Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/jed-mercurio/page,3,493353-american_adulterer.html
The morning is bright and freezing cold, with snow decking the capital, and up on the Hill the low winter sun blinds the masses, as the new President swears his oath:
“I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Coatless, he appears impervious to the weather, in contrast to the chill bones of old men who surround him, but in truth his furnace is fired by shots of painkillers, steroids and amphetamines as he addresses the crowd below the Capitol:
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation. In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. “
To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction engulf all humanity. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
“The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
The crowd applauds, and the new President is attacked by an octopus of handshakes. One of them must be the Old Bastard—he was only a few feet away, on the podium—but, when the President scans the faces, he can’t see the grey old man anywhere, so he has uttered his last and melted into history, a curtain of snow falling across him as it fell across his image blanked by interference on the TV screen in last night’s delirium, and the President is escorted back to the motorcade, his sojourn in the open air having been all too brief. He would have liked to have walked back to the White House, but pain revisits his back as the anesthetic injections wear off, and nowadays he can only walk a hundred yards or so at most, so he bends into the limousine and the agent closes the door on the clear, cold air, which now turns to leather.
The President occupies a box, waving out through glass, but he feels a great sense of hope for his country and for himself. He believes the work carried out in the next few years will change the whole world for the better. He has an idea for an organization called the Peace Corps, which will give idealistic young men and women the chance to dedicate their skills abroad, to carry his message to the poor and dispossessed of the world that the great powers must hold out a hand not a gun, and perhaps he should have mentioned it in his address, but he’s merely being jittery, because he knows the speech went well, and the First Lady smiles at him proudly as they glide along Constitution Avenue to their new home.
Later, in the Oval Office, secretaries unpack boxes while workmen maneuver his desk into place. His wife brings the children to see him, and he plays a game with his daughter that’s a hybrid of hide-and-seek and peekaboo, Caroline being too young to obey the rules of the former and too old to be entertained by the latter, and then, when his wife says that she ought to take them away, he asks them to promise to return soon, because this office resembles yet another cell, another interior, and he wants them to have the run of the place so he doesn’t feel so isolated. He places his arm round his wife’s shoulders, kissing the side of her thick dark hair, smelling it, and gazing down at their son whom she cradles.
The President’s first executive order doubles the federal food ration to the poor, a secret promise made to himself when campaigning in West Virginia, where he and his wife were shocked by the sight of countrymen who appeared to live as if in the previous century or on an undeveloped continent, whose children brought home food from school to share with their hungry families. By the end of his first full day, he suffers dry eyes, a runny nose and a sore throat, triggered by his allergy to house dust, which customarily flares up quite severely during initial habitation of a new home or office, it being a straightforward matter to take antihistamines until his immune system becomes desensitized.
As the real work begins, the President discovers that the country really is in as big of a mess as he claimed in his campaign, so he orders his team of close advisors to compile a list of all the idiots, obstructionists and deadwood in every division of government, which the President dubs the “shit list,” but soon the mandarins of intelligence and the military distract him with bulletins on their force of fifteen hundred exiled freedom fighters training to carry out an amphibious landing from which they will stir an uprising against the dictator of a certain foreign power. Naturally the President would like to see the downfall of every tyrant, and he possesses no obstructive affection for this particular republic, his days long gone of vacationing on the island for the purposes of gambling, whoring and screwing the Italian ambassador’s wife (or was it the Spanish?), but he’s equally opposed to the idea of our own military participating in the operation, given that his quest to win the respect of peoples of alien ideology has only just begun, and it would advance his cause not one jot to be seen interfering in the self-determination of a sovereign state with the odious violence of an imperialist, particularly given it’s plain for the world to see that this particular dictator is better characterized as a thorn in America’s flesh than a dagger through our heart.
But the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are convinced the operation will be a surgical decapitation, after which the citizenry will gladly embrace the freedom with which it has been presented.
As the President sits in his rocking chair with a face waxen at the effort involved in concealing the agonizing spasms down his spine, he asks, “How do we know the people will welcome the post-invasion regime?”
The CIA Director says simply, “Why wouldn’t they, Mr. President?”
Afterward the President struggles to his feet and presses his palms hard against the lower portion of his back brace as he attempts to arch rearward, but there is no relief, only unremitting pain, so he asks Mrs. Lincoln to contact the First Lady urgently, while he stumbles through to the small private study adjacent to the Oval Office, wherein his wife arrives a few minutes later to discover him prostrate on the floor struggling to untie the seam of his back brace.
She helps him release the brace, and then they pull down his pants to give a painkilling shot in each buttock, after which she kneads the hollows of his lower back, endeavoring to pry open the iron grip of muscle spasm, while he waits for the anesthetic to take effect.
Then he returns to work.
That evening, in the Residence, his wife insists he receive a visit from a doctor. Instead he summons two. Adm. B. advocates surgery as the only definitive treatment, followed an hour later by Dr. T., who declares surgery will almost certainly render the President a cripple. If one laid all the physicians in the world end-to-end, they wouldn’t reach a conclusion, this being the subject’s reason for being as promiscuous with doctors as he is with women. He goes to bed with painkillers, but wakes in the night, his back in spasm again, so he slides out onto the floor, trying not to raise a sound that might disturb the children sleeping in the next room, but the
gasps of pain from stretching and bending wake his wife, who puts his favorite record on their old Victrola, the music turned down to a whisper, as she rubs muscles that are hard as the stone-cold floor underlying the bedroom carpet.
The subject met his future wife at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend when he was a junior senator and she was employed as a roving camera reporter, an occupation that involved approaching strangers on the streets and in the meeting places of the capital, with the purpose of capturing their reactions to the lighter news stories of the day, which he purported to find admirable, as is only sensible when meeting someone for the first time who also happens to be a beautiful young woman, to which she responded that it was a temporary diversion, as she wished to pursue a career in serious journalism but her youth and good looks were obstacles to being taken seriously. “Then I’m certain to go far,” he joked.
Her name, Jacqueline, she pronounced in the French style. She was intelligent but shy, a luminous presence that outshone everyone at dinner that night, so first he asked her for the asparagus and then for a date. They saw each other on and off for the next two years, during which he often worked evenings and weekends, while her wanderlust took her to Europe for a time, so their courtship was intermittent, weeks often elapsing between dates, though, when it got late in a bar somewhere, he’d fish a fistful of coins from his pocket and, despite frequently going home with some girl he’d picked up, there was only one woman he kept on calling, and one woman he ever seriously considered for the permanent position.
He lies face down, feeling her hands squeeze his flesh but blind to her expression, and remembers he could never be sure in the early months of their relationship whether she understood the depth of his compulsion, but even at that stage she must have capitulated to the fact, almost as if she expected it in a man like him, an expectation developed from her father’s philandering, and possibly finding herself subconsciously attracted to a similar type. Whatever her reasons, she decided marriage was worth the risk of heartbreak, just as he now lies twisted in agony from an office he has craved but that rides him harder than fitter men.
She is the only woman he’s let witness his vulnerability. Because he’s suffered sickness all his life, he’s been taken ill in the presence of girlfriends before, and there have been times when his back interrupted sex, sometimes with consequences that in retrospect were comical, but on those occasions, rather than admit his infirmity, he preferred to leave the girl believing she was to blame, unless she happened to be a particularly decent type, in which case the story of a back wrecked by a war wound might be acknowledged in a superficial sort of a way, rather like the fellow in The Sun Also Rises. Only the subject’s wife is fully au fait with the complete extent of his infirmities, alone against the various members of his family who have witnessed his episodes over the years but no longer receive his intimacy, and alone against the various medical professionals who have come, scratched their heads, argued among themselves and done precious little, none ever quite grasping the whole story of this body lurching into premature decrepitude. Although no doubt she would wish for a husband blessed with rude health, his wife has learned to accept her lot, as has he. Where perhaps they might differ is that he would include his sexual proclivities within the spectrum of his physical stigmata. He can no more dispel his compulsively active libido than he can wish hormones from his adrenal glands.
In the morning, however, he must act as though his glands are pumping, his intestines carrying out pain-free digestion and his back providing solid support. The subject continues to suffer a mild allergic reaction to the dust and dander of his new surroundings, stimulating a dry cough that particularly troubles him in the evenings.
At 7 a.m. he enters the family dining room in the Residence, where they breakfast together; he explains to their daughter he was unable to read her bedtime story last night because of work but makes it up by walking hand in hand with her along the West Colonnade, where she spends a few minutes exploring the Rose Garden, excitedly crunching tiny shoe prints into the frosty lawn, and then they continue into his office, where the acts of concealment begin, as the steroids, painkillers and amphetamines flooding his system permit him to project an image of vigorous health. He allows Caroline the run of the Oval Office while he finishes reading the newspapers, then he lifts her up onto his knee to kiss her bye-bye before the nanny conveys her back to the Residence, so he can study the latest set of documents relating to the invasion.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines troop into the Oval Office, followed by the Director of the CIA and his Chief of Operations, to give a progress report.
The President says, “The code name Bumpy Road sounds unwelcomely prophetic, gentlemen. I wonder if this is some form of reverse psychology on the part of the CIA, and in future I can expect to be advised of Operation Abject Failure and Operation Political Suicide.”
They chuckle, and then continue to persuade the President that the surgical excision of the dictator will be a great success.
The President asks, “How many men do you estimate he can mount in a counterattack?”
“Twenty-five thousand, Mr. President,” answers the Director of the CIA.
“Mr. Dulles, it doesn’t take Price Waterhouse to figure out twenty-five thousand against fifteen hundred amounts to pretty good odds for him and pretty rum ones for us.”
The Director describes how the invasion will lead to a popular uprising, yet the President treats his argument with the same suspicion he regards the term “military intelligence,” the most mordant oxymoron in the idiom of government, because the CIA and the Joint Chiefs are cut from the same cloth as the men who killed his elder brother, a pilot blown to smithereens flying a mission carrying an explosive payload primed with a hair trigger that could be tripped by a bump of turbulence, who equally resemble the generals and admirals who prosecuted the war in the Pacific, safe ashore, pursuing strategies that caused thousands upon thousands of needless casualties, among them the crew of the President’s own command, a torpedo boat ripped in half by a destroyer, ruining the President’s back and drowning two of his men. Now the generals begin a discussion of exact numbers and how the uprising will unfold, while the President wonders if any of these men, despite the fruit salad splayed across their chests, has spent nights on the black ocean listening out for the rumble of vessels a hundred times your size, if any of these men have seen comrades consumed by fire. Their conversation halts abruptly, and the President surfaces from his reverie hearing his own fingers drumming impatiently on the arm of his rocking chair.
Alone again later, the President limps to the window and stretches his back, peering over the South Lawn toward the Washington Monument, tracking the vehicles sailing along Constitution Avenue, but he hears not a sound through the bullet-proof glass, nor feels a breath of the wind that choreographs fallen leaves into a thousand dead hands waving.
At the end of each working day, the President leaves the door into his secretary’s office ajar as a signal he’s available to the staff, and through the gap he observes his press secretary talking to an attractive young woman in the hall outside. Mrs. Lincoln presents the President with tomorrow’s engagements for approval, and lastly she hands over some personal letters, one of which bears a sender’s address they both recognize, though Mrs. Lincoln discreetly lays the envelope on his desk as if it carries no significance, the envelope remaining sealed unlike the rest of his mail, which she quite properly vets, then she withdraws to her office, shutting the interfacing door to grant privacy for the President to do what he will with the letter, which, after a moment’s hesitation, is to open the envelope, to slide out a colorful card of “Good Luck in Your New Home!” with a short greeting on the back that appears to be written with lipstick and her name signed in the bottom right corner.
The President hasn’t seen Marilyn since a few weeks before the election, initially giving her the excuse that he’d become too busy with the campaign, and t
hereafter being noncommittal when she telegraphed CONGRATULATIONS!, which she followed by placing a call to his transitional offices, though it was never clear to him how she obtained the number, but obviously during that time he wasn’t so busy that it would have been impossible to manufacture an assignation, either at Palm Beach or on the West Coast, instead the issue being the magnitude of Marilyn’s celebrity and the concomitant challenges to a discreet liaison now he’s been elected, the bittersweet irony being that, had he lost, he could have spent any number of blissful days in Beverly Hills screwing her brains out and no one would have cared a damn.
Truthfully he was seeking an exit, as she was beginning to resent her role in the chorus line of casual lays and wanted to audition for the lead, the prods, hints and neediness of which were becoming somewhat of a drag, climaxing with their assignation the night he secured the nomination, such that it was becoming quite the challenge for him not to appear as if he didn’t really give a damn for her, which might sound incredible given her status as the country’s foremost sex symbol, yet one of the lessons learned in a career of fornication is that one mustn’t be intimidated by a woman’s beauty, and certainly not by her overt sexuality, since the appearance of such is a clear statement of her insecurity. A woman like Marilyn is so accustomed to every man in the room wanting to sleep with her that she is imbalanced when they don’t, becoming anxious that her face is no longer fresh or her figure no longer firm, to the point where one must tread the fine line between appearing to want to sleep with her while also appearing not so very desperate to.
In Marilyn’s case, he found himself adept at striking this balance, for it has been his practice for many years now to treat every woman the same—with the obvious and magnificent exception of his wife. Moreover, it would appear that if one sleeps with one actress or model, it secures a pass to such encounters with their peers. These women receive so many advances in the course of their average week that their methodology for selecting the appropriate suitor appears to be fashioned from herd mentality, where what’s good enough for one is good enough for all, and it is also possible that, once a man has secured a liaison with one of these starlets, the others regard him as a means by which to legitimize their status within the herd. Strict adherence to a policy of treating all women the same, however beautiful, necessitates the corollary of not appearing unduly diminished by the fact that one particular starlet or another proves impervious to his charm—or a political aide or a housewife, for that matter—because the smooth cogs of philandering turn on the grease of inconsequential encounters, the gears crunching if rejection is given undue importance. Instead each tooth must turn over in smooth rotation, he to the next model or aide or housewife, and the starlet, who regardless of their conversation has been scanning over his shoulder for the bigger, better deal, to her next sugar daddy.