“He just doesn’t seem to me to be there. His whole body language is defensive. Something seems to have scared all the authority out of him.”
“That’s an interesting theory. Look, I’m sorry—how do you hold that down? Do you have to glue it?”
“Word, we’re talking about the character of the President!”
“Too much character isn’t good for you, Belton. I’m writing a book on it.”
“And you think the American people should continue to repose their confidence in this President?”
“I think the President is capable of responsible leadership. He loves his country and wants to serve his people. I believe in the President.”
“All right, there you have the statement of Word Wallace, the President’s palmist. Coming up, the voice-print results and precedents for impeachment, right after this.”
Alberta switched it off with the phaser and sat back on the pillow. They’d been rerunning it since midnight.
“But what do you see in him? He’s such a dolt!”
“He’s in there somewhere. I know he’s in there somewhere.”
“I’m afraid we’re backing a loser.”
“Trust me on this, Alberta, he beats the alternative.”
“Wordy, I know you think you’ve finally found something worthy of your talent—”
“I didn’t want to come here,” I reminded her.
“—but I wish you wouldn’t go on as if everything depended on you.”
“Look, try and open yourself to the fact that there is a dangerous vacancy at the center. There is no center.” I jabbed myself in the chest. “I’m the fuckin’ center!”
“Do regulate your language. It’s so unseemly.”
“Who cares, okay?”
“Just because you’re having your moment on television—”
“Yeah. You’re the one who’s getting all sweaty.”
“It must be lonely making all that sense.”
“We’re all he’s got. We’re in this and we’re all he’s got.”
This was the moral high ground. I sat staring away from her, enjoying it.
After a minute she turned and rowed over, nestled her nose in my neck and felt me up.
“Alberta, I’m under a lot of pressure.”
My mauve acorn. She cupped it in her hands and warmed it, bent and blew on it softly, watched it stir.
Well, what the hell, I was too jacked up to sleep. I felt about as sensuous as the toilet at the back of the bus but she got me around into the attacking position and fitted the parts together. The velvet membrane. I stood in there while she rode as on a bannister, playing my back with her fingers.
I nuzzled her lightly, perfunctorily, a thirsty man straining over a pool. Didn’t ripple her. Her personal perfume, no two alike. Out there at the edge of language.
I was already nostalgic for what we’d been. The character of a thing like that is determined not by either one of you but by the couple, was how I saw it. You leave yourself behind and enter the couple sort of thing. Any insistence on your status as a separate citizen is chickening out.
Whereas I felt like a man with a concubine.
All right, all right, it doesn’t matter that much which woman but, I don’t know, I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of replacing her. I mean I guess I’ve been through a lot of them but I thought I was always going towards being part of a pair. Something where I wouldn’t feel restless, is that so romantic? I just wanted to survive until that, achieve that.
Then, because she was a woman and not a girl, she moved her hands over me and made me feel my nakedness, pulled me at her and served herself with me. My landing gear locked into place and I trembled obediently, slid into a profound absence and glowed, went dark, glowed, went dark. Hung there flashing like a hotel sign.
The phone rang. She picked it up. “Oh, hello, Belton. Of course I saw it. Yes, darling, you were wonderful. So ruthless! I have to be careful who I unleash on the world! Yes I got it, it came this morning.”
She reached out of bed for one of those extra-huge vibrators you see in the variety stores. It was the size of an antiaircraft shell. A ribbon around the shaft held a card that said, “You may need this”, and his smiling photograph was printed on the business end.
“Belton, you absolute idiot. How excessive of you.”
It’s not that big! she mouthed.
Still stone faced I unplugged myself and gaped at the dildo. “Belton, you fool. Of course I do, darling. Yes, I was proud of you.”
“Tell him you liked his hairpiece.”
“No, Wordy’s just being wicked.”
“Tell him he should tie it on with a handkerchief. It looks like a golf divot.”
“Of course he doesn’t. Yes, dinner, I’ll call you. Kisses.” She hung up. “Poor Belton.”
“He’s a better man than I am.”
“Don’t sulk, darling.”
“I happen to be pretty well endowed myself.”
“I know!” She slid the tusk onto the floor.
“Misses you?”
“He’s always been excitable. The neighbors used to see him masturbating through the window.”
“Wants to get back together, I guess.”
“Well I’m not going to waste any feeling over that.”
“You’re very efficient.”
She gave me a wide-thighed look. “Well you certainly enjoyed that! Shall we have a drink while you recoup?”
Then, as cleanly as life sheers away answers, the door kicked open, WHAM, and a tall bald guy in surplus fatigues stood there in a wide stance. He had a skull like the dildo, no eyebrows and a high-tech pistol in his hand.
It took him point zero three seconds to get his bearings and without raising the gun to aim he thunked whispering jerks in the mattress at us, one, two, three, four, smooth as counting and we made the floor behind the bed like a jump in the film and kept lower than I thought it was possible to keep, squirming madly away as bullets puffed and doinged in the springs and cracked into the walls.
He snapped in another clip and took out the chandelier, the mirrors, the eau de toilette. A plaster-and-glass mist followed his fire as he sprayed it. He was going wild. We could see his boots braced wide under there.
“YOU FUCKIES!” he screamed.
Sure was good to be back.
17.
The phone rang.
I combat-crawled over to the night table, jerked it down by the cord and whispered into the prostrate receiver. “Hello?”
“Word?”
“Hi, sir.” It was the President. The one person who probably couldn’t do anything.
I peered over the bed. Weapon limp, the bullet-head was sobbing. “It’s all right,” I called.
“Word?”
I picked the phone up. “Here I am, sir.”
“Word, I saw you on television and I just want to say that I—I—”
“It’s okay, sir.”
“I can’t—I’m not even supposed to be—They won’t let me talk to you.” He sort of laughed. “Everybody else is saying bad things about me. They’re all—”
I could hear him cracking his bones.
“Word, are they going to impeach me?”
“I don’t know, sir, it’s mostly just talk but, I guess we have to look at the possibility.”
“Gee, Word!” He was almost in tears. “What’ll everybody say?”
“It happens, sir! You can start a whole new life! And anyway, maybe they won’t! We may beat this!”
Alberta had meanwhile sheeted herself and gone to the succor of the assailant. “There, there,” she said, taking his pistol.
“I love you!” he blurted. “I can fuck your shit!”
She led him to a chair.
I pumped what therapy I could through the phone. Mrs. President had withdrawn almost totally now. Shocked, mortified, all that. She blamed herself of course but it was his fault! He couldn’t handle anything! He wasn’t fit to be president! What they w
ere saying was true!
“Truth is something you have to get over, sir.”
Nobody believed in him, nobody liked him. He had to endure the snickering of his own entourage, it was the only human contact he had. “You’re the only one who—” He didn’t finish. “Word,” he whispered, “I never had a friend like that!”
We held on in silence. I mean what do you say?
“I have to—Somebody’s—” He hung up.
I knelt there as for bedtime prayers until it occurred to me to put down the phone and get my pants on, go check out the hit man.
He was sitting with a blanket wrapped around him sipping tea like a flood victim, Alberta standing by in Roman-goddess drapery. “How is he?” she asked.
“Hanging on by his fingernails.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier on him to just end it?”
“Somebody seems to have the same idea about us. How’s this one?”
“He’s mother’s little lamb.”
“Did he tell you who sent him?” I kick-nudged him on the ankle. “Hey,” I said.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!” he screamed. He sipped tea.
“Hey. What’s your name?”
“I have no name,” he smiled.
“Who sent you? The police are going to be here, who sent you?”
“I come from Beyond,” he said.
“How’d you get up here? How’d you get past the guard?”
He smiled. “I waited a long long time.”
Well, of course I was bluffing about the police. Get involved in another interrogation and the complications could be endless. After a few questions we were able to satisfy ourselves that he was a stray psychopath. Essentially directionless. And if he wasn’t random when he came in he was now.
“Can I click my pistol?” he said.
Working on a whole other project.
We gave him a downer and put him to bed in the guest room, locked the door.
“I wonder if he can be trained,” said Alberta. Certainly we were low on staff.
These crazies are around in life, it’s best to have them on your side. This deviate attached himself to me in Goa once, ran errands for drink money. Used to sit in the bar of an afternoon saying, “I wish I’s Word Wallace. Ol’ Word Wallace got it made!”
Guy comes in one day asking for me, says, “Are you Word Wallace?” at which Dumbo mouths up, “Yeah, I’m Word Wallace,” and the guy takes out a piece and opens up at him. Husband or something. They aired out in opposite directions, I never saw them again. These guys can be good to have around!
Besides, who knows what voices he heard. Maybe he was from beyond. I mean I don’t know whether God sits across the table dealing or on this side backing the bets, I’m just a clerk in the cosmic corporation, but I admit it made me feel a little better to think I might be aligning myself with Mission Control. Not holding the whole bag.
He screamed like a soul in hell at some dark hour and we went in and turned on the light. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Your mother loves you. Your father loves you. We love you.”
He lay there smiling.
In the morning I couldn’t get into the bathroom until he’d finished shaving his head. “I don’t look good in hair,” he explained.
Then he did his t’ai chi exercises and sat around reading while we made breakfast. He ate eagerly and smiled with his mouth full. Feeling fairly at one with life.
“He’s so cute!”
“I wish you wouldn’t say everything is cute.”
“I don’t say everything is cute!”
“You say everything is cute.”
After breakfast a vice-presidential staff person came by and delivered an invitation to dinner that evening, with a note apologizing for the short notice.
“They didn’t get us last night, they’ll get us tonight,” I said.
“I think we should go.”
“You two go ahead. I’ll stay home and defrost the fridge.”
At six-thirty we fed him some Librium caps I kept on hand for overwrought clients, tucked him in and locked the door. By now the money was in the safe downstairs and there wasn’t much he could get to.
Alberta insisted on ordering a limo. I wanted to take a taxi, we didn’t have that much, but apparently asking for a cab at the end of the evening was a gaucherie not to be contemplated. I wrapped the gun in a plastic shopping bag, laid it across an ashtray in the lobby as we were leaving and didn’t look back.
A queasy sense of deja vu welled up in me as we pulled onto the grounds. Silver storm clouds. The Residence stood on a knoll with a turret and windows that stared at you like a haunted house. Thunder.
Secret Servicemen lurked among the trees like zombies. We climbed to the porch, the door opened and attendants nodded us through to the parlor where people were standing around drinking.
“Hey! Hi! You came!” said Recky. “Come on in! I don’t even know what we’re sposed to be havin’, here, but when my Vice Husband says party we got to party. I’m out on the sundeck this mornin’ lyin’ on my dead ass, I could care less, and he gives me this list and tells me to get it together! So it was just aaa!” She raised her arms to charge the chaos.
The women’s bodies confronted one another. Both were in the boudoir mode. Recky wore a silver negligee-looking thing and Alberta, who I now looked at for the first time that day, was loosely held by something stiff and black-lacey like a pixie emerging from a flower cup.
“I just passed it on to the help and they’re gonna hopefully, you know, do it.”
“It’s a comfort to have reliable staff.”
“I know, it’s so neat. This is your first time at the mansionette, isn’t it hon. You want to look around too?” She dead-eyed me. “No, here, you better meet some of these folks first.”
Most of them were military moguls in dress uniforms with tough-eyed wives. There was one movie star, you’d know him, I can’t mention his name. I saw Celebrado and nodded knowingly. And Norman was there! He was standing by himself, no one was talking to him.
Recky touched Reb’s arm and he turned to us from his conversation. “Welcome to the Vice-President’s Residence,” he said, not smiling. “It’s pleasant to have you here this evening.”
We were minimally effusive and he circulated ponderously, murmuring remarks to the generals and paying quiet court to their wives. Had on a green plaid cummerbund.
“Hey, polecat!” said W.T. from the door.
“Hey, W.T.!” Suddenly both seemed to be chewing gum.
“Hey!” Fat and sassy, W.T. strutted on in, his wife in his wake. “Hey!” he said.
“What’s shakin’, W.T.?”
“Hey! Old guy takes a old girl from the seniors home out parkin’, starts in givin her a little feel and she pulls back and says, you do know I’ve got acute angina. He says, I hope so cause these tits ain’t doin’ nothin’ for me! Hyuh hyuh!”
“W.T.!” Said Recky. “This is company!”
“Hey, hey,” he said, dropping his voice, “what’s the last sound a pubic hair makes before it hits the floor? Hey?”
“I don’t know, W.T.! Whut?”
“Thpth! Hyuh hyuh! Hey! No, wait, hey—” He shook Reb to get him started.
Recky rolled her eyes. “You blamed idjit.”
Triumphant, W.T. lifted a knee, curled it in and broke wind, popped his gum.
Like Reb he was too hump-bellied to be able to quite close his jacket, but he was by far the more animated and had a reputation as a ladies’ man. His cheek bore the scar of many an earring.
He wore thick-framed glasses and now touched something in his pocket that opened miniature trucker mirrors on each side of them so he could rearview the heifers without appearing to let his attention wander.
“W.T.,” said Reb, “you want em all!”
“They all need me. WOW! Will you look at that?”
“You ack like a damn dawg, W.T.!”
“Whooie, boy! Look at the action on that! Check the bouncers on that thing
! That is just about the gorgeousest—”
“It ain’t natural, W.T.!”
The latter wheeled as if reeling, put his arms out against fainting and regarded Alberta. “Do I ever want to shag that! Gosh!”
“Why dash my flash, W.T., I believe you’d put it in the lectric pencil sharpener if you couldn’t find no nuther aperture!”
“Fuckin’ near, buccaneer, but that is class! That is eatin’ material!”
These remarks, though conversational in tone, were generally overheard.
“That is un-fuckin’-believable!” And so saying he made his awestruck way over to Alberta and stood staring at close range.
She continued chatting with some NATO chief-of-staff or something until she could no longer ignore the Secretary of State and glanced at him uncertainly.
He shrugged. “What are we waitin’ for?”
The Major-General made the introduction and without qualms or quandry W.T. got in there and worked.
Of course I was getting a little tired of him by now but no one else so much as gave them a curious glance. It was widely assumed by those who assumed things that I was sacking with Recky anyway, and she now caught my eye and gave me a this-opens-the-way-for-us look. Even Reb didn’t appear put out.
If there was a casualty to be considered here it was W.T.’s wife, Nola. Nola was, how shall I put it, of less than glamorous aspect. A stick figure body-wise, hair like a magistrate’s wig and the face of a lab specimen. Not all that beautiful until you chose her, sort of thing.
How she and W.T. had ever combined is not known to me. In Washington, where divorce is political poison, you get these matches that have long since ceased to make sense, but even so. Rumor was that, in their fiery early days, W.T. had actually made her wear a bag on her head during coition, told her it turned him on or something.
She stood by now observing his behavior with Alberta, talking to herself indignantly.
With W.T.’s arrival it was clear that the party had begun and Recky came and took my arm and led us in to dinner. She and Reb sat at opposite ends of the board and I found myself between her and Nola with the movie star across from me. Alberta sat opposite at the other end between Reb and W.T., Celebrado across from her and the rest in descending order of rank, Norman in the middle.
The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy Page 20
