They lay in bed. She traced his scars.
She said, “Movie lovers do this, Tash, but I never did. Lloyd is scarless, of course.”
A slice above the hairline. She traced it. “What’s this?”
“Kid hit me with a rock,” Tashmo said. “I was fourteen. It was strictly accidental. Poor kid went to Vietnam, died with the Marines.”
“And this?”
An old gash down the lifeline of his palm.
“Bowie knife, jungles of Chu Lap, 1968. I was opening a jar of Skippy peanut butter. They’re vacuum-sealed and—”
“This?”
Stitches on his buttock. “A snake. My horse. Betsy Annenberg.”
“And this?”
His calf. He said, “You bit me.”
She doubted this.
They listened to the ocean and the radio and polished off the scotch.
She said, “I’ve been four places in the world, counting all of California as one place.” She said the others were: Maryland; Muncie, Indiana; and the Punjab.
They were in the trailer the night before Reagan headed east again.
“What’s in Muncie?” Tashmo asked.
“My innocence, my growing up. I told you that whole story.”
“What about the Punjab?”
“Sepoy! My big shot at feature film. I was Lady Adelaide, frigid baroness and bitch extraordinaire, trapped in the seething tumult of the 1854 Raj Mutiny. The producers were three dubious Hindus with underworld connections. They planned two endings, one for export, in which whitey wins and I marry Major Smuts, the other for India, in which I die quite badly. The producers asked if I could do a British accent. My agent said, ‘She doesn’t have to. She’s a native Londonian, as English as the queen.’ The producers said, ‘But she seemed so American on Barnaby Jones.’ My agent said, ‘I told you, she’s a genius!’ We shot all the scenes involving elephants and the backing collapsed. I later heard the movie was cover for an arms deal, an excuse to import rifles and light artillery. The extras were actually members of a Hindu terror group. Big things afoot in Bangladesh, I gather.”
They drank the scotch and listened to the wind across the parking lot. She didn’t own a television, but she read TV Guide—to keep abreast, she said. She bought it every week, but didn’t subscribe.
He asked her why. He said, “It’s always cheaper to subscribe.”
She said, “This way I can stop at any time.”
She brought the eggs to the table steaming. He was getting ready to climb into his car and drive the switchbacks up to Reagan’s mountain, where the helo would take them to Mugu, on to Washington—the world.
“Stay,” she said. “We could live this way forever.”
Did he fall in love with Mrs. Felker? He thought he loved her, coming east on Air Force One—loved her more than Shirl, more than the girls, more than all his other mistresses combined. He loved her, maybe, even more than he loved Ronald Reagan.
When the team got back to Washington, Tashmo started sleeping in the ready room, a line of cots in the basement of the White House for agents pulling back-to-backs. He couldn’t face Shirl, Mandy, and the baby, and the shitty new construction in upper P.G. County. This went on for days. Shirl tried to find him. She fed the kids and watched the nightly news for any sign of her AWOL husband. Shirl knew that Reagan was in town, meeting with the cabinet and the Contras, and she knew that Tashmo was somewhere in the presidential wake. On the fourth day of no Tashmo, Shirl showed up at the East Gate, bawling at the guards, Mandy in the backseat of the station wagon, Jeanette screaming from the bassinette.
The guard said, “Well, you know, they’re pretty busy in there.”
Shirl said, “Pretty busy? We’re a family in crisis here. Step aside or else I’ll run you down.”
A line of cars behind her. The guard made a call, trying to find the husband of this loon. The wall phone rang in the ready room. Tashmo picked up, heard the guard and Shirl cursing in the background. Tashmo said he hadn’t seen Tashmo in awhile.
Shirl stayed away after that. A silence. From Lydia, a silence. His wife and mistress were saying the same thing with their silence: this is the X that marks your life, the cloverleaf of choice.
He couldn’t choose. He slept on a cot five nights in a row, trying to decide: his mistress or his family? But he was back in a suit, official Washington, endless prayer breakfasts, bill-signing ceremonies, a rack of pens handed out afterwards as mementos of the law, the Pro-Family Export Amendment, the Glad and Happy Tidings Act of 1981—no posses, no horses, no thrilling vistas of not-101, just Tashmo standing post again, waiting for nothing on the pavement, a crowd of gawkers gawking at the limo with the Seal of Office on the door.
The X that marks your life. Reagan’s in the ballroom of a luxury hotel, addressing labor leaders. Tashmo is outside, underneath the overhang, a curving wall of poured concrete, roughened, the faux-sandstone look. Light rain falling in the street. Tashmo hears the detail coming out, Reagan through the doors, waving at the gallery, agents weaving all around him, Felker, Loudon Rhodes, chief-of-detail Tim McCarthy. Tashmo sees it happening: a distant sodden popping sound like hunters, cornfields, boyhood, Reagan stumbles as if bumped, Tim McCarthy falls, a cop falls to his belly. Tashmo’s like a movie extra playing Streetman when Rodan appears, one face in a mass reaction shot of faces, Oh. In the time it takes to startle and de-startle, bloody Reagan’s bundled past him, wrapped in Felker’s bulk. The door handle’s ripped from Tashmo’s hand, which is how he knows the limo’s off and safe. The blond boy with the pistol crumples under a humping, grunting pigpile of terrified plainclothesmen.
For the next two days, the agents kept a vigil outside G.W. Medical Center. Inside, Reagan quipped and wavered at death’s door. Loudon had to be sedated, Tashmo couldn’t eat, Felker didn’t shave, and none of them could sleep. The Service tried to send the agents home. The deputy director told them one by one to get some sleep, but they didn’t sleep or leave, they wouldn’t go, they couldn’t. They were Reagan’s boys. They had seen a nation at sweet zenith, and they had fucked it up, fucked it up, they had bungled something precious on the sidewalk at the Hilton, and Hinckley’s bullet, fired in the rain, was still killing Ronald Reagan as the doctors operated. Reagan’s agents lived in the lobby of the hospital, pissing in the men’s rooms and the shrubbery outside, Panepinto in the chapel lighting candles, bumming money to light candles, Gus Dmitri in the chapel, offering his prayers. Billy Spandau in the chapel offering his life, Dear God please take my life, but spare my protectee, offering his life and Panepinto’s too, if this would tip the scales. They couldn’t sleep or leave until the word came down from the man himself, from Ronald Wilson Reagan: Go home, boys, I’m in the clear—I want you to go home.
Tashmo left the hospital that day, drove back to P.G. County, the shitty house, the yard, the screaming baby and his wife. He never saw Lydia again.
Tashmo stood by the back wall of the Rumsey Moose Lodge, waiting for the motorcade to show. He was watching the loose crowd of Moose and friends of Moose, the volunteers, the press pool from the lost bus. O’Teen was busy at the choke point, shaking his tray, “Anything metal—”
Tashmo was thinking, Shirl—this is my apology, my last full accounting. This is what I did and didn’t do. I’ll skip the others, Shirl, because they’re not important—the barmaids and the bridesmaids and the campaign volunteers, the eager phone bank coeds and my Christmas party conquests, too numerous to count. This is what I did—and I lied about it too, and I know that I’m supposed to say that the lie is worse than the lay, a bigger, more polluting sin, and I’ll say it, and believe it. I know I’m supposed to say that I never loved a one of them. Loving them is even worse than laying them, I know, somewhere well below lying about laying, and so I’ll say that though I laid and lied, I never loved. I loved them all, of course. I loved them as a concept, as a demographic, but I don’t think that counts as love, do you? But I know I cannot lie in my apology, and so I have t
o say: maybe I loved Lydia a little.
The motorcade arrived outside. Tashmo heard it on the comm, Gretchen in the parking lot, telling the snipers to spread out.
A runner came in from the vans and whispered to the emcee of the event. The emcee, a ranking Moose, climbed onto the stage and stood behind the podium, tapping the microphone. “This on? This on?”
The entourage was coming in, a rush of noise, a clatter on the stairs. The crowd stood up. A cheer.
And so they came to Portsmouth, that early haven of the English-speakers, that former spice-and-whaling port, that faded base of long-range bombers and ballistic submarines, that host of now-ghost throw weight, that pretty harbor city voted third most livable by the editors of a well-known in-flight magazine, that swing of state elections, that home to fifty thousand souls (including the down-county towns), that target of the pollsters and perfect microcosm of the—
“What’s the opposite of microcosm?” asked the wire service woman, pausing at her laptop as she typed her lead. She was sitting at the bar of the renovated inn, the Old Governor Weare, which wasn’t pronounced “weary” but rather “wear,” she had learned from the snippy concierge. It wasn’t very renovated either, from the looks of it, except for the roof bar itself, which revolved slowly, offering successive views of, first, a steeple like a candlestick on Market Square and, later, the black channel of the Piscataqua River, a ribbon of no light between the populated banks.
The wire service woman asked the question of the tall, graying gentleman to her left, thinking he was a fellow journalist or columnist or possibly a speechwriter or in-house campaign memosmith, a word-worker of some sort.
The tall man popped a salty cashew from the dish. He said, “Opposite of microcosm?”
“And don’t say ‘macrocosm,’” said the wire service woman. “Micro is a little version of the thing. Macro is a bigger version. I’m asking, what’s the thing?”
“You got me,” said the man, scoping out her blouse. “They call me Tashmo, by the way. I’m with the VP’s detail. May I buy you another flavored vodka or would you care for a mixed drink?”
The wire service woman suddenly remembered an appointment down the bar, leaving Tashmo at the taps, one cheek on the stool, drinking Bud from a pewter tankard. The bar was crowded, network men and beat people, producers and politicos. O’Teen, Herc Mercado, and Bobbie Taylor-Niles shared a table in the middle of the room, where they were working on a round of drinks.
The barkeep slid another Bud in front of Tashmo and fiddled with the bills by the cashew dish. Tashmo drank in the manner of old cops. Put a fifty on the bar when you sit down, leave it there all night, watch it go, fifty turning into twenties, twenties into tens and ones and fives, as the barman does subtraction, wet fingers in the pile. This was how you drank, paying as you went. It was more a custom than a law, like throwing rocks in Falling Rocks when he was a kid—stay motionless until it hits, only a punk would turn his back on a falling rock. The Bud arrived and, with it, the thought: he was endangered here, tonight. He saw the wire service woman at the far end of the bar. He thought, I guess the word is “cosm”—as in “cosmos,” a word containing every other word except, of course, “macrocosm,” which was a bigger version of the cosmos.
He drank the beer, left a tip, left the bar. There were six floors at the renovated inn. The VP was on six, just below the bar. He was always on the top floor, whatever that floor was. The elevators were, of course, locked out of the sixth floor. There were troopers in the stairwells, in the lobby, on the roof, cops and K-9 in the parking lot, guarding the vans against a bomb plant. The vans would be bomb-dogged in the morning, a full sweep, but the Service stored them under guard just to be certain. The planners always rented out the entire floor the VP was staying on, or the entire wing in a very large hotel. The rooms in the secure zone (the whole top floor tonight) were parceled out to the VP (he got a suite, empty rooms on either side for anti-eavesdropping purposes), his military attachés and close civilian aides, his top politicos, the agents on his detail, the aircrews on his jet and helicopters, which often left a lot of empty rooms, and gave the secure floor a creepy and deserted feel, tense and dead all at once. Tashmo knew the feeling well.
He shared a room with Sean Elias. He sat on the bed, watching Elias carefully unpack his undershirt supply. Tashmo had come back to call Shirl and confront her on her statements of earlier that day (I love you and I trust you, everything is going to work out), but now that he was here, sitting on the bed, he felt the danger again. Lydia and Shirl. He decided not to call.
Elias tidied up the tabletops. Elias was perhaps the only man on earth who felt the need to tidy up a new hotel room.
Tashmo hung his cowboy suit inside the bathroom door, ran the shower hot to steam out the wrinkles for the morning. He dressed himself in sporting clothes, slacks, loafers, and a short-sleeved turtleneck.
He said, “Fuck it, Eli, let’s go grab a pop.”
At the table in the middle of the bar, Herc Mercado was splitting an order of Cajun chicken fingers with Elias and O’Teen, and trying to figure out if they had ever stayed in the Governor Weare before.
Herc said, “This is Portsmouth, right?”
“Look around you,” said O’Teen. “Or better yet, just look and let the building move.”
Bobbie said, “The building’s moving?”
“That’s a rodg,” Elias said.
Bobbie looked relieved. “I thought it was me.”
Tashmo, feeling dumpy still, nursed a beer and listened to them talk.
Herc said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this bar before. When were we last here?”
“October,” said Elias. “We stayed in this hotel. We always stay here when we come to Portsmouth. It’s on the list of Plans-approved dignitary lodgings. I think they gave it two stars.”
Herc said, “Did we drink in this bar?”
O’Teen said, “Hell yes—don’t you remember, Herc? I scratched your pager number in the men’s room. I’ve never seen you so irate.”
“I was getting paged for days,” said Herc. “But it was a different bar, I’m pretty sure of it. The bar we drank in had a buccaneer motif.”
The agents looked around the room, risking motion sickness. The waitresses wore tight white breeches, low-cut bodices with big puffy sleeves, and shoes with big square buckles. The barmen wore a similar getup with cockaded tricorner hats. The imitation fireplace was six feet wide, hung with pots and kitchen implements of hammered brass. There were crossed oars on the walls, hanging sabers and muskets on pegs.
Elias said, “It’s fairly buccaneerish, Herc.”
Herc said, “No it isn’t. Check the menu.”
The menu was seven heavy pages cased in plastic. Every drink was dubbed, of course. Vodkas-by-the-glass (in a spate of flavors) were listed as the Shots Heard ’Round the World, Bloody Marys were called the Boston Massacre, martinis were known as the Midnight Ride.
Herc said, “That’s more your revolutionary theme.”
The waitress appeared, a pert coed in breeches, pen ready at her pad. She said, “Hi, my name is Kelli. I’ll be your server for the evening.” She looked at their suits. “You all flight attendants or something?”
Bobbie said, “What happened to our other server? She was nice, I liked her.”
“She had to cash out early,” Kelli said. “Her psoriasis was acting up.”
Herc said, “Did this bar have a different theme before?”
“No,” said Kelli, “we’ve had this theme all night.”
“How about October?”
Kelli said, “I’m new.”
“Well,” said Herc, “how would you describe this theme?”
Kelli looked around. “Oh, I don’t know—Roaring Nineties?”
Elias said, “Is history required at your college, Kel?”
O’Teen said, “Ignore them, Kelli. I’ll have another.”
Kelli said, “Another what?”
Everyone had
beer except for Elias, who had another Schweppes, and Bobbie, who had a Shot Heard ’Round the World. The agents pondered dinner, reviewing the menu.
Kelli said, “We also have our specials for tonight: old New England baked spaghetti in a spaghetti sauce; the hearty Yankee pot roast with creamed spinach, buttered bread or a popover; our signature baked ham with your choice of the house salad, a popover, the steamed green beans with slivered almonds; the cod, which you can have baked, grilled, poached, or deep-fried in a popover; roast turkey with the cream-a-corn, or your choice of two, creamed spinach, maple carrots, Uncle Jesse touched me, or a steamy crock of our famous onion soup.”
“Cheeseburger,” said Herc.
“Ditto,” said Elias.
Tashmo said, “Uncle Jesse what?”
Kelli blushed. “I usually get away with that—no one ever listens to the specials.”
O’Teen said, “Do you have baked spaghetti?”
“Yes sir, it’s a special.”
O’Teen got spaghetti, Bobbie got the cod. Kelli took the orders to the kitchen. O’Teen left to see if Herc’s number was still in the men’s room and ran into Gretchen Williams. Tashmo watched her cross the room, pushing O’Teen along.
Gretchen stood over the agents at the table. No one said hello to her.
Gretchen said, “Where’s Vi?”
Bobbie said, “She’s sleeping.”
“She was yawning,” said O’Teen.
“I’ve never seen someone so tired,” Herc observed.
They were obviously lying. Tashmo knew that Vi had left the hotel without orders. The VP’s team wasn’t a close group, like the glorious old Reagan team, but at least these half-assed kids had the decency to lie and cover up for a fellow agent, even if they did it badly. Tashmo was proud of them, a little.
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