Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales

by Mark O'Donnell

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GLORIOUS WEAKLINGS

  Van’s uncompromising study revealed that the exorbitant slipshod Ace of Spades helicopter had enriched the Woodheads and the Torques, but had caused hundreds of deaths in Vietnam since the war’s end. Hounded and impugned, President Torque announced he would show his faith in the accused helicopter by taking a ride in one. Its crash, and his death, threw the nation into an excruciating position, a mood of simultaneous shame and suppressed giggles. Newsmakers pointed out the irony but declined to smile. Spokesmen tried instead to focus on the future, always less shameful or hilarious because it’s unknown. A special presidential election was called.

  The scandal twisted deeper when it was discovered that the President had committed suicide. The helicopter had been specially built for him to ensure normal operation, and he had tampered with it to ensure its explosion. His Vice President, Price Rice Marmot, committed suicide as well, as a gesture of solidarity with Torque’s policies.

  Despairing of top officials, the public called for new answers, as if there had been old answers they didn’t like. The Republicans perfunctorily nominated ex-president August Dodd Woodhead. The press did make hay of his son Shep being in a drug rehabilitation center, which was a small but at least comprehensible disgrace, but bypassed analyzing the fiscal amoralities of Woodhead Paper and Aircraft as too arcane for cameras. Reporters were merely confused by Win’s working for his father’s likely opponent, and all Win would say was that someday certain people would be sorry they had ignored certain children. It would have been steering into an already fatal skid to add any more liabilities to August Dodd’s campaign, though, since all he could do as Torque’s defendant was apologize for an absent monster, take his coat and tiptoe out backwards, hoping for a future invitation for himself.

  The Democrats nominated Van. He’d been an orphan, he had no fortune to investigate, and he stood for Examination Before Takeoff. They even excused him for being under thirty-five. Van’s slogan was He’ll Make Sure It’s Right. It was to prove catastrophically true. Win engineered the campaign with virulent resolve, which made Van feel uneasily like a voodoo doll rather than a fair-haired boy. Also, the campaign coincided with America’s Bicentennial, and another Walker son was killed, this time by a depth charge that misfired during a waterfront rendition of the 1812 Overture by the Pompey Pops.

  Win recognized the death as a good promotional opportunity, since mourning implies rectitude, so an armada of press trailed after Van when he returned to Vertigo Park for the funeral. They were indecently delighted, though, when Charlotte Haven showed up to pay her respects, too. She had grown tired of the shiny endearments that tinkled like a line of credit from the makeshift Hollywood suitors she’d tolerated since Cliff had vanished. Reading about Van had renewed her pride in him and her own stung idealism, and she wanted to offer her respect to a man she knew respected her. Despite his grief, Van was flourishing and self-confident, since August Dodd Woodhead’s was a lame duck candidacy, and people now thronged to Van’s blandness as to milk of magnesia after President Torque’s chili peppers of deceit. The publicity firm of Scud, Scurry, and Edgewise had convinced even Van of his worthiness, and when he saw Carlotta, he was at his most radiant. Unlike Cliff, he was grateful, lovable, and able to love in return. Win, pragmatic even about his thwarted love, arranged to have Van inspect local blackout emergency supplies by candlelight, and invited Carlotta along. She was entranced by the shrewdly romantic photo opportunity, and Van saw in her, if not his unknown mother, then his childhood, and attributed to her the tantalizing value of everything precious irretrievably lost. Their weaknesses met, orphan to orphan, and he proposed. She accepted, swept on as much by duty to drama as a conviction that this was honorable love.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WEDDING IN SHADOW

  An engaged candidate was a sanguine novelty for the media, especially since the couple was barely thirty and the late president had been long-married as well as grotesque. This would settle any restless speculation about Van’s wet-eyed sensitivity, and not only was Carlotta famous, her scar could prove her seriousness even to ambassadors who spoke no English. As Win observed to an aide, she gave good headlines.

  The ballyhoo of the election bolstered Carlotta, and she mistook its mood for hers. She reminded herself that she was doing the greatest good she could by joining this good man in his work, but sexual doubt crept in like mice gnawing at the bedboards, and as she lay in a succession of chastely single hotel rooms along the campaign trail, hearing the even, unending inhale of the air conditioner, she wondered if she was making a mistake.

  The wedding was scheduled for the weekend before the election. It was pointedly simple, taxpayers take note, held in the basement of Pompey’s VFW hall, and instead of gifts the couple requested donations to charity. Carlotta wore a turquoise dress borrowed from the garment workers’ union—something new, borrowed, and blue—and for something old, she clutched a bouquet of dead, dried flowers. August Dodd Woodhead’s camp tried to compete by having him adopt a Vietnamese baby, but since Win, his real son, was estranged—in fact, he was Van’s best man—the heartwarming aspect was overshadowed by the gothic.

  As the hired combo played the love theme from Woman in Jeopardy, Van’s stepfather, Big Bill Walker, approached Carlotta, his red face redder with nuptial wine. “Raise many, many children,” he told her, “so no single one will matter too much.” Then Chick Burns, uncomfortable in a borrowed suit, approached and asked Carlotta if she knew where his son was. She honestly didn’t, but seeing Cliff’s father made a low bell toll in her carillon, and a cold vermouth breathed darkly in her happiness cocktail. Prompted by Chick’s questions, she began to imagine she saw Cliff in the shadowy corners of the hall, in soldier’s fatigues at the bar with the Secret Service men, behind a pillar or the ziggurat silhouette of the wedding cake. She shivered, feeling that chastised, funky sensation one gets from going too quickly from dazzling sunlight on the beach into a dank, dim changing booth. Van, like the sun, was scrupulous but untouchable. Cliff was the periodically vanishing moon, erotic and preceptor to danger. Her head swam, and not very well.

  She faltered from the heat at the crowded reception, but she was brought back to reality, such as it was, by the sudden spectacle of Julienne arriving on the arm of Culvert Booney. Julienne had returned to traditional values, or at least to her childhood address, and set her sights, if not lower, then backwards. She had married Culvert earlier that day. The uselessness of such outdated triumph let Carlotta hope the gesture had nothing to do with her, until Julienne announced she had changed her name once again, this time to Carlotta. Somehow, perhaps numerologically, she hoped to tail Carlotta to the mansion of happiness, to get on some electrified u-dodge-em track to fulfillment. On a night already as fraught with doubt as her wedding was, Carlotta could only faintly murmur congratulations to the couple. She let the mystery of all lives but hers pass around her, and her stepsister receded from her into the unavailing celebrants, glistening into the dark like a desperately polished nickel.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE DAWN OF NIGHT

  Van won the election, the youngest president in history, with the youngest wife. He chose not only to walk to his inauguration, like a simple man, but to show his trust in the people’s voice, he opted to wear a blindfold. The idea was that ordinary citizens would line the streets of Washington that morning and call out directions to him as he advanced, so, through their guidance, he wouldn’t run into the curb or take a wrong turn. The gesture was awkward, and for the first time, people noticed his limp, but Carlotta walked by his side throughout, though without touching him, since that would be cheating.

  His honeymoon with her, and with the nation, was brief. He did indeed try to make sure everything was right, and in his first hundred days in office mandated sweeping and expensive examinations of military equipment, commercial airlines, hospitals, infant plush toys, traffic-light suspension, escalator speeds, postal
sweepstake paper cuts, and all the tangle of conveniences that add up to modern life. The result was safety, but stasis, since air flights, operations, paychecks, and even home delivery of groceries were delayed for days in the Hamlet-slow process of systems analysis. The people, dazed by too much recklessness, now chafed under too much caution. As always, they abhorred lawlessness but decried restriction, and millions wriggled like children confined with allergies they don’t believe they have.

  Synchronized swimming was added to the roster of Olympic events, with Carlotta as honorary timekeeper, guilty memories of wounding Van assuring her enthusiasm. She declined the many movie offers that poured in, but she did do a series of public service announcements urging Americans not to panic.

  Inflation, impatience, and global unrest mounted, and Van’s youth now came to be seen as a kind of weakness. He tried to meet with anyone who wanted to, but his schedule became decimated by crackpot retirees, star-struck checkout girls, and bored first graders fulfilling requirements. He came to bed drained but insomniac, and tried to absorb statistical abstracts to make the most of the night. Carlotta had skyrocketed into a sexless marriage.

  Eventually, Julienne came to see Carlotta, and seemed contrite and friendly. She even identified herself as Julienne. She was now the honored sister of the First Lady in Vertigo Park, which was still depressed but was selling a few presidential souvenirs. She had her pick of roles at the Pompey Community Playhouse, and sometimes did the weather with Culvert. She was in charge of attaching the Partly Clouded Sun. However, Culvert was weakening, and she looked tired herself. She needed a project. Julienne announced she wanted to write Carlotta’s biography, but asked if she might do it in the first person, like a ghostwritten autobiography. Disconcerted by such oblique devotion, and worried by her sister’s haggard appearance, Carlotta conceded. She offered to let Julienne come and live with her, but Julienne said it wasn’t necessary, that she had the whole book already written in her mind. As she was leaving, Julienne tremblingly asked if Carlotta had any news of Cliff. Carlotta had none, and pity and resentment welled up in her, plus the chilling epiphany that she and Julienne were not so different in this frailty. She shivered as they hugged in parting, and this palpable chip in Carlotta’s gilding reassured Julienne that she and her sister were not so different. Julienne left coughing but happier, and Carlotta was shaken to behold herself in one she pitied.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DEMANDS IN THE SANDS

  Van’s pledge of Christian cheek-turning made the Allies nervous, and in no time he was tested point-blank. A busload of reporters covering a movie thriller being filmed in the Middle East was hijacked by terrorists, and they were held hostage in a crudely rigged-up broadcasting studio in the trackless desert hills. Since the reporters and hostages were one, and the terrorists gave them free use of the camera, the coverage was excellent and impassioned, and stressed the crucial importance of their own rescue. The terrorists made no specific demands, but asked that Van make them an offer.

  In a messianic spirit, he offered himself, unprotected, in exchange for the reporters. This didn’t appeal to the terrorists, though, and they asked for Carlotta instead, since most of them had admired her in the dubbed version of Blood Pressure. At first Van wouldn’t consider it, but she, eager to do right, convinced him that since he had been willing, she had as much right to self-sacrifice as he did, and it would be vanity in him to forbid her to contribute. After complicated soul-searching, he let her go, “of her own beautiful free will,” to the desert to surrender herself. The public, and even the reporters who were thereby released, saw this as spineless and unmanly, to turn over your own wife to terrorists, and a thunderous outcry arose on their return to their customary newsdesks. People pointed out that Van was short for Vanilla, and Vanilla sounded like a girl’s name.

  Her captors invited Carlotta to become their spokesperson, but before she could negotiate, there was a sudden outbreak of gunfire in the studio, and a group of mercenaries swarmed into the room, and incidentally onto live television. They had spotted the hideaway and, without any idea of its international significance, figured it might have some equipment worth plundering. Once again, her life was saved in a bloody minute, and once again her rescuer was Cliff Burns, the leader of these opportunistic soldiers of fortune. He had hooked up with some survivalists in Northern California and ended up doing pickup jobs in war-torn areas. Everyone in the studio was killed but Carlotta, and the viewing public never realized she had been spared only by accident.

  Van was hounded from office after her return, though it took several weeks for the convulsions to play themselves out. Carlotta stood by her husband, since she believed he had done the right thing, but her stance was unsteady with the reappearance of Cliff, who was posed hugging her by a jubilant press. Cliff had barely known Van in Vertigo Park, but he revived an old schoolyard taunt and teased the president as Van, Van, Born in a Can. A few faint voices pointed out that Cliff hadn’t even known Carlotta was in the terrorists’ studio, but people admired his sneering good luck. Beyond his own mortification, Van also sensed Carlotta’s electric response to Cliff, and, despite her pleas, he resigned and entered a monastery, renouncing worldly things. Haplessly, with his typical waffling, he reappeared a few days later to try to resume his office, an attempted reverse dive the Congress declared inadmissible. Carlotta was torn by Van’s torture and her own unresolved passion for Cliff, who had been installed as a guest of the White House by popular demand. Wanting to be strong for Van, trying to avoid encountering Cliff, she nonetheless found herself gasping and dizzy, as if spinning on an amusement park rotary ride, where the floor drops away but one hangs motionless, pinned to the wall by air. She and Van spent a night together weeping as proof of their love, but then he vanished definitively, supposedly to Sri Lanka, though no one was ever quite sure. There were later reports of a blue-eyed penitent there who had taken a vow of silence, and so could not explain himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A WOLF IN DOG’S CLOTHING

  Nestor Haze, like the sentimental painters drawn to plagued frontier towns, traveled to Washington to appropriate what seemed an epic tale to him. He offered to write dialog for Cliff during the Senate hearings on the violent rescue of the First Lady. Surprisingly, Cliff accepted, and the two proved well matched. Cliff was the perfect terse loner to speak for blabbermouth, clubby America’s wishful image of itself, and Nestor’s niblets of corn sounded pithy in Cliff’s monotone.

  Since Van had trimmed the vice-presidency as needless fat, an immediate election was called for on a write-in basis, out of necessity and as a token of electoral reform; besides, the country was virtually broke. August Dodd Woodhead ran on an I Told You So platform, but this time his son Win decided to run against his father himself, despite the presumption that his acidic manner was unelectable. The family conflict was a sensation, but it made the public tired of Dodd and alienated by Win’s witticisms and his tawdry revelations about his childhood spankings. Natural momentum put Cliff in the race, running without any party’s support but with the defense that he owed nothing to any machine. His slogan, crafted by Nestor, was Be Proud—He Is. Nestor was also his vice-presidential choice, since Cliff didn’t want to meet any strange men in suits and pick one to work with. Also, Shep Woodhead emerged briefly from Lilly Willow, not to endorse his father or his brother, but to reminisce about what good care Cliff had taken of him, and what a good job he’d done running the farm. In Shep’s anesthetized mind, it had been a farm.

  The public hoped against hope that Cliff and Carlotta would get together romantically, especially since they were high school sweethearts who had dated briefly later. Tabloids urged her to hear his plea, though as always he seemed to desire her without any particular neediness. She resolved to resist him, and announced she could not keep falling under his spell, only to be abandoned. He grinned and shrugged.

  The next day Cliff called a press conference and announced he was marrying Carlotta, that
her husband had been declared not only dead but already dead for several years, so she was free to wed without criticism. Carlotta was half thrilled and half affronted, since although this was her dream come true, he hadn’t asked her first. The country went wild for it, and as it had been with Van, the luster of others’ approval burnished Cliff to a husbandly hue. Besides, he seemed to be civilizing his Dodge City heart, thanks to Nestor’s gulch-brown banalities and his own taste for authority. Anyway, she reasoned, the system of checks and balances would keep him, if not in line, then at least on hand. They were married in the Rose Garden, and Cliff wore a suit. Julienne was invited to the wedding, but she claimed she had already written the chapter about it, and the trip would be superfluous.