Finally, she could see him clearly. He was dribbling a basketball…
Fifteen-year-old Vaclav Szabo, his sweaty basketball uniform stuck to his body revealing his rock-hard erection.
She broke into a smile and hurried down the jet stairs.
Below, he tossed her the basketball.
She reached out to catch it, but lost her balance.
“Mrs. Funck?”
She felt herself falling.
“Mrs. Funck?” The soft feminine voice spoke again, softly, lovingly.
She opened her eyes and found herself peering into the face of Jackie Kennedy, the Jackie from the official portrait: beatific smile, ruffled high-necked collar, eyes that looked into her soul. She reached out a hand to Natalia, to help her up.
“Jackie…”
“Jackie?”
Startled, Natalia opened her eyes. She was lying in bed in her White House bedroom, looking up into the round, overly made-up face of Sally-Ann. As usual, her social secretary was wearing a prim black pantsuit and carrying an iPad, a black-leather tote bag emblazoned with a Tory Burch logo slung over her shoulder. “Who’s Jackie?” she asked.
“I was dreaming.”
Sally-Ann winked knowingly. “About last night with POTUS?”
Natalia winced at her memory of make-a-baby sex with Rex last night. After leaving his bedroom and praying to Jackie, she had taken a quick detour to the staff-cafeteria kitchen in the basement for a buttermilk biscuit snack and a friendly chat with Stella. Then she had returned to her bedroom, climbed into bed, and pulled the covers over her head. Usually snuggling under her white Frette comforter relaxed her: there was something about its delicate cover made from 1000-thread Egyptian cotton and its filling of 850-loft white goose down from Hungary, just across the border from her native Slovakia. Not last night. The question had tormented her: Should she have Rex’s baby or leave him? Finally, she fell asleep and had that dream.
The images from the dream careened back into her mind. She sat up in bed. “It was a sign!”
“Ma’am, your yoga instructor is here in ten minutes,” said Sally-Ann, reading from the FLOTUS daily schedule on her iPad. “After that, you’ve got a Shiatsu massage. Then makeup and Angel.”
Natalia threw back the covers and climbed out of bed. “Jackie heard me!”
“Who’s Jackie?”
“Cancel my morning appointments!” She hurried across the thick white carpet toward the bathroom.
“All of them?”
“Except Angel.”
“What about Hilda? Ma’am, Hilda’s here to get you bathed and dressed!”
Natalia glimpsed the white-uniformed Slovak maid walking into the bedroom with a stack of towels. The First Daughter had hired Hilda. “To make you feel at home,” Gretchen had explained. “You’ll have someone to talk Slovak with. Hilda doesn’t speak English.”
Natalia hadn’t bonded with Hilda. She found the muscle-bound woman with whiskers on her chin creepy, like the gym teachers who lurked in the locker room of Žilina Catholic School when she and her girlfriends took showers. She didn’t believe for a minute that Hilda spoke no English. She bet that Gretchen had hired Hilda to spy on her.
“I can take a bath and get dressed by myself.”
She closed the bathroom door and walked across the white-marble floor to one of the three white-marble sinks with gold-plated, swan-shaped faucets. She studied her face in the mirror. Her cheeks were puffy and the dark circles around her almond-shaped, deep-set green eyes made her look as if someone had punched her. “You look like hovno,” she said, then broke into a grin. “But for the first time in months you have something to smile about!”
She walked past the Jacuzzi bathtub to the steam shower. She turned on the faucets for all six showerheads: two on the ceiling and two on each wall. She had found the shower a welcome retreat since the hormone shots started making her feel sexually aroused. Surrounded by swirling steam, with the gentle pulse of warm shower spray caressing her private spots, she fantasized about making love with Vaclav. She hoped that soon the orgasms she enjoyed as a result wouldn’t be stimulated by fantasies, but by Vaclav in the flesh. For now, they would have to do.
She pushed an intercom button on the bathroom wall. “Hilda, I’m taking a shower,” she said in Slovak. “Don’t bother me.”
Chapter 7
The White House
December 16, 8:00 a.m.
Natalia sipped from a bottle of Evian and wrapped her wet hair in a towel. She slipped into her terrycloth robe and studied her face in the bathroom mirror. Three orgasms and you still look like hovno, she thought.
“Madame Funck,” said Sally-Ann over the intercom. “Your mother is on the phone.”
“Tell her I’m busy.”
“She says it’s urgent.”
“Tell her I don’t believe her.”
“Madame Funck, I don’t really think I can—”
“Tell her I’ll call her later.”
Natalia opened a door from the bathroom that led into her own personal salon and spa. The vast room was wrapped in mirrors and held a styling chair surrounded by makeup lights; a massage table; and a station for facials, complete with high frequency, galvanic and ultrasonic wands, an ozone steamer and a UV sterilizer. She felt calmer here than in any other room in the White House. The reason was simple: It made her completely forget that she was in the White House.
Across the room, his back to her, a twenty-something Latino was standing at the counter by the styling chair. Angel was wearing a red-sequined “Frida Kahlo” T-shirt, tight black jeans, and red-alligator cowboy boots with silver heels. She suspected that he put elevator insoles in his boots to add three inches to his five-foot-four-inch height. At five-foot eleven plus, she still towered over him. His White House ID hung from a beaded red cord, a touch he had added to match his outfit. Angel loved flashy. Once, when she had teased him about it, he grinned and said: “It’s not ‘flashy,’ it’s ‘colorful.’ Us Mexicans love bright colors cuz they make us feel happy, even when we’re facing sad things and hard times.” Too bad Slovaks aren’t like that, she thought. Black, gray, and brown are our favorite colors.
“Hola!” she called to him.
Angel spun around to face her. “Hola, mi amor!” He winked at her, so quickly that it looked like his eye had twitched. Angel always winked like that, she knew, as if a gnat had flown into his eye.
“I gotta lay out my bag of tricks.” He broke into a lively Mexican song, gracefully moving to a salsa beat as he pulled scissors, combs, hairbrushes, and a hair dryer from his red-leather Gucci satchel and laid them on the counter.
The satchel had been a Christmas gift from her. She realized that last year, she had gotten more pleasure from buying Christmas presents for Angel than for Rex. As she headed toward the walk-in closet, she stopped behind him and wrapped her arms around him.
“Yo, chica, you’re goosing me!” he said.
She rested her chin on top of his head. “I need to talk to you.”
“‘Perame! Give me a minute!”
She ducked into the walk-in closet and dressed in the form-fitting Lululemon Wunder-Under yoga pants and scooped-neck shirt that Hilda had laid out for her. She could hear Angel singing in the salon, his voice sweet and gentle. She thought back to when she met him, a little more than five years ago. In those days, she was just the wife of a billionaire who owned hotels and real estate all over the world, as well as Beau Rivage Resort and Club in Miami. Angel was a five-dollar-an-hour-plus-tips hair washer in the Beau Rivage beauty salon. The first time he washed her hair, he massaged her scalp with a touch that was strong yet sensual. She found the experience remarkably intense, even bordering on orgasmic, and gave him a $100 tip.
The next time Angel washed her hair, she urged him to open up about himself. “I grew up in pinche TJ, where the pinches macho assholes beat up maricóns, gays, like me,” he said. At first Natalia thought the word pinche was Spanish for “pinch me.” She didn’t
understand why Angel used it so much. “Would you rather I said ‘fucking?’” he said. Natalia agreed that pinche, or pinches if describing a plural noun, was a much nicer-sounding adjective than the F-word that Rex used to an obnoxious degree. But she teased Angel that she might just pinch him the next time he said it.
“So, Tania, my aunt, got me a job washing hair on Saturdays at the salon in TJ where she worked,” he went on. “Pretty soon I was totally into cutting and styling hair and realized que estaba que chido, it’s awesome. I decided to, like, make doing hair my art. I saved enough money to get the hell out of TJ, out of Mexico. I chose Miami cuz I read there are lots of gays in Miami, especially in South Beach, and like, everyone speaks Spanish.”
“How did you get into the U.S.?”
“On my estómago, my pinche stomach!”
She pinched him playfully.
“I crawled through a pinche tunnel that was, like, two miles long.”
“Seriously?”
“There were rats, dead bodies. It totally sucked!”
Natalia was so touched by Angel’s story, that she asked the salon manager to give him an opportunity to prove his talent as a hair stylist. She would be his blank canvas. The next time she visited Beau Rivage, Angel softened her hair style and added nuance to her ash-blonde color. Even Rex complimented her on the change. Soon Angel was styling hair regularly for her and all the Palm Beach billionaires’ trophy-wives at Beau Rivage. It didn’t take long for his fee to rise to $1500 a pop.
When Rex announced his run for President, Natalia invited Angel to travel on the campaign trail with them. She admitted to Rex that Angel was in the United States illegally, that his papers were fake. ‘I’m campaigning to build a fucking border wall and you’ve got a fucking homo wetback cutting your hair?” he screamed. “I’ll deport his ass!” She threatened to ditch the campaign if he did. Rex caved. Through his scuzzy lawyer, he paid thousands to fast-track Angel for an EB-1 visa. Known as the Einstein Visa, it was offered only to immigrants who proved they had “genius” or other superior and unique qualities invaluable to the United States.
She remembered how, a few months ago, the press ridiculed her when they discovered that years earlier, when she and Rex were dating, he had paid big bucks through the same scuzzy lawyer to get her an Einstein Visa. She knew that being a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model didn’t require genius, just good looks and big tits. Angel has the “genius” to make women look beautiful, she thought. He deserved the EB-1.
She recalled the hours that she and Angel spent alone together aboard the Funck 757 as Rex campaigned for President around the country. During each flight, Rex hunkered down with his advisors; she could hear him shouting at them through the cabin walls. While Angel washed and blow-dried her hair, or when they were just sitting together, gazing out at the clouds, she shared her dread with him about how her life would change if Rex were elected President. He had made his decision to run on a whim, the way he made most of his decisions, she thought. When she had expressed her reluctance to be First Lady, he said, “I’m doing this for the fun of it. No way in hell can I really win.” But what if he did win? “How can I be the First Lady of a country I barely know?” she asked Angel. “I have no education, no skills for it.”
“You are smart. You will learn quickly,” he reassured her. “You will be the most beautiful, elegant, and gracious First Lady this country has ever had!”
She also confided in Angel about the anger she felt at the press for playing up the revelations about his sordid affairs. “I’m sure everything they say is true, but it makes me look like a gold-digger to stay with him,” she said.
Angel’s response was never, “Rex is rich and he takes care of you. Don’t knock it,” like her mother repeated constantly. He would nestle closer to her and lay his head on her shoulder. “I feel your pain,” he would say. “But you’re a mujer fuerte, a strong woman. You will figure out the right thing to do.”
Natalia recalled how soon after she married Rex, when she suspected that he was having flings behind her back, she considered going to a therapist, like her ex-model friends who had married billionaire adulterers. Rex refused to pay for it. “Psychology is a pile of shit,” he said. “You go to a shrink, he’ll just tell you fake news about your feelings.” She was grateful for Angel. Angel was better than a therapist.
She walked back into the salon and grabbed a bottle of Evian from the counter. Across the room, Angel looked to her more like eighteen years old than twenty-four. She was certain that gay men found him attractive, but he never discussed his love life with her. “It’s too pinche nasty for your beautiful ears,” he said. With his carefully clipped stubble, bushy eyebrows over sparkling amber eyes, and neatly trimmed black hair, he looked like a modern-day Mexican angel. If I were a gay man, she thought, I’d jump his bones.
Smiling at the image, she plopped down on the styling chair. She swigged from the Evian bottle, then put it down on the counter with a bang. “Buenos dias!”
“What’re you so pinche cheerful about?” he asked. She pinched him playfully. “Wait! I know! You fell back in love with Rex last night!”
She made the finger-down-throat barf gesture, then whispered, “Turn it on!”
Angel scooped up the sleek aluminum Dyson Supersonic hairdryer from the counter, like it was a 357 Magnum. He clicked the “On” switch to high. The dryer’s metallic racket filled the room. Natalia knew that the noise would drown out any conversation that she and Angel had if, as she suspected, the room was bugged. He stepped behind her chair and unwound the towel from her head.
“Did you bring it?”
He did one of his twitch winks, raised his right leg, and rested his foot on the edge of the counter, the silver heel of his red-alligator cowboy boot glimmering under the makeup lights. With a flick of his wrist, he parted the blades of a scissors, and poked one sharp tip into a slot on the side of his silver heel. He gently pried open a secret compartment and pulled out a tiny plastic bag.
“Levonorgestrel,” he said. “The morning-after pill.”
She reached for the bag, but he drew back his hand. “Chica, are you sure?”
“Positive!” She snatched the bag away from him, drew out a yellow tablet, and gulped it down before he could hand her the bottle of Evian.
“You got one more pill in there for tomorrow.”
“I can’t believe I have to do it with Rex again tonight.” She shoved the plastic bag into the depths of her cleavage. “But after that…” She raised a hand to high-five Angel.
“What’re we high-fiving?”
“Freedom!” She saw that he was toying with the arc of silver studs on his left ear, a telltale sign that he was skeptical. “Jackie came to me in a dream last night,” she said. “So did Vaclav!”
“Yo, I know about Saint Jackie, but, like, who’s Vaclav?”
“My first true love. My only true love.”
Angel slipped a plastic hair-salon cape over her clothes and snapped it closed at the back of her neck. “Go on.”
“We were fifteen. Okay, I was fourteen and a half. Anyway, we had sex whenever and wherever we could. Six months of great sex. Then I got pregnant.”
He covered his mouth in mock horror. “Dios mio!” He unwrapped the towel from her head and ran a comb through her wet hair.
“My parents made me give the baby away. Then they sent me to live with Aunt Zorina in Bratislava and finish school. They didn’t know she was not just a waitress. She had ‘boyfriends’ who came to the flat at night. Some were hitting on me. Her solution was to kick me out. For days, I was living on the street. Lucky for me, Pierre, this French modeling agent, was in Bratislava looking for Slovak women. He saw me and said, ‘The hot new model for Guess, Eva Herzigová, is Slovak. You can be famous like Eva if you dye your hair platinum blonde and come to Paris with me. I’m gay. I don’t want to fuck you, just get rich off you.’”
“What did you do?” He picked up the scissors and trimmed her hair.
>
“I didn’t want to end up like Aunt Zorina in Bratislava. I dyed my hair platinum blonde and went to Paris with Pierre.”
“What happened to Vaclav?”
“Papa was a welder at the Škoda factory where Vaclav’s father worked. There are many car factories in Slovakia. When I got pregnant, Papa told Vaclav if he tried to see me again, his papa would have a deadly run-in with a five-ton machine on the assembly line.”
“Did you ever see Vaclav again?” He snipped at her hair.
“Once, four or five years later. I was in Paris, starting to make it in modeling. One day, Vaclav shows up at my flat. He says he bribed Franc, my baby brother, to tell him where I lived. I swear, Vaclav’s wearing the same jeans he wore in high school. It didn’t matter. We made love. All night, all the next day. He was a better lover than any man before or since. Then we hear a horn honking on the street below. I ignore it. Pierre, my agent, calls me on my cell. He says, ‘What the fuck! You have a date! He’s waiting outside!’ Pierre’s yelling so loud, Vaclav hears him. He looks out the window. He sees my date is this old guy driving a shiny new silver Porsche. He says, ‘I work on an assembly line to make Porsches. You date dudes who drive Porsches! Go, live a good life, Natalia. I cannot give you that life.’ And he walks out. I never saw him again.”
“Chica, how come this is, like, the first time you’re telling me all this. About the baby, about Vaclav? How come now?”
“The hormone shots.”
“Huh?”
“All the fertility hormones made me start thinking and dreaming about Vaclav. It’s like my body is calling to him.”
He winked/twitched at her. “Are you saying FLOTUS is horny?”
“Like when I was fourteen!” She laughed. “So, then, in this amazing dream I had last night, Vaclav threw me a basketball!”
“A basketball?”
“I made a decision this morning. I will leave Rex and be with Vaclav!”
Angel tugged at the diamond studs on his ear. “Whoa, chica, this is, like, wow!”
The First Lady Escapes Page 5