Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
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She keeps looking around for the Secret Service. They’re on foot and in crawling cars, but, true to their undertaking, remain inconspicuous as they stroll the couple of blocks to Claridge’s. The doorman’s eyes widen as the President approaches, but, then, in the classic British tradition he’s counting on, the doorman doffs his cap and bids them “Good evening,” as he would any other aristocratic couple.
The President’s date checks her hat and coat, then he leads her into the Fumoir. The President notices a heavy-set man with a crew cut in the lobby, and another follows them into the bar, but the agents are doing their best to blend in, even ordering drinks, and, though heads inevitably turn as they seat themselves, flawlessly observed British social reserve prevents anyone staring.
A waiter takes their order with such affected nonchalance that, when he walks away, the First Lady bursts into laughter. “Jack, this is crazy!”
But he says, “What’s so crazy about wanting to have a night to myself with the world’s number-one sex symbol?”
THE WALL
When the President returns to the United States, the children have been brought to greet him at National Airport. Caroline scurries across the tarmac and flings her arms around his thighs, the nanny following as she cradles John Jr. His son sits on his lap in the limousine as they coast back to the White House, while Caroline squeezes herself against his side, laying her head on his upper arm. He realizes how much he has missed them physically. Often we think of our children as tiny packages of ourselves, disregarding the physicality of our love for them, but as his daughter presses herself against him he feels an impression of her soft cheek and hair against his arm, as if he’s marked by it as one would be by a tightly bound bandage, and his son gurgles when his father brushes his hand against his face.
The First Lady has stayed on in Europe for a short vacation with her sister. She seems rather taken with the regal status she enjoys over there, prompting the President to jest she’s hanging around to hook a prince.
In the confines of the West Wing, the President hops on crutches. Dr. T. speculates that the stress of the European tour aggravated the Canadian insult, but the President keeps secret that Dr. Feelgood’s elixirs sped him through those summit meetings at an appalling cost to bone and cartilage that were already in a state of severe trauma. For once, Adm. B. concurs, but wants to investigate further with X-rays, wondering whether something has gone awry with the metal plates. Even Dr. Feel-good makes a house call, smuggled in by the Secret Service to avoid the umbrage of Dr. T. or Adm. B.
The quack enquires about the First Lady, whom he occasionally treats for mood. “You will miss her, Mr. President,” he says, “and the danger will be a critical buildup of orgone energy. It must have its release through orgasm, or else a destructive endoplasm infiltrates man’s mental and bodily processes.”
Too infirm to attend social engagements, the President becomes a recluse, relying on the children for company. In the First Lady’s absence, he allows them the run of the West Wing, so that Caroline can often be found seated on a chair in Mrs. Lincoln’s office, her feet not reaching the floor, playing at typing and, occasionally, but only if she’s very, very good, being allowed to stamp envelopes. The President lets John Jr. bring his toy trucks, planes and boats into the Oval Office and is happy for the boy to play quietly nearby, even under his desk, while the President reads reports and letters.
The President becomes attached to keeping his children close by. He knows the perils of the world better than most fathers, and fears for their future. They accompany him to and from the Residence in the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening. When work keeps him at his desk, he glances out the window to watch them in the playground with the nanny. Like any doting father, he loves them more than he loves his wife.
On the morning of the third day back, the subject wakes with a mild tension headache, for which he takes aspirin, which irritates his stomach, for which he takes antacids, which give him gas. By evening, the headache is almost intolerable. It is not in his character to pay close attention to his maladies, but in this case the subject makes an exception, since he suspects he is suffering a withdrawal syndrome. Fiddle (or Faddle—he has stopped trying to distinguish them) visits him in the Residence that night.
The girl is shocked by the President’s infirmity. When he tugs her hand into the slit of his dressing gown, she says, “Are you sure you’re up to it?” That only makes him tug harder. As a boy of sixteen, he was confined to a sanatorium in New York City where a battalion of medics probed the mysteries of his dysfunctional digestive tract. After they’d buggered him with an enema, a nurse cleaned him up. Betsy was her name, an apple-cheeked girl from a good family, not a day over twenty herself. When she rolled him on his back, his face flushed beet-red and Betsy stifled a laugh. She quickly tossed a towel over an erection she could have twanged like a tuning fork. “There, there, Jack,” she said. “At least there’s one part that work properly.”
But the President’s back gets no better, and Dr. T. and Adm. B. prescribe convalescence in Palm Beach. The compound is eerily deserted at this time of year, before the winter migration, folded deck chairs and raveled umbrellas pinned on adjacent estates as he laps the hot saltwater pool.
A skeleton staff accompanies the President—the French chef, the valet, a few close aides plus secretarial support from Fiddle and Faddle, who’ll be least missed in Washington owing to their utter lack of usefulness.
On the second evening, the chef excels himself with a fish supper, and, while the diners quaff chilled Chablis on the verandah, the President entertains a journalist. In quiet moments, the President reflects on the Soviet Premier’s threats, and the transient loss of confidence allows his back pain to register around the eyes.
“Aren’t you enjoying your presidency?” the journalist says.
“I wouldn’t recommend the job,” the President says, and, as the journalist is about to make a note, he adds, “not for four or eight years!”
The journalist chuckles, but there’s an awkward moment after dinner when the President’s aides prepare to drive to their hotel, and the journalist offers Fiddle and Faddle a ride. They make excuses, first that they have their own car, and, when he expects them to follow the group dispersing to the vehicles, that they have some more work to do here tonight. His gaze flicks to the President, but he is casually waving off the staff and hoisting himself onto crutches to turn indoors. Whether or not journalistic inquisitiveness has been piqued, it’s understood the matter’s off the record.
The pair linger like prom girls waiting to be asked to dance, as they did the night before, when he wanted to avoid favoritism toward one but couldn’t recall which he’d had last, and again tonight he can’t remember whose turn it is. Fiddle (or Faddle) says, “With all your responsibilities, you shouldn’t be expected to make yet another decision,” and then Faddle (or Fiddle) says, “not when you don’t have to choose.”
The President grins. “I believe I’ve gone on the record favoring equality of opportunity in all federal employment.”
“We’ll run your bath,” they say.
“Make it hot,” he says, and then, as they scoot indoors— “that also goes for the bath.”
The next morning, the President rises early to swim, another little compartment in his mind cleared by not having to distinguish between the girls—he now considers them the Fiddle-Faddle duality, but last night’s amusements have put another area into spasm, despite their being scrupulously circumspect. Two agents hoist him out of the pool, one in the water hefting his legs and the other on the side hooking his armpits, then he stands in a stoop while they pass the crutches.
He happens to see a woman walking past the perimeter. She’s a voluptuous brunette of about thirty-five. The presence of the Secret Service at the gate intrigues her, and she looks up toward the house. The President calls, “Good morning!”
She smiles, somewhat bemused. “Good morning … Mr. President!”
/> He says, “I hope you’re a Democrat,” and tells one of the agents to go get her number.
The President’s embarkation from Palm Beach is shrouded in secrecy, as he is unable to mount the steps of the aircraft, instead being hoisted on a cherry-picker like a tricky item of oversize baggage. The First Lady returns to Washington a week later, and he’s so anxious to see her he has the Secret Service run him to National Airport, where, in a rare public display of affection, they appear as indecorous as a pair of college sweethearts. The subject has missed his wife terribly. There has been no one to whom he has been able to confide his pain and despair, especially not the women he’s been using for sex.
Even in the limousine sailing back to the White House, the President appreciates a transformation has taken place in the sexual attraction toward his wife, as the deluge of adoration for her looks and sartorial style reveals how other men must regard her. At dinner in London, having gone on from Claridge’s, they behaved like a normal married couple in love, oblivious of the agents stationed discreetly in a car outside, inside at the bar and in the kitchens to prevent assassination by poisoning, though he did joke to his wife that at some point they might be disturbed by a commotion in back followed by one of the agents shouting, “Step away from the manges-touts!”
The First Lady was radiant that evening, not least because she appreciated the thought that went into it, namely that she’d spent day after day and night after night under the spotlight, where everything she wore was photographed and analyzed, and everything she did was reported and given an op ed, always under the constant pressure to entertain but not offend. In that exclusive restaurant, they were the beneficiaries of British aristocratic reserve, allowed to dine without intrusion, the only occasion they turned heads being when the waiter offered the President a Cuban cigar and he boomed with laughter, and, if anyone cared to comment on the First Lady’s chain-smoking or the high pitch of her laugh, they did so in the privacy of their own mansions.
Their sexual relationship has followed the natural trend toward diminishing returns, but his wife holds an enduring attraction that ensures the subject remains interested, and perhaps, for a couple such as they, love can be defined as a state of constant curiosity.
She said, “Jack, this is so romantic.”
“I thought you said it was crazy.”
“Maybe the two words mean more or less the same.”
“Then another glass of this Beaujolais and we’ll be dancing on the table.”
“Now that will raise eyebrows.”
“I could kiss you right here and now and no one would care a damn.”
“Now wherever did you get the idea a girl could fall for all your big talk?”
Outside the restaurant, in the dark, he spun her into his arms and kissed her on the lips. A limousine shot them back to the embassy, where they made their excuses to the ambassador and retired to bed. He wished they could have fallen up the stairs giggling, but he couldn’t even crab up on crutches, nor could that night conclude in a gymnastic concerto of squeaking bedsprings and percussed headboard. The subject’s wife always becomes concerned about injuring his back, though nonetheless she feels as his life partner she deserves some sexual gratification of her own.
The subject rarely considers the woman’s pleasure, preferring to work fast and sleep early. Often in their early days, she would try joking about it, to which he would respond that she should take it as a compliment. A great deal of their lovemaking has been procreational rather than recreational, but recently she has opened a discussion regarding the question of her own sexual pleasure, and so on that night in London the subject endeavored to provide what he could muster despite being hors de combat. Theirs is described as a “political” marriage, yet when husband and wife go to bed every marriage becomes political.
Dr. Feelgood has been good enough to adumbrate his medical opinion to the President regarding the natural history of “orgone energy,” observing, “As described by Wilhelm Reich, release is essential for cool intellect and balanced mood. A routine of weekly ejaculation is sufficient to prevent a toxic accumulation of endoplasm—sufficient, but not ideal. Ideally the stressed executive must ejaculate twice per week and do so in circumstances of maximum sexual stimulation in order to maximize orgastic potency, to induce the secretion of all potential toxic vectors of orgone energy into his ejaculatory fluid.”
And so it follows, at a Wall Street dinner, that the President runs into an old Navy buddy who served him for a time when he was a senator, and asks him to come work at the White House. Only later does the man suspect the precise nature of his duties, when the President suggests he approach a beautiful young woman and ask her whether she’d like to be introduced. Naturally she blushes at the request but then hitches her dress and crosses the room with the newly appointed Beard, who cuts in on the President’s colloquy with a dull stockbroker and presents the young lady. They speak for a few minutes during which the President discovers she hails from a wealthy Wall Street family—she could hardly be here if she did not—whose father is someone with whom the President is distantly acquainted, an extremely successful businessman scarcely a few years older than he.
At the end of the evening, the President arranges with the Beard that he will escort the young lady to the White House on Friday evening, when the First Lady and children will have decamped for their customary weekend in Virginia, with strict instructions that she be vetted and processed by the Secret Service as his guest, not the President’s, all of which, come the evening in question, goes off strictly to plan.
“I know it’s going to be hard for you to divorce your wife.”
Marilyn has come through on Mrs. Lincoln’s line every day for a week, and in the end the President decides the only way to stop her is to take the call. He dodges her suggestions of meeting in New York or L.A., but eventually she wears him down, whereupon she interprets his tense silence not as a desire to escape from her but to escape to her.
He stifles a shocked laugh and says, “But I don’t want a divorce.”
“Of course you don’t, Jack. It’s not going to look good. That’s why we should wait till after you’re reelected.”
“Neither of us should count chickens.”
“I know. It seems like such a long way off. But we can see each other discreetly. You’re going to come stay in Palm Springs, aren’t you?”
“My schedule has to stay fluid.”
“Sure it does, Jack. But you’ll call me, won’t you, when you’re coming out?”
“I don’t know. It might not be so easy.”
“All I want is at least for you to try.” “I’ll try.”
“That’s great, Jack.”
He makes his excuses and signs off. He wants to sleep with her again, naturally, although the emotional overlay is beginning to bug him.
Yet, over the following months, the letters and calls become less intrusive, and he begins to think fondly of her again, particularly on a clear evening late in summer, sitting on the fantail of the presidential yacht sailing down the Potomac with a few chums, including the Beard, who has dutifully added the Wall Street heiress to the muster roll, and, while the President’s time in the cabin with her was pleasurable, as he sits gazing downriver he can’t help but reflect on how comfortably and conveniently this new concubine has slotted into the harem, with, after some initial bristling, astonishingly little rancor from the dyad, the girls even coming to chat convivially among themselves on presidential outings, although there is precious little else for them to do save wait for a summons to a private “briefing” with the President.
In part, he credits himself for the success of the arrangement, by an overt absence of favoritism, calling upon the new girl no more often than her counterparts even in the early weeks when her novelty made her far more appealing. Now that that’s worn out, he’s developed a different appreciation of the comfort and convenience of the policy, his downriver gaze drawn not by the calm waters but by the swells
and breakers of Chesapeake Bay, a reminder that sometimes a man needs a little danger. Marilyn hooks him with her troubled sexuality and trickier psychology, and, exposed to the elements on the deck of the yacht, it seems a simple matter to throw overboard any concerns about her needy assumptions and become acquainted with the night.
Later, when he stays in Palm Springs, his brother-in-law plays the beard and escorts Marilyn to a party on the second night, after which the two of them spend some time frolicking in the guesthouse. It reminds the President of their first time together in her apartment during the convention last summer, when he escorted her through the door while the driver waited on the curb. She poured a drink, of which he sipped only a little while gazing at her over the rim of the glass. She put on a record and danced to it. Tonight she does the same, and it helps them find their rhythm after the months apart. In L.A., she moved more slowly, as did he, and the first touches were indecisive enough to be laughed away. But tonight she’s faster and drunker and spills her martini. He sets it aside and guides her dance toward the bed. Afterward she drinks too much and comes out of the head with white powder on her nose. “Don’t worry, Jack,” she says, “I’ll make a great First Lady.”
The stay in Palm Springs upset Frank on account of its not being at his place, which was a deliberate decision on the part of the President. He had done himself no favors when he finally got his ticket to the White House, to join the cast of a Hollywood movie being filmed in D.C., in which the President’s brother-in-law took a supporting role, as did his former flame, Gene. Frank acted as if he were the biggest star in the room, which he might have been, but it was the acting like it that was the problem; he called the President by his first name a time or two too many, which is fine in private, but not in public with people the President has never met before, such as the stars of the movie, which was about the unseemly underbelly of Washington politics, as if such a thing could exist. Getting Frank to leave that night was like getting the Japanese off Iwo Jima, the repeated solicitations for a firm commitment from the President to stay at his place in Palm Springs eventually breaking down in nebulous concerns about security. The President detected that his raucous and overbearing manner at dinner resulted from a belief that he held a special place at the table. But the President no longer requires his patronage, as he does appear to have acquired a considerable pull of his own. Perhaps Frank feels their bond was forged inside the curtain wall of his sybaritic Palm Springs castle where they first twinned as sexual kings, and what continues to exist of that connection is so unutterably intimate that it can only be implied by the periphrasis of coarse badinage.