Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  “No. I got rid of that one after the divorce. That was stupid, wasn’t it?”

  They were standing side by side, just within the bedroom doorway. She looked up at him and said, “Not at all. I understand why you did it. And I’m glad you did.”

  He returned her look, and seemed about to say something humorous, and then something serious, and then something inconsequential, but finally he didn’t say anything at all, and when his arms came around her she thought, This time, there won’t be any stopping.

  She’d never been to his house before, and how odd that seemed now. Tonight, they’d returned Dinah to the house, full of spaghetti, well before eight, and there had been a moment of indecision about how to spend the rest of the evening, until he’d said, his manner a little too impromptu to be believed, “Come see my house! We can do it in an hour and a half. It’s a beautiful night, why not?”

  There were thousands of reasons why not. Should he drive two round trips the same day? That would be four hundred miles, most of it at night. But she found herself agreeing at once, raising none of the objections that quite naturally crowded her mind, so here it was nine-thirty and she was in the town of Lancashire, and Robert was giving her the tour of his house. It was neater and more settled than she would have expected a home of his to be, but of course he’d been married when the house was bought.

  But he’d made some changes of his own, and this bed toward which he was now moving her had never known the body of his ex-wife. She was glad of that; she wanted no ghosts in bed with her, the first time with Robert.

  Ghosts. But Fred was no longer even that real, was he, there wasn’t even enough left of him to put together a good ghost. Two months from now he would have been dead three years, having last physically departed from her a full year before that. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve loved a man, and she had never doubted her love for Fred, after four years of permanent separation love will have withered to no more than a memorial echo. Robert was the one now who kept love alive, so the bed was free of ghosts from everywhere.

  The Frenchman never even crossed her mind.

  They were still completely dressed when they stretched out side by side on the bed, the little puffs on the bedspread tickling her neck. She kicked off her shoes, kicking them over the edge so they bumped on the carpet, lighter sounds than the thumps made by his shoes. Then his mouth found her mouth again, and his fingers found her zippers, and for a while they made slow progress together, concentrating their attention on kisses, until a mounting sense of urgency in her made her roll hard against him, both to help him reach the closures of her clothing and to encourage him to move faster. He needed no more spur. He lifted his head and grinned down at her and said, “Evelyn, in five seconds I’m going to rip this stuff right off you.”

  “I’ll help, you don’t have to rip it.”

  There was something funny about them sitting up side by side on the bedspread, two grown people, pulling their clothing off, and the funniness struck them both at the same time, and then there they were laughing at one another, laughing at themselves, laughing simply because it felt so good to laugh. “God, I love you!” Robert shouted through his laughter, and Evelyn cried delightedly, “God, I love you back!”

  They seemed to tend to extremes of attitude, and their next swing was to deep solemnity. Both naked now, the bed also naked, stripped down to the pale sheet—only the hall light gave illumination—they looked at one another in something like awe, and neither moved, as though a spell had been cast on them by a passing wizard and they would have to sit that way in semi-darkness forever.

  He’s hairy, she thought. I’ve never seen such a hairy man. And something deeper than thought told her, against all reason, that that meant he would be cruel. It was against all reason, but she was afraid.

  And so, in a different way, must he have been. He broke the immobile silence between them at last, reaching out one cautious hand toward her and saying, “Evelyn . . .”

  He was going to give her a chance to change her mind, to back out, even now. “Don’t,” she said, not wanting the opportunity, not knowing what she might do with it. “Don’t say anything, please.”

  “Evelyn.” But the name meant something different this time, and she leaned toward him as he moved to meet her.

  It was like being a virgin all over again, her body having gone so long unused. (No memory of the Frenchman, none at all, not till long afterward, when she laughed to think she hadn’t thought of him.) But he was not cruel—she had known, really, that he wouldn’t be—and the most beautiful thing in the world was to move her left arm up, her left hand up, rest the palms and fingerpads against the side of his head, stroke downward to his strong neck, feel the intricate curvature of his head and his throat and his shoulders, and all the time feel the strong protective weight of him stretched atop her, the firm resilience of the new bed beneath her, the strong stroke of him within her. His breathing fanned slow and warm beside her ear, her gathered hair, her slender throat, and then quickened its pace, and she thought how sweet and beautiful that she was giving him a climax, and she hoped he would understand that it was all right that she wouldn’t reach one, that this was all perfect anyway, that orgasm wasn’t as important to a woman if everything else was right, that it was only to be expected that she wouldn’t have one, after such a long abstinence, in a strange place, with a new man.

  And then she had one.

  v

  NOT TILL THE END of the program did Evelyn get up and switch off the television set, the slightly green face of her brother George suddenly contracting into the middle of the tube as though he’d just fallen down a well. As he should, as he should. George became a dot, and the dot disappeared.

  And then she was sorry she’d shut it off, since any chatter—a commercial, another program, even the bone-rattle of canned laughter—would have been better than the silence that now descended on the room occupied only by herself and Bradford.

  The house had four television sets. Aside from this one in a small downstairs parlor rarely entered for any reason other than TV, there were sets in Bradford’s bedroom, Evelyn’s bedroom and Dinah’s nursery. (There were also, of course, sets in the servants’ quarters.) Evelyn tended to watch a lot of television—before last Tuesday, before Robert—mostly old movies and mostly on her own set in her room. Dinah’s set ran all day long, but the child rarely looked at it. Bradford probably did some viewing in his own bedroom, but what programs and what he thought of them he never discussed with Evelyn. That left this room and its set either for guests or for those rare occasions when something of specific interest to Bradford and Evelyn led them to want to watch a program together. Like tonight’s interview.

  Now she understood why Howard had told her to lay off the interview, not to use it in an attempt to make Bradford feel better after the bad review. Because the interview was going to turn out to be infinitely worse.

  She hadn’t referred to it again, not since his warning on Tuesday. Of course, she hadn’t seen much of Bradford in the meantime—she’d wound up staying Tuesday night in Lancashire and had then spent Wednesday there, in bed, with Robert leaping upstairs and out of his clothes between classes, so that she didn’t get home till midnight Wednesday, and then yesterday Robert was back down here again and they’d gone riding in the twilight in the woods and made love on a blanket in the vanished village—but even if she’d been with Bradford she would have honored Howard’s warning and said nothing, despite not knowing what it was all about.

  She hadn’t yet looked directly at Bradford, but she did so now, and he was staring at the blank television set, brooding at it, and she knew from his expression that he wasn’t seeing that blank screen at all, he was seeing something else unreel inside his head.

  The interview, of course, replaying over and over.

  How could George have done it? Bradford was his grandfather, too! And he’d said many incisive things, thought-provoking things, interesting things, even controvers
ial things. And where were they? An amiable old fuddy-duddy had appeared on the screen, his answers so chopped up and cut to pieces that they frequently didn’t even make sense any more. It sounded like a Reader’s Digest condensation as remembered ten years later by a feebleminded optimist.

  There was nothing left. None of Bradford’s warning about the direction in which America was drifting, none of that at all. None of the important things, the things that meant so much to Bradford, that he was so pleased at having been given the chance to say to millions of people all at once, through television. All gone.

  What was left? Inanities and commonplaces, pointless chit-chat, silly little anecdotes from Bradford’s days in the Senate. And his reference to The Final Glory, but without George’s confusion about the title.

  In a low troubled voice, not looking at him, Evelyn said, “I’m sorry.”

  Had he heard? She looked at him again, and he was still brooding at the television set. She should have left it on, and now it was impossible to turn it back on. In a stronger voice, looking at him, she said, “I’m sorry.” For everything from having a brother named George, to Bradford’s being old and retired, to her having switched off the television set.

  He nodded. He’d heard. Then, still gazing at the blank set, he said, “I do have to do it. I can see that, I do have to do it.”

  “Do what?” she asked him, but he got to his feet and left the room.

  vi

  “I WAS HALF AFRAID he meant to kill himself,” Evelyn said.

  Robert, sitting beside her in the Jaguar, said, “Of course. So would I, that’s what I’d think, too.”

  “When I followed him,” she said, “he understood, and he turned and told me he wasn’t going to do any such thing. He said the last thing he wanted to do was throw his life away at this stage, that the whole point was to find a way to go on being useful. He said he would want to talk to me about it very soon.”

  “And he hasn’t?”

  “No, he hasn’t.”

  This was Sunday afternoon, the fourteenth of October, nine days after the disastrous television interview. Evelyn had been short-tempered and distracted with poor Robert all last weekend, her sexual renaissance having been snuffed out when it had barely awakened, leaving Robert baffled and gradually annoyed. They had seen each other not at all during the week, Evelyn begging off with one excuse after another, but it had already been arranged that he’d spend the weekend here, and when he’d arrived he’d obviously been determined to find out what was going on or blow up in the attempt.

  The blow-up had come last night. He had wanted to go to bed with her, and she had said something stupid and irritable about how-could-he in her grandfather’s house—as though that made any difference!—and then she’d cried herself to sleep, knowing she was throwing him away by her stupidity and yet unable to stop herself.

  He’d been ready to leave first thing this morning, but she had managed to gather herself together enough to ask him, humbly, to stay. Her change of pace had confused him all over again, and after lunch he’d taken her aside and insisted on knowing what was wrong. She’d understood by then she had to tell him (though her impulse was always to shield Bradford, to keep his confidences from everyone), so she’d suggested they go for a drive, that she show him the old road around the perimeter of the property that the Secret Service used to patrol during Bradford’s Presidency, and now here they were on a slight ridge from which they could see woods stretching away on both sides, the house hidden somewhere far away to their right. And she had at last told him the whole story.

  A little silence settled between them once she was done, until Robert exhaled noisily and looked out at the woods, saying, “All right. I’m not crazy about it, but I can understand it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “Everything was so beautiful, it was growing and growing, and this just knocked the life out of me.”

  “I noticed,” he said, but the irony wasn’t biting, and when he looked at her he was smiling. “You have two men in your life now,” he said. “Try not to forget it.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said, and as he reached for her she smiled and murmured, “I won’t forget.”

  vii

  AFTER ROBERT’S DEPARTURE, BRADFORD had said, “When Dinah’s in bed, I’d like to talk with you.”

  “Of course,” she’d said, and now, just after eight o’clock, she found him in the back library, paging through a bound volume of the former left-wing magazine Ramparts, shut down by the State of California last year.

  Usually when he sat in here he used only the floor lamp behind his reading chair, so that he read in a pool of light, with the tiers of books in comfortable semi-darkness around him. But this evening the room was as bright as a supermarket. The fluorescent ceiling lights focused on all the bookcases were on, gleaming from the glossy dust-jacketed spines and the polished wood, the stacks of books seeming to lean forward into the room. A second floor lamp glared down on the second reading chair, completing the assault of light that bulged the room.

  Bradford put Ramparts down on the small table to his left and said, “Dinah in bed for the night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sit down, sit down.”

  “Would you mind if I turned this off?” Meaning the lamp behind the empty chair.

  “Of course not.” Looking around, he said, “I don’t know why I turned them all on. Trying to get light on the subject, I suppose.” He gave a crooked smile.

  “The subject,” she said, and sat down.

  “I want to ask your advice,” he said. “No, I don’t, either. What I want to ask is your help.”

  “Anything,” she said. She was sitting on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

  “I have to do something, you know,” he said soberly. “You know that. You know what I think about the future of this country.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I’ve thought of things I might do,” he said, glancing away from her, looking somberly across the room. “I thought if I had a platform again, a political position, that would help.”

  “Running for Congress, you mean.”

  “Not the running so much as the being. I’d thought, if I had a role, a position, if I were active again—” He shook his head. “That’s why I thought about Congress, about getting my old seat back.”

  “Maybe you should,” she said, thinking that after all it would be better than the position he was in now.

  But he said, “No. Everybody was right, I shouldn’t do it. Because in the first place I wouldn’t give a damn about this Congressional district, and everybody would have to know it. What I care about is the whole nation, what worries me is the United States in its relationships with the rest of the globe and how those relationships affect our internal matters. It would be a fraud for me to be in Congress, and it would be an obvious fraud, and it wouldn’t do me any good anyway. Because the other thing is, I do have more voice now than a freshman Congressman, even if that freshman Congressman was an ex-President. I’d only make my voice weaker, it wouldn’t accomplish a thing.”

  “Then I don’t see what you can do,” she said. “I’m sorry, I wish there was something I could say, but I just don’t see what you can do.”

  “There are two or three things,” he said. “I’ve been considering them, trying to make up my mind which would be best.”

  The Final Glory?

  “That’s exactly right,” he said. He sat back, smiling thinly in reminiscence. “You know, for a while I thought I might run for President again.”

  “Bradford! You couldn’t stand the White House again, I don’t care how healthy you are!”

  “Oh, there wouldn’t be much chance me winning anything, not even the nomination. But I thought I might enter a few of the primaries, the ones people pay attention to. New Hampshire, California. At least I’d be in the right arena, I could talk about the things that are important. But you know it wouldn’t be any damn good. I’
d be a sideshow, nothing more. The serious contenders would get the newspaper space. That interview with George, that’s the sort of coverage I’d get.”

  “That was despicable,” she said, still angry about it.

  “He phoned, you know. Said he was sorry, they had to be careful about controversy since the FCC got its teeth.”

  “It was just despicable,” she insisted.

  “It was real life,” he said. “Rutherford says I’m a politician, and if a politician is anything he’s a man who doesn’t blink from real life. I don’t blame George, and neither should you.” He sat forward again, earnestly, saying, “Don’t you see that what happened to that interview is just exactly what I’m trying to warn people about? We’re moving into the Year of the Ostrich again, everybody’s starting to play it safe again, keep their wings in close. I really shouldn’t be surprised when the climate I’m trying to warn people about is just the thing that keeps me from doing the warning.”

  “It was still George,” she said. “He didn’t have to—”

  “If he didn’t have to, he wouldn’t. No television man puts on a dull show if he could put on an interesting show. Don’t be mad at your brother, Evelyn, he’s just as trapped in all this as anybody else.”

  Grudgingly, she shrugged and said, “All right. But if that’s true, there’s nothing at all you can do, is there?”

  He leaned back. “I think there is. I’ve rejected other ideas, I’ve thought about this for a long while. You know, I first started thinking about it when I went to work on The Temporary Peace and began to see the parallels between that time and this. Except that this time is going to be even more virulent, I’m sure of it. I started thinking about it then, and when we came back from France I knew I had to do something about it. So I’ve been considering my plans ever since, this isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision.”

  She was about to say that she could believe that, she had been aware of a change in him since Paris—in the way he’d treated Harrison, for instance—but she thought it best not to refer to such specifics, and she simply nodded and said, “I’m sure it isn’t. You never jump into things without knowing what you’re doing.”