The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

  “Word, do you think he can do anything?”

  “You’re the President, sir.”

  “Looks like we’d better come up with our own list. You want to be on the Supreme Court, Word?”

  “Well, thank you, sir, I don’t think so.”

  Long ago, I think I was watching Dawn Patrol, I’d concluded that to command is empty; to be commanded, inconvenient. Best thing you can do is stay out of their way.

  “I wouldn’t get past the hearings, sir.”

  We sent out for cherries and closed the drapes, lowered the video screens and put our feet up. Figured to watch the world on satellite for a while, eat cherries.

  The features of the globe drifted by on the screens, dark but outlined by the gray glow of the ocean in moonlight. It was sort of peaceful from up there.

  Slowly, serenely, Pacific islands passed under us. Japan. China. The lower peninsulas. We spat cherry pits at the wastebasket.

  “Word,” he said, “are we really an empire?”

  “The sun never sets on Macdonald’s, sir.”

  India. Facets gleamed in the Himalayas. Afghanistan. Darkness stretching west.

  “Hey! Word! Hey! Let’s drop the big one on Iran! Hey?”

  We giggled.

  “Better wait a while, sir.”

  Evening in the Eastern Mediterranean. The President pressed the intercom. “Murray? Can you move us up a little on The Museum?”

  The frames shifted north until we had a composite view of Europe. “Okay, let’s have an eastern country. Bring us in on, I don’t know, Poland.”

  The middle screen lost outline and we went from bluey-green to green pocks and ruffles. Fields, mountains.

  A village.

  “Hold it, Mur. Come in a little on that.”

  Tracks, a railway station, streets, parked cars, a cafe. Guy with his arm around a girl at a table, reading the paper together, nuzzling behind the paper.

  “Hey, hey,” we laughed.

  “Guy’s getting a little, sir.”

  “Come on, Murray! Get in there!”

  A phone warbled and the President picked it up. “Hi, dear.” He muffled it to his chest. “It’s my wife!”

  “Tell her you’re busy, sir.”

  “No I can’t right now dear, I’m doing this. Listen—No I—But I—”

  “Bite moose, tell her.”

  “Sweetheart, take a pill and watch TV or something, I’m busy.” He hung up. “What happened?”

  We were skipping over farmland like a cloud shadow. “It’s all ours now, sir.”

  The other screens were sweeping over the Atlantic coast of North America.

  “Look, Word! That’s where we are!”

  I touched the intercom. “Murray? Give us a shot of The Park.”

  The frames tilted upwards and the blue-green receded to a curved white horizon.

  “What’s that?”

  “Canada, sir. Everything north of Buffalo.”

  A city, a highway, rocks, pines. A moose standing in a clearing. Some people in a cabin watching television. Vast reaches of ice and snow. Moscow.

  “Want to look at the Latinos?”

  “Fly us down to Rio, Mur!”

  “Samba City!”

  Mountains and jungles blurred past. Teeming white cities. The land thinned out.

  “Hold it, hold it! Fuck, Murray!”

  The Canal. A waterfront. Blinding sunlight, people in straw hats.

  The President shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a hard one, sir. Why don’t we pull the CIA out of Nicaragua and beef up the guerilla forces here?”

  “Yeah, but Word, they got a hell of a military here! The president’s a general!”

  “I don’t know, sir, why don’t we just off the mother?”

  This was a time when the local president was not a guy you’d double-date with.

  “No sooner said than dead, Wordo. Sally? Get me the Pentagon. Ed? This is Number One. Listen, what do you show on your board for the Canal Zone? How long would it take us to neutralize an offical in there? What’s that? What? I’ll get back to you, Ed.”

  He stood up and grabbed the red phone and waited, glaring around.

  “Hum Fat? That you, Hum Fat? I don’t care what time it is! My people tell me you’re putting guns into the Canal Zone! That’s MY ZONE, Hum Fat! I catch you pulling any more of that stuff I’m going to put poison smoke holes all over your map, Hum Fat, are you listening? I’ll do it, Hum Fat! My finger’s on the button!”

  For a moment of time there I thought the President might really be ready to let go, read off the numbers. But it was just schoolyard psychology. If you’re willing to fight you don’t have to.

  He put the receiver down with a little flourish.

  “Way to charge, sir.”

  “Who does he think he is?” He put his feet up.

  So after a hard day’s running the world we were usually ready for some light diversion. When the working day is over one naturally wants to slide downtown and merge with life, have a few. Go out and gambol.

  Trouble was, where? I don’t know if you know Washington but after hours it’s a pretty lame-ass town unless you’re into being shot dead. We didn’t want to just sit around the Pied de Cochon sipping wine, you know what I’m saying?

  And when? Between his nap and bedtime? This guy was policed! How were we going to get him out there?

  We planned it carefully. On the appointed day Mrs. President had been in New York all afternoon having her nose sanded. By ten-thirty she was under several pills and sleeping the sleep of those who have made it through surgery and for whom it is now only a matter of rest.

  Watching her carefully the President rose and dressed, folded a blanket under his arm and tiptoed into the hall where Fes was on evenings. The President whispered that he didn’t want to make any fuss and wake anybody else up but he had to have a chocolate malted milkshake now and it had to be at an all-night diner he knew of with a fifty-foot counter and a short-order cook with a teeshirt and a white G.I. cap out of his boyhood, and was Fes up to this mission? Could he be trusted?

  Fes followed this moving his lips on a kind of delayed broadcast basis. Without the constant flow of instructions from the earpiece he got in the daytime he was more or less open to shaping, and certainly soldier enough to sign on. He went ahead down the hall, told the guy at the elevator to take a long lunch in the kitchen and gave the President the sign. They boarded and dropped to the basement and while the President waited inside Fes got a car and whipped it around to the elevator flush with the door, and the President ducked into the back and covered up with the blanket. “Back in five,” Fes told the sentry, nodding through the open window, and they were out.

  The President sat up and said left here, next right, and they Pac-Manned around in the maze. Washington is laid out in a spider web grid, no doubt to confuse invaders, and it’s like trying to pick your way through the center of Amsterdam, there’s just no sense to it.

  Three blocks from the White House and you’re in the slums. You won’t see them from the tour bus but they’re right there.

  “Is this where the diner is, sir?”

  “Pull up right here, Fes. Hey! There’s Word!”

  Poor Fes. He peered out past the headlights but I was at his shoulder. I tapped on the aquarium and the fish came over and moved his mouth.

  He smiled. “Hi, Word!” The President was already gone.

  “Holy shoot!”

  “Bye Fes.”

  The Capitol area is lit up like a service station but here it was dark. We stood in a doorway under an ARMED RESPONSE sign till Fes got tired of figure-eighting the neighborhood, and then slipped off on our own, light and loose. Fairly sinister scene for a couple of white boys but we were so giddy with freedom we didn’t much sweat it.

  “He’ll be too embarrassed to call anybody, sir.”

  I didn’t know where we were going.

  “I sure hope my wife didn’t hear
me, Word! She was snoring like she was asleep!”

  “A woman snoring is never faking sleep, sir.” I mean he didn’t know anything! “It’s when they’re not breathing you have to watch it. They’re either awake or dead.”

  There were people on the street. Their street. We kept our hands in our pockets and our eyes straight ahead as one does, and kicked right along. I was beginning to wonder if this wasn’t perhaps insane.

  I hadn’t worried about the President being recognized. Up close isn’t the same as on TV, was my thinking. In person he was taller, more human-looking.

  Now that we were out in the war zone though I wouldn’t have minded a little preferential treatment. If we got in trouble I was ready immediately to introduce him. “The President has picked your family to have dinner with,” I would say.

  That thought got me down several hastily chosen streets, turning whenever we saw anything like a group up ahead, and when I couldn’t take the pressure any more I hooked his elbow and pulled him into a bar.

  Boom, we were in lights, music, waves of crowd noise, people busy with one another, a whole different thing. Tables everywhere, people eating, sitting back and nodding to the music, a kid going around with a bucket collecting dirty dishes.

  We were safer here. White people come into a club, the owner doesn’t want to discourage them, it could be the start of a thing. The musicians don’t want to discourage them, the waiters don’t want to discourage them, the bouncer knows his job. We were cool.

  Not that it was upscale yet. We made our way gingerly among the tables towards the bar. It was crowded! The sax man had lost interest in his own pain and was waiting while the guitarist peeled strings.

  A guy at a table slapped a woman as we worked past and she came back claws out. He grabbed her wrists and held her off and she got up to leave so hard she towed him to his feet but he wouldn’t let go. Paris pimp dance without the Gauloise and the split skirt.

  I mean, right? You pay the dues or you get off the street. It was an arrangement of sufficient longstanding that I wasn’t ready to suggest revising it right there. I made myself invisible and squeezed through but the President steps forward, puts a hand on his arm and one on hers and separates them! Pulls them apart!

  “Hey all right, fella, leave the lady alone,” he says.

  “Uh, sir?” More of an asshole than insane, really. “Sir?”

  They looked at us like this wasn’t really happening.

  “It’s all right,” I said to them. “Sir?” I guided him away hard but he wouldn’t go. “Sir, they can work this out!”

  “Just let him apologize!”

  I didn’t want to actually bulldoze the President but I could see the other guy getting ready for an exchange of views.

  “Sir, it’s not what you think, sir. They really like one another.” I looked at them eagerly. “Don’t you!”

  She gave us an up-you-A-hole look and turned away. Had her own politics to consider. The guy’s arms swung faintly and in unison.

  “Come on, sir.”

  A knot had formed around us but they heard me sirring him and must have figured either we were cops or too crazy to mess with. We shouldered through and made it to the bar, got into a space and ordered double vodka-tonics.

  “Shit, sir!”

  “Well that’s no way to treat somebody!”

  “I think she can handle herself, sir.”

  We huddled over our drinks and let the weather clear up.

  The singer was scatting around with the lyrics to Summertime. We ordered two more and waited for the vodka to make us gregarious. I put a foot on the rail and did a three-sixty scan. No silhouettes. Ran a glance along the crowd in the mirror and leaned down on my elbows with my arms folded, you know how you do, when I noticed I was shoulder to shoulder with Someone Else.

  She had an acne-pitted face and eyes that said buy it or beat it. Metallic-blue eye shadow up to the hairline, matching tank top and nine-ball-yellow hair, one had to presume it was dyed. Kind of woman if she bleeds on your sheet she bleeds on your sheet, she can live with it.

  I glanced down past my shoulder at her muffins. The little points poked through the shirt.

  “Chilly?”

  “Watch it, Steve, you get this glass between the face.”

  I sipped my drink and our eyes met in the mirror.

  “Hey, you know who that looks like?”

  “Yup. Talks like him too. Go ahead, ask him something.”

  The President was already watching us nervously.

  She twirled her necklace at him in rather an obvious way and then straightened up and tuff-stuff-walked around me towards him. Her platform heels put a certain decision in the strut and she put her hands on her waist and jerked her head to it. Her shorts came up past the cleft in her hip.

  The President leaned sideways on his elbow and did his best to look cool but his eyes were frightened. He couldn’t stop fidgeting.

  She walked right into his personal space and leaned in close, pinning him to the bar. “You wanna fuck a nigger?”

  “Gee!” he said. He looked at me pleadingly. I nodded with my eyelids and he swallowed hard. “Sure!”

  She looked him over at close range and led him off into the crush.

  “You want to go too, Word?” he said.

  “Naw, I got it waitin’ for me.”

  I leaned back on the bar and watched her walk away. The bartender watched her walk away. We did not glance at one another.

  10.

  “Darling, what are you doing to the President?” She came into the living room tugging hairs from her brush.

  No, wait. Let me set this up.

  We were, I think you can say, on top. We had Made It.

  In keeping with our status we had taken a penthouse apartment at the Watergate. Not that it gave us a historical shiver or anything but there weren’t that many buildings in Washington tall enough to afford anything like a view of the skyline. Mostly trees anyway but come evening you settled back with your martini and watched the pollution go pink, had a sort of a Buck Rogers feel to it.

  By now I had jettisoned even the most solvent of my peripheral clients and was nine-to-fiving it as the First Adviser. Of course the responsibility was draining but there was a quiet satisfaction in each new day won for humanity, and the cash-flow was awesome.

  Texts from Mrs. X were falling off. An up-and-coming Tarot reader was attracting her attention and I wished her well. It was time to burn my bridges.

  We engaged a French kitchen-mechanic to mince onions for the pâté, a lackey to serve drinks and boudoir personnel to control the powder build-up on Alberta’s hand mirror. Household-maintenance-wise my own impulse was to kick it all into a corner but in matters of this order I deferred to Alberta.

  We each had our tasks. I brought home the money in a wheelbarrow and she paraded the staff, lined up references for the country-club applications and enhanced the moment of possession with colorful language.

  Weekends in Palm Beach, his’n’hers Mercedes sportscars, a tailor with a degree in plastic surgery and a padded toilet seat so you could read the movie page and the comic section before your ass went to sleep.

  And I had My Work. By day I shored up world politics, did what I could to keep inflation down, gave the Japanese a few jolts. Greedy little guys. By night I exhibited my person in the salons of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. I had become, in a modest way, something of a star.

  When you’re a star people treat you like they should anyway. They don’t stand in your way, cough in your face. I sort of dug it!

  “Mr. Wallace,” a hostess would say, “come and tell us what you think of the New Music.” They always wanted to know about the New Music.

  “It’s great!” I would say. “You can hum a tune while you’re listening to it!”

  They loved me.

  Alberta clung to my arm as we strolled through these soirées, my partner in niftyhood. I had become rich and famous for her, her look said, and it was tr
ue. Her hula-hoop earrings, her bare shoulders.

  Privilege came naturally to her. She left the car in spaces marked NO PARKING EVER IN YOUR LIFE, accepted tickets apologetically and then crinkled them up and threw them on the street. When she’d finished dancercizing and the stores were shopped out she came home and brushed her hair and watched the lobby on video, thought about me.

  Belton was extant but still under a sentence of doom. Still news but no longer an issue, so to speak. He was out of hospital and begging for another interview, our terms, but he was bound to ask questions about the President and of course we declined. An open secret in government circles was one thing; going national with it was something quite distinctly else, as Alberta put it.

  When I got home in the evening it was my habit to fall into the hot tub and just let it all go. Lie there and become an X-ray of myself. Upon emerging I slipped into a kimono, accepted a martini from the manservant and ambled out into the living area feeling light, cool, combed out, permissive.

  The room was high and open to the terrace. Baronial-hallish. I lay corner-wise on the couch and sipped, spreading my arms along the cushions and trailing my sleeves. What the hell, I was happy.

  So, “Darling,” she says one night, “what are you doing to the President?” She plucked hairs from her brush, one of those things people feel they can do before one another at a certain stage of intimacy.

  “What do you mean, what am I doing to the President?” I sipped and sat back. “I’m fixing him!”

  “Well what are you doing?”

  “I’m helping him cope!”

  “Mrs. President says he stays out all night and won’t tell her where he’s been.”

  “He’s growing up; it had to happen.”

  “I’m not sure I approve.”

  “Alberta, don’t be a bitch.”

  “We mustn’t alienate Mrs. President, Wordy! Besides, I am a bitch.”

  “Well curb yourself. The President needs to regain his confidence in certain areas.”

  It was working, too. We had a domestic policy, we had a foreign policy. We were lining up cabinet replacements. The corncob mafia was under control, that was the main thing.

  “I’m restructuring his whole personality!” I said.