Gretchen said, “Absolutely!” She corralled her reluctant brothers. “Even without Daddy, we need Funcks in the public eye daily.”
James slipped his arm around her. “Helps promote your 2024 Presidential bid, right, Sis?” Gretchen jabbed him with an elbow.
Like father, like daughter, thought Moon.
The photographer motioned for everyone to line up in front of the Christmas tree. The Funck sons’ wives and Jacob wrestled the iPads from their children and walked them over. Moon wasn’t sure where to stand and none of the Funck offspring glanced her way. I’m not a piece of furniture, she thought. I’m invisible.
“Madame First Lady?” The photographer motioned for Moon to flank Gretchen, who stood beside her brother James. Moon took her place. She noticed that Jacob, Gretchen’s husband, was standing at the end of the line with his children, like an unwanted dinner guest banished to the kids’ table.
The photographer tugged on his goatee as he peered through the lens of his Canon. “Closer please, everybody! Move closer together. You’re a loving family, remember?”
“Gretchen, do you love me?” teased James as he pressed closer to her. “Gretchen only loves Daddy.”
“And herself,” said Conrad.
“Go to hell.” Gretchen edged away from James, closer to Moon. Gretchen’s toned arm brushed against hers. As the photographer clicked away, she felt perspiration dribbling down her sides.
“Oh dear, are we nervous?” whispered Gretchen through her fake-for-the-camera smile.
“It’s not nerves,” Moon whispered back. “I’m wearing your new Gretchen Funck deodorant.” She knew that Gretchen was taking heat from the press for selling her line of beauty products in China while acting as a Presidential advisor. She couldn’t resist adding, “Guess it’s as fake as its namesake.”
Suddenly, the photo shoot was over. The family scattered. Moon found herself alone in the grand foyer. She started up the staircase, but then realized that she didn’t know her way back to Natalia’s bedroom and there was no sign of Sally-Ann. She called to the Marine guards posted at the bottom of the stairs. “Excuse me,” she said in her Natalia voice. “I seem to have twisted my ankle. Can one of you please escort me back to my room?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said one. He started up the stairs toward her. She studied the other guard. He was taller and more handsome than her escort, in a young Brad Pitt-ish way. It doesn’t matter that I’m stuck with the ugly one, she thought. I passed the “First Lady test” today and tonight I’m outta here. I sure as hell get why Natalia wanted to blow this joint.
Chapter 17
Highway West of Washington, D.C.
December 17, 12:00 p.m.
“Tijuana?” Natalia wriggled in the passenger seat of Angel’s red Mustang as they inched along in bumper-to-bumper traffic out of Washington. “We’re going to Mexico?”
“Mi amor, I smuggled myself from Mexico into the U.S. five years ago,” he said. “It’ll be a lot easier to smuggle you out of the U.S. into Mexico.”
“What about Vaclav? Where am I meeting him? When?”
“In three days. I emailed him to go to this little hotel, El Paraiso. It’s on the beach in Rosarito, just outside of TJ. My family used to go have lunch on Sundays in Rosarito.” He kissed the tips of his fingers. “You won’t believe the fish tacos!”
Natalia didn’t answer. She wasn’t thinking about tacos. She was picturing herself running barefoot on a windswept beach, the waves crashing, the sun setting fire to the horizon, into Vaclav’s arms.
Suddenly, they heard sirens, lots of them, racing closer from behind.
Natalia looked through the rear window and saw the flashing red lights on what seemed like hundreds of police cars. Vehicles were veering out of their way. “It’s over!” she gasped.
“What?”
“They’re coming for me!”
“No way!”
But as Angel checked the rear-view mirror, she saw that he was toying with the arc of silver studs on his left ear, a sign that he was skeptical. “Get down on the floor,” he said. “Just in case.”
Natalia struggled to wedge her tall body into the narrow space between the passenger seat and the dashboard. Impossible. “Hovno, why do you have such a little car?”
“A Mustang’s not a little car. It’s a pinche sports car.”
She realized that she was too large to squeeze her body below the dashboard. Feeling a stab of pain in her neck, she raised her head to peer out the passenger-side window. “It’s no use. People can see me.” She met the gaze of the driver in the Chevy beside them. He was staring suspiciously at her. “He knows who I am!”
“Trust me. He thinks you’re a trans weirdo, not the First Lady.”
The sirens screamed closer. In the rear-view mirror, Natalia and Angel watched as a column of police motorcycles pulled out from behind the police cars and roared toward them. Cars were forced to swerve into the left and right lanes of the freeway to let them pass. Angel spotted an off-ramp up ahead. He cut in front of a pickup truck and raced toward it.
One, two, and then three motorcycles whizzed past them. Half a dozen more followed, all flying American flags. Natalia realized that the motorcycles were leading the way for a phalanx of police cars. Behind them, she could make out half a dozen hulking black SUVs: Escalades with smoked-bulletproof windows. “It’s the President’s motorcade!”
“It’s the pinche President?” Angel checked the rear-view mirror. “Which limo is he in?”
“It’s always the one in middle. They call it the ‘Beast.’”
“The car’s not the beast. President Funck’s the ‘Beast!’”
As the limos whizzed past the Mustang, he slapped Natalia a victorious high-five. “And he has no pinche idea you ditched him!”
She said a silent prayer to Jackie as the motorcade passed. When the sirens faded away and Angel cut back into the fast lane, she turned to him. “That was a sign. It was another good omen!”
“A good omen?”
“It means that I did the right thing, that it’s all going to work out!” She crossed herself.
“Yo, chica, here’s to el destino!” He raised his palm for another high-five.
“Destiny!” She slapped his sweaty palm with her own.
Chapter 18
Washington, D.C.
December 17, 1:00 p.m.
Phil climbed the narrow staircase in his rundown apartment building. He was breathless by the time he reached the fourth floor. The super hadn’t replaced the bulb that blew out six months ago, but it was just as well. He lived in NoMa, the worst part of Washington. The dim lighting hid the gang graffiti that covered the walls. Some people called graffiti “poor-man’s art.” Phil called it “wall garbage.”
He pulled a key from the pocket of his worn jeans and unlocked the door. Nudging it open, he kicked off his threadbare sneakers and padded into the studio apartment in his mismatched socks.
An empty container of “Hot & Spicy Cup of Noodles” that he had microwaved for breakfast sat on the scarred Formica-topped table, one dried noodle stuck to the Styrofoam like a shriveled worm. He tossed the cup into a wastebasket and made room for the old Dell laptop he spotted on the sofa that doubled as his bed. He walked over and picked it up. A fluffy tabby cat curled up next to it awoke with a start. “Sorry, Oscar,” he said, running his hand over its natty fur. The cat opened its mouth, emitted a squeak that he recognized as “Hello,” then dropped its head back on its paws and closed its eyes.
Phil slid the laptop onto the table, plugged it in, and removed the Nikon slung around his neck. He gently removed the digital chip from the camera. While he waited for the computer to fire up, he walked over to the refrigerator, its door plastered with celebrity photos that he had taken over the years. He proudly straightened the photos of Jennifer Aniston, Beyoncé, and George Clooney, the only three photos that had earned him the big bucks. Below them were dozens of celebrity photos that hadn’t sold. Too often, the
celebrity had covered his or her face with a hand, a purse, or a hat at the last minute, or flipped him the bird.
Among what Phil called his “turkey photos” were a few of FLOTUS. In one, the First Lady was more sunglasses than face. In another, she was so bundled up in a white cashmere scarf, that her only recognizable feature was her nose. Phil had stalked Natalia Funck for months and come up empty. He wondered if she had put a Slovak curse on him. He had read that they still believed in witches in Slovakia. Whether or not she had cursed him, she certainly had bewitched him. He spent hours poring over everything he could find out about her online. The First Lady remained a mystery to him, an obsession, a riddle he felt compelled to solve.
Some of Phil’s paparazzi buddies on FLOTUS watch, guys who viewed Natalia through telephoto lenses so powerful that they revealed the dark roots at her widow’s peak two weeks before her next dye job, said that there was nothing behind her dazzling almond-shaped eyes. “She’s just a vapid, empty-headed bitch,” said Ralph, who had been a paparazzo since before Michael Jackson died. “She’s a gold-digger who is so beautiful and so lucky that she nabbed a billionaire husband who just happened to become the most powerful man in the world.”
Phil didn’t agree with Ralph. Even though his telephoto wasn’t as powerful as Ralph’s, he had taken pictures of Natalia that revealed the vulnerability, pain, and helplessness in her exotic green eyes. He felt for her, even pitied her.
Maybe that’s why, a few weeks ago, when a paparazzo friend had texted him that he spotted Natalia’s mother getting out of a taxi in front of Mount Sinai in New York, Phil took the next Amtrak to Penn Station. He hung around the hospital until the next day, when he saw her emerge in a wheelchair, her face bandaged, and bundled into an Uber. He tailed the car to a Park Avenue surgery-recovery center. After a day and a half of lurking near the entrance, he got the photo of Natalia’s nose peeking out of the white scarf, along with one of her mother’s freshly lifted face framed in a window, looking like the one in Munch’s painting, The Scream.
This morning, Phil had taken the Metro to the White House. Somehow he felt certain—was it a dream? a wish?—that today he would score a Natalia sighting. He vowed that if he got a great shot of her, he would send a box of See’s candy to his mother in Pasadena and buy himself a longer telephoto lens.
There had been no Natalia sighting this morning. The only person-of-interest Phil saw leaving the White House was Angel, her Mexican-American hairdresser, with a freak wearing a pink-streaked black wig. Phil wasn’t sure if the person was a man or a woman. The face was one he hadn’t seen before. But there had been something about it…
The computer screen lit up. He inserted the digital camera chip into his laptop. As he waited for the photos to upload, he grabbed a carton of almond milk from the fridge and gulped from it.
His laptop pinged: It was a Google Alert for FLOTUS, a CNN piece about the Presidential Family Christmas photo session at the White House this morning. The President had bowed out at the last minute for reasons unknown, but there was a photo of the First Family, minus President Funck, standing in front of the White House Christmas tree.
In it, FLOTUS was standing next to Gretchen, her dazzling red-beaded gown making the First Daughter’s white sheath look frumpy. Gretchen was flashing her usual fake smile. Natalia’s face was pasted with what he called her “grin-and-bear-it” smile, but it looked a little tighter than usual. He wondered if that was because she was nervous around her stepchildren and step-grandchildren when her husband wasn’t there, or because she was upset that another one of his sordid affairs had been revealed in the press. He downloaded the photo to his laptop.
Phil was convinced that he could trace Natalia Funck’s emotional arc as First Lady by comparing old photos of her with the newest. He decided to compare today’s photo with one he took last summer. He pulled it up: Natalia crossing the lawn with the President, about to step aboard Marine One. At the last moment, she had defiantly pulled ahead of him. The press speculated that it was because she was furious that a Victoria’s Secret model had revealed she slept with Funck the day before their wedding.
Phil cut and pasted last summer’s photo of Natalia next to today’s White House Christmas photo. Something wasn’t right. Was it because she was wearing a light-blue dress and pink lipstick in the first photo, and a red gown and red lipstick in today’s photo? He looked from one to the other, trying to discern the difference. In today’s photo, she looked unhappy, but she looked unhappy in the photo taken last summer too. And yet what was it? There was something more to the difference between the two photos, he felt certain.
The images from his camera finished uploading. There were only a few, mostly shots of Angel and his weirdo companion leaving the White House. Who was she, or he? Something about the person with Angel intrigued him. He enlarged it. Now he could see that she had breasts as well as a bulge at “her” crotch. Was she a trans woman?
Phil had been buddies with a paparazzo in L.A. who was a trans. Her name was Harriet, but before she took female hormones and got breast implants, he was Harry. “Being trans is the worst,” Harriet explained one day as they waited outside the Chateau Marmont for a Jennifer Lawrence sighting. “It’s not that you hate your thighs, but that it feels like they’re on the wrong person.” Phil was bombarded with so many thoughts and feelings he couldn’t account for that he often wondered if he was born with the wrong brain. Maybe that’s why Harriet and I got along so well, he thought. We’re both misfits.
He cropped the photo and zoomed in closer, moving in on the trans-woman’s eyes. They were slightly slanted, as if he/she had Asian blood. Exotic, like Natalia’s. On his laptop, he moved the photo of the trans woman next to the photo of the First Lady at the White House today. He studied them both. The trans woman’s eyes and the First Lady’s eyes looked strikingly similar. Was it just an illusion? Was his mind screwing around with him because he was obsessed with FLOTUS?
Phil moved the photo of Natalia on the White House lawn last summer, so that it was on the left side of the photo of the trans woman. He moved today’s White House Christmas photo to the right side of it. He enlarged the three photos. Something about the eyes… What was it?
He switched the positions of the three photos on his laptop screen. Now the lineup was:
1.) FLOTUS on the White House lawn last summer.
2.) FLOTUS at today’s White House Christmas photo shoot.
3.) The trans woman with Angel outside the White House this morning.
Studying them, Phil realized that the eyes in the first and third photos looked more similar than those in the first and second. How can that be? he thought.
He felt a nudge against his leg. It was Oscar, eager for lunch. He scooped up the cat and held it up to the laptop screen. “Oscar, am I losing it, or what?”
Chapter 19
The White House
December 17, 3:00 p.m.
A cup of squash-and-broccoli soup; a kale, radish and quinoa salad; and an antioxidant-protein smoothie the hue of the fresh-mown White House lawn. This is what FLOTUS eats for lunch when she is alone in her bedroom? thought Moon. Oh, well. It beats a formal luncheon in the Blue Room with a contingent of apple-polishing ambassadors’ wives from South America.
Per Natalia’s instructions, after the family photo session this morning, Moon had complained of a headache and instructed Sally-Ann to offer the First Lady’s regrets for bowing out of the lunch. She also asked her to bar visitors and staff from the First Lady’s quarters for the rest of the day. “No worries. I will ask Hilda to give you her special Slovak anti-headache spa ritual,” Sally-Ann said.
“Please refresh my memory about it,” Moon replied because she was a secret spa whore at heart and couldn’t resist.
“It includes a sauna, a scrub using birch branches, rock salt, and dry-ice cubes, plus a massage and a body mask made of clay from the Morava River, a tributary of the Danube,” explained Sally-Ann. It sounded awesome to Moon, but o
bviously she could not allow Hilda’s hands on her body. She declined in favor of what passed for lunch and a siesta. Staring at the barely touched soup and salad, Moon took a sip of the grass-green smoothie. She grimaced from the nasty flavor, wishing she were on a massage table getting scrubbed with birch branches instead.
As she stood up from the table, she glimpsed her reflection in the expansive mirror on the wall. It had been a bitch unzipping the Valentino without Hilda’s help, which she also had refused for obvious reasons, but when she finally liberated her body, she had snuggled into Natalia’s peach terrycloth bathrobe. She noticed that the peach color made her cheeks look rosier. She padded, barefoot, over to Natalia’s canopied bed, and dove in.
Natalia had mentioned that the bed’s mahogany frame was an antique; it once belonged to Dolley Madison, wife of James Madison, the fourth President of the United States. “I hate Dolley Madison,” she had said. Moon asked why and learned that Dolley Madison was the first powerhouse First Lady, always at the President’s side. “It boosted Madison’s popularity, so since then, First Ladies are expected to be in the public eye.” Natalia repeated, “I hate her.”
Moon stretched out her long legs in Dolley Madison’s bed, remembering the time she watched Martha Stewart make a Dolley Madison cake on her TV show, for the Fourth of July. Moon loved to bake and tried making one at home. A White House favorite during Dolley’s time, the cake looked okay until Moon frosted it. The chocolate icing never quite stiffened. It dripped down the sides of the cake and pooled around it on the plate, like a mud puddle.
Luxuriating in the softness of what she deemed to be at least 1,000-count Egyptian cotton sheets, Moon picked up a remote control on the nightstand and tried to figure out the buttons. She tapped one. The floor-to-ceiling bookcase across the room sank into the floor, revealing an expansive flat-screen TV. She punched another button and the screen lit up: The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
The First Lady Escapes Page 10