The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  “Against whom?”

  “That’s what I want you to find out.”

  “Your mother is not Mata Hari.” But I could see that the idea tickled her.

  While she showered, I sat on my bed and phone-skimmed news accounts of the protests. The battle at the Port of Miami was over. It had been bloody but not quite catastrophic. No one was killed, only a few hospitalized, a few hundred arrested, half of those already released. Both security officials and activist leaders—those who had avoided arrest—were congratulating themselves. Chomp’s people, unusually, had no comment, so all the reporters just quoted Chomp’s tweet.

  Through the thin bathroom walls I heard my mother singing a Taylor Swift song. That was my partner in combat reportage. I hoped she’d left me some towels; she tended to profligacy when it came to personal care. I laid aside my phone and glanced at the room’s other bed. When was the last time we had traveled together? My father hated long trips, but every year he would agree to go to the beach, sometimes just to the south shore of Long Island, but occasionally to the Jersey Shore, and once, but unforgettably, to Florida. In the evenings he would read a 1950s science fiction novel—not just the Golden Age of SF, but the only age, he claimed—while my mother and I had a stroll on the beach. She would wave to the drinkers, the guitar strummers, the s’more-roasting families. The lovers she would merely smile at. We, like them, were scheming to be alone. We would sit on the rocks far down the beach. I would tell her secrets and she would tell me stories. When we returned to our room, she would always kiss my father first thing. Later on, I would lie awake and listen to their cover-rustling and murmuring, trying to catch them fighting, snuggling, whispering their own stories. A few years later, when I was older, I would wonder if they were screwing. As a young teen whose body constantly agitated for sex, I couldn’t figure out why people who had the chance wouldn’t take it all the time, even if they were old and weird-looking. My father hid away all interest in sex—he refused to ogle or even acknowledge the hottest of television swimsuit models—but I was reasonably sure he was human. My mother, on the other hand, celebrated attractive actors and smirked appropriately during the strip-joint scenes in premium-cable movies. But I never caught them going at it. I decided my parents employed some special sexual method, smooth and silent as sharks.

  Someone was calling my name. My limbs scattered across the sheets in four separate panics, and my eyes shot open. Standing over me was my mother, dressed in a brand-new Hawaiian-print nylon wrap. “Do you hear something?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Wipe the drool off your face and get up.”

  I shook the confusion from my head and stood. She yanked open the sliding-glass balcony door and urged me out.

  The ship had not yet left port. Our little balcony, perched almost as far back in the ship as possible, looked out, not onto the protest zone, but onto the trafficky causeway across the bay and the old gray teeth of Miami Beach apartment towers in the distance. I leaned out over the railing and could see below us another, wider—that is, normal—balcony. A man there was throttling a wine bottle in his fist. “I told you a million times!” he shouted. “And what did you do?” A gust lifted the tendrils of his disorderly gray hair.

  “I forgot!” This came from a woman somewhere inside. My mother slotted herself in next to me. We could hear their argument as clearly as if we were sitting in their room. I remembered a line from one of my old cruise reviews: If you have to be a jerk onboard, do it quietly—or at least close your balcony door. Also good advice for lovers.

  “Are you sorry?” the man demanded. “You don’t look sorry. You know how much this is gonna cost?”

  “Ten dollars?” The woman’s answer came with a hint of anger at the outrageous price. She was trying to match the man’s emotions without setting him off.

  “Try twenty! They charge twenty for a fucking corkscrew here!”

  The man stepped back, as if giving himself room to charge, and lifted the bottle. Now I could see a swath of his forehead, as red as a brake light. Beside me, my mother shot her hand across my chest, just as she used to when she was driving and had to stop suddenly.

  I cleared my throat as loudly and disgustingly as I could, to remind the man that he was in public. He failed to notice. He roared a single word. I had no idea what it was—maybe his wife’s name. He lowered his head and seemed on the verge of charging into the room.

  “Excuse me!” my mom called out in her loudest and most musical voice. She leaned out over the balcony railing. The man stepped back and looked up.

  “I have a corkscrew,” said my mother. “Is that what you need?” She smiled delightedly.

  The man’s face changed. I remembered a long-ago party at our house. An awkward neighbor knocked over a glass of wine onto our rug, adding a dark splotch to the fantasy of green swirls I had run Matchbox cars over all my life. The poor klutz—Mr. Hamron—apologized abjectly. I remember how his stubbled neck bulged under his cheek, making him look like the swollen puffer fish in my Encyclopedia of the Sea. My mother just laughed and snatched up a few napkins. She murmured something in Mr. Hamron’s ear, something that made his blazing face burst into a smile; then she dropped the napkins on the stain, and laid a hand on his shoulder as she twisted her foot over them. The general drone of the party dropped away and I saw a roomful of men looking at her, all alike, and their wives in turn looking at the men, all in different ways, some wives confused, some resentful, some amused. My mother’s intimate courtesy was everyone else’s distraction. Mr. Hamron wasn’t her type, but, from that moment on, he was forever in her power.

  “That’s exactly what we need,” said the man. “We prepurchased two bottles to save money. What’s the point if you got to buy a corkscrew?”

  His wife stepped out onto the balcony beside him. Her cheeks were plump and sagging, and gray roots in her hair were extremely apparent from above. She looked up and narrowed her eyes at us, the eavesdroppers.

  My mother let out a deep sigh. “It’s disgusting what they charge. We found out the hard way. Wait here.”

  Like most people embarrassing themselves, this couple didn’t notice. I looked into the room to see my mother at the minibar, tearing the wrapper off a twenty-dollar souvenir corkscrew. She carried it to the balcony.

  “Can you catch?” She dropped it straight down into the man’s begging-bowl hands. He caught it easily. Then he deftly pulled the cork, which he flipped backhanded into the ocean, and tossed the corkscrew back my way, not trusting a woman to make that catch. He thanked us and disappeared inside. His wife remained.

  “Do you think he knows?” she asked my mother. “I mean, how much it is. How much everything is.” Not everyone on board was a VIP.

  “He can’t control the prices,” my mother reassured her. “The cruise line makes the rules.”

  “Even he can’t own a cruise ship,” the woman agreed. “They should be ashamed. After all we spent.” Satisfied, she disappeared from view. We heard their door slide shut.

  My mother let out a breath.

  “Mata Hari never thought so fast,” I said.

  She nodded but said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the green pom-poms of the trees lining the distant causeway. As a child, I had never seen her fearful. When I was a teenager, my father was always anxious for me, but I regarded his fretting as a personal quirk. His rules—against certain of my friends, certain friends’ houses, certain friends’ automobiles—were designed not so much for my safety as for his peace of mind. Now my mother too was becoming anxious. Perhaps it was inevitable. She had been growing older alone for the last ten years, which would wear on anyone’s nerves. Maybe she should have stayed with my father. He, at least, gave her nothing to fear.

  Someone knocked at our front door. It was the steward, informing us that the evacuation drill was about to begin.

  Chapter 9

/>   The alarm sounded, and all passengers in our area practiced strolling down the hallway and up a flight of stairs to our designated muster station, the Sir John Feelgood Theater, where we sat around to wait for a signal from the safety officer. Meanwhile, servers passed semi-alcoholic drinks and the head cruise director entertained us with mustering jokes: “No booze for me, thanks! I’m driving home.” Chompians, already annoyed at having to ascend stairs for federal regulatory reasons, were unamused. We were finally led out to the deck to visit our lifeboats, and then released. The cruise was under way.

  My mother and I took the elevator to the top deck. The Sailaway Party took place on the topside pool deck, or Lido Deck. This was also the hot tub deck, sunburn deck, ogling deck, kitschy contest deck (hairy legs, beer gut, hairy beer gut), and pan-tropical party-music deck. The water slides were in the back. The ship’s other outdoor facilities included Ping-Pong tables, a putting green, and a basketball cage, but those were out of sight on the Athletic Deck, tucked behind the ship’s funnels. Nobody wanted them now. They represented ordinary rumpus-room kind of fun. Chomp’s cruisers had paid for Making History kind of fun.

  Chompians were already out in force. Many of them, like my mother, had changed for the occasion. The elderly were dressed for comfort, the youthful for temptation, the fancier or more self-important to match the moment’s magnificence. One particularly distinguished gentleman was decked out in white linen pants, a tweed jacket, an Andrew Jackson T-shirt, and a gold-tipped walking cane; his wife had on a sun hat the size of a Diego Rivera sombrero, though if you pointed out the resemblance the man would probably have challenged you to a duel. A few were dressed up as caricatures of their favorite political villains: Pocahontas, Li’l Marco, Leaky Mooch, Betrayin’ McCain, and, of course, the Witch in Chains. Some of those were trying to charge for pictures.

  Kids two-fisted from the brownie pyramid and cannonballed into the pool. Adults grabbed incautiously from passing trays, some of which held complimentary champagne-ish drinks and some such elaborations as the twelve-dollar Sailaway Spine-Stiffener, a kind of Long Island Iced Tea that came in a souvenir “Re-Take America” glass. As many of these rip-off drinks were sold to giddy older passengers as to clueless younger ones, but no one really seemed to mind. They were drinking for a good cause.

  The old looked indulgently at the young; the young moved respectfully around the old. Tattooed bros in goatees mingled with tattooed girls in bikinis, while skin traditionalists of all ages eyed the surrounding body art with interest, not scorn. The goodwill seemed like it could last forever, as goodwill tends to on vacation, but here the team spirit was almost overwhelming. Everyone was for Chomp, everyone was having fun, everyone was ready to help him save the world. Did they know they were drinking on a floating fortress?

  My mother and I took an outdoor staircase up to the promenade deck, the sweeping balcony overlooking the Lido. From there, we had a good view of the stage down below, just in front of the pool. An emcee was introducing the Regal Majestic Extraordinaires, the ship’s song-and-dance troupe. They flowed onto the stage, all dressed in puffy wigs that made them look like birds in a Dr. Seuss book. The music was something from Chicago. I thought I spotted Shell pushing her way close to the stage. Perhaps she expected Chomp to jump out of a birthday cake halfway through the number.

  I was as interested in the workers as in the passengers. Various uniformed guards kept watch both above and below. Some were ship security and some Chomp’s personal guards. You could easily distinguish between them. RMB guards were Indonesian and Indian; Chomp guards were all white. RMB guards tried to blend into the architecture; Chomp guards grinned, bantered, ogled, spun to take in the view of the city streaming by behind them. I wondered which side would prevail in a fight. The Chomp guards would have the passengers on their side; the ship guards, all the crew.

  My mother and I headed to the promenade deck bar.

  “My son’s a writer,” she told the bartender. “Give him something intellectual.” Thus she simultaneously ordered me a drink and informed everyone in earshot that I wasn’t her date, at the small cost of hinting at her age. The drink I received was a martini, of course, in honor of that noted intellectual James Bond. We made for the seaside view. Clouds had rolled in, providing a respite from the sun’s midafternoon brutality. The city was behind us, and I could start to see whitecaps out in the distance, tiny snow-peaked mountains that rose and avalanched repeatedly.

  “I’m thinking of your father,” she said.

  Had she seen him after all? Then I remembered the music behind us. Chicago. “How can we enjoy Fosse without Dad?” I asked.

  “Your father invented razzle-dazzle.” She leaned her head on my shoulder.

  To a stranger the joke would have been meaningless; to anyone who had met my dad, it would have seemed like mean-spirited sarcasm. Surely no one besides us had ever watched my father’s VHS tapes of All That Jazz and Cabaret with him, and surely no one else ever would.

  “I did love him,” she said. “I hated myself for what I did.”

  “You could still apologize.”

  “I did apologize. I was twenty-three when we married, Jacob. Five years younger than you are now. Do you understand that? At the age you spent your time rooting around with flight attendants and chambermaids”—PR reps and fellow writers, but she had the gist—“I was alone with a toddler.”

  “Not alone. You should have just divorced him early on. That would have been honest.”

  “Oh, nobody wants honesty. Least of all men like him.”

  “There’s isn’t anyone like Dad.”

  “If you must know, I mean men with a satisfactory job, reasonable manner, and conventional—albeit reasonably effective—sexual strategies. They all prefer to know nothing. Women have lied to their husbands since long before the Virgin Mary.”

  “I’ve lied to women I loved.”

  “Really? How?” Her eyes brightened at the confession. I was joining her team.

  “I once told a girlfriend you were dead.”

  She laughed, as I had hoped she would. “Oh, that’s all right. I let half my boyfriends think you were never born. You haven’t seen Clark, have you?”

  “No. But he won’t stay in his room forever.”

  “Help me look for him.” She preferred to face her fears. We returned to the railing overlooking the Lido. “Jacob, who is that?”

  “Where?”

  “There, by Pocahontas. That woman. She’s looking at us. Don’t gawk! Look near her. Why aren’t you wearing sunglasses?” My mother was, and still she was trying not to look directly. Upon her dark lenses floated a few clouds with gray underbellies, like dogs who’d been crawling in the mud.

  “I’ve never seen her before.”

  “I have. I can’t remember where. Wait. I think it was on a phone. Clark’s phone. She must be Clark’s girlfriend.”

  “She can’t be.”

  “She’s still looking at me. Oh God. At least she’s old.”

  I finally saw the woman. She looked about my mother’s age. “It can’t be Clark’s girlfriend. He obviously came alone. He invited us to his room, remember? And I still don’t see him.”

  “For God’s sake, stop looking. Oh, Jacob. Don’t put up with my insanity. Go find some young woman.” She turned back to the sea.

  I had a vision of her in years to come, old, frail, crotchety, without humor or self-awareness. People would hate her. I would watch them hate her as I visited her in a nursing home.

  I continued to survey the crowd below, looking for Clark.

  And then I saw him. Not Clark—my father. He too had changed his clothes. He was now wearing his clompy brown fisherman sandals and his only pair of shorts—also brown and of a weird kind of canvaslike material that was supposed to breathe. And my mother complained about my Lands’ End. It was hard to tell from this dist
ance but I was pretty sure his T-shirt bore his software company’s logo. He bent his head to fiddle with his camera. His bald spot was a blistery pink. I wanted to tell him to put on his hat. He looked up and grabbed for a glass from a passing tray. He got one on the second try. Party on, Dad.

  “I’m going for more drinks,” I said, and left before she could turn around.

  Chapter 10

  I dashed down the stairs to the Lido Deck, but on the way, I lost sight of my father. He had been wandering toward the buffet in the enclosed Wannsamore Restaurant. This made sense—alone in a weird crowd, he would resort either, like a normal person, to snacking or, like himself, to snapping pictures of improperly chilled dairy-based desserts. But he wasn’t in the Wannsamore either.

  He was on the ship. He was on the Chomp cruise. Why? I could no more fathom my father’s purpose than Chomp’s. All I knew was that, for the first time in years, maybe the first time ever (or since proposing to my mother), my father had taken action. He had no experience with action. He might do something dangerous or even disastrous. I realized I was not just afraid for him—I was afraid of him. I had come to plumb the mystery of the most dangerous man in America, and here I was baffled by the man I knew better than anyone else.

  I checked the elevators in back of the Wannsamore. He wasn’t there either. I had missed him.

  More Chompians were arriving for the party. I turned and floated with the passengers’ current back to the restaurant. But instead of letting it carry me to the deck, I stepped aside and looked out the restaurant windows. I could see my mother on the upper balcony. She was laughing and hefting a drink in a tall colored glass—not the same glass I’d left her with. She was chatting with a man. Not my father, of course. She was probably hoping Clark was watching.

  I returned to the elevators.