by John Welter
“Because we’re stupid.”
“The one thing you can’t do is be honest,” I said.
“About what?” Yamato said.
“About anything. People say they want honesty, but they don’t, usually. See that brunette over there? In the green blouse with the symmetrical breasts right beside each other? I’ll bet she insists on honesty and says it’s one of the most important things in life. But just think what would happen if you walked over to her and said, ‘Excuse me. Even though I have no idea who you are and I’ve only seen you for a few minutes, I get an erection when I look at you.’”
“I think that’s too honest,” Widdiker said, nodding.
“I know. The truth is usually too upsetting. That’s why you seldom find out what it is.”
“Well, don’t start walking around here telling women they give you an erection,” Widdiker said.
“Now isn’t that an interesting expression? Women give you an erection. If they give it to you, don’t they want you to use it?”
“I think most of them want you to keep it.”
“And then it goes away.”
“It wasn’t a very good gift, then.”
“And sometimes when women give you an erection, they mean to give it to someone else.”
“You mean you can get somebody else’s erection? Sex is too complex for me.”
“We better be quiet, or they’ll throw us out.”
“No they won’t. We have guns.”
What we did, then, was not meet all the women who were there, which at least didn’t take very long. And even though I made jokes and was ironic and pretended to be cheerful, I was just sad, as if that was the only emotion I had left. At least I had hope, I told myself abstractly, wondering what hope was, and if I really had any. Hope was when you had nothing at all but you acted like whatever you needed was on its way, even though you had no reason to believe it was. This only confused me, so now I had two emotions—sadness and confusion. I decided it must mean I was starting to feel better.
7
I was still in the doldrums the next day, full of a kind of anxious indifference to everything, because nothing in my world worked but I was expected to go on anyway since people are always pretending life is fine, when in fact it’s wretched. I wandered into the White House kitchen to eat whatever free food was lying around, and I saw Abbas Amal, the Jordanian chef, opening cans of Spam. One by one, he plopped the pink globs of nearly rectangular meat onto a wooden cutting board.
“What’s that for?” I asked Abbas, who looked unhappy and sullen.
“For eating,” he said.
“Are you fixing that for the president’s dinner tonight?”
“If you have to bother me, could you go bother me somewhere else?”
“I think bothering you here is convenient. What’re you doing with Spam?”
“I’m wiping the scum off of it. Then I’m going to cook it.”
“Really? For the state dinner tonight? You’re serving Spam to the president and the prime minister of England?”
“And cat food,” Abbas said in a quiet and resentful voice. “There are certain kinds of cat food, made from chicken, that look and smell like paté. I’m going to serve it on crackers. The president won’t know it’s cat food, but I will. This pleases me,” he said, using a French knife to begin slicing the Spam.
Probably I should have been alarmed and protective of the president, but I wasn’t in the right mood for that, and this was starting to seem like an interesting project to me.
“May I ask why,” I said, “you’re serving Spam and cat food to the president and the prime minister?”
“So they will eat it.”
“You could get fired.”
“Not unless you tell on me. Are you going to tell on me?” he asked, not even looking at me, but watching the Spam as he sliced it.
“I don’t care what the president eats. I didn’t vote for him. But Jesus Christ, Abbas—you’re serving Spam and cat food to two of the world’s most powerful people?”
“Then you are going to tell on me?”
“Possibly not. But why’re you doing it?”
“The president pissed me off.”
“Isn’t he always pissing you off?”
Abbas scowled at me and said, “If he wants to have stupid policies, fine. If he persists in being a jackass, fine. I’m a chef, and it’s not my concern what kind of son of a bitch the president is. But yesterday on TV when he ate a hot dog at a Baltimore Orioles game and said he wasn’t accustomed to such fine food at the White House, I decided, ‘All right, Mr. President. Go to hell. If you insult me on national television, if you demean my skill as a chef, then I too can fix you junk meat.’ And this is what I’m doing. I will prepare Spam and cat food for him, which is about the same thing as in hot dogs. I will disguise it in such a wondrous way that the president will eat it at a fine dinner, a dinner fit for monarchs, and dogs and cats.”
I had a very faint impulse to stop this, but a stronger impulse to see how well it could work. This was because I knew Abbas would get in trouble, not me.
“How do you disguise Spam?”
“This is easy,” Abbas said almost pleasantly, as if he felt safe with me and appreciated my curiosity. “I’ll marinate it in lemon juice and herbs, and then bread it, so you can’t see what it is, and broil it. To conceal it more, I’ll put lemon sauce and slivered almonds on top of it. I’ll call it some ridiculous name, like Viennese Veal, and no one will question it. It might even taste good. How peculiar.”
“What about the cat food?”
“That’s very easy. One time, I ate cat food by mistake. I was visiting a friend, and while he was out of the house, I got hungry and found a can of something in the refrigerator that had been opened and had no label. It looked like cheap paté to me, and so I ate it on crackers. It was slightly good, and when my friend got home and started to feed his cat, we discovered that I’d eaten the cat food. So I think the president and the prime minister will like it, too, which of course I don’t care about. And so now that you know all this, are you going to tell on me?”
“My job is to protect the president from assassins, not dinner.”
I think Abbas and I came to an understanding then, although what it was, I didn’t understand. We were only casual friends, based on the frequent trips I made to the kitchen to get whatever free food he’d give me, but now that we were accidentally brothers in this secret plot, it seemed as if we were closer.
It was odd how, at that moment, at that exact time in my life, I was supposed to be an abstract professional man, concerned only with the immediate needs of my job, directing my mind only to those exact tasks and concerns of the Secret Service, when, honestly, it didn’t matter at all to me and I was just being quietly sad, revealing this to no one. Who do you tell this to? It was almost as if the only one I might tell it to was whoever I couldn’t find, whoever in my heart was absent. I was trying to imagine her face when Abbas smiled at me and said, “Would you like to help me make the lemon sauce?”
I stared at him and said, “Secret Service agents don’t make lemon sauce.”
“Why? Are you too masculine?”
“No. I don’t have any lemons.”
“I have lemons.”
“Well, don’t tell me any more, Abbas. This is your plot. I already know too much, and keep me out of it. If you want to advance your career by being fired, that’s your concern, so please don’t tell anyone I know about this, or the fuckheads will fire me, too. This is your plot and I know nothing about it.”
“You know nothing,” Abbas repeated.
I wondered if this was a moral problem. Was it wrong to let the president eat disguised Spam and cat food? The question seemed to wander through my mind with no obvious place to go. It didn’t seem like a serious question. The mind, the conscience, knows when something really matters, and in this case, mine was silent. It had no opinions on Spam and cat food. It wasn’t so much a spiritu
al matter as it was an interesting project, and for a while I wasn’t sad anymore as I concentrated on this stupid and amusing subterfuge of Abbas’s, which I thought presented him with at least a fifty-fifty chance of getting fired, but which I supported both morally and spiritually because there was something vaguely admirable about attempting to ridicule the president without him even knowing it.
What I envisioned—and I had to envision it because Secret Service agents usually weren’t needed during dinner—was the president and the prime minister, and maybe the secretary of state, and several other tedious eminences of the highest order, dressed in black tie as they discussed some urgent world matters while holding unimaginably expensive and lovely glasses filled with an enormously costly wine as they ate animal by-products that had come from cans.
It was the most fantastic dinner I was never invited to, but in the morning I was invited to Chief of Staff Gardenaul’s office, which was decorated with framed paintings of George Patton, Geronimo, and Julia Child. I sat in a leather chair in front of Gardenaul’s desk, pointed to the painting of Julia Child and said, “Which war did she fight in?”
Gardenaul didn’t smile. “I suppose you know why you’re here,” he said in a mildly grave tone.
“Yes. This is where I work.”
“Were you aware of the Spam incident last night? Gardenaul said in the same grave tone.
“The Spam incident? Was that on TV last night? I didn’t watch TV. I was at a bar trying to meet women I’ll never know.”
Gardenaul glared at me and said, “What if the press finds out about this? What if the Post reports that the White House chef served goddamn Spam to the president and the prime minister of England?”
He didn’t mention the cat food. I squinted at Gardenaul with what I hoped would look like perplexity and annoyed innocence.
“The president had Spam last night? He never invites me for dinner. I don’t know these things.”
“Don’t feign innocence with me, you little shithead. You were seen in the vicinity of the kitchen last night.”
“Little?” I said impatiently. “I outweigh you by about twenty pounds. Whether or not I’m a shithead is a different matter.”
Gardenaul slapped his hand violently on the desk and winced, then pretended not to feel the pain.
“You’re the one agent I’ve never liked,” he said with quiet anger.
“There’s quite a few of them I don’t like. I guess you’re more amiable than I am.”
“Caldron,” he said, deliberately mispronouncing my name, “I have no idea which part of reality interests you, but the part you should be interested in is that the president is pissed. Seriously pissed.”
It made me think of the president standing at a urinal. One time when the president was in a public restroom at a hotel in Denver and a man started to walk in, I stopped him at the door and said, “You need security clearance to urinate.”
“Can you explain,” Gardenaul said, “why you didn’t tell anyone that Abbas was planning to serve Spam to the president?”
I wondered what the best way was to lie. I decided, in what was probably one of my frequent reckless impulses, to just tell the truth.
“My job is to protect the president and all other assigned people from physical harm. Spam, in my opinion, is incapable of physical violence.”
Gardenaul flung his arms into the air and said, “Then you knew! You son of a bitch, you knew Abbas was fixing Spam, and you did nothing to stop him?”
“The president regularly eats food without requiring my opinion of it.”
“But Spam? Good God, how can you pretend to tell me you thought it was all right for the president to eat Spam?”
“The president eats fish eggs. If he wants to eat the unfertilized ova of Russian fish, I don’t imagine he can pretend to be very sensitive about what he puts in his mouth.”
Gardenaul looked contemptuously away, taking a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighting it as he swiveled impatiently in his leather chair and stared at the pictures of Patton, Geronimo, and Julia Child.
“Caldron,” he said.
“It’s Coldiron.”
“If I don’t like your name, I’ll call you what I want,” Gardenaul said, not even bothering to look at me. “As chief of staff, I have the authority to change your race if it suits me.”
“Could you change my sex, too? It might improve my chances to be with a woman.”
Gardenaul was quiet, probably aggravated that I wasn’t obediently intimidated by him, like nearly everyone else was—the fuckhead.
“Caldron, I don’t know how, or by what intolerable set of circumstances, you were allowed into the Secret Service, and although I don’t have the authority to have your balls removed and hung from a lampshade in the Library of Congress like I want to, I can at least write a derogatory letter to your boss about this jackass incident. And I will. I’m through with you. You can return to your duties, not that you’ll have that many left.”
8
As I left Gardenaul’s office, walking silently down the hall in my conservative suit and matching 9mm automatic, with nothing before me or behind me but difficulty, in a world where I just wanted to hold somebody, to share my life with a woman who, as far as I knew in my undisturbed ignorance, had no intention of ever meeting me, it seemed as if the only eternal force I’d become intimate with was trouble. I started quietly saying, “Uh-oh. Uh-oh,” probably one of the first phrases I learned as a boy, wondering pointlessly and intellectually if, despite the hundreds of languages and dialects that separated humanity from itself, all people were born with the innate ability to say, “Uh-oh.”
I thought about Spam. I pictured it in its blue can with the little key you used to open it so you could slosh out the architecturally sound lump of meat. Spam was sturdy enough to both feed and house the poor. I thought I should have said to Gardenaul, “I’m sorry the president didn’t like Spam. At least he enjoyed the cat food.”
“Good morning, Doyle,” one of the White House staffers said as he walked by.
“Uh-oh,” I said, since it was the only greeting I could think of.
“Pardon me?”
“Sure. Why not,” I said, continuing to walk down the hall.
Every instant of life was an occasion for trouble. Animals millions of years ago evolved or were exterminated based solely on their ability to avoid trouble. And then humans evolved (or at least we assume they evolved, because this is a useful assumption for pissing off all fundamentalists in our worldwide effort to trouble everyone), learned how to walk upright and invented tools, which they used to bang other animals in the head, and humans gradually and fantastically learned how to domesticate wild grasses and animals, and finally invented tribes and clans and civilizations with written languages so they could begin giving proper names to all the countries they stole, or were stolen by. History wasn’t a record of advances. It was a record of who stole what. If you looked at all of natural and human history as an inevitable progression of events, you could say that the world was created and life sustained so that I could find myself walking through the White House with a 9mm automatic.
It seemed that I was depressed, or in trouble with one of those emotions you have when you can’t have any of the good ones. But then, by the guaranteed randomness of the world, I was distracted by the wondrous buttocks and thighs of Natelle, who walked in front of me in a snug green skirt that simultaneously hid her flesh from view and seemed designed to emphasize every surface I couldn’t see and wanted to embrace. It happened again, the way it always did when I suddenly and unexpectedly saw her anywhere. My heart fluttered, its beating seeming to speed up and maybe wobble. And, almost instantly, a warm jolt flashed through me, like something too good to imagine or understand was secretly waking in me, like exuberance and glee and hope were all stirring and crashing into each other in this huge, silent collision in my heart that I never told Natelle about, because she was married, and I wasn’t supposed to have secret
collisions in my heart for her. But I always did. I looked at her and was jolted. I looked at her and caught my breath. It seemed as if this would never stop happening. I looked at her and felt like I was wakened by every emotion that would ever matter. I wondered if this was love or psychological trauma. I’d accept both.
But I had no hope of ever telling her this, telling the forbidden married woman that I went through intense spasms of elation (Was that the right word, elation? Was there ever a word that did more than pleasantly obscure what you felt?), that I was almost disabled by elation, whenever I saw her. So she just didn’t know. Unless sometimes in my eyes, or in my obvious eagerness to be with her, she saw everything I never said, and she didn’t tell me. Just like I never told her. It was as if our real lives were the ones we never talked about.
I didn’t have time for this introspection, particularly since the person I needed to tell it to, Natelle, was the one person I couldn’t tell it to. I walked up quickly behind her, feeling the sudden urgency to be next to her that I felt when I saw her anywhere. And, when I reached her and lightly touched her wrist with my fingertips, and she turned and stared into my eyes and smiled, I was home. Of course I couldn’t tell her that. This always bewildered me—how Natelle, who was the best thing in my life, wasn’t really in my life. This meant that I was always on the verge of Natelle. She had a nice verge. But you couldn’t hold a verge, or kiss it.
“Well Doyle,” she said in a happy voice, and squeezed my fingers with her hand. She grinned, as if a new emotion came into her, and she said, “So what did you have for dinner last night?”
“I forget.”
“Well if you don’t remember what you had for dinner, possibly you recall what the president had?” she asked, grinning expectantly.
“Cat food,” I said.
“Cat food? That’s not the rumor I heard,” she said in a suddenly quiet voice that went down to a whisper. She leaned her face close to my ear, making me wish I could kiss her neck, and she said, “I heard Abbas fixed Spam with lemon sauce for the president and the prime minister. My God—did he really?”