There was definitely something going on. The black eye and the pickup were probably unrelated, but the other facts were probably not so unrelated. He reached three conclusions as he flicked his cigarette away: 1) that Lydia Felker had talked to Shirl, and therefore (1A) that Shirl knew about his old affair with Lydia; (2) that his wife and former mistress, bonding over this, were now in league against him; (3) that all of Tashmo’s past was crashing in on him; and (4) that he needed to piss immediately.
He thought about weeing in the parking lot, but if the motorcade came in and Gretchen saw him in the headlights, watering a wall, he’d catch a lecture about Secret Service dignity, so he went down the stairs, moving through the crowd of Moose. People sat in folding chairs or stood in the aisles or were laughing at the bar, the flower of the Rumseys, oldsters most of them (which meant, to Tashmo, anybody older than he was). Tashmo heard Gretchen on the comm and knew that the motorcade was in range, coming down from Shawgamunk. Her signal grew stronger as the motorcade drew near and weaker as it passed the lodge without seeing the sign on the pole outside. Tashmo called Elias on the cell (the vans were crossing Rumsey Bridge by then), and gave him directions back from there.
The funny thing, the spooky thing—the thing most beautiful—was how it all came back to him, and how it always did. Just close your eyes and think of it: the last malaisey summer of the Carter presidency and Lydia, a frizzy waif in faded jeans. She is gorgeous, she is sleepy, she is sunburned on her legs. Her ass is white, however, a moon to be landed on, and her arms are deeply tanned. Her front is deeply tanned except for her bush and boobs, and Tashmo (in the bedroom, gazing at her bush and boobs) can’t work out how she came to have this grab-bag pattern of tan, burn, and total white.
He faced the dirty urinal in the men’s room at the Moose Lodge, feeling tense, trying to relax the special peeing muscles in his dick. His eyes were closed. He was seeing her again, naked, slick, and sleepy after sex. He felt at once relaxed and aroused, the twin sides of comfort, his dick releasing pee at last (he heard it drill the urinal), and getting hard a little in his hands too.
“Shit.”
He jumped back, dabbing at his pants above the knee.
Easy, big guy. Start again.
He coughed and started peeing. How it all came back, those delicious trysts, summer into fall. They got together at the house, the house she shared with Lloyd, and later at a motel in northeast Washington, the hilly ghettos around Catholic U. They weren’t Catholic, they weren’t black, they weren’t college students; nobody would know them there, they figured. They trysted at the house and the motel, and yes it was betrayal, Shirl betrayed and Lloyd betrayed, but Tashmo did it anyway. He was seeing Lloyd every day on Carter’s team. They worked the late watch in the shack at Camp David, a wall of screens, drippy eco-hippies trying to sneak in, and Lloyd could only talk about his wife.
Lloyd drinking coffee, watching screens: “I don’t know, Tash—I worry about Lydia. She needs some outside interests. Maybe if you sat her down. She still talks about the time you changed the fuse. I think she looks up to you.”
Tashmo didn’t squirm. He tried to be a pro about it. He said, “She needs a change of scenery, that’s all, Lloyd. Go back to Fresno, have a kid. I bet they’d make you a group supervisor in Crim, bright young guy like you.”
But Lloyd, the trusting geek, said he couldn’t leave. He loved Protection, the idea of the perimeter, the science of the thing. He said, “She was an actress, Tash, did you know that? She was on TV in supporting roles. She was in a two-part Harry O.”
In fairness, Tashmo had tried to end it after a few weeks, his thing with Lydia. The record, he was thinking, should reflect this. The sex was unbelievable, yes, but Lydia, the actress, was into melodrama, which spooked him in his sober, nontumescent moments. Shirl was pregnant with Jeanette that summer—Tashmo had a family to consider. Lydia was risky for a hundred reasons. So he made his move. He called her from the White House and arranged a lunch-hour meeting at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a good place to remember their duties, Lydia to Lloyd, Tashmo to his family. The Tomb was Tashmo’s favorite place to end his love affairs. He had dumped many women in the pillared amphitheater over the years—it was the perfect setting, strategically and otherwise. The Tomb was always awash in out-of-towners, nobody he knew, and always hushed, the awesome, marble hush of fatherland and sacrifice. Even Lydia would find it hard to shout obscenities at him in such surroundings. He planned the breakup like a Secret Service op, doing the advance work in his mind. If she wept, a fifty-fifty bet, the tourists around them would assume that she had given a loved one to America’s defense and respectfully ignore her sobs. He had a whole plan for cutting Lydia loose—a sleazy, craven plan, brilliant in its way, but it was raining when he met her in the amphitheater, and they had to make a run for it. They wound up in the front seat of his government sedan. He tried to deliver the speech he had prepared. You know how much I care for you, that’s why this is so hard. It might have worked at the Tomb, but in the car it sounded phony. She was drenched through her blouse. Steam rose from both of them, fogging the windows. As he spoke, she slowly put her seat back, and unbuttoned the top button on her blouse.
Not a success. The next plan he came up with (equally craven, though less brilliant) was to never call her, never see her, never return the coded messages she left at the White House switchboard. Tell him he’s got a dentist’s appointment, Tuesday, say threeish, the usual place. He was guarding Jimmy Carter, going down the ropes, knowing she was elsewhere in the city, waiting for him on the greasy sheets of the ghetto motel.
He was saved by the elections. He traveled double hard with Carter, volunteering for every trip, keeping temptation far away. He came home in November 1980. Carter was defeated and good riddance to the pious little party-pooper. Jeanette was born and Lydia wasn’t calling anymore.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was Tashmo’s new beginning, his clean slate. Tashmo loved the Dutchman as a father, as a pal and fellow dude. He loved the team, Loudon Rhodes, Felker, Gus Dmitri, Billy Spandau, Panepinto—Reagan’s boys they were, and would always be. He loved the trips out west, door to door, coast to coast, the South Lawn to the California ranch, six hours in the air, three touchdowns in between, Memphis, Phoenix, LAX. They crossed the time zones like an arrow, nearly made the sun stand still, bringing Reagan west. They worked prepackaged rallies at the airports, shirtsleeve crowds, clapping hands, low rolling chants, music from the marching bands, tiny flags, red, white, and blue, a blizzard of these tiny flags, like unfalling confetti, and it was Reagan who did it, and Reagan who made it, word chanted into manglement, name chanted into stadiums of sound, A-gihn, A-gihn, A-gihn. They jumped from LAX to Point Mugu Naval Air, met the helo on the tarmac for the final leg, rising with the mountain walls to the Western White House, the Rancho del Cielo, which Lloyd Felker (bilingual and showoffish) tried to say meant the Ranch of the Ceiling, a concept of fixed limits, of you-can-go-no-higher-than, but which Tashmo and the other boys knew meant just the opposite, the Ranch of Heaven and no limits.
Shirl was always after Tashmo to come home. She got him when he was at his weakest, after sex and sloppy joes, after soapy hand jobs in the tub, when his daughters were asleep, when he kissed them both asleep, just before he went away. She’d be at the bathroom sink, washing the jism and soapsuds off her hands. His bags were on the bed, packed and zippered for a month in California. He’d be at the mirror, styling his pompadour, waiting for the burning sensation in his dick hole to die down.
“You should watch your daughters grow”—this was Shirl’s argument back then.
Tashmo thought the best way to watch a child grow was to see the kid something like once a month. That way you really noticed the progress. He didn’t share this insight with his wife.
Shirl said, “Men do projects around the house. That’s what a husband does. Look at Bo Gould. He redid their kitchen with his own two hands.”
Tashmo tied his tie. “He did not.
”
“Did so.”
“Did not.”
“He paid the men who did. He paid them with his own two hands. Tash, it’s not for me. It’s for Mandy and the baby. Don’t you think they deserve a dad?”
Well, he thought, they had a dad. He had done his bit, sent his little cowboy DNAs along.
Shirl was stuck in Maryland—that was the problem. She didn’t understand how it felt, crossing time, taking Reagan west. Half a day of sunset, boys. We’re at the peak—
Heaven was a ranch in California. Who was more American than Dutch?
Reagan went riding most mornings at the ranch. He went out with Laxalt, his pet senator, or Charlton Heston, or with Mrs. Reagan and the Annenbergs. The Service bought a stable of used horses to cover Reagan on these rides. The horses had appeared in Mexican westerns and were trained not to buck at gunfire. Agents who could ride formed a mounted subdetail. Tashmo’s father had run a bar in Falling Rock and Tashmo grew up shooting pool, throwing rocks, pumping gas. He wasn’t any kind of rider, but he was a skilled and supple liar, and he bluffed his way onto the saddle squad. Reagan always cantered to this one high-country meadow, which looked like a set from Bonanza, the perfect tableau west, but only from one angle. Every other angle took in the sprawl beyond—snarling US 101, booming Santa Barbara, miles of arroyo burning for years, some vast drought management fuckup, which Reagan always blamed on too much government. Against this modern backdrop, men on horses looked hemmed in, endangered, asinine. But Reagan had a gift for making cameras see him as he saw himself, and in the thousand wire service photos of the meadow on the ranch there was never any evidence of 101, the city, or the smolder in the hills. In Tashmo’s memory they were really cowboys at the ranch, packing Uzis, wearing chaps and creaky Tony Llama boots. He was with the Reagans and the Annenbergs on the semifamous morning when someone’s horse kicked up a rattlesnake. Tashmo drew his Uzi and fired at the dirt, the muzzle exploding in his horse’s ear. The nag forgot its training and Tashmo fell backwards, emptying his clip into the sky. He landed on a stump, still firing, and nearly put a hole in Mrs. Reagan. All the agents opened up on the snake threat, a ring of blazing Uzis in the meadow. They couldn’t find the pieces later, but Betsy Annenberg swore it was a rattler.
Just another day in heaven with the Dutchman, and when it was all over, the posse had a story to bring down the mountain into Santa Barbara on their day off. The journalists and generals hung out at the Biltmore. The agents commandeered a London-style pub with forty-seven beers on tap and dollar bills tacked to the rafters. The pub was up the coast a bit, near the county trauma center, and often full of nurses getting off. Tashmo dated many nurses from the pub and learned a lot about the nursing profession. Like they don’t wear white and look down on those who do. Like they spend every December in Reno dealing blackjack—the money was better and you skied. Like every pit queen in Nevada is actually a California trauma nurse, thinking about skiing as she deals. These were things you could only learn in a beachfront pub, cheating on your family back home.
He went to the pub one afternoon during his second evolution to the ranch, just after the inaugural in 1981. The pub was dead, he remembered that. The other men were on the mountain guarding Reagan. Tashmo sat at the bar and had a Foghorn by himself. The bartender was a new guy, a fill-in. Tashmo asked for the darts. The new guy said he’d have to take a credit card impression as security.
Tashmo said, “I’m in here all the time.”
They went back and forth about the darts, the policy, the credit card impression. Tashmo turned on his stool and saw a woman in a booth across the bar. It was Lydia Felker, eating a bleucheeseburger, reading TV Guide.
For a moment, he thought that she had stalked him all the way from Maryland. He considered walking out, or ducking in the men’s, but she saw him at the bar and waved. It wasn’t a fraught wave. It was just a Hi there sort of deal and back to her reading.
He sipped his Foghorn, thought it through. Felker’s mother lived in Fresno, a few hours north. Lydia was probably staying with the mom and had come down to spend the weekend with Lloyd. It was just the thing Tashmo himself had recommended, a change of scenery to shoo the housewifely blues. He could even imagine Lloyd’s therapeutic itinerary, a visit to the painted caves, the Itty-Bitty Railway, and maybe, if there’s time, the aquarium. Tashmo figured he was in the clear.
“Want them darts or not?” the bartender said.
He took his stein of Foghorn across the London pub and said hello to Lydia. He remembered how she offered him the radish garnish on her plate, how she tore a match from a book of matches and used it as a bookmark when she closed the TV Guide. He remembered how he took the pungent radish in his fingers. It was cut like a flower. He ate it as a gesture—look, I’m cool, I’m non-hung-up, I’ll eat your garnish—and he remembered how he suddenly remembered that he hated radishes.
She looked at him and said, “I guess you dumped me, Tash. I waited for you in the motel, three weeks in a row.”
The radish was burning in his belly as he started his Unknown Soldier speech, the speech he never finished at the Tomb.
She cut him off. “Did you lose your nerve?” she asked.
He tried to be Reaganesque about it, mimicking his hero, grinning like he didn’t hear the question.
“Nerve—did you lose it? I thought we were having fun.”
The Reagan thing didn’t work for him, so he tried Carter. He pulled a quivery, conscientious face. “I’m married, Lydia. There are long-range issues requiring much study. I have lusted in my heart.”
She said, “That’s your trip,” and pushed her plate away.
He remembered how the pub slowly filled that afternoon, nurses coming in, surfers playing darts in flip-flops, the hour creeping toward the shift change on the mountain. He drank stein after stein, but couldn’t wash the taste of radish off his tongue.
She said, “I was supposed to spend a month in Fresno. Ever try to spend a month in Fresno? Mother Felker didn’t really see me at my best, I fear. She claims I shoplifted. Claims she saw me shoplifting. Says the Felkers of Fresno have a name to protect. I said, ‘Let me tell you something, Mother Felker, there’s no way you saw me shoplifting.’ So I drifted over here. I don’t care about your wife. I don’t care about your kids. How are they, by the way?”
“Good,” said Tashmo.
“I don’t care.”
She said Lloyd had tickets to a brass ensemble, an all-atonal program at the hanging gardens. Lloyd would be on the mountain until four-o’clock. It was half past two.
Lydia said, “What do you want to do?”
He was out of presidents. He answered as himself.
She was living toward Oxnard in a rented trailer in a colony of trailers in a parking lot along the PCH. They got there, he gargled with cheap scotch, and they made love.
He would come to know the trailer well. Reagan spent fourteen days at the ranch after the inaugural. Whenever Lloyd was in the hills, Tashmo was living in the trailer with his wife. Tashmo connived the duty charts, putting himself on when Lloyd was off, off when Lloyd was on, becoming, in effect, the anti-Lloyd. He drove the canyons from the ocean to the ranch, switchbacks like a ladder, headlights below him in the night, many sets, crawling back and forth. He drank Sanka at the trailer from the same chipped mug, standing in the open door, watching the morning surf pile up a mist. His eyes traveled down the coast and up the mountain walls. The beach outside the trailer was duneless, hard-packed. He dumped the dregs and the wind took them. He was thirty-three years old, had saddle sores, a bite mark on his calf, and rashes from his radish allergy, and had never felt stronger in his life.
They walked the beach at sunset, played Scrabble in the kitchen, drove to Montecito for cheap Mexican. She scrambled eggs at midnight and talked about her television days.
She said, “I was Quinn Martin’s favorite for a few seasons. He threw me a ton of work. Quinn has a reputation, but he was sweet to me.”
&n
bsp; She wore a big sweater, faded jeans, and no underpants.
Tashmo said, “Quinn Martin?”
“Harry O and Cannon, Barnaby Jones. A certain pulpy gravitas. Act I, Act II, Epilogue.”
Tashmo asked her if she missed the acting.
“No.” She thought about it. “No. I was typecast. It’s every actor’s dread. I was always playing frightened witnesses. That’s how I met Lloyd. I was sick of the type-casting, I wanted to break free, so I went to Fresno. Buried Child, summer stock. I was Shelly, the girlfriend with the heart of gold. One night, Lloyd came to the show. He was into cultural self-improvement even then, poor bean. He sat in front, a scratchpad on his knee, noting his emotions with a penlight pen. After Shelly ditched the shitheel, Vince, Lloyd asked me out to the half-priced matinee at the Fresno Planetarium. The wheeling Milky Way got me hot and bothered, so I unzipped his fly. He resisted—momentarily. Lips and milkiness, I guess I blew his mind. Within a week, we were engaged. I called my agent in L.A., told him I was through. He begged me to reconsider. ‘Give it two more years,’ he said, ‘we’ll get you other roles. You won’t always play the frightened witness. I just saw a casting call—you’d be prefect for it. It’s called Hill Street Blues, you’d play the captain’s wife. She’s basically the star of the entire show.’ I told him no, I was getting while the getting’s good. He said, ‘No one marries their agent, Lydia. It’s always a disaster, and besides, I’m your agent. You signed an exclusive with me.’ I told him Lloyd was not that kind of agent. He said, ‘Oh my God, you’re marrying a literary agent? What will you do for food?’ I told him Lloyd wasn’t literary, he was literal—utterly and totally, heroically literal. He was clear—Lloyd. In his head. His mind was a perimeter, and clear, and, God, I thought I wanted that after television. So we got married and came east to Maryland. And the rest, as they say, is histrionics.”
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