The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

  Reb had something on the President. Belton had this on W.T.

  All we had done was cement the alliance. Stupid, really.

  And I knew why he was doing it. I knew he just wanted to impress Alberta, get her back.

  I didn’t care. It was all in the toilet.

  “Darling!” she told him on the telephone. “You’re not that boring!”

  This was after she got over her rage. She hadn’t wanted to compromise herself so publicly by making this tape but that something exhibitionistic in her had beguiled her and she’d risen up on the toes of her ambivalence and flung herself in. Now no one would ever see it.

  And worse than that, she’d been had. Outsmarted.

  But then who does the con person really respect, finally, but the one who out cons him/her? Just ask one.

  I lay on the bed playing solitaire.

  “Oh, Belton, how excessive of you. Lots of people in politics get divorced now. It happens all the time. The important thing is to remarry immediately. You do have a family coming.”

  I couldn’t get the aces up. Couldn’t open any spaces for my kings.

  “But how can you think it’s not yours? Of course she is rather a pizza pants.”

  I flipped through the cards. Nothing.

  These were those last sad days when you’re no longer in love with someone you like too much to leave. That wasn’t exactly the equation but it was more or less the mood.

  Her body, the way her foot fit her shoe. Wasn’t worth it.

  I shuffled and redealt. Didn’t look any better.

  “No, I’m sure everything’s fine.”

  Used to be some kind of timelessness between us. Now we were watching the clock. Eternity. It doesn’t last.

  We are our work, was how I’d finally put it. That’s how we do it now, isn’t it? It’s the civilized way to say good-bye. Got to get back to my work.

  She hung up and came and stood over me. “He says he doesn’t think the child is his and he’s afraid to ask her. Of course she’s of rather average intellect, she may not be sure it’s hers. Do you want to leave a wake-up call?”

  “What?”

  “What time do you want to wake up?”

  An Albertatude. She meant I had missed a move. I placed the eight on the nine, glaring at her as I did so, and turned up a black six.

  “One so much prefers the red cards. Shouldn’t you be getting ready?

  “I am ready.”

  “You’re not going on televison like that!”

  Yes, I was going on television. It was the night of the Vice President’s speech at the National Press Club and the network had arranged for Belton and me to co-commentate. We had become the Buckley and Vidal of our day. Matching profiles in Esquire and so forth.

  To tell the truth it wasn’t all that exciting. Sort of small-g great, I know you don’t believe me.

  “What am I going to say on television?” I had protested.

  “You don’t have to say anything, darling. Just sit there and glow. You’re an important man now.”

  One thing I wasn’t going to do was blow the whistle on the conspiracy. I mean can you suggest how?

  Ladies and gentlemen, there is a coup coming and Belton Haines is behind it. He is plotting to place the government of the United States in evil hands and has a tape in his vault of the Secretary of State dressed up as a chicken. I’d be taken away and confined.

  No, the best thing I could do was go on and get into my act. Pray for church unity or something. Play along until the right moment.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Well it is dinner. Aren’t you dressing?”

  “I’m not eating.”

  “Belton will be dressed. Why don’t you take the three back down and put it on the four. Then you could move the deuce.”

  “Because you can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “No you can’t.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “No,” I said, savoring the opinion, “you can’t.”

  “There is nothing wrong with ignorance unless you insist on it.”

  “Well I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

  “Wordy, you don’t really think I could go back to Belton.”

  “You’re already renegotiating your deal, aren’t you? You should be.” Jack on queen.

  “How could I possibly? How could you think so?”

  “You’re a clear stone, Alberta. You take your color from whatever you’re worn with.” Nine on ten. Ten on jack.

  “Wordy, can I be honest with you?”

  “I doubt it.” By the way, never say yes to this. Honesty is the sincerest form of aggression. Whenever someone wants to level with you, duck.

  “You don’t have any will,” she said anyway. “I’m sorry. All you do is bounce. You know how to bounce, I’ll give you that, but that’s all.”

  I moved the five to the six. Her voice was at that fragile point where it becomes brutal to jab back, and besides she seemed to be saying I wasn’t worth it, which is hard to answer.

  “Well,” she said. She shifted and sniffed the way they do when they’re Setting Out on a New Life. “You enjoy thinking of yourself as a bastard. It won’t surprise you to be treated like one.”

  She bent over to kiss me and crushed my nose with her sunglasses. Then she left.

  I threw the cards down and got up, took my shirt off and went into the john, slapped perfume in the pits and got into the silk suit. Did all that. Went downstairs and waited for a cab.

  When I got to the Willard the lobby was crowded but they smiled me right in past face control. I was getting used to that kind of thing and I knew it was nearly over. Some things I know.

  Everything was gloomy. My mood seemed to match the rest of the country’s. The impeachment talks were on the tube every day and the president had lost his hold. There was an air of subdued panic about the empty space at the top.

  The armed attack on the Vice President’s office hadn’t helped much. At first it was dismissed as an isolated incident but as tension built it was acquiring importance. The whisper campaign said the President himself was behind it. No one knew what was happening.

  Inside the crowd surged in several directions at once. The hall was huge but then so was the press corps. As the importance of the event had grown so had the guest list and it had been decided to move it from the Press Club building to the convention center. In the same spirit the networks had opted for on-site coverage rather than sitting us in a studio. The nation’s pulse and so forth.

  Acres of people sat at round tables with white cloths and waiters moved around with trays trying to serve them and control the flow. There must have been two thousand people in there. The press, the guests, the people with pull.

  I saw Gora Smard, sort of a press-corps mascot, so far holding a table to herself. She was doing Oprah and Charlie Rose these days, had her own career going, and I suppose she regarded me as a professional rival, not to say a political opponent. She set her jaw as I passed.

  What I wanted to do was find a bar and have a drink before the TV thing. Two drinks. But when I went by the network booth just to make sure where it was they waved me in impatiently and I had to sit there while they worked lights and slapped me around with the powder puff.

  Belton came in and sat in the other chair. We didn’t speak.

  The whole palmistry fiasco had been a blow to his authority, let alone his political future. He had become a figure of fun, and the more so in that the network was inclined to yoke us together to amuse the multitude.

  When he did emerge into politics of course the whole context would be changed and it wouldn’t really matter what kinds of role he’d played as a star. Right? Best he could do now was cultivate the glamour of the condemned man, the grit of the survivor, and do what he could to discredit me. He had lived to fight again.

  Outside they were eating. Dan Rather had a booth a little closer to the stage but we were all right. I could see the pod
ium with the Vice President’s seal on it off to the side, the microphones like a tray of drinks.

  Along the dais from it was the head table. Reb and W.T. sat side by side in matching green plaid dinner jackets. They leaned back lazily not quite chewing gum while aides buzzed around them. If one had a remark to whisper the other came forward impassively and then they leaned back a little further this time, looked in opposite directions, did one chew.

  Reb’s eyes kept drifting to the podium and every few minutes he took some papers from his pocket, unfolded them and looked at them through half-moon reading glasses. The last page was there now.

  W.T. looked like a man with nothing to hide, and why not? Things were happening big and fast and if he had to sacrifice the security of a clean record, why, that was all part of the giddiness of flight. He was ready to fly, you could see it in his eyes.

  Recky eyed the crowd and worked her gum with her back teeth. It was all happening and she was the incumbent First Lady, not that she took any notice. The hotter it got the cooler her eyelids.

  Only Nola betrayed any nervousness. She sat with her knees snapped shut like a purse, hands folded on them, fighting back the tears. When she spoke the tip of her nose moved and the others stared at it until she stopped.

  Nearby sat Norman, wedged in at a crowded table. The investigation was closing on him and of course self-loathing produces that impression of guilt that we are apt to associate with actual crime.

  Mrs. President was moving in on him too. The pressure was on and she was turning to Norman for sympathy, ready to surrender up her sweets.

  “Try to keep her happy,” I told him. “She may be all that’s keeping you out of the sneezer.” Not to say me.

  On the face of it he was here on her behalf. She could hardly appear in person. He was functioning as Reb’s de facto aide, though of course that wasn’t true either, and his duplicity was eating at him. He had nail marks on his hands from clenching his fists so hard.

  His breath must have been whistling in clogged nostrils or something, people kept turning to look at him. I thought I saw a glance pass between him and Nola but I can’t be sure.

  Bjorn and Bibi were there, his adam’s apple bulging above his formal collar, she looking free, free, fee. “I’m free!” she told me. Just went around being free. I was getting tired of her.

  Tiffany was at a table with some television people, glowing. Luminous. Something typically American about her, I think it was her nose was so short. Screwed her face on a little too securely.

  Shoop went by in a waiter’s jacket with a tray. Filling in for a friend of his. So he was there.

  Across the room Madame settled into her seat like a butterfly. Even at that distance there was a willingness in the shoulders.

  And here came Alberta, escorted by Stolkov, caressing his arm. They had that he’s-old-enough-and-she’s-young-enough-to-be-interesting look about them. Her neck was just too long for her, it was embarrassing.

  “She belongs to me,” said Belton quietly. “I think you should accept that.”

  “It’s not very convenient then. I mean she’s living at my place.”

  “She’s using you.”

  “I know.” I gave him my Marcello look.

  We watched her be seated.

  He decided to kick me right in the moral sensibilities. “Do you love her?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So you’re playing with her. Playing with her feelings.”

  “She wants me to play with her feelings.”

  “She’s punishing me. She’s on this Germano-feminist vengeance trip and she’s just tasty enough to pull it off.”

  “Face it, she wasn’t happy with you.”

  “What do you get out of smoking another man’s cigarette butts?”

  “She says your dental work smells like yesterday’s fish.”

  “Is that right? You know what she says about you?”

  “Wait till I fasten my seatbelt.”

  “She says food without fucking is The Woman’s Problem. She says you’re the solution.”

  For a moment there I considered ripping his microphone out of his shirt. “I think that means she can’t get enough of me.”

  “She needs it from me. I drive a big Harley, I don’t know if you heard.”

  “I hope it’s not too big. Guy your age, you could strain yourself pumping it up. She needs a younger man, I think you should look at that.”

  “Oh, it works. And works. I don’t want to threaten you with statistics. Let’s just say she calls me forth inexhaustibly.”

  “She tells me she faked it with you.”

  “She had a lot of chance to practice.”

  “Remember what I told you, you shouldn’t overdo it. Look at your hand. The lines are melting away from the edge.”

  “Save it for the suckers.”

  “The whole equation says finito. You should be savoring your last days.”

  “What are you going to do now, sell me a piece of the true cross?”

  “THE END, it’s there in big letters. Life is both very long and very short, think of it that way.”

  “I think I’ll just kick your ass for you.”

  “Shiva!” I said. “Won’t that hurt?”

  He was making a move and I was in fact inching awaywards when we saw the director gesturing wildly. The red light was on. So were we. How long already it was hard to say.

  Belton came to first. He found reverse and gunned it back to whatever mode he had figured out for dealing with me, I could feel him do it.

  “We’re at the National Press Club Dinner for the Vice President’s address here tonight and what many analysts of the Washington arena see as the most important speech of his career. This is Mr. Rawlins’ first appearance before the Press Club and it comes at a critical point in the course of the current administration. With me tonight is Word Wallace, the President’s high priest and crystal-gazer and one of his few remaining advisers and Word, do you think Mr. Rawlins can save the President tonight?”

  “Well Belton, I don’t think there’s any question but that he’s going to try to savage the President—”

  “I didn’t ask you if he would save him, I asked you if he could.”

  “I don’t know why you’re asking anything. Is this your show or something?”

  “Well we do want the futurological point of view, Word, uh—”

  “It looks to me as if the Vice President’s going to make his own bid for power here tonight, Belton. He’s already gathering people around him who want in on whatever comes next and there will be an attempt to topple the President.”

  “What do you do, consult the I Ching?”

  “That’s how the situation reads, Belton. We do future and we do character, and loyalty isn’t strong in the Vice President’s make-up. I’d watch out if I were you.”

  “You don’t think it might be a good idea to dump a President who can’t do the job? Did the President say I’ve lost my own soul? Did he say that?”

  “That’s been taken out of context, Belton.”

  “Has the experience of the presidency made too many demands on his personality, do you think?”

  “He feels things deeply, Belton. His heart is open.”

  “But his staff are running his office.”

  “He may on occasion have been the victim of his own organizational skills. But people like this President, Belton, that’s the problem.”

  “Well you like him, Word, but then you’re on the payroll. What is an occultists’s salary at the White House, Word?”

  “I never received a salary, Belton.”

  “Cumulative charges, I guess. Are you the only super-naturalist on staff?”

  “I’m not on staff, Belton.”

  “I see. Well, there you have the word from Word Wallace and tell me, Word, how did you develop this flair for the mystical?”

  “Well, some people are born with it, Belton. Some stumble on it. Some are reduced to it. You come to it
sooner or later.”

  “Must be a lot of satisfaction, serving a Higher Power.”

  “I don’t know much about it. There’s someone inside me who knows what’s best, I just try to stay out of his way.”

  “Nothing is perfect, I guess—”

  “Even our ignorance is ragged, Belton.”

  “—except the money. But you won’t say exactly how much the President pays you.”

  “Enough for a better hairpiece than that one. Is that coming loose?”

  “Look, I told you—”

  “It’s crooked or something.”

  “Don’t touch me, you faggot!”

  He ducked away and tore his shirt on the wire but the lights were already down. The chairman of the Press Club was well into his introduction and the warm-up act was over.

  As the applause began Reb stood with hang-head humility and walked to the dais, skipped up the two steps and moved heavily to the podium. The coat hadn’t been cut that could close around his belly and the tailor had gone for a draped open-jacket look that suggested a certain frankness. This boy had nothing to hide.

  The chairman shook his hand warmly and retired. Flashes popped while Reb spread his papers behind the microphones. When he was ready he looked up.

  The applause, eager but nervous, grateful but guilty, had already died. He looked around at the audience, nodding at its anxiety, understanding it. He bit his lip, looked down at his papers, looked up again.

  “Mr. Chairman.” He looked at the chairman. “Members of the press. Ladies and gennumen. Friends. Americans. Citizens of this planet.

  “Is that everybody?”

  A relieved giggle and then they were silent.

  “I guess you’re all wonderin’ what I’m gone say!”

  A shorter laugh, less patient.

  He looked around at them. “Wayull, I’m gone say the only thing I can say. I’m gone say the truth. The truth, the whole truth, and nothin’ but the truth. So hep me.

  “Because you’re the judge! And you’re the jury, in this democratic process!

  “And this, this gatherin’ of the nation’s journalists, this is the court! We’re in a courtroom, here! And I have been called to testify!

  “So I must tell the truth! It’s my duty to tell the truth! My duty: to the American people.

  “Now: