Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
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Later, Mrs. Lincoln takes a call for the President, which fortunately, as it’s from Marilyn, comes while he’s in a meeting. He gave the number of his direct line during a weak moment (of which there were many) in the hotel suite in L.A., ever since receiving elliptical bulletins on an almost daily basis. She leaves messages asking if she should change agent, or to report seeing a darling puppy she just had to buy but now worries about his allergies. Mrs. Lincoln dutifully logs the calls as coming from, “Mac,” as the subject invents male-sounding code names for his paramours. He has problems remembering their names already, so often the caller’s cryptonym must serve as an aide-memoire, a buxom girl, say, being christened Tim Todd Smith. So Mrs. Lincoln takes a message and a return number, dutifully logs them under an alias, and lists them without accentuation among his many other calls at their midafternoon update.
Mrs. Lincoln has been the subject’s secretary since the beginning of his career in the Senate, and she probably knows more than anyone about his independent personal life, albeit only the names of the women with whom he socializes and possibly a vague knowledge of the duration of the relationship, certainly not any deeper appreciation, as far as he knows, of what he actually gets up to with these girls. They have a reciprocally remote relationship, Mrs. L. and Mr. President, though not without mutual affection and loyalty, which suits them both, rather as his marriage is a marriage of two distant, austere figures who are both, despite being socially attractive, shy at heart and figures to whom outsiders rarely warm. Hence, Mrs. Lincoln would be amused to hear them described as working in a successful professional marriage, particularly given she is a rather matronly woman in late middle age whom he never addresses as Evelyn. The President genuinely has no inkling what Mrs. L. assumes about his extramarital activity. It was never addressed, for instance, in the case of Pamela, now the First Lady’s press secretary, with whom he had a dalliance at the time she worked in his Senate office as a receptionist on quite a small staff, when the campaign by Pamela’s landlady to publicly embarrass the subject could scarcely have failed to escape Mrs. Lincoln’s purview.
The subject senses that Mrs. Lincoln’s redoubtable discretion is about to be tested once again, since she has now been joined in her office adjacent to his by a new assistant who will assume responsibility over a pile of typing, as well as assisting with other minor administrative chores. This new girl appears to the President to come from the same mold as Jill, a campaign volunteer and Farmington alumnus (his wife’s school), good-looking, vivacious, unattached and well bred. She is very much his type, if there is such a thing, that type perforce being a woman with his wife’s attributes—looks, refinement, education, wit and intelligence—though no woman possesses those attributes to quite the same degrees as the First Lady. The subject soon tires of the empty-headed type of woman: Marilyn, for example, who tries heartbreakingly hard to appear serious and well informed without being remotely convincing. She has developed a delusion that she is both these things due to the numerous men who collude with it as a route to her bed, and he finds himself often in a struggle to withhold his dissenting view because he appreciates how much it will distress her, though if any of her lovers has a right to claim intellectual superiority it would be him over her avid entourage of Hollywood cads and Las Vegas hoods.
The subject diverts himself for a minute or two while Mrs. Lincoln briefs the new girl on her duties. Meanwhile he folds the paper bearing Marilyn’s message and drops it in the trash. When he recalls their last time together, his vision of Marilyn is colored by a curtain of delirium. He compares his condition those weeks ago to a physical and psychological toxemia, and now he must recover: he must learn from his mistake in Cuba and reestablish political authority.
While Mrs. Lincoln and the staff take their lunch break, he swims in the superheated pool, the President sticking rigidly to Dr. K.’s exercise plan. The President consults Adm. B. once a week, but he decides to call him in at the end of the day for an irregular consultation, at which the Admiral is pleased to hear that the President is eager for the treatment of his other medical conditions to be reviewed. Adm. B. advises that the priority is to moderate the President’s digestive crises since they cause unpredictable disturbances in the absorption of oral medications, though he is not so pleased when the President seeks a second opinion from Dr. T., who argues that the priority is to manage the Addison’s disease since the corticosteroid treatment thereof exerts an enormous effect on the workings of the President’s digestive system. An endocrinologist, Dr. C., is summoned from New York for a private consultation at the White House, and soon becomes disconcerted by the full inventory of presidential maladies: Addison’s disease, thyroid deficiency, gastric reflux, gastritis, peptic ulcer, ulcerative colitis, prostatitis, urethritis, chronic urinary tract infections, skin infections, fevers of unknown origin, lumbar vertebral collapse, osteoporosis of the lumbar spine, osteoarthritis of the neck, osteoarthritis of the shoulder, high cholesterol, allergic rhinitis, allergic sinusitis and asthma.
Addison’s disease is an insufficiency of the glands lying atop the kidneys that secrete hormones that together govern a whole array of bodily functions. The President has a layman’s understanding of this complex disease accumulated over the past fifteen years of suffering its effects—fatigue, weight loss, abdominal pain, aching muscles, headaches, abnormal skin pigmentation, low blood pressure, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting, weakness, constipation, muscle cramps and joint pains.
The subject was first diagnosed in England following a collapse, but it became clear that he must have had the disease for some time beforehand, as he’d long suffered weight loss, fatigue, fever, digestive problems and a yellowish complexion, but successive doctors had missed the diagnosis, probably for years, by ascribing his ailments to an inflammatory condition of the bowel. On the voyage home aboard the Queen Mary he collapsed again and received the last rites. Dr. C., like all members of that fraternity, closes ranks with his nameless colleagues of yore and endeavors to convince the President that the steroids employed in the treatment of his digestive problems will have confounded the diagnostic picture for any reputable physician, while at the same time possibly contributing to the atrophy of his adrenal glands. The President offers no comment, given his weariness with debating the rank incompetence of the medical profession. Their self-serving obfuscation served him only once, when rumors of his condition surfaced before the election and were repudiated by a physician’s statement that the senator did not suffer from “an ailment classically described as Addison’s disease,” the verbal trickery hinging on the modifier “classically”—classical Addison’s being a primary failure of the adrenals, whereas it is scientifically insupportable to exclude the possibility that the subject’s condition originated secondarily to prolonged steroid treatments.
One might also consider it pertinent for the subject to ask the specialist whether his hormonal dysfunction may be responsible for his outstanding libido. Before he was married, the subject did once make this very enquiry, only to be advised there was no medical evidence endocrine disease caused satyriasis. Needless to say, none of these considerations enter the remit of today’s consultation; if they did, a reputable endocrinologist like Dr. C. would form the opinion the subject’s dependence on sex was purely psychological and his withdrawal symptoms psychosomatic.
Dr. C. reviews the President’s records and asks the appropriate questions, although the President withholds the irrelevant details such as his daily use of painkillers and almost daily use of amphetamine. The doctor intends to balance out the prescriptions of hydrocortisone, fludrocortisone and prednisolone, and do the same for the thyroid medications, advocating close monitoring of the President’s condition. In return, the President enquires how these changes might affect his other medical problems, but the doctor is evasive, claiming he can’t be certain of the prognosis for the President’s back and digestive system or his urinary tract for that matter, but he is adamant that the key to the Presiden
t’s well-being lies in fine-controlling his Addison’s disease. With that, the good doctor returns to New York, and the President returns to preparations for a speech before Congress that will convince them of urgent necessities facing the country.
He tries when possible to take breakfast with the family and then walk with his daughter to the Oval Office, or sometimes they will all visit him when there’s a gap in his schedule. His daughter usually waits in Mrs. Lincoln’s office, peeking through the door while he plays a game of pretending to speak on the telephone about her.
“Is that the Federal Kindergarten Bureau? Really? Has Caroline been so very naughty?”
Or pretending to read an official report: “Apparently the Secret Service have seen the First Daughter picking her nose …”
“Daddy!” she will complain.
He looks up sharply with a loud laugh and claps three times, the signal for her to scoot into the office for a hug and a chat. He makes time to exercise in the pool while the staff take their lunch, and then returns to work until the evening, with the hope he can finish in time to see the children put to bed and read a bedtime story before he and his wife take part in an evening engagement, either a formal reception on the ground floor or a private dinner up in the Residence. But all the time the President is aware of a narrowing around his eyes, a subtle pursing of his lips, that only those closest to him recognize as his suffering, the spastic muscles over the metal plate in his back, the chokingly tight brace pushing against his churning gut, his whole body being squeezed and the pressure flowing up into his head from where it cannot escape.
Sometimes, as he works or transits to meetings in the Cabinet Room or the Fish Room, he glimpses Mrs. Lincoln’s new assistant tapping her typewriter keys or stapling documents. She is there, just a few feet away, a gift waiting to be unwrapped, but for now he closes his mind to the possibilities and concentrates on political obligations.
One of the President’s meetings this week involves the State Department’s latest offerings on the situation in Southeast Asia, in which the senior advisor alleged to be homosexual takes part. The meeting proceeds in a routine fashion, yet the President makes a point of observing the man’s performance. The advisor is outwardly unremarkable, but he answers specific points intelligently and offers sound advice on one topic in particular, the guerrilla warfare tactics of indigenous armies. At the end of the meeting, the President dismisses them all with equal thanks, but pauses for a moment before his next meeting to decide the advisor’s fate.
While a lack of hormones gives the subject the advantage of maintaining a calm, even sanguine, disposition, he can never benefit from a sudden boost in physical and mental power as would other men in a similar situation. With his speechwriters, the President toils over a speech to Congress outlining urgent national needs during which he tires and weakens and gains new energy only through sleep. In such times, his metabolic engine is fueled by amphetamines and his rest by sedatives, but the address takes shape, its central ideas expressed in key phrases of his invention and no one else’s. He has one single objective: to show the world that he will atone for the bungled invasion.
On the day, a closed limousine conveys the President to the Capitol, where he must confront Congress with the inherited neglect of his predecessor’s policies and command a new vision for this new decade, with no adrenaline to drive him forward when he gazes out across the rising rows of critical faces, though his voice holds steady before the hundreds, his palms don’t sweat, and he says:
“These are extraordinary times. And we face an extraordinary challenge. Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom’s cause. The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the lands of the rising peoples. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation. But the adversaries of freedom plan to exploit, to control, and finally to destroy the hopes of the world’s newest nations; it is a contest of will and purpose as well as force and violence, a battle for minds and souls as well as lives and territory. And in that contest, we cannot stand aside.
“There is no single simple policy which meets this challenge. Experience has taught us that no one nation has the power or the wisdom to solve all the problems of the world. We would be badly mistaken to consider these problems in military terms alone. Military pacts cannot help nations whose social injustice and economic chaos invite insurgency and extremism. We stand ready now to provide generously of our skills, and our capital, and our food to assist the peoples of the less-developed nations before they are engulfed in crisis.
“But while we talk of sharing and building and the competition of ideas, others talk of arms and threaten war. So we have learned to keep our defenses strong. We will deter an enemy from making a nuclear attack only if our retaliatory power is so strong and so invulnerable that he knows he would be destroyed by our response. But this deterrent concept assumes rational calculations by rational men. The history of this planet, and particularly the history of this century, is sufficient to remind us of the possibilities of an irrational attack, a miscalculation, an unnecessary war, or a conflict of escalation in which the stakes by each side gradually increase to the point of maximum danger which cannot be either foreseen or deterred. I cannot end this discussion of defense and armaments without emphasizing our strongest hope: the creation of an orderly world where disarmament will be possible. I am determined to develop acceptable political and technical alternatives to the present arms race.
“Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. Now it is time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth. While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful.
“In my judgment, this is a most serious time in the life of our country and in the life of freedom around the globe. In conclusion, let me emphasize one point: our desire for peace. We seek no conquests, no satellites, no riches—we seek only the day when ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’”
Afterward there comes applause, with congratulations from those nearby, yet the subject cannot experience the visceral signals of an ordeal survived, since there was never a racing pulse now to slow, nor sweaty palms to dry, his chemical disposition constant irrespective of triumph or disaster, and the first physical indication of his performance arrives in the form of his wife, in her embrace and kiss through which he senses her pride.
His political authority regained, the President is expected to make a decision on our course of action in Southeast Asia. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs represents the majority view when he says, “We need a show.” A small, covert action failed in Cuba but a large, overt action will demonstrate our undiminished power. Instead the President informs the Cabinet he will not sanction military action and instead intends to open negotiations designed to achieve a cease-fire in the region. Faces drop, not least the generals’, one of whom mutters a four-letter word.
Later his aides bring responses from the press and members of Congress, and he realizes his gamble has succe
eded, that his grand vision for a better country and a better world is winning admiration. Yet on occasions such as this one, he finds the approbation of his colleagues insufficient, and even the love of his wife, perhaps momentarily enhanced by his ascendance, seems quotidian. Instead he believes himself most acutely in need of a sexual tribute from an impressionable young woman swayed by his political adroitness to the extent she will vote with her body. He holds that the type of leader required to achieve these goals in so short a time must be capable of magnetizing the human core; to move a whole nation and a whole generation, he must be capable of turning their compasses toward public service with the same gravity that bent him from his erstwhile life of academic rarefaction and material privilege, and the proof of electrifying the hearts of the young lies in the honest currency of a sexual transaction.
Jill is the obvious choice, and he plots to seduce her again tonight, since his wife and children leave today (Thursday) for their habitual long weekend out of town, this time to the ranch in Middleburg, Virginia, where his daughter’s pony is stabled. After he sees them off in the afternoon, with an embrace for his wife and for the children a slow disunion of hands, the nanny cradling John Jr. while Caroline clings to the hem of her mother’s dress, the President works through till early evening, principally in meetings but alone at sunset, before he suggests some of the staff join him in the pool, knowing that Jill will endeavor to be among them, and subsequently she is, in a borrowed bathing costume, together with Mrs. Lincoln’s new assistant, with whom she has formed a little bond.
The President glides through the steaming water, occasionally stopping to small-talk with aides, but no one speaks to him unless he speaks to them first, so he is able to complete his exercise program surreptitiously while they bathe in small groups, the girls’ faces hot, flushed and gleaming—the only females being Jill and the new girl—until eventually he swims to their corner of the pool and casually enquires about their work.