Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
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In the morning, he wakes refreshed and free of the coughing or tightness in his chest. Though he appears to have suddenly acclimatized to their new home, the First Lady seems much less chipper than usual, but, instead of quizzing him further on his trip to the West Coast, she confides a general depression at the prospect of living for the next four or eight years in musty old halls with chipped paintwork, gimcrack heirlooms and tasteless art—furnishings, she complains, that appear to have originated from a discount store—and it comes as no surprise to him when, over breakfast, she vows to deal with the situation in precisely the same fashion as she has dealt with every period of disenchantment in their marriage, by profligate expenditure on redecoration.
Although his other chronic ailments seem to be temporarily in remission, the same cannot be said of the subject’s back, which appears to be deteriorating as a result of the long hours and intense pressures of his work, a situation not helped by Dr. T. and Adm. B. disagreeing over management of the condition. It is now being proposed that the President consult with another specialist, Dr. K. The consultation takes place in the White House, as it would if Dr. K. were an academic expert drafted into a briefing on some specialized field of foreign affairs, an arrangement by which the good doctor is both honored and irritated. He has studied the President’s medical records—actually, only those selectively relevant to his back— and recaps the history with the kind of crisp brevity the President appreciates: a ruptured lumbar disc playing college football, exacerbated by a severe impact against the bulkhead of his patrol torpedo boat when rammed by a Japanese destroyer, followed by osteoporosis as a side effect of steroid ingestion, leading to collapse of the fifth lumbar vertebra, which necessitated internal fixation by means of a metal plate, the postoperative course being complicated by septicemia—the future President went into a coma and was given the last rites—only to recover and be diagnosed with an infection in the internal fixing plate, which had to be extracted in a second operation, damaging the bone and cartilage into which the plate had been screwed, this damage being only partially repaired by bone grafts.
Dr. K. examines the President in the Residence, appearing as shocked as by the sight of a sideshow freak, because like any ordinary citizen he has no inkling that the vigorous young leader for whom he possibly voted cannot bend or straighten his back, cannot lift his left leg more than the few degrees necessary for walking, cannot put on his own shoes and socks, cannot turn over in bed and cannot sit in a low or reclining chair, after which the good doctor pronounces that the muscles of the President’s back, abdomen and pelvis are dangerously weak and he must embark on a daily regimen of exercises to avert permanent immobility.
The President responds to his anxiety by saying, “You may be interested to know, Doctor, that President Eisenhower had a heart attack and a stroke while in office.”
“So did the country,” the doctor says back.
The President’s booming laugh echoes down the hall for all to hear, but, just as the diagnosis takes place behind closed doors, so he carries out the exercises in the privacy of his rooms, his office and at the pool, where the hot water increases his suppleness, or, more accurately, reduces the lack of it.
He takes to inviting close advisors to join him. Occasionally they swim, but mostly they stand at the side of the pool with their ties loosed and sweat glistening on their faces.
Weekly the President pursues the State Department and the Justice Department about the fate of the Cuban internees, the survivors of the Brigade slung in prison, whose release he’s ordered them to negotiate with the Cuban government. But today in the pool it’s the turn of Justice to burden the President, as a senior official reveals that the FBI suspect a senior State Department advisor of being a practicing homosexual, a matter that has come to light in a routine (i.e., routinely tense) meeting with the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to the FBI reports, the State Department official has formed the habit of frequenting certain bars, and federal agents have witnessed transient male acquaintances spending the night with him at an apartment he rents on the other side of town from the home he shares with his wife and children.
“He has to go, Mr. President,” says the man from the Justice Department. “He’s a security risk.”
The President struggles out of the pool and towels his eyes. The agent stationed at the shower is the one from the night with Marilyn, and the President greets him warmly. “How are you today, Dwight?” he says.
“Very well, thank you, Mr. President. And you, sir?”
“Well, thank you. Peggy and the kids?”
“They’re also well, thank you, Mr. President.”
In order to practice successfully as a fornicator, the President has been forced to secure the complicity of others, but, though he would rather act alone, this situation is not unfamiliar. Sometimes one must rely on a certain gentlemen’s-club mentality that provides opportunities to hunt in a pack, to provide alibis where needed, and most importantly, to engender a general moral acceptance of infidelity.
The agent stares sightlessly into a nonexistent distance while the President washes and dries, which he does unselfconsciously, as one would after boarding school and the Navy, unselfconscious even of the double foot-long gashes up his spine. The President experiences no shame in his prematurely decrepit body or in his sexual peccadilloes, only in the failure of a promised new age that foundered in the criminal invasion of Cuba.
The Soviets have put into orbit one of their cosmonauts, a young pilot named Gagarin, ahead of our own plans to launch a man into space. Our national prestige has been dealt a resounding symbolic blow, because the simple-minded of the world are liable to become convinced of the superior achievements made possible by the communist system, and the simpleminded of our own country, always a group to whom one can successfully appeal in times of crisis, to the inferiority of our nuclear missiles, a point the President made repeatedly during the election to stir up mistrust at the shocking complacency of the previous administration, capitalizing on his predecessor’s embarrassment when, on the golf course (where else?), he was forced to answer to his Soviet counterpart bathing in the afterglow of Sputnik.
“Beep-beep,” went the little satellite, to which the Old Bastard answered that hurling chrome balls into space was meaningless.
But the new President faces the mightier derision, because, while a Soviet pilot has orbited the globe, we have had to make do with chimps.
Eventually our own man is ready to fly, and the President decides the launch must appear live on television, so that the nation can share the tension and excitement of the event, though he is warned of the possibility that the nation might also share in the impromptu son et lumiere of an explosion, but he sticks by his decision, confident that it will help focus the minds of the engineers and that, as he told the astronaut himself, it won’t make a damned bit of difference if he’s vaporized in secret or in public, the effect on his person will be equally embarrassing.
The First Lady joins the President and some close aides, plus the Joint Chiefs and the Vice President, as they follow the launch on a TV placed in the Oval Office. The President’s unadrenalized heart beats normally while other pulses race. The countdown descends to zero, and the little rocket lifts off into the sky and shrinks to a dot riding a plume of vapor. Once our man has safely gone up and safely come down, which only takes a matter of a quarter-hour, the President joins in with the smiles and handshakes in the room. The Vice President punches the air with delight, reveling in the success, and the President asks the VP to join him in telephoning congratulations to Mr. Webb at NASA, then, once the group has dispersed, the President is alone with his wife for a few minutes.
The First Lady is wearing a striking new hat and coat, which reminds the President he’s recently received a clothing bill for her account in the sum of forty thousand dollars.
She says, “The news hens never stop clucking about what I’m wearing, how my hair looks … Everyon
e’s watching me, Jack.”
“I know, Jacqueline.”
“Perhaps I needn’t have spent so much. I’ll cut back.”
“That’s all I ask,” he says. “I know it’s not easy being First Lady.”
“I loathe that title,” she says. “It makes me sound like a saddle-horse.”
He laughs loudly and plants a kiss on her mouth. No woman makes him laugh like she does.
The following week, the President makes a trip to Florida to visit our Space Center in order to give his congratulations in person to the flight personnel and, naturally, to the astronaut himself. That day, he rides with the Vice President and the astronaut in an open-topped limousine, greeting the cheering crowds, at one point remarking to Our First Man in Space that not many of our citizens are aware that the Vice President is the chairman of the Space Committee, but adding, with a glimmer in his eye, that, if the flight had been a catastrophe, he would certainly have made sure that there’d be very few people who didn’t know it.
The President feels little bonhomie toward the VP, mainly for small reasons of personal taste and hygiene, having repeatedly witnessed him using one of his giant, stubby fingers to excavate nasal mucus while he talks loudly on his telephone with the door to his office wide open, and having heard from independent sources that he urinates in the washbasin, sometimes doing so during a meeting. The President rarely uses a public urinal lest his inflamed prostate betrays him with an unmanly dribble, and he wonders if perhaps this is the reason the Vice President appears to rejoice in the idea that every golden parabola of piss proclaims him the more vigorous and powerful politician.
Before they took office, the VP made so many entreaties for the President-Elect to socialize with him that, in the end, he consented to a weekend hunting on his ranch, though the “hunting” element was somewhat artificial, given that their party simply crouched in the undergrowth, armed to the teeth, until a team of ranch hands drove a herd of deer straight into their ambush. The experience epitomizes the President’s view that the VP, despite his political artfulness and loyalty, is apt to misjudge a social situation, for which the President feels a measure of pity. But to this day he recalls with a shiver the cruel crack of gunfire, the animals’ blind terror, then the bursts of blood before their legs folded. He cannot shake the Vice President’s surprising affinity for slaughter.
The President’s family owns a compound at Palm Beach, at which they customarily spend winter weekends, and this is where he repairs, after parting from the VP and Our First Man in Space, for informal discussions over dinner with close aides, the topic of conversation on this occasion being the objectives of the space program. Once again the President has the advantage on his aides, by virtue of the ability, acquired during endless days of convalescence in his youth, to speed-read 1,500 words per minute with close to 90 per cent retention, being first to identify from the exhaustive documents the twin decisive factors, namely (1) that many of the objectives of space exploration are not of the right nature to capture the imagination of the country and therefore our ultimate goal must be a simply understood triumph over the Soviets, and (2) that, owing to the Soviet Union’s lead in certain aspects of space technology, the chosen goal must be so far removed from current capabilities to give our Space Agency time to overtake their rival.
In taking office, the President appealed to the best men the country has to offer to devote themselves to public service, as he has done despite the gifts of wealth and education that would swing open the doors of every corporate boardroom in the land, and now he sees he must galvanize the people in a similar endeavor, to divert everyone into looking up. “We should put a man on the moon,” the President proposes, as the single clearest statement of his belief in the limitlessness of American ambition.
The subject’s wife and children have not joined him at Palm Beach, instead remaining in Washington before spending a couple of days at the ranch the family has rented in Virginia, his wife excusing them because it’s too hot for the children this time of year in Florida and Caroline is pining for her pony.
As the sun goes down, the presidential party sits out by the pool. He wears a hot pack inside his back brace and sips a daiquiri. His gut has run the gamut of constipation, diarrhea and colic, now finding itself in a kind of temporary equilibrium before it veers into its next dysfunction. The President has completed the course of antibiotics prescribed for his urinary tract infection, with the result that he’s now able to pass water with minimal discomfort. Marilyn may have sucked the poison from his snakebite, but the snake remains, leeching poison via a subtle osmosis involving his shrunken adrenal glands and swollen prostate. The constipatory intensity of his sexual needs has passed, but those needs have been sharpened since his first dalliance in office, and so the question arises of whether it may be possible to return to preelection levels of fornication, most pertinently on this balmy Florida evening, because the party includes the pretty young press aide who has accompanied her boss, the President’s press secretary, who thought it would be good experience for her to play some small part in the trip, particularly since our first successful manned spaceflight means there’s currently a much more favorable mood toward the administration among the news media.
The girl addresses the President directly, the first time she has spoken before being spoken to, saying, “Mr. President, do you mind if we use the pool?”
He says, “See if you can make as big a splash as Commander Shepard,” and she laughs, she and some of the other aides taking to the pool while he speed-reads a fistful of reports. He slides the hot pack over to the other side of his spine. Through a shutter of shuffled reports, he glimpses the group in the pool swimming and splashing, his glances focusing repeatedly on the girl breast-stroking down to the shallow end then standing, water dripping from her slick hair, her bathing suit glistening tight against her figure, but, as she turns to swim the return leg, he drops his gaze a split second too late.
The girl is twenty-two years old. As she splashes in the pool with her colleagues, and he is minded that his recent assignation with Marilyn may already have been rationalized by his staff as a singular encounter between former lovers, so he ensures that the next time she glances up from the water she observes only his departing figure, trudging indoors with a senior advisor.
Before bed, he speaks with his wife over the telephone, who updates him on the children’s adventures on the ranch, particularly his daughter’s pony rides, which he is sorry to miss even though exposure to horse hair can leave him wheezing for twenty-four hours or more, then he carries out Dr. K.’s back exercises, after which he’s helped out of his brace and into his pajamas by the valet. The subject’s medications have been placed out on the bedside cabinet beside the telephone and notepad, and he takes each dose with a sip of water, checking each drug on the pharmacopoeia prepared by Adm. B., one of which is a sedative that speeds him to sleep before reflections on the press aide’s glistening swimsuit turn tumid.
In the morning, the party returns to D.C., where the President conducts a full day of White House business before donning black-tie for a reception at the Smithsonian thrown in honor of Our First Man in Space, at which there is genuine enthusiasm for the proposed effort to land a man on the Moon. Critics believe the objective is beyond reach, but the President wants the American people to imagine there is nothing we as a country cannot achieve if we set our minds to it, and we will only test this belief by applying ourselves to tasks that are hard, not easy, and by turning our best minds toward lofty endeavors rather than the venal accumulation of wealth or weaponry.
The President notices the VP clinging to Our First Man in Space with ingratiating offers of participation in product endorsements and corporate schemes. Political capital has made him an unlikely shipmate. The President cuts in, barely noticing the Vice President’s doleful mien on being cast overboard.
“Naturally, Commander,” says the President, “you’ll be offered a berth on the second voyage to the
Moon.”
“Why the second, Mr. President?” the astronaut asks.
“I’ve reserved the first for the Vice President.”
The astronaut laughs, and a waiter glides a tray of champagne flutes toward them. The President barely touches his champagne since it fires up his heartburn and gives him diarrhea for days, but hides his infirmity by saying, “If I have too much, Commander, Soviet spies will send word tonight would be a good night for a surprise attack.”
“Who’d have your job, Mr. President?” the astronaut says.
“I hope there are no takers just yet,” the President replies. Then the President catches the astronaut’s gaze drift toward the press aide, looking young and lovely in a cocktail dress, attempting to appear not bored by the attentions of one of the Space Agency’s senior managers, and, later, after dinner and speeches, seated at the top table, the President risks a cigar, feeling only a minor tug in his gut as he takes his turn to eye her. The men at his table clench whiskey glasses and drift smoke at each other, while the President and the astronaut talk Navy talk. The President has gravitated toward Our First Man in Space in masculine admiration, and the astronaut senses it, because an erstwhile deference has departed from his manner toward the Commander-in-Chief, and now they converse as if equal alpha males.
Our First Man in Space wears a crew cut, is a man of above-average looks, though not as tall as the President, but clearly, after months of rigorous medical testing, in perfect physical condition. The astronaut’s gaze turns toward the girl again, and this time the President’s look openly follows his. The astronaut says, “They don’t make ‘em like that in Pensacola.”
The President says, “Go talk to her,” then measures a pause, before adding, “I forgot, Commander. You’ve a wife.”
Our First Man in Space grins. “She married a sailor. Excuse me, Mr. President.” He slides his left hand casually in his trouser pocket, angling his drink in his right fist, and strolls across the room. The President watches her delirious wonderment that Our First Man in Space is regaling her with tales of his fifteen-minute voyage through the heavens, before the President turns away, satisfied all men are like him, or at least the ones who get the opportunities to be.