Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
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“I haven’t had the pleasure,” he says to the new girl, “of knowing your name.”
She laughs and offers her hand formally. “Priscilla, Mr. President,” she says.
Beads of sweat run down their necks and their hair hangs dark and lank. The President expects to have to draw out slow, nervous answers from the girls, but they brim with confidence, only deferring to him with an occasional “sir” at the end of their shorter sentences, Jill in particular having dispensed with the obligatory “Mr. President” in favor of a familiarity to which the President neither objects nor warms. She leans in his direction, watching her colleagues bid their farewells to him until the three of them are alone—Jill, Priscilla and the President— and her gaze locks with his.
The President chooses Priscilla. He prefers a drug sufficiently novel his body has yet to develop tolerance. The execution is simple, in that the President calls an end to the pool session and advises her she must stop by Mrs. Lincoln’s office before leaving tonight as some papers require filing, and, although he half-expects her to arrive with Jill, when he meets her in the now empty office (as he has earlier sent Mrs. L. home), she makes no mention of her colleague, leaving him free to remark that Mrs. Lincoln is no longer available for the filing and perhaps she would like to join him in the Residence for a drink. They stroll under the gaze of the Secret Service and return under the same gaze less than half an hour later, the picture of innocence, but a transaction fulfilled, his poisons expelled and her tribute avidly received.
The President joins his family for the short weekend, slipping back into the waters of family life without so much as a ripple, the serenity of his wife’s outlook perhaps due to her certainty in the practical obstacles aligned against his opportunities for fornication. The weekend passes happily between the four of them with the exception of a slight wheeze picked up by the subject, almost certainly due to the transfer of horse hair via his daughter’s clothing, which afflicts him gravely if indoors, a fact often overlooked by his wife, who will promise their patronage of some horse show or other without ensuring it is an outdoor event, thus placing him between the Scylla of asthmatic attendance and the Charybdis of confessing his allergic sensitivity. Economists quip that when America sneezes the world catches a cold, and it is equally true that when a President sneezes the press have him expiring of double pneumonia.
Following the First Family’s return to D.C., the President gives a perfect impression of incuriosity about his two concubines, the affairs of state naturally taking precedence over such trifles (he is about to leave for a series of summits in Europe) to the extent that there is plausible deniability when he ignores them both, and, to their credit, he detects no stirring from either party that they consider themselves in receipt of unsympathetic treatment.
The subject has learned to treat his younger mistresses with a combination of paternalism and disdain, but in both cases the central message is the same, to wit that their feelings are irrelevant and it is of no influence on his emotional well-being whether they remain sexually attracted to him or would prefer nothing better than he go jump in a lake.
This philosophy arose from his first adventures in the art of picking up girls, when he observed fellow egos crushed by rejection, to the point where they became incapable of approaching the next girl. The subject determined to take rejection with complete nonchalance, to proceed to the next girl without deflection or deceleration, and to do so right there at the same party or with her best friend or whoever presented herself, soon learning that this could be readily effected without fear, shame or embarrassment, and, moreover, would often lead to his seizing the lips of victory from the jaws of defeat.
Looking ahead to the European tour, the President becomes hopeful that the new treatment regimen for his Addison’s disease will thin out his face. Over the years, he’s learned to disguise his physical limitations, walking briskly on the flat to give the impression of vigor, talking rapidly, but approaching stairs with an air of languor to conceal his inability to descend or ascend at normal pace, and spending weekends outdoors in the sun, at Palm Beach in the winter and Cape Cod, frequently at sail, in the summer, to top up his “tan.”
The President learned physical courage as a young man. Though failing both the Army and Navy medical boards, as the offspring of a rich family he could have secured some comfortable sinecure far out of harm’s way, but instead he exploited his connections to win a position on the front line. The President is inspired by the physical courage of Senator James Grimes, paralyzed two days before his vote against impeaching President Johnson, and Senator Thomas Benton, keeping silent for days to save his voice for speeches due to a cancer that made his throat bleed. It is quite commonplace for the President to request painkillers in meetings, wherein he will wave away the concerns of his staff by playing down his discomfort, the word going out to Mrs. Lincoln that the President has a headache or the President has a twinge in his back and she will come through with a couple of pills and a glass of water; but a few days after his tryst with her little helper, he receives a quite uncommon therapy, when Mrs. Lincoln relays that her new assistant has read in a magazine that tension headaches can be relieved or prevented by scalp massages.
At the President’s invitation, the girl bounds into the Oval Office, full of the confidence her breeding confers, and demonstrates the technique upon his person.
The next day, the President is asked by Mrs. Lincoln if he would care for another scalp massage, and Priscilla once more applies herself to the task, this time suggesting that she uses a gel as both a lubricant and a hair tonic, his hair in her opinion being a national treasure, and when this substance is applied the day after, it is by Jill, who has joined Priscilla in what becomes a daily ten-minute session to relieve him of stress, which it does quite successfully, even though for the first few days it seems too good to be true that these two concubines have developed such a selfless camaraderie, so that the President jokes with them that he suspects they are Soviet spies bent on turning him as bald as Chairman Khrushchev.
He worries that their intimacy is becoming too visible, but, after due soul-searching, the President decides there is no harm in scalp massages. In fact, they are so beneficial to his stress levels that he employs this excuse for including the two girls on the forthcoming presidential tour.
***
Finally, before he sets off, Justice presses him on the fate of the State Department advisor identified as a practicing homosexual, to which the President responds that the man should retain his post, on the grounds that he is a valued professional and what he does in his private life is his own business.
THE BUTTON
The subject’s relationships with men are far more important than his relations with women, which, with the exception of his marriage, have been irrelevant in the progress of his career, and, sexual desire apart, exert no major influence on his day-to-day life, although growing up with female siblings did have a profound effect on his development, inculcating the sense that having girls around was the norm, something that otherwise might have been as foreign a concept as it was to many of his fellows at boarding school, college and in the Navy. Though naturally shy, he was no shyer around girls than at other times, and certainly never nervous or intimidated by their presence. Because women have come to him without too much work on his part, he has been liberated to concentrate on male relationships. The subject boarded at an exclusive boys’ school in Connecticut, albeit missing many weeks and occasionally months of the year through illness, his medical problems repeatedly preventing participation in sport, so that he was regarded as one of the weaker physical specimens, but eventually his burgeoning facility with women overcame the stigma of being Boston’s answer to Tiny Tim Cratchit.
Although he is buoyed by female attention, and certainly a visible lack of it puts a hard ceiling on a man’s status (though not popularity) within his peer group, he dismisses women’s caprice in favor of the logical disinterest of male companion
ship. When he first sought public office, the subject could not have been elected through flirtation; the youth and material wealth that attracted certain women were vote-losers to a considerable section of the electorate, requiring him to promote the substance of his character and idealism.
Arguably the President’s relations with the men in his administration are more complex than those with women; of them all, the most curious is with the Vice President. In their contest to secure the party nomination, the VP conducted a whispering campaign against the President on the subject of his medical health, knowing that the electorate would mistrust the suitability of a manifestly infirm candidate to hold executive office, and, though the doubt was swiftly and decisively quashed by the President campaign team, the issue resurfaced when the VP haggled over his role in a potential new administration, where-upon this leverage, together with his popularity in the South, persuaded the President to accept his deputyship. But, having recognized the Vice President’s electoral significance, the President now does his best to ignore it.
One day the VP appears at the poolside, less jacket, tie loosened, barefoot with his trousers turned up, to discuss the cost of the space program. He studies the President intently while the latter flexes and stretches, with a jealous gaze that takes in the enormous scars on his back and the bruises from injections and blood tests. Before the President leaves for Europe, he jokes, “If anything happens while I’m away, Lyndon, the keys to the Oval Office are under the mat.”
The subject is a man’s man, who believes there’s something decidedly peculiar about men who do not prefer the company of male peers. He enjoys male talk, male humor and so forth, and, although women have a unique sexual appeal, there are a great many of them he finds a crashing bore. His sisters were all hearty, physical sorts of girls who enjoyed the rough-and-tumble of touch football, in contrast to his wife, a dainty debutante who broke her ankle when reluctantly co-opted into a game, hidden physical frailty being another attribute they share.
His elder sister’s frailty was more mental than physical, prompting their father to arrange a lobotomy while their mother was on vacation. The subject does not blame himself, of course, but occasionally he wonders if he should have done more to oppose the operation, particularly since the procedure was botched and his sister is now permanently institutionalized. Such is the price of not fitting in.
Despite his advantages as a child, the subject was accustomed to the state of not fitting in, since he lacked the raucous personality that initially wins favor in the locker room. He learned that one should be smart enough to lead but not so smart one won’t be followed. But, by the time he ran for President, the subject had become adept at courting favor from potential supporters, through which efforts, with the help of his brother-in-law the movie actor, he extended his Hollywood connections, which had initially been made during his father’s brief flirtation with the movie business, and his somewhat longer flirtation with movie actresses.
In Hollywood, the subject encountered men who appeared to have everything he cherished—money, success, good looks and, most of all at that time, women. They were playboys, and partying with them proved he was no longer the bookish, sickly prep-school loner, but a different, more magnetic type of loner, one who lives on his own terms, as exemplified by Frank.
The subject first met Frank a couple of years ago, his father initially making strategic contact in order to curry support from the Italian-American community, via his brother-in-law, Peter, who seized the opportunity to inveigle himself back into Frank’s social circle, from which he’d been exiled for the crime of lunch-dating one of Frank’s girls. The subject’s father was first to accept hospitality at the bacchanalian court in Palm Springs, which naturally piqued the subject’s interest, so that his own visits commenced soon afterward. Frank stood out as the alpha, in contrast to the subject’s brother-in-law, an inveterate follower, who’d received no formal education in his youth, instead traveling the world with impecunious aristocratic parents who eventually washed up in Palm Beach, from where he leapt to Hollywood and became a leading player in romances and comedies by usurping the roles of wartime rivals who were overseas doing their duty.
Originally, Peter had invited the subject into the B-list Hollywood scene, and it became a perquisite of office, after being elected to the United States Senate, to plunk an orchard of starlets, many of whom gave forgettable performances on-and off-screen, through which he deduced that there is no class of woman more complaisant with the principle of sex as a social transaction than the aspiring actress-model. Yet it was the subject’s unexpected rapport with Frank that opened the green door, through which sashayed Marilyn, Jayne, Angie et al.
To Frank, the subject offered the ticket to a rarefied form of power he’d never experienced, and in return Frank offered access to the most glamorous women imaginable. His brother-in-law might have been able to furnish him with the occasional starlet, but Frank could provide any kind of woman he wanted, whether she was a movie star, a model, a dancer or a hooker. Soon the subject was making regular trips to Palm Springs, or to Las Vegas, where they’d drink and trade jokes, and Frank would mention some girl or other, wondering if maybe the subject fancied meeting her, and then one of his stooges would make a call and the girl would join them later at dinner, or for drinks, or sometimes she’d simply be waiting in the hotel room when he went up. It seemed there wasn’t any available woman in Hollywood Frank couldn’t call. In all probability, Frank had them first, but that never bothered the subject, since he generally believed he created the more favorable impression, and once he’d been with a girl it was up to him and her if they saw each other again, not Frank.
Toward the subject, he acted respectfully, but with his entourage Frank would often vent spiteful character assassinations to which the victim would offer no retort for fear of exile. The subject does not extend himself to Frank’s monarchical excesses, yet one weekend at Palm Beach after the election he got the guys doing push-ups, a spectacle he found hilarious, lying on his lounger wearing a back brace, the agent of a bizarre vengeance against the athletic tormentors of his youth. The subject has reached the pinnacle of his social power, but it is the power he wields over men that furnishes its deepest meaning, something he observed repeatedly with Frank, who might sulk with a girl who wouldn’t succumb to his bidding, but his retribution would stop there, whereas, in the case of a male who displeased him, ostracism was not enough: Frank had to see the man ruined.
Those Palm Springs weekends were the subject’s first insight into the behavior of a king. Frank was not then, nor has he ever been, Hollywood’s biggest movie star, and younger, hand-somer singers are arguably more popular, yet he assumed the mantle of a king because he conducts himself like one: he runs a court, he gives and withdraws favor, and people fear he can call upon a private army. Most of all, he explores excess as though the rules that constrain ordinary men don’t apply. Like the subject, he exhibits a rampant appetite for women. He could have two or three in a day, or simultaneously, and, as the leader of a pack of lions, would roar at any other male invading his territory. The women were more than a little scared of him and would often submit for fear of causing displeasure, but they understood what was expected when they received their invitations, so one feels they had no cause for complaint. When the subject first joined these gatherings, particularly the ones behind closed doors in Palm Springs, he must have been regarded as something of a curiosity—a young United States senator, a war hero, a Harvard alumnus—but Frank and the senator soon developed the lingua franca of fellow fornicators. Possibly Frank expected an ambitious young politician to disapprove of the limitless sexual opportunities on offer, but of course the subject did not, nor did he deport himself so as to convey unfamiliarity with such practices. Those weekends in the desert, where the air was bone-dry and the pools were dazzling mirrors under the immaculately blue sky, proved that man follows a common and predictable path when free to do so, the path of unconstrained sexual
predation. Behind the security gates and high walls, Frank and his guests were at liberty to take a beautiful stranger’s hand and walk her across the lush lawns, to the pool, to the hot tub, or into the villa, therein to peel away her coverings if any she wore, and gorge on pleasure. Up against such rampant behavior, monogamy appears a dismal state. The sexual profligacy on display at Frank’s was neither unnatural nor immoral, nor did it inflict the deleterious effects of bingeing on alcohol, narcotics or even food. The subject reveled. He took a different girl for each part of the day. He made love as a king makes love.
In Hollywood, there is a hot new girl every month, and, when he volunteered to Frank an interest in a particular actress from some movie or other, he could rely on his fellow fornicator to know somebody sufficiently adjacent to offer bald insights into her availability for sex. One night at his place, the subject listed a dozen girls about whom Frank instantly returned pithy assessments: “married,” “in love,” “insane,” till the whole room descended into laughter, the final epithet being “She’s a guy!” Despite the bonhomie, there was always a distance between the two of them, albeit the comfortable remoteness of loners unwilling to surrender intimacy to the other.
In Frank’s court, Frank was king, but it was apparent to any observer that the subject was the cleverer, and, when he began his campaign for the Presidency, the possibility arose that one day he might be the more powerful, added to which are Frank’s deficiencies in the twin departments by which men compare themselves at first impression, height and hair. Frank’s hairline has receded to the point where he has begun experimenting with styling and toupees to increase scalp coverage; in addition, he appears to reach middle height, except when one sees him around the pool without his custom-made shoes, whereupon he shrinks dramatically. But one area of competition is far too sensitive for them to have become rivals. Frank avoided competing with the subject over women by presenting them as campaign contributions, and the subject avoided competing with Frank by never making an overt pass at one of his concubines. It would not be worth jeopardizing an alliance unified publicly by politics and privately by relentless sexual predation.