland,” he said. “Of course they cost your ass but they’re sposed to really work. Do you think I should get a sex change?”

  I pored over the prints. “No major reorientations coming up,” I said. Assuming this would be major. “But there’s nothing here against it.”

  “I wish I had tits,” he said. “I want to live whole.”

  I shrug-pouted. “You could always try it.”

  “I think I’m gonna get some transplants. I told Recky I already got depilitarized and she nearly fell off her elbow. Relax, I says, it’s just the hairs! I mean she is so gauche. I’m doing my best with her. These are the people, sweetheart, don’t forget it. We got to keep America Byoo-tee-ful! She did let me work some indie-pop highlights into her haircut, I must say, but she’d rather have pigtails, which would not be at all inappropriate, this girl is open to all comers if you’ll pardon the expression. Even Boosoops is choosier, aren’t soo Boosoops! Yes! She gets that Secret Service hunk before I do I’m gonna sulk for a week. No really I sense a real tenderness there. It’s true he’s a little heavy but I think that adds to the vulnerability. You need a man who can be tender and brutal at the same time. The last one took his clothes off and he still had the gun on. Afterwards he told me he still respected me and his mother made us potato pancakes. Anyway. I did get Recky to stop ruining her hair with the dryer, she’s much easier to work with than Mrs. P. I absolutely had to pry her out of that bun and-skullcap do! I mean how would it look! We did a floppy-curl thing first, sort of a Mia Farrow but of course she’s a little full for that. I was on the point of suggesting suction but I mean where would you stop? I promise you she is below the knees from both directions. So we’re going with the angel-hair aura, takes a lot of upkeep but that’s what I’m here for. I have no authority over the husbands. The President has his own hair person and of course he’s Mr. Gray Suit. Mr. Quiet Strength. The market dips or something when he wears blue. And Reb is just not evolved. Sta-rictly from astronaut chic, the loud shorts, the whole thing. I mean my dear you cannot deal with these people! So it’s just us girls. The Three Disgraces. And now you. And of course Alberta. Who is she anyway! Is that phoney accent for real? I mean I don’t want to imply anything.”

  7.

  Belton Haines was kept on at the clinic to be treated for nervous exhaustion. The ordinarily huge pressure on him increased enormously when a second palmist brought in by the network confirmed my own prognosis. It was a wonder he was still walking around.

  But under heavy questioning at the news conference a hospital spokesman admitted that no, he wasn’t actually walking around. There had been a, well, a mishap. Their legal staff didn’t want them to go into it very thoroughly but it seems a nurse had been on the verge of injecting him with Sleep-Eze when she’d been called to another room, collared a passing intern and left him standing over the abandoned sufferer.

  He did a creditable job of tapping out the air bubbles, squeezing off the preliminary squirt and swabbing the cheek. But he’d got hold of the wrong syringe—he was only a painter passing through for a pee, it turns out—and pumped the patient up with penicillin, a thing grease-pencil contraindicated on the chart. Belton swelled up like the Cookie Monster and had to pry his eyes open with his fingers to see who was talking to him. It happens. The shock to his nervous system made his hair fall out and the check-out-line rags ran pictures that made him look like X the Unknown. Of course the effect wasn’t that calming.

  I was beginning to think I had a Horrible Power!

  My career continued its dizzy upward spiral. Mrs. President came to our suite for follow-up consultations, wanted to refine a few points, and as the association developed her fears about the press fell away. Her husband’s administration was too new to be that vulnerable and she was not herself an office-holder. Of course the more she opened up the profounder she felt the experiences were and my own input was becoming pretty monosyllabic.

  Now that we were in the position of entertaining her we spared no effort to identify ourselves with her c
oncerns. The Old-Girl-network thing with Alberta rose in the pan until Mrs. President became more or less of an ahnt.

  It was like a meeting of mothers, yours and another kid’s, deciding it’s okay for you to play together. Ratifying your little association. Now everybody wanted to play! My appointment book was jammed!

  To tell you the truth I wasn’t all that keen on the caseload. After that purse we pulled on The Arc I felt entitled to sit on the sidelines for a while and sip some Gatorade. The strategy now, it seemed to me, was to select a few of the fatter and more desperate customers, develop an efficient, short-term schedule and spend the evenings feeding the bill-counter. Book for early retirement. In and out like a fiddler’s elbow, was my way of thinking.

  But Alberta said no, we were here to make it and we were going to make it. Big. All the way.

  Right now money was secondary. What we had to do now was Keep Those Doors Open. Firm Up Our Base. Hold Out For The Big One. After that we could write our ticket. The house by the Swiss lake, whatever, we could talk about that.

  Shortly I found myself interviewing people whose ability even to meet the down payment was in doubt—whose function seemed to be to confirm our membership in the inner circle, not to say screen us as we passed in.

  For instance I had to face the guy I was replacing, Dr. Finkle, psychoanalyst to the upper-level politicos and for some little time Mrs. President’s close personal adviser. He was a short man with a wrinkled hawk face, wild watery eyes and electroshock hair. I am sorry to have to say that he was drunk.

  He logrolled into my consulting room without so much as a glance of greeting, his napkin still attached from lunch, stood a half-gone bottle of Teacher’s on the table and established himself in my swivel chair.

  “Ice!” he snapped, seeing me. Then, pleading the sorry human cause: “I have no ice!”

  I punched Room Service and ordered the ice.

  “So,” he said, holding the armrests and rocking back, “what’s your problem?”