Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/jed-mercurio/page,15,493353-american_adulterer.html
The Admiral is naturally delighted when the President informs him he will no longer be employing Dr. Feelgood’s services, though he goes on to attest that, following discussion with the President’s other physicians, small revisions to his medical regimen are required. The principal change, instigated by evidence of muscle weakness and weight loss, is to commence a course of testosterone injections.
The President says, “I never felt I was short of testosterone.”
“It’s for muscle weakness and weight loss,” the Admiral repeats, preparing the first injection.
The President denies any immediate effect, although at the end of the afternoon, he does ask Mrs. Lincoln to retrieve Mary’s number from the files kept by the Secret Service on the guests from the last dinner dance. She puts him through and he says straight out, “Don’t you like me?” to which Mary says, “I hate what you did in Cuba,” and for once he has no rejoinder to cover the insistent static that hums between them.
A sore festers in America, and its name is race. Our economy was built on the blood and bones of slave labor, and for a civilized republic we were rather late in dispensing with the practice, yet emancipation led not to universal liberty but to an economic and social apartheid that our fellow Western democracies struggle to comprehend, through which every single pronouncement on the value of liberty around the globe is undermined, causing many among the dark-skinned peoples of the world to regard the United States as a nation of hypocrites, the political cost being a loss of influence among those nations most susceptible to anti-American ideology.
Any southern politician will pontificate on the political dangers of granting equal civil rights to nonwhites, a threat almost as great as that which led to secession, but the time has come for the Union to treat all its citizens equally, and in that cause the President must lead, although the course ahead will be perilous, and his instinct is that the least constitutional damage will be done by effecting change through gradualist policymaking. Yet he also appreciates that such an approach will incur the wrathful impatience of those citizens who suffer under this ghastly American apartheid, and they will quite properly accuse him of failing to confront the issue in purely moral terms. Any parent would be proud if their son grew up to be President, but dismayed if he had to become a politician in the process.
The unpleasant truth the President faces is that a bill granting equal civil rights to all would never pass Congress, the result being increasing frustration and resentment among those pressing for those rights and violent schism between North and South. In his opinion, the worst outcome of failure to pass effective legislation would be the confirmation to observers here and abroad that the United States government connives in the systematic dehumanization of one-tenth of its own citizens, some of whom fought courageously for their country in opposition to the poisonous ideology of a master race and yet returned home to experience similar subjugation. His predecessors have long promised to act, but their approach reminds him of an old Chinese proverb: “There is a great deal of noise on the stairs but nobody comes into the room.”
The President could turn his back on his fellow man, as countless predecessors have done, retreating behind a smokescreen of pragmatic gradualism, or he can take up arms in the struggle. Despite leading a life of material privilege, he is not unfamiliar with bigotry. His ancestry and religion have provoked outrageous slurs. The first Catholic to win the presidency, the first from immigrant stock, he represents proof that the electorate can be persuaded to overlook creed or class, and this charges him with the determination that one day they might see past color.
He begins in a quiet way, by issuing an executive order against racial discrimination in federal employment, by appointing talented black politicians to high office, by appointing black judges, and by demanding an ethnic census of all government departments (the result being predictably monochrome), after which he personally instructs members of the Cabinet to diversify their recruitment policies. The President invites the young son of a black government official to join the White House schoolroom alongside his own children.
Next he tackles voting rights. In many southern states, only a fraction of eligible nonwhite voters are permitted to register, the scandalous practice being to deny their intellectual competence to vote, exemplified by the case of a black voter obstructed from registration on account of his alleged inability to interpret the meaning of certain passages of the Constitution to the satisfaction of an electoral clerk, the voter in question holding a doctorate in political science and the clerk having only a high-school diploma. Previous Presidents have turned a blind eye, but this one orders the Department of Justice to file suits against any county operating such a policy, while at the same time encouraging a voting drive among black southerners, knowing that once they are permitted to vote in sufficient numbers, politicians will have no choice but to consider them in their policies or else fail to win reelection. Violence flares when the federal government attempts to desegregate bus terminals and airports, but the prospect of civil unrest does not deter him. President Lincoln was prepared to lose half the country in the cause of his moral conviction, and, should the moral imperative arise, this current President must act in the image of Abraham Lincoln summoning his wartime Cabinet to a meeting on the Emancipation Proclamation. “I have gathered you together,” Lincoln said, “to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter. That I have determined for myself.” Later, when he went to sign, after several hours of exhausting handshaking that had left his arm weak, he said to those present: “If my name goes down in history, it will be for this act. My whole soul is in it. If my hand trembles when I sign this proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say: ‘He hesitated.’” But his hand did not tremble, nor will this President’s.
The subject ensures Mary’s name appears on the guest list for the next White House function, this time a luncheon, and when he once again maneuvers her into a private encounter, he asks her directly if she would like to visit one evening in the Residence when the family is weekending out of town. “I’ve started seeing someone,” she says.
“Is he a head of state?” he says.
“Sure,” she chuckles.
“Does he have a big country like I do or some tin-pot banana republic?”
“He doesn’t even have a country,” she says.
“So,” he says, “what’s he got that I haven’t?”
“Mystery.”
The First Lady appears in the hall with a summoning expression. He says, “Apparently I can be read like a book.”
“Which one?” his wife says. “Vanity Fair?”
“Nowhere near so challenging,” says Mary, and the two women laugh.
Sometimes the subject must ponder whether his wife is complicit in his womanizing. She never disapproves openly of his consorting with attractive women—in fact, at times, appearing to facilitate it, for example in the seating plan for today’s luncheon, which is a matter she insists on deciding herself, whereby the President finds himself seated between two vivacious ladies, whom he will be amply motivated to charm (or at least attempt to), whereas the First Lady would be aware of the struggle he would face if his immediate neighbors were a pair of old crones.
When he burrows into the company of a good-looking woman, sometimes he glimpses his wife drawn, say, by the woman’s laughter or his, and the expression that momentarily plays on her countenance is not one of jealousy but of pride, presumably in the observation that she possesses a husband capable of charming other women rather than being saddled with a cretinous bore. Perhaps she watches him maneuver toward a conquest with the same swings of pride and disgust as she would if he were winning a fistfight.
Moreover the subject questions whether on occasion she designs his fornication to ensure a partner of whom she approves. Aesthetics are so important, after all. Perhaps he succeeds in his philandering, in part, because she wants him to. She has surrendered fair portions of time in
which he can pursue private interests, and, while these are almost totally political endeavors, a few hours here and there in a week are devoted to womanizing. Fornication would be infinitely more challenging to schedule were it not for her willingness to leave him to his own devices, which, given his suspected proclivities, is such a patent risk that one may conclude she is affording him these opportunities rather than countenance the unambiguous hurt and conflict of catching him in flagrante delicto.
This is one possible explanation for her decision, by way of example, not to attend the fund-raising concert at Madison Square Garden in celebration of the President’s forty-fifth birthday, at which Marilyn is billed to sing.
Marilyn draws a gasp from the audience when she slips off her fur. For an instant, he too is fooled into thinking she’s naked before the light catches her skin-tight, flesh-colored dress. She croons a breathy version of Happy Birthday that brings a lump to the pants. The after-show party takes place on the Upper East Side, where she flirts with half the men and attempts to impress the other half with her political savvy. She quietly asks the President how her audition’s going.
“What audition?” he says.
“For First Lady,” she says.
Later she gets drunk and in an upstairs bedroom wiggles her tail at agents stationed on a neighboring rooftop. As the party winds down, the President invites her to accompany him to his duplex atop the Carlyle. Either it’s the dress or the testosterone shots.
As usual, he aims to avoid displays in front of the staff or Secret Service, the plan being for his guest to travel independently across Park Avenue, but she is a little garrulous, so he decides the safer course will be to keep her where he can see her. In the Beard’s absence, he’s forced to pick out one of the aides with whom she flirted earlier tonight; he wore the look of a child who’d never been to Coney Island before. The President orders him to accompany her to the Carlyle in a yellow cab, while the President travels in the limousine and takes the elevator to the thirty-fourth floor; the aide brings her up to the apartment where the President intends to thank him with a drink, but Marilyn stretches out invitingly on a chaise longue, spilling a splash of wine down her dress, and both men gaze momentarily at the damp patch soaking through to her nipple.
“Thanks, Kenny, goodnight,” the President says, and shows him the door.
“Poor guy,” Marilyn laughs. “I think he was hoping for a ménage à trois.”
“It’s a federal requirement that they be able to count at least that high.”
“Swell suite, Jack.”
This pied-à-terre’s been in his family for years. He perches at the window overlooking Central Park. Cars are ants crawling on the streets below, the beams of their headlights like probing antennas. He prefers for her to believe this is just another ad hoc presidential suite because he needs the comfort of personal barriers. He doesn’t want her picturing him here in other assignations over the years, or shooting the breeze with his dad over a nightcap. In the end, it will dispel her fantasy of usurping his wife.
His head throbs and possibly it’s an effect of the testosterone but his prostate feels inflamed. For two hours now, he’s experienced a singular desire to have sex with Marilyn. She could be the most unpleasant personality imaginable and he’d still suffer this surging physical compulsion. He stares at her lying on the chaise longue, her dress clinging to the pout of her breasts and the curve of her belly, and he feels fit to burst.
“That’s some dress,” he says.
She says, “Thank you, Mr. President. And it might interest the President to know I needed quite some help getting it on, and I think I just might need some getting it off.”
Some women complain it’s over so fast, while others must be grateful it is. Sometimes he wonders what they do after he falls asleep. Perhaps they stare at the ceiling, or curse him, or deliver a heartfelt monologue oblivious to his narcosis till the interjection of the first hoglike snore.
That night the President was awoken by a ringing at the door. Marilyn snuck to the bathroom while he dealt with the interruption, which came from the same agent who showed his disapproval at their first presidential tryst at the Beverly Hills.
The agent said, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, a security problem is ongoing in the hotel and my orders are to confirm your location and notify your safety.”
“I’m safe, thank you,” the President said sleepily.
“Very good, Mr. President.” The agent keyed his lapel microphone and transmitted, “Lancer secure.”
The President heard a chuckle echo in the bathroom and suppressed a grin at the suggestive code name. “What’s the security problem?” he said.
“It’s delicate, Mr. President.”
“Scandalize me.”
“Mr. President, a gentleman claims his wife is being corrupted. The agents stationed in the lobby are attempting to calm him down.”
“A simple phone call would have given you the information you require.”
“The lobby captain telephoned, Mr. President. No one picked up.”
“I must’ve been asleep.”
The agent gazed back at the President inscrutably.
“The gentleman in the lobby …”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“… he would be my guest’s ex-husband?”
“He would, Mr. President.”
“I want no charges against him. Put him in a cab and make sure he gets home safely.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
The agent fixed a sober expression and withdrew into the hall as the President shut the door. Marilyn emerged from the bathroom wearing an untied toweling robe open from neck to knees.
“That was sweet, what you did,” she said.
She twirled the loose ends of the belt, making her body ripple. Suddenly the President was wide awake again and surfing toward her on a wave of hormones.
Afterward she laughed, “You are corrupting me … Lancer!”
“Perish the thought,” he said.
“You know, Jack, Joe’s harmless,” she said. “He gets upset, is all. He’s still kind of protective. It’s sweet, in a way.”
“‘In a way,’” the President said, yet, as soon as he had pictured Marilyn’s ex causing a disturbance in the hotel lobby, his instinct was to be sympathetic, if only because former athletes also live in pain.
Back in Washington, the President summons the head of the Secret Service for a short meeting at the end of the day, at which he inquires if there are any continuing security concerns. “No, Mr. President,” comes the reply. “The gentleman made no threats to your person, and, in their reports, all my agents concurred that he appeared embarrassed by his conduct almost immediately on the night in question. He became extremely apologetic.”
“Were your agents able to make out the substance of his grievance?”
“It seemed Mr. DiMaggio was under the impression he was meeting the lady for dinner after the concert in Madison Square Garden.”
“How would he know where she was and with whom?”
The head of the Secret Service shifts uncomfortably. “With respect, Mr. President, I have concerns regarding the security smarts of the lady in question.”
“She told him?”
“I believe she must have, Mr. President. My guess is she informed the gentleman when she broke their date to accompany your aide to the Carlyle Hotel.”
“I see. Thank you.”
The President moves to dismiss him, but he holds his position. “With respect, Mr. President, may I continue? My field agents have expressed their concern at presidential guests being permitted to circumvent standard security protocols. I needn’t stress the potential jeopardy to your person, particularly your defenselessness if you fall asleep in their company.”
The President says, “I appreciate your concern and shall do my best to cooperate.”
The head of the Secret Service sets his jaw the way his agents do, then leaves, after which the President takes a swim,
alone for once, to reflect on the stupidity of his latest tryst with Marilyn, which he knows will only encourage her delusions. She called him the morning after because her ex-husband was worried he was going to be watched from now on.
“It’s fine,” the President snapped. “We let him go out of respect for his services to baseball. There’s a rule you can’t be a threat to national security if you made a fifty-game hitting streak twenty years ago.”
“This isn’t funny, Jack,” she bit.
“No?” he bit back.
“It was fifty-six games.”
“I do apologize.”
“Lancer, are you jealous?”
She avoids conflict by flirting, and he fell for it before, but not when he called her straight after the meeting with the Secret Service chief.
He said bluntly, “It was a mistake your telling him about us.”
“What’s the big secret, Jack?” she said. “Everyone knows.”
“My private life is sensitive. There are national security considerations.”
“You know what I mean, Jack. I mean everyone knows who’s in the know. Our thing is like Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter’s thing. Everybody knows but nobody knows.”
“They only know because you tell them about it.”
“You sound calm, but I feel you’re angry with me.”
“I’m not angry.”
“I’m so happy you’re not angry with me.”
“Swell.”
Without a pause, she shifted the conversation. “I know there’s a problem with me making movies,” she said. “I couldn’t be a movie star and First Lady. Look at Grace. She had to give it up.”