Q Clearance

by Peter Benchley

  From ground level, Georgetown was like the back lot at Burbank Studios. It could be any number of things: quaint, colorful, historical, chic, dangerous. What it could not be, and what nobody ever tried to pass it off as, was grungy.

  From the air, Georgetown was grungy. The houses, with their filthy roofs and tiny gardens, were packed together like cattle in pens. The alleys between the backs of the houses were littered with trash bags and garbage cans. The carriage lamps and the washed bricks, the leaded windows and the brass door knockers were all invisible.

  From the air, Georgetown was revealed as the slum it used to be.

  Burnham pushed open the door to his house and knew instantly that something was amiss. From the second floor came none of the accustomed cacophony of two tape decks playing two different songs by two different groups, as each child did his and her homework to his and her Muse. No food odors came from the kitchen. The kitchen had not been used since breakfast.

  His first conclusion was that Sarah had been asked to stay late at work, addressing envelopes or laying out the draw for a celebrity tennis tournament, and had farmed the kids out to friends' houses. But that made no sense: The children were old enough to be alone in the house until he came home, and he was capable of subduing a couple of lamb chops and a box of frozen spinach for them. His second conclusion, a fleeting fantasy that his family had been kidnapped, was dispelled by a pungent aroma of wine. Red wine. Good, expensive red wine. A drinker might not have noticed it; the wine had not been spilled or liberally poured, merely opened and reduced by a single glassful. Burnham had not had a drink in a year, and his nose for alcohol was as keen as a shark's for blood. It could detect vodka in orange juice, bitters in ginger ale and ethanol in any combination through even a screen of Binaca.

  He shut the door and turned left and saw Sarah. She was dressed in a white silk blouse, with a demure little bow at the neck, and a tweed suit. He didn't know she owned a tweed suit. What was she doing, applying for a job? Before her on the coffee table was a single tulip goblet and an open bottle of Margaux. A $22 wine. Judas Priest! Was Town & Country coming by? She sat on the sofa with her knees together and her hands in her lap. She hadn't been reading or watching television or doing a crossword puzzle.

  He said, "Hi . . . Hon?" as he shut the door.

  She smiled at him, a vague, perfunctory smile appropriate to direct at a doorman or a train conductor.

  Burnham felt a change in the atmosphere, as if the barometer was falling, but he sensed that his behavior now wouldn't affect anything, that whatever was going on had already happened. So he strode across the room and said, "Where are the troops?" and flopped in a chair beside the sofa.

  Sarah didn't answer. She just smiled again, more faintly.

  Burnham felt like an unwitting participant in a Cheyenne religious ritual. He leaned forward and filled Sarah's glass and sniffed the bottle. "Times like this I miss the stuff. Wait'11 you hear what the leader of the free world ..."

  "Timothy."

  That's all she said. Timothy.

  Well? "That's my name."

  "I want to talk to you."

  Oh God. It was the monster. The children had rolled back the rock from the mouth of its cave that morning, and sometime during the day it had emerged. Try to stuff it back.

  He forced a feeble laugh. "Their antennae are something, aren't they? They see things about you, feel things, even before you do."

  "I want to talk to you.''

  "What does that mean? You.''

  Now he had to force himself not to smile, for now he knew who the third person was whose presence, whose guidance he had almost tasted since he walked through the door, the force that had staged this scene. "How's Sonja?" he said.

  Sarah blushed, instantly and lividly. She said, "Sonja has nothing ..." But then she stopped, for the lie was absurd.

  Sonja was Sarah's guru, a term that Sarah despised and denied.

  Nor would she accept "counselor," "therapist," "leader" or even "moderator." She insisted that Sonja was nothing more or less than a friend, although, pressed, she would concede that Sonja was the wisest, kindest, most perceptive friend she and the other members of the Thursday afternoon reading group had. Sonja was a freelance copy editor, and she had edited a huge tome that discussed, analyzed and evaluated every one of the mental, psychic, pseudoreligious and psychosomatic disciplines that had surfaced since the sixties. She knew everything about EST and Esalen, biorhythms and biofeedback, multimodal therapy and the Moonies. She knew techniques for everything, from fifty ways to leave your lover to regulating blood pressure through breathing to talking yourself into or out of an orgasm.

  "She conned you into this Dress for Success number, right?" Burnham gestured at the tweed suit and said, attempting to imitate Sonja, "If you have an impression to convey, a strong appearance can be a strong ally."

  Sarah stiffened. "I don't intend to argue with you."

  "Who's arguing?"

  She took a deep breath. "When I married you ..."

  Oh-oh, he thought. The big guns are firing already.

  "... I knew that you were not a man of high principle, that you functioned in response to what could be called a situational ethic."

  She was beginning to piss him off "Don't say 'what could be called.' Say 'what Sonja calls.' "

  "Damn you!"

  He looked at her eyes, and he saw the telltale signs that tears were trying to escape and that she was trying to contain them. He felt sorry for her. What she was doing was important enough to her, and frightening enough, to have led her to seek help and to follow Sonja's loopy instructions. The least he could do was let her play herself out.

  "Okay," he said, but couldn't stop himself from adding, "We were at the part where I'm not Patrick Henry."

  She seemed not to hear. She pressed on. ''I could deal with that because you were smart and clever and fun. And you are basically a good person. You care for me and the kids, and you don't go out of your way to hurt people. I allowed myself to hope that as we grew together, we would develop strong beliefs and that at least some of them would be in the same things."

  Politics again, he thought. Warmed-over horseshit. Mentally, he sighed a martyr's sigh and steeled himself for a tedious replay of one of their standard arguments. "I never once said that wording for the President was ..."

  "Let me finish. Please." She waited until he nodded assent. "To have you work for a man for whom I have no respect, for whom none of my friends have respect, for whom no civilized human being can have respect—''

  "—except fifty-six percent of the American people—"

  "—has not been easy. The children were right. We have been fighting more. But I could live with that, because I loved you, part of you at least, and I kept hoping that someday there might be a miracle and you'd suddenly grow up,"

  Inside Burnham's head. Dr. Johnson was outraged. He begged to be released into the fray, he waved weapons of destruction tantalizingly behind Burnham's eyes. Burnham had to swallow him back into his guts.

  "Then this morning I discovered that it was hopeless." She stopped.

  "This morning? You mean that petty little argument in the kitchen? Come on ..."

  "When I went around the comer for the car, there was this couple, these two people, the most disgusting, filthy, revolting creatures I have ever seen ..."

  "Living in it!" Burnham laughed aloud.

  Sarah looked puzzled. "Yes."

  "Usually they're gone by then. They must've had a bad night."

  Now Sarah was amazed. "You admit it? You know them?"

  "I don't know them, for crissakes. I ran into them just the way you did. But at six-thirty, not nine o'clock. They're harmless."

  "I see."

  Burnham stopped laughing. “They're what all this is about?"

  "No." Sarah put a hand into one of her suit pockets and left it there. "They left, but not before showering me with every four-letter word in the book, and I aired out the car for a fe
w minutes and came home and got some Glade for the back seat. I got in the car and started it, and I must have had an anxiety backlash—"

  Anxiety backlash! Dear Sonja.

  "—because when I was backing up, I put my foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, and I hit the curb and something was knocked loose and fell on the floor."

  "What was knocked loose?"

  Sarah brought her hand from her pocket and opened it. "This."

  "What's that?" It looked like a blazer button—round, silvery, with fine crosshatched striations.

  "Please, Timothy. Don't insult me."

  " 'Please' what? What is it?" He plucked it from her palm.

  "It's a microphone! A bug, they call it. And you know it."

  Burnham turned the button thing over in his hand. On the back was a small magnet that would hold it to the metal beneath a car's dashboard. "I don't understand," he said, and he didn't. "What are you accusing me of?"

  "You put it there! You, or your . . . your people/' She spat the word, as if his people were a loathsome assembly of vile creatures.

  "Why? Why would I bug my own car?" He shouted, "You're nuts!"

  "It's not just your car. You know it; they know it. They know that it's also driven by someone who works for one of the few men with the courage to stand up to that . . . that grotesque who calls himself the President."

  "For God's sake, Sarah. Be serious." But as he protested, Burnham searched his mind for alternatives: No question, this thing was a bug. But who would be trying to bug whom? He wasn't worth bugging. A monitor of his conversations with himself as he drove to or from work would have heard an occasional curse at an inconsiderate motorist or a vituperative reply to an inane news item on the radio. And surely Sarah didn't spend much time in profound policy discussions with senior members of the Kennedy staff as she drove back and forth across the Key Bridge.

  Maybe they hoped—who could they be, anyway?—simply to gather dirt, gossip about something sensational, like a Chappaquiddick for the eighties. Maybe . . .

  Maybe they knew something he didn't. Was Sarah having an affair with the senator?

  He looked at her and saw that she was staring directly and righteously into his eyes. The moment didn't seem propitious for a descent to lubricity.

  "I have never been more serious," she said.

  "Sarah. ..." Burnham fingered the bug, as if to rub it would force it to divulge its secrets. "Whatever you think, I don't know anything about this. Instead of accusing me, let's try to work it out together."

  "Timothy." She wasn't listening. She wasn't going to listen. "I have always known you were unprincipled. I did not know you were unscrupulous, that no depth was too low for you."

  "Hey! You haven't—"

  "I don't want to hear a lot of lame lies!" Sarah's fists were clenched, and she was trying not to shout. "I told you, I don't intend to argue with you. I believe you were responsible, directly or indirectly, for that microphone. But I am a fair person. I want to give you a chance to prove that you had nothing to do with it."

  "How noble. How about taking my word?"

  "Here are your options: Tomorrow morning, you resign from the White House and issue a public statement accusing the Administration of having a Watergate morality and deploring its behavior.''

  "You're crazy! How about proof?"

  "The proof is in your hand," Sarah said, pointing at the microphone.

  "There's no proof of who did it. For all you know" —Burnham was hoping his mind would keep pace with his tongue—"those street people left it there by mistake."

  "I believe they put it there, but not by mistake. Those street people work for the President."

  "Sure." Burnham snorted. "And their job is to skulk around Georgetown bugging cars." Jesus, Burnham thought as he spoke, can that be true? The creeps had been around for nearly a year. He decided to try sweet reason. "I know that what you do is important to you, Hon, and it may turn out to be important to the country, too. But don't you think—won't you at least consider—that to imagine that the President of the United States has dispatched a bunch of hippies to bug your car so he can overhear your every word, don't you think that smacks just a little bit of paranoia?"

  Sarah said, "Will you do it?" She had no intention of listening to him. Sonja had programmed her just like a floppy disc.

  "What'll we live on?"

  Sarah seemed to sense that she was winning. She leaned forward, and her eyes shone. "Something. Anything. At least the dollars will be clean. We can live with ourselves."

  Who does she think I am? he thought. Jesse James? "I don't have any trouble living with myself."

  She stiffened again. "I do."

  "You said options. Plural."

  "You leave."

  "Leave what?"

  "Leave here. Leave the house. Leave us."

  Doctor Johnson was not in the game, so, in his anger, Burnham called on David Mamet. "Fuck you, Joan of Arc! You're not happy, you leave."

  "All right." Sarah stood and smoothed her skirt and walked to the closet beside the front door. "If you believe you can feed the children and do their laundry and take them to their lessons and remember when their dentist appointments are and be home every night by seven, I'll leave." Sarah opened the closet door. Inside were two suitcases, packed and standing side by side. One was Sarah's heirloom Vuitton, plastered with Cunard and French Line stickers. The other was his own heirloom Mark Cross that his father had passed on to him when he went away to college, its oiled leather and brass hinges gleaming even in the dim closet light.

  "Your choice," she said. She held the door open and stood aside, reminding Burnham of Betty Fumess doing a 1950s Westinghouse commercial.

  She had thought of everything. Rather, Sonja had thought of everything. He had no room to maneuver. Either, or. Two absolutes. One would spell poverty, the other loneliness.

  He knew that, really, he had no choice. He could not be the one to stay and care for the children, and he would not quit his job. He did not commit the crime of which he had been accused, and (the determination blossomed within him) he was damned if he would let himself be pussy-whipped— especially not by that dingbat surrogate, Sonja—into pleading guilty.

  He walked toward the closet. He wanted to ask a thousand questions: What would she tell the children? When would they speak with one another again? Was this a separation, or was she planning to file for divorce? What had she packed in his suitcase? Where was he supposed to go?

  But all he did was pick up his suitcase and open the front door and walk outside.

  "I booked a room for you," Sarah said.

  "Where?"

  "TheY."

  Burnham took a step away, and then stopped, for at last Dr. Johnson had joined him. "Nobody has a right to put another under such a difficulty," he said. "You and Sonja should remember that it's always much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing."

  Sarah slammed the door.

  Once, in prep school, Burnham had been hit in the testicles by a lacrosse ball, a pound of hard rubber traveling at forty or fifty miles an hour. He had collapsed, and just before he vomited he imagined that his insides were being torn from him by a clawed hand.

  He felt the same way now. He retched in the gutter, but because he had not eaten in many hours, all that came up was bile.

  He was dreaming he was on a school bus. All the other kids were fully dressed, but he was naked. They didn't seem to notice, certainly not to care; they chattered merrily away. But he cared. What would happen when he got to school?

  He couldn't remember why he was naked. Had his mother sent him out of the house without clothes, or had he taken them off at the school-bus stop? If he knew why, maybe it would be all right.

  The dream was familiar; he knew what would happen next. But he was scared nonetheless. The bus turned into the school driveway. A pretty girl with a pony tail, a girl for whom he had been showing off for weeks, got up and took her bookbag from the overhead rack a
nd walked down the aisle toward him. When she reached his seat, she looked down and smiled and said, "Don't hide your dick," then moved up to the front of the bus.

  Obediently, he removed his hands from his lap, and the kids around him all laughed and pointed at the shriveled little worm hiding between his legs.

  A door banged shut, and someone screamed, "Asshole!"

  This wasn't in the script. He looked around, but he couldn't see a door, couldn't locate the screamer.

  "Asshole!"

  It wasn't part of his dream. He opened his eyes.

  Everything was gray. He could tell by the feel of the sheets that he wasn't in his own bed. The room held a faint astringent odor, like Mr. Clean. Was he in a hospital? Jail? Dear God, had he done it again, gotten wasted and blacked out and been lost downtown and gone to some skid-row dive of a flophouse? Had his buddies put him on a plane again, like that time in college, with no money, no driver's license, just a one-way ticket to Pittsburgh? Fearfully, he put out a hand and felt the sheets beside him, praying he would touch no other body, no glutinous thigh of a sodden slut who would giggle and recall for him the noisome misdemeanors of the night before.

  No. He was alone.

  He sat up, and there was no pain, no foul taste, no sensation that his brain had slipped its moorings and was floating free in the cabinet of his skull.

  All at once the pieces came together, like a backward-run videotape of a shattering glass. He knew where he was and how he had gotten there, and he felt grateful and strong, grateful at being strong enough to have weathered the storm with Sarah without being compelled, as once he would have, to repair to a dark saloon where a sympathetic anesthetist would help him remove himself from himself.

  Out in the hallway, the door that had slammed now opened on creaky hinges, and an Oriental voice said something Oriental that was undoubtedly so poisonous that, in the Orient, it would have resulted in bloodshed.

  Burnham looked at his watch. It was 6:30. The rising sun might have shown in his window, if his window hadn't been opaque with grit and facing an air shaft. He flicked the wall switch behind the bed, and the cold light from the bare ceiling bulb brought out all the character in the room's decor: That is, it revealed the room as suitable as a holding cell for a psychotic killer. There was the steel-framed bed on which Burnham sat, whose hard-used springs had given up and now formed a pocket as deep as a first-baseman's glove. There was a straight-backed chair and a square wooden table, on which every hooligan who had ever lived had carved his initials.