The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

  The hostess came up and double-kissed Recky. “I was afraid you wair not coming!” She was one of those Frenchwomen who are a little too eagerly refined, all pursed lips and pointed chin.

  “Oh!” said Recky. “Contraire!”

  “Oh but zis is Mistair Wallace! Za so famous clairvoyant! But you must promise me a seance, Mr. Wallace, I am at my wits’ end, I must ‘ave guidance!”

  “This is Madame Lucerne,” apologized Recky. These French. And to Madame, “He’s havin’ a night off.”

  “Oh but I understand completely. I will tell no one to mention it.” She took my arm and walked us in. “We try to ‘ave a party every once a month even my ‘usband is not ‘ere.”

  Recky grabbed my other arm. “And keep your paws off, I brought him.”

  “But I did not suggest to have action wis him!” I must have smiled.

  “Did I say a wisdom?” She surveyed the crowd. “Pas un beau mec ici. Jusqu’a maintenant, bien-sur.”

  “That means French,” explained Recky.

  We penetrated the throng. Everyone was fairly togged down. Dinner jackets and the women were showing their shoulders. I should have been wearing a three-tailed wig.

  But then the glamour of my profession did give me a certain license and, flanked as I was by Madame and the veep’s wife, a wide way opened before us.

  This was an unofficial, beat-the-heat sort of party. A few senators and lobbyists were there but it was too close to the end of the season for anything serious to be going on. Diplomats, bureaucrats, H.O.B.’s from the House Office Building, S.O.B.’s from the Senate Office Building, old favorites, fast-laners and otherwise desirables. The late-evening elite.

  Many I’d met already, not to say cast the divinitory sand for, but if they don’t wear their little name tags I’m helpless. “So nice to see you.” “Let’s have breakfast/lunch/dinner!”

  “Have your girl call my girl!”

  We hooked some champagne from a passing tray and drew up by the German Ambassador, a vaguely Klaus-Kinsky looking type. Smoked the cigarette palm-up and so forth. Despised you at first sight.

  “Yah,” he said when she introduced me and that was it. Leaned, back and leered at me through his monocle. Either he was skeptical of my skills or he’d heard of my status as a suspect. Hard to say who knew.

  Confused, Madame cancan-wheeled us until we were facing the Swedish Ambassador. Bjorn Banderdood. Red-faced with a cowlick and little close-together eyes. Had an adam’s apple as big as his nose. “Hi!” he yodelled.

  His wife’s name was Bibi, they were first-name people. She was the kind of royally dangerous beauty you make a fool of yourself trying not to stare at. Blonde hair; blonde breasts, everything you ever wanted!

  “What does my palm say?” She held it out. Blue veins under skin clear as a child’s.

  “It says you’re beautiful.”

  I know that, her eyes said.

  A tray paused. We parked our glasses and chose fresh mounts.

  “Is it frightening to see the future?”

  The interview approach. At least she had no accent. There would be none of that maudlin cuteness I’m such a sucker for.

  “I can’t see the future. I just make it up.”

  “Sure? You don’t have no special knowledges?”

  “A guess is best. Has a more authentic ring to it.”

  She didn’t know whether I was putting her on or what. I could say anything I wanted!

  “That’s pretty much it,” said Recky.

  “It’s a mystere,” confirmed Madame. “You ‘ave never consulted a magic, Mr. Banderdood? C’est l’fun!”

  “Wale, I’ll tale you—”

  His wife gave me that you-want-me-don’t-you look. And my bow tie, had I been wearing one, would certainly have been spinning.

  “You really want a reading?”

  “Yaw!” She hit three notes saying it.

  I drank off my glass, plucked some passing petits fours and started her with a standard loosening-up exercise. Give me three words to describe the ocean and that’s how you feel about sex and so forth. Sort of a Gestalt thing.

  It was time to come to the party, you know what I mean? A let’s-put-on-the-music-and-get-down mood was stealing over me. I snagged another glass and the motion brought us a little closer.

  Suddenly I was jerked backwards by the arm and Recky was towing me through the crowd. I did my best to keep up, exchanging smiles with people as we barged past.

  “We got to get some groceries here, dude.” She steered me across the entrance hall to a dining room where a buffet supper was on display. “You’re gettin’ more attention than a rock star.”

  And I’d been enjoying it too but, jolted as I was, the new context was not altogether unwelcome. For two days I’d been living on Pizza Crackers and rat nibblings and the petits fours hadn’t quite brought me up to date. I advanced like Aladin into the cave.

  Cream-of-almond soup and lobster mousse lay close at hand, and more cheeses than Eskimos have words for snow, presided over by waiters whose fastidiousness made you feel like a slobbering pig. I refused to be intimidated.

  We did a little cursory damage while the servants stared at us, and retired to a table with plates of bone-marrow lasagne and goblets of chablis. I went into a brief trance while the inner voice said, You have food in your mouth. You are eating.

  Recky’s tongue came out to greet each forkful.

  The British Ambassador ahemmed and we were introduced. Lord Battersby, she called him. Fat, formal, walrus mustache. He sat down and we held what conversation we could while I freebased the food.

  “I’m absolutely bodged,” he grinned. He sat back and held his stomach so that must have meant he was through eating. “Streets ahead of what they gave us last time, what?”

  “Mbjmbm,” I said.

  “Try the olives,” he winked. “Good for the potency.”

  “Really?” I swallowed. “What do you do with them?”

  Someone excused himself sitting behind me and I did a double-take. “We’ve met, haven’t we?”

  “Not quite.”

  “That’s our speechwriter,” said Recky, but she obviously didn’t remember his name so she turned back to Battersby.

  “I was there when you and Belton’s wife blitzed his office,” he said. “I write for the show.”

  He was an average-looking guy, not handsome, not ugly. Maybe a little rich for a writer.

  “Isn’t that a, what’s the phrase?”

  “Conflict of interests? Not really. I’m free-lance. I just do whatever the job is.”

  My little alarm beeper was going sinister, sinister, sinister, I don’t know why. He turned to his table and I went back to the mess sergeant for dessert.

  It was worth standing in line for, the kind of thing you don’t eat in the sense of an act of will, you just watch it going in, like sex with something ruthless.

  Celebrado was standing by the counter, a man who was known to me. He was Ambassador from one of the coke-and-coffee countries in Latin Am, I can never keep their names straight, and a young conquistador about town with the ladies. Blond hair, blue eyes, pencil-thin mustache that he actually brought off. I mean you bought it.

  Recky had gone through her Celebrado phase in a couple of clicks of the castanets and since he was unlikely to climb higher it was his habit to moon bitterly at the edge of her vicinity.

  “What a fuckin’ bitch, man,” he now confided to me. “What a fuckin’ cunt, man. What a fuckin’ hoohoo, man.”

  Still spooning and feeling unable to comment I rejoined Recky and Battersby. “So,” I said, “does the Queen eat peanut butter?” Well I mean does she?

  “Don’t know as I can say,” he said, measuring me for shrewdness.

  “It is agréable, za food?” asked Madame, floating past.

  “Food?” I said. “This is food? But it’s a mere sensation of taste, it’s so light!”

  “Ah, m’sieur is a little bit playing wis me,
yes?”

  “It’s, it’s—”

  “Ah, do not try, m’sieur.” She evanesced.

  “Of course the wine tastes like aspirin in coke.”

  “This is true.”

  “Doesn’t really push the boat out, does it.”

  I scanned the skyline for the viking princess. It was about time for her to migrate. I had the feeling she could be coaxed open, flower-wise.

  To cover my search I meandered back towards the buffet table. I was feeling less vulnerable to anxiety now that I’d eaten, and tongued my molars meditatively.

  There she was, moving along with an unapologetic stride. The little black dress hadn’t really told the story. Hiking boots, the walk said. Granola-and-brown-rice type. Dae-glo sweatsocks, khaki underwear. Grew her own herbs.

  Celebrado was watching her too. Recky and Battersby were absorbed in something she was saying, horror never far behind his eyes. I divided speed by angle, took a trail through the trees and stepped into Bibi’s path.

  She gave me an I-knew-it-all-along look. “You disappeared.”

  “I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.”

  “I’m not especially strange.”

  “Shall we find someplace private and consult the jinn?”

  She sighed. “Probably yes, probably no, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so good to see into the heart now. It’s very up and down, the time for me.”

  “Up is down,” I shrugged, “according to Einstein.”

  She thought me over. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “The usual reason.”

  “You’re looking at my legs, not at me.”

  “No! I see you, the real you! The spiritual you!”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure!”

  “What do I look like?”

  “Troubled.”

  The string ensemble switched to Eleanor Rigby and she hummed at me brazenly. “I like this song,” she explained.

  “You should learn to sing it.”

  Her eyes flared and she stopped. I sensed I was transgressing but forgiveably.

  “All right,” she challenged, “in there?” She pointed at a door into darkness off the dining room. It meant getting past Recky. “See you in five minutes,” she said and moved off.

  Her shoulders dared me.

  I looked around for some other possible route and saw a short guy with Dr. Zorba hair, if you remember him, standing with his back to me.

  “Finkle!” I said, descending on him, glaring, disregarding whoever he was talking to.

  “Hey, Word, baby! How you doin’, kid?”

  “Finkle!” I said. “You knew.”

  “Knew what, Boobie?”

  “You knew, Finkle

  Not that he’d ever had the President as a patient but he’d had Mrs. President, he’d had some of the big ones and he could certainly add things up. He knew what I was going to find in the Oval Office and he didn’t even warn me.

  “You didn’t even warn me, Finkle!”

  “Sweetheart, I swear on the highest Torah—” But he didn’t finish. He knew despair when he saw it.

  Until this moment he’d been stiffer than a new boot. His pain pretty well on hold. Now he was confronting a man with human fate on his hands, a man with a burden as heavy as any he’d ever exorcized. It was a hard lurch to be left in and he knew it.

  “I told you, kid. They’re all crazy.”

  He gave me his we-only-die-in-the-end-anyway look, took two glasses from a passing tray and turned to his companion, a woman a third his age and twice his height who had her own glass.

  Well, fuck it. I took a glass myself and topped up. My meager project under the sky, who cares?

  I started lurking towards the pass, playing the wind, studying how to slip through without being seen. But I paused at the wrong moment and some guy I didn’t remember engaged me in conversation and would not let me get away.

  I tried to hear what he was saying so I could work in a polite good-bye but my mind was up ahead with Bibi and my radar was out for Recky and he just kept stealing the initiative. He was so intensely boring I thought at first he must be Canadian but he talked with enormous determination about nothing I could figure out and it finally came to me that he was a member of Toastmasters International, flinging himself on me for the exercise.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  He didn’t even know who I was! I looked at him with a mixture of contempt and loathing.

  “I sell insurance,” I said. “Can I interest you in a package policy? I can put something special together for you, tie in your home, your car, your wife, your mortgage, get a fund going for your kids’ college and still have some left over for your golden years—”

  But he was already gone.

  By now people were so drunk they weren’t looking to either side. I slunk from group to group keeping Recky in sight, matching my silhouette to the cover with exquisite caution, watching her glance flick around. I joined a formation heading for the food line, paired myself with one of its members as it broke and then got out in the passing lane and shot for the door.

  When I looked back she was facing in my direction but her feelers were pointed behind her. The hall went along past high closed doors into a wide space. Another salon. At the far end french doors opened onto the garden and slanted a slash of moonlight over the floor. Bibi crouched by it holding her knees.

  “What is this in English?” she said as I came up.

  I sat beside her. “A June bug.”

  It lay on its back straining for some maneuver that would return it to its feet. Another one bumbled in and bounced around, crash-landed and strolled suavely with quick little steps. She helped the first one over.

  “He is so stupid!”

  “Doesn’t have all the facts,” I agreed.

  She looked at her palm. “You can’t see it here.”

  “Moonlight is best. It shows you the real lines.”

  “Sure?” She held it out.

  I resisted the impulse to seize it and suck the fingers. “Let’s see now. You married for love. But then he shaved off his beard.”

  “Bravo.”

  “And now a feeling of futility has come over you. This career-wife stuff isn’t really for you. You want to split this sophisticated emptiness and find meaning.”

  She took her hand back and lay her cheek on her knee. “You’re having fun at me,” she said, rocking from side to side.

  “I’m just making conversation.”

  In the distance the music dropped into a new slot. After a minute she said, “You make it very well. Conversation.” Sleepy voiced.

  “I do?”

  Our faces were close.

  “Yes. It’s all in the silences.”

  Our noses touched.

  “We seem to have a lot to say to each other.”

  “I’m awful,” she whispered.

  Our lips tickled in close.

  “Sin bravely,” I counselled.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m my own party, I don’t need anybody else,” said Recky.

  My head came up guiltily. “Oh!” I said. “Hi!”

  “How is this in English?” said Bibi, hurrying to head off a diplomatic incident.

  “June bugs!” I said. “We were—Remember June bugs? I was showing Mrs. Banderdood how we used to race June bugs.”

  We seized a couple and set them there like Volkswagens, shoved them along a little. They veered off in opposite directions.

  “You have to keep them going straight,” I explained.

  “Not really,” she said. “Huh.” She swaggered over with the arrogance of the unconvinced and dropped down beside us, drink in hand. “Well that’s a large charge. Looka this un, he’s goin’ like a looner.”

  We got another bug and started them again. Someone else came in and watched, the lights came on and presently people were lining the track to cheer for their champions and making a lot of noise.

  Some of them w
ere getting money down and I took it upon myself to cover bets. Nothing to do now but go with it. If an entrant won before it occurred to him to revolt and fly off he paid even money. Excitement mounted and so did the stakes. The screams were getting committed.

  One bug wore a little red dot of lip rouge, one had a blue dot of eyeshadow and one had a white dot of something, I don’t know. Madame and the Second Lady and Bibi skittered along behind them squatting or on all fours or whatever they could manage, keeping them on course with swizzle sticks, no pushing allowed.

  “Oof!” shrieked Madame. “Oop!”

  Of course this required the ladies to bob their bottoms around and make sort of a spectacle of themselves but they couldn’t really be expected to mind.

  Bottles passed along the sidelines and “Gentlemen,” Madame called, “if you want to bring zose champagne in and open zem hi hagree entirely.” It was already happening. Corks popped, foam ejaculated, glasses brimmed dangerously.

  I was cleaning up in a quiet way. Of course when they’re betting even money on three horses the odds are with the house. I sat cross-legged behind the starting line, a little monopoly bank of bills in front of me, people shouldering in to back their color.

  “If the bug flies you lose the prize,” I reminded them.

  I don’t know, it’s a gift.

  I mean is not the good life for those with the courage to live it? The world is constantly generating beautiful women, new dances. Who can resist it?

  Servants darted around. The string-players moved in and got reseated, those who could stay away from the action. Newcomers jockeyed for position.

  “The mutable, rank-scented many, what?” said Battersby, winking at me through the noise. He leaned in and bet fatly.

  Celebrado stood back and tapped his cigarette on his case, calmly affirming his membership. He’d seen all the movies.

  Down a few hundred, the German Ambassador paced impatiently and watched from a distance, his cigarette-holder in his teeth at a dangerous angle.

  Emotion rose. Recky and Madame were neck-and-necking for the tape. “Yoopy!” The doicher ran over to see and the crowd gave a photo-finish “OH!”

  He stalked away with his hand upside-down on his waist. “Yah, you were so laughing you PUSHED za inzect,” he was overheard to say.