Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
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Meanwhile the President wanders the halls between meetings, from his office to the Cabinet Room and the Fish Room. Mrs. Lincoln becomes concerned about these lonesome interludes in his schedule and ensures that meetings are scheduled back-to-back so his mind can’t wander toward its shameful self-interrogation. Pretty soon the only time the subject is alone is for his midday swim, the water heated to ninety degrees in an effort to relieve his back, and in the restroom, which is becoming a source of considerable embarrassment. The President has been ingesting large doses of Lomotil to control the diarrhea that afflicted him severely during the invasion, with the result that now, following a return to more normal hours and stress levels, he is severely constipated, for which he’s prescribed Metamucil by Dr. T., with painful abdominal cramping, for which Adm. B. is giving Bentyl, but, in spite of frequent, long visits to the head, which do not go unnoticed by Mrs. Lincoln and the Secret Service, the President feels unable to expel the blockage, a situation compounded by a recent exacerbation of urethritis and prostatitis, both of which make urination excruciatingly painful (the subject is on penicillin from Dr. T. and Furadantin from the Admiral), so he voids as infrequently as possible, the resulting condition now being one of great discomfort, particularly when seated, whereby his full bladder presses on his inflamed prostate and also on his loaded bowel, which swells against his sensitive lower spine.
When Dr. Feelgood pays a visit, he prescribes various tonics for the President’s back and bowels before making a direct enquiry about sex. “Are you enjoying normal activity, Mr. President?” he asks in his accent.
“Who’s to say what’s normal?” the President answers.
The doctor says, “A subject accustomed to frequent sexual activity may suffer drastic psychological withdrawal. Concentration and judgment may be severely impaired.”
The sense of choking follows the subject in an invisible cloud, when he’s with his wife, with his children, when he plays golf, unable to concentrate so he tops shots that skip through the grass menacing field mice. When he gets into bed with his wife, he embraces her, and the sorrow for those men dampens his eyes before she tells him everything will be all right, but she can’t share his nightmares because she’s never seen a man die, never seen a head explode right beside her.
In the morning, he eats a bland breakfast high in fiber, yet still endures a painful, unproductive half-hour on the toilet before tackling his daily schedule, the pressure in his pelvis building till noon, when he’s prescribed some additional pills to move his bowels, this new medication exerting no remedial effect, so that evening, after another low-taste, high-fiber meal, he smokes a cigar and imbibes three Bloody Marys, which have no influence except on his heartburn.
His direst complaint becomes headache. When troubled by the cough, the pressure in his skull becomes unbearable. He feels his hair roots being pushed out from the inside. The subject’s condition fails to improve the next day, yet, as is his invariable practice, he lets no one in on his discomfort, so not even his physicians receive a full picture of his constellation of miseries, although Mrs. Lincoln notices the set of his jaw and the tightness around his eyes, which most of his aides assume result from the failed invasion.
Mrs. L. gently inquires whether the President feels in strong enough spirits to fly, as planned, to a West Coast dinner tonight, but it is an important occasion, the first official visit to California since the election. When she has returned to her office, he finds the card from Marilyn, filed in his desk, and slips it into his inside jacket pocket.
The President kisses his family goodbye, assuring his wife he’s well enough to make the trip, before the Marine helicopter hops across to Andrews Air Force Base, where he boards the Special Air Mission Boeing for the flight west. The speech tonight follows a meal, and the President is wary of being seen in public to eat a restricted diet, so he consumes the steak just as everyone else does, though in his case he suffers a beef intolerance, which exacerbates his abdominal discomfort. The speech goes over well, and he attempts to relax with a cigar and a whiskey sufficiently to propel himself through the customary glad-handing and arm-twisting, then the Secret Service convey him to his hotel, two agents taking their stations outside his suite, while he suffers on the toilet for forty-five minutes. Afterward the President lies on the bed and consumes his nightly regimen of hormone replacers, painkillers, muscle relaxants, germ killers, bowel movers and stomach pacifiers, till his blood simmers with chemicals.
The hour approaches midnight, but he can’t sleep. His sinuses feel blocked, something that occurs regularly when he sleeps in a new place, even though it’s mandatory for the presidential suite to have been intensively vacuumed of every particle of house dust and any pillows or mattresses containing feathers to have been replaced, the sinusitis and cough and tightness in his chest simply being the result of the indigenous dander of the environment. He puts the light back on and hears the agents come to attention outside the door. The President limps to the bathroom, where he fears he’s going to regurgitate the steak dinner, but nothing comes up save a sickly taste. He runs a scalding bath, the steam misting the mirrors and chrome of the bathroom, then he slides under the water, which turns his skin pink and prickly, and here he lies for almost an hour, regularly reheating the water with a burst from the hot tap, yet experiencing only minor relief, so, in the end, he struggles out of the water and towels off, returning to his bed from where he studies the agents’ movements that break the slit of light at the foot of the door. He goes out in a sweater and slacks and tells them, “I need some air.”
“Please hold, Mr. President, while I call that in.”
“Just some fresh air,” he says.
“Of course, Mr. President, but you understand our orders are to notify your movements.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” he says.
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, it’ll only take a few minutes to call it in.”
“Please don’t take any trouble.”
The President shuts the door and returns to one of the beds, where his head feels ready to explode. He makes up his mind, and dials a number. There are six or seven rings before she answers in a sleepy voice, then he says, “It’s me.”
“Jack?”
“I’m in town.”
“My God! Where?”
“The Beverly Hills.”
“Shall I come over?”
“It’s late.”
“Tomorrow then?”
“I go back to D.C. tomorrow.”
She says, “It’s not so late to come over tonight. It’s been too long, Jack.”
Down the line, he hears her breathing. He pictures her mouth and wonders what she’ll wear.
“Come on over,” he murmurs.
The President paces his suite. He limps between the two bedrooms and then into the bathroom but is still unable to pass a motion. He puts on a clean shirt, and then a few minutes later he summons the agent and says, “An old friend is coming to pay me a visit.”
“No problem, Mr. President, I’ll just require his name and address so we can run the necessary checks. It should be all done in time for breakfast, sir.”
The President hesitates. “My friend wants to come tonight.”
“Tonight, Mr. President?”
“Very shortly, in fact.”
The agent shifts uncomfortably. “I have to report to my captain, Mr. President. Visitors to the presidential suite must be given security clearance prior to arrival and that takes time, as you know, sir.”
“Well, there isn’t time.”
The agent studies the President. The President bites his lip, on edge. “What would you like me to do, Mr. President?” the agent asks him.
“I’d be very grateful if you would just let her up,” the President says.
The agent notes the feminine pronoun but, as to a backfiring car engine, he’s trained not to react.
The President begins to pace the suite again. He has developed a fine tremor in his hands. He
is tempted to call the whole thing off but takes a breath and states, “Yes. Please see to it she’s let up.”
Now the agent glances back toward the door, where his colleague remains stationed. The two men share a look, and then the agent by the door shrugs and returns to staring blankly along the hall.
“Mr. President, with respect, sir, we follow a security protocol with all visitors. This is most irregular, sir.”
“I want to see her,” the President says simply, with a hint of desperation.
The agent comes to attention. “Yes, Mr. President, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Relax,” the President says. “I intend to search her thoroughly.”
The agents don’t relax, but Marilyn arrives about an hour later—fifty minutes in makeup, ten minutes in the taxi. The President hears her voice outside, being greeted courteously by the agents, with whom she flirts, and, as he opens the door, the President sees the agents snap back into their disinterested gaze.
The President helps Marilyn out of her mink and then fixes drinks. “It’s great to see you,” he says.
“It’s great to see you, Mr. Pres-i-dent,” she says, with a giggle.
“And you’re my first lady,” he says, though she misses his irony.
He glances at her blonde hair and the heft of her breasts, and soon after he coughs his poison into her.
THE MOON
In her typical needy fashion, Marilyn insists on coming to the airport to see off the President, his polite efforts to deter her making little impact, since she has perfected the heedlessness of the movie diva who only hears what she wants, even if it’s bellowed at her through a megaphone. As her President, he commands her not to come to the airport under any circumstances—in fact, she must leave the hotel at once via a back exit. But she laughs, putting a finger to his lips before knotting his tie, promising that, if he prevails once more on the Secret Service to convey her under camouflage to the SAM, she will give him a memorable send-off.
He hesitates. Then he says, “How memorable?”
“Unforgettable!” she says.
The President arranges for her to motor in a separate vehicle and to be smuggled aboard the aircraft. She must conduct herself as if they have not been in each other’s company the night before, claiming she has traveled out especially to discuss an important matter with the President before he departs for Washington. In a private cabin shielded from staff and crew, the President confronts the prospect of a return to constipation in its many excruciating forms, and succumbs once more to his libido’s treacherous permeability, with the result that the airplane overruns its takeoff slot, delaying other traffic, until Marilyn emerges from the cabin and makes her exit, after which the Commander-in-Chief learns his aides have ascribed the delay to a presidential haircut.
“At least they didn’t say I was getting a blow-dry,” he mutters.
Once the doors are sealed and the SAM lifts off, the President rejoices in a clear head and sinuses and a pain-free stomach and tubing. He sips an orange juice at his customary window seat and attacks reports on the economy with renewed vim. The tense furrows around his eyes have softened, making him look five years younger. He flashes a smile at a stewardess who has flown the SAM many times before but never with the new President, and she blushes, struck by his bright eyes, his splendid hair and his tan. When he stands to join his aides for an airborne policy meeting, she offers to brush down the ruffles on his jacket.
“Would you mind hanging it?” he says, and she helps him off with it, stepping close enough to his back for him to get a whiff of her Chanel.
Last night he worried that, as he leant to kiss her neck, Marilyn would hold him off, exclaiming, “But I can’t! You’re the President!” When she did say it, it was afterward, with a coo of pride. And now, as he watches the stewardess’s chewing-gum walk up the aisle to hang his jacket, he conceives his office as aphrodisiac.
***
After the meeting, he retires to his cabin for a short nap. The President views the prospect of Marilyn ducking in and out of his life with a mortal kind of dread. Last night’s sex has turned him from a man stumbling through the desert dying of thirst into one who happened across a cocktail bar, but he is deeply concerned by the necessary breaches of privacy required to secure a completely gratifying assignation, having only succeeded in upholding two of his three rules of womanizing: one, that Marilyn is gorgeous enough to warrant the risk and, two, that their dalliance does not develop into a continuing affair (his definition of “continuing” being that both parties expect coupling to occur whenever the opportunity arises). The third, possibly most important, rule—and the one by which he has failed to abide—is that no one must know. In the past, he could enjoy a hotel-room encounter with a pickup and no one would notice her go in and no one log when she came out, but his position as President has put an end to the anonymity of traveling-salesman sex.
Because Marilyn is possibly the most familiar female face on the planet, it’s of course impossible to go anywhere she is not recognized, so when they met during the Democratic National Convention last summer, there seemed no likelihood of concealment—in fact, such an approach would have aroused greater suspicion—so they dined openly together at Puccini’s as if she were lobbying him about some Hollywood pet interest (animal welfare, let’s say) and he were patiently indulging her. Even when he smuggled her into his limousine, it could be said he was merely acting the gentleman by dropping a lady at her apartment.
However, the facts of last night’s assignation are that an unaccompanied female was admitted to the presidential suite in the middle of the night and didn’t leave till morning, and suspicion would be equally uncomfortable whether the lady in question was a mousy secretary or, as she happened to be, the world’s most stupendous sex goddess.
The extremely awkward conversation last night with the agent stationed outside his door brought back memories of smuggling girls into his room at Harvard, or in port, where one always ran the risk of encountering an earnest sentry and having to weigh friendly bribery against confident rank-pulling. But in those days, he was a tail-hound in a crew of tail-hounds, whereas last night, when Marilyn presented herself to his suite ready to be unwrapped from her mink, the President read the agent’s expression, albeit carefully buried beneath the stone patio of professional disinterest, of betrayal of family, colleagues and voters. It was an unfortunate coincidence that the man on duty happened to be a moral monogamist, but, on the other hand, the President takes heart that his little adventure may have disabused friendlier parties of the fallacy that he’s one too. When the stewardess brings his jacket, she slips it on and straightens the collar, expectant he will enjoy physical intimacy with a good-looking woman. He says, “See you on the next flight, I hope,” and she replies, “I hope so too, Mr. President.”
Whatever the consequences of his tryst, the President feels clearheaded and detoxified by the experience, allowing him to be lucid and decisive with his aides, most of whom deport themselves toward the President in precisely the same fashion as yesterday, which he interprets as proof they agree a man is entitled to his recreation whether he’s a longshoreman on the Boston docks or the President of the United States.
The subject and his wife are reunited that evening. They conduct their children’s bedtime ritual before sitting down to dinner together. Over the entrée, she remarks that he looks well, then later, over dessert, the same thing: “You’re looking well, Jack.”
He smiles but doesn’t answer, and rather than searching her eyes for a glimmer of suspicion, he is smart enough to peer into the meniscus of his St. Émilion as he swirls the goblet and ask their staff for a petit corona. The First Lady lights her own filter cigarette, saying, “You must have gotten over Cuba.”
“True,” he says, blowing some fog, “but never their cigars.”
The subject appreciates that sometimes the adulterer cannot help but be smug about his conquests. He enjoys the apocryphal tale of a man shipwreck
ed on a desert island in the company of a beautiful woman, with whom he enjoys day after day of passionate lovemaking, until eventually the man becomes downcast, whereupon he asks the woman to dress in his clothes and meet him the next morning on the other side of the island. The next morning she sees him running toward her, waving happily, shouting, “Hey, buddy, I just gotta tell you about this chick I’m screwing!”
Philosophers dispute whether a tree that falls in an isolated forest makes a sound, and the artless philanderer becomes anxious that his sex is diminished by people not knowing, causing his behavior to adopt the smug semaphore of secret achievement. As the First Lady loosens his back brace before bed, even he experiences a fleeting temptation to proclaim he spent last night with the nation’s number-one sex symbol, on the assumption his wife might be proud of him.
She massages his scars and he feels her breath on his shoulder. He turns and kisses her, and she lets him maneuver them toward the bed.
“You’re ready?” he says.
“I’m ready,” she says.
“Because if you’re doing it just for me …”
She shakes her head and kisses him. “I’m doing it for me,”
she says.
One critical element of the subject’s sexual psychology pertains to his withdrawal symptoms appearing refractory to relief from his wife, owing to the unique excitement associated with a new or infrequent partner. This relativism would be hard for his wife to comprehend. At least his father had the excuse of a spouse who denied him sex. Worse, the subject takes his wife’s sexual availability so much for granted that, perversely, he’s often disinclined to avail himself of it.