The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

  Staying together for the kids.

  “Why should I help you?” Belton had demanded.

  “Do you hate the President that much?”

  “He’s dead, it’s a waste of time. He practically resigned on television! I should put myself out of favor with the next administration? For what? I owe these people! I’ve got my position in the news community! Besides, I have a theory that everyone gets what he deserves.” He looked at me.

  “Those are the reasons not to,” she said. “Now what about the reasons to?”

  Of course she brought him around.

  “All right,” he said, “I would suggest a rematch. Something we can videotape. We get him on TV, get him answering some easy ones and then we run the tape.”

  “You are evil.”

  “Could that be why you married me?”

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  He laughed. “You don’t think Alberta can do it?”

  “The President’s falling. Is the country going to care if the Secretary of State falls too? It won’t stop Reb. And what about the third guy?”

  “Bedtime stories. The tape’ll open Wayne up, you watch me go. He’ll stop Reb. The question is, can you get into the condo before he shows and set up?”

  I tried not to be too cocky about it. “Oh, I think so.”

  I handed the joint back. The pool, whirling.

  I was caught up in a terrible momentum but I was here, now, that was the important thing. The job, the woman in front of me. I was ready to go with it. I was the momentum.

  I stood up, my erection arching, and swamp-waded towards her. The water pulled at my thighs. She blew smoke away like she was tossing her hair and drew her knees up, her crossed toes breaking the surface. Her heels in my hands.

  I hesitated whether to hold her arches together and fornicate with her feet or try the deeper water and as I hovered over the dilemma her husband splashed in and came over.

  “Hi!” he yodelled.

  I remember once being footsied in a glass-table restaurant when my escort suddenly whipped the off cloth and saw someone else’s toe in my fly. I mean what do you say?

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi!”

  “Hallo, Bjorn,” she said, perhaps a little bored.

  He strode up with nordic naturalness and accepted the joint from her, sat down.

  I found that by bending my knees a very little I was able to dunk my weapon and sort of waddle back to my bench and cringe politely. I mean I knew they were liberal and everything but I wasn’t going to work my plunger while he was sitting there!

  “It looks very please-ant,” said Madame Lucerne, sitting on the side at my shoulder. A poile she was bluish and angular. She slid in beside me. “Am I squeezing you?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I crossed my legs and made room.

  “Neither now? Oh! You have cold bums!”

  “Get away from the Washington stodge, what?” The water rose as Battersby settled in. He was pale and overhung himself in folds, almost not naked. “Still infesting these shores, Wallace? Your man’s having a tough time of it, I must say. Why doesn’t he get his finger out?”

  “‘Cause he ain’t worth de sheet,” said Celebrado, plopping in. Thin-chested, blond body hair. “We going to have somebody who cares about de Latinos, going to make a new worl for everybody. Das wa we nid.”

  Stolkov eased in on my other side. “Rawlins is so much more reasonable,” he told me softly. “My government will feel more comfortable with him. We share so many aims.”

  “Vell, vhen in Rome,” grinned the German Ambassador, lowering himself in.

  Bibi gave me a little shrug.

  “You were in Rome,” Stolkov reminded him. “You lost that too.”

  “Yah, I am two zeconds here und you are zis sheisse telling?”

  People got in I’d never seen before. Asians. Africans.

  “This is Yoshi,” said Bibi.

  “Hi, Yoshi,” I said.

  “This is Katsu.”

  “Hi, Katsu.”

  “This is Oomdowb.”

  “Hi, Oomdowb.”

  Battersby put his arm around one. “Had your test, old bean?”

  Madame pressed me to make room. “Foo!” she whispered. “After we can go to a box.”

  New joints went around. Anonymous feet probed in.

  “Sorry,” I told her.

  “I didn’t forbid you not to.”

  Bubble bath was unleashed and we foamed over with giggles, shouts, slippery limbs.

  “Fantabulous! Goodish grass, what?”

  Here was my chance to dive in and have everybody. Have Bibi. By now it would be a socially acceptable act but, I don’t know, I just wasn’t with it. Coke commercial-wise I was out of the circle.

  Bibi was tangled up in a tickle war and when Madame lunged in to pinch someone I slipped out and stole away, found my clothes.

  • • •

  I mean I was down.

  Down.

  Real down. Worn out by my own dreams. Bent double.

  It was all I could do to walk aimlessly. Shady streets, sunny streets, I didn’t know where I was. Dark suit and sunglasses. Mr. Anybody.

  I would keep walking until I became a casualty of the city. An item on the news. Days would pass and I would become ragged and vacant, too holy to interfere with.

  I no longer existed.

  Somewhere down inside me I knew I had to get help. I stopped a taxi and went to find Finkle.

  Afternoons he hung out in the bar at the Shoreham Hotel. When I got there I contrived to walk absently in and not see him. You know how it is, you make the decision to seek out an analyst, you don’t quite like to admit it, right? I mean there’s a reluctance there.

  He was at a table. I passed without looking over.

  “Hey, Wordo! Sit down, old buddy, you can buy me a drink!”

  “Hi, Finkle.” I sat with the air of one who didn’t really care whether he did or not.

  “Oo-hoo-hoo, kid! You look a little haggard! What’s eatin’ Rasputin?”

  “You should have warned me, Finkle.”

  “Hey, gimme a break. You know you can’t breach confidence.” He waved at the waiter. “Besides, so what? What would you have done, walked away? From the nut case of the century? I mean the guy is a sick ticket, am I right? Very sketchy, you can see it in his eyes. Course they all are. Kindly leave the bottle, Alfredo, and bring us some ice cream and a coupla beers.”

  He poured scotch over ice and slid mine across.

  “Besides, whenever I’m in doubt about how to proceed in such cases I always fall back on my theory. You want to hear my theory?”

  “Again?” I drank bitterly.

  “No, no, no, that was another theory. A new day, a new theory, Boobie, get with it.” He poured new shots. “You want to hear this or not?”

  I composed my features and awaited the worst.

  “All right, my theory is, the following. We—you, me, everybody—are all vision. That’s what we are, you see what I mean? I mean, something bad happens to someone, I never have the feeling it’s somebody else. I always—It’s me, you see what I mean? I go through it! I empathize! I attempt every form of propitiation, knowing I can’t avoid it. That’s me there! Weep for me!

  “And I mean I see it all in my job, the whole Bosch poster. The tongs, the funnels in the rectum, the whole baloney roll. Right?”

  He poured new drinks.

  “Okay, now, following along from that, thinking along those lines—y’understand?—it seems to me that the proper procedure in the face of these circumstances is to cultivate blindness. Cultivate a little blindness. Because otherwise you become totally screwed up, if I may use a clinical term. Wacko. All right?

  “Blindness, kid.

  “Because our ignorance, after all, here in this vale of tears, our ignorance is a clue, you know what I’m sayin’? Nothing could be that perfect unless it was a clue! Am I right? I mean it’s too perfect not to be eloquent.”

&
nbsp; “It’s certainly a thought,” I said.

  He poured two more.

  “I mean what are we? You know? What are we? Souls in heaven? Souls in hell? Creatures? Gods? What?”

  He drank.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to know! The mystery’s the thing, kid. Blind man’s bluff.”

  “Yeah, that could make sense.”

  “And how, in the light of these starkly self-evident facts, could I possibly presume to illuminate you, you see?”

  “Better to let me stumble around,” I said. “I can see that now.”

  “Best thing for you.”

  The waiter arrived with a tray. Finkle gulped off a sip from each schooner and, having made sufficient room, stirred in the ice cream and made a sorcerer’s foam that overflowed onto his fist. “Ice-cream-and-beer floats,” he explained. “Sin, kid.” He poured scotch on for sauce and lifted mine to me.

  To tell you the truth it wasn’t bad.

  “Beats drinking sun block, which by the way can run you into money.”

  We sipped noisily.

  “So what is it, Boobie, you look like you’re losing one. And I don’t mean a patient. That wouldn’t do this to you, can we level on that? What brings you up to my office?”

  I turned the base of my glass on the table cloth.

  “Start with your sex life.”

  I sighed, more or less collapsing. “It’s all up with Alberta.”

  “Alberta. That would be the dark-haired thing that struts around with you. Blue eyes. Smile that says just don’t try it. Nice-looking broad.”

  I turned my glass.

  “But I sense that this is, how shall I say, more than that. The One You Don’t Wear The Condom With, am I close? Relax, kid, this is all very confidential. I Want To Come All My Cream In You, is that it?”

  “Piss of, Finkle.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  I regarded him with considerable rue. “I caught her with somebody else,” I spat.

  “Ah. Not very nice, then. Look, kid, can I just get into the father-figure thing here for a minute? When you lose ‘em—I’m talking about women, I’m talking about patients—let ‘em go. Believe me, there’s lots more. Lots more.”

  I brooded on this.

  “She’s a bitch,” he said. “Repress it.”

  “I like bitches.”

  “Yeah. All right. Well, if she rips a hole in you that ragged, marry her.”

  I looked up at him. “What?”

  “Handcuff yourself to her, it’ll serve you right. Teach you about Life.”

  “People don’t do that any more, Finkle, it’s like waltzing.”

  “Hey, take a look around. That’s what they do here!”

  “They two-step.”

  “Same thing.”

  “And that’s politics.”

  “Hey! Boobie! What’s this?”

  I found this strangely disconsoling, and stared at my beer.

  “All right. All right. You want Love, not marriage. You want the steady dose of manic depression. You want passion in the morning, passion in the evening, passion that distends your little sojourn across the mannaless waste, you want to be always slightly off-balance, does any of this make sense?”

  I fidgeted helplessly.

  “So forgive her. Big deal. A little spice to keep things interesting. Everybody needs a change. Love overrides tears and pain anyway. Probably feeds on them.”

  I didn’t look up.

  “No? Has she done the unforgivable? What did you see? She wasn’t doing artificial respiration on his kazoo!”

  I allowed my silence to confirm this.

  He nodded philosophically. “And of course this has aroused anxieties about your relation to her mouth, and thereby to his penis—”

  “Get off it, Finkle.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Occupational hazard. I’ve been manifesting strange symptoms of my own lately. Everything I look at reminds me of a bottle-opener. I don’t know what it means yet. Something deeply hidden in my own savage past. My parents were desperately misinformed. I recall confessing to my father that I had feelings like a goy. Gay! he says. No, goy, I said. Gay! he says. He calls my mother in. Now he says he’s gay! He never understood me.”

  He dredged a belch up from the bottom and raised his hand at the waiter.

  “I always recommend tanga briefs in these cases,” he said. “They give you the feeling of being wanted, at least by your underwear.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Think of yourself as being turned on the lathe of experience. It’s all for the best. A little beating around ripens up the avocado.”

  The waiter put two more beers down and Finkle added the scotch. “Let’s skip the ice cream this time. I don’t think we should overdo it.” He handed me my glass.

  “To the moment of accepting life,” I said. What the hell. Thing I find is, if you go out and get really drunk you feel a lot better. This is an absolute rule.

  We drank deeply. A consulting-room silence fell over us. I wiped my mouth.

  “Non carbarendum illegitimate leechee,” he stood up and pronounced. “Means don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

  “I’ll sign that,” I said, belching unsuccessfully. “You know, when you’re standing up you look like you’re folded in half.”

  Mum-mum-mum,” he intoned, fellating his thumb at me.

  After that there are blank spots in the conversation. Things that don’t come back. We may have ordered more to drink.

  At some point I fell forward and hit my head on the table. Finkle didn’t know if I’d fallen asleep or hurled myself down in desperation. Neither did I. All I felt was the vertigo of the thing.

  Eventually Finkle got up, puzzled as a revived corpse, turned his body in the direction of the pissoir, and walked.

  “You know,” he said when he came back, “standing there holding my peter I was reminded of a case. Woman’s husband couldn’t—You say you couldn’t do it with the group?”

  I must have mentioned the group.

  “This guy could only do it with a group. Classic case, this guy. A clock with no hands ticking on some interior table.” He gave me a someone-we-both-know look.

  “Seems his parents changed towns when he was a kid and when he shows up at the new school the other guys take him down somebody’s basement to play the local game. Everybody throws a buck on the table and they cut the lights and jerk off and the guy who comes first gets the money, see, so they’re all beatin’ away but everybody else is just slappin’ his pants makin’ sound effects. He’s the only one really in there and when it boils over he screams I got it, I got it and they hit the lights and yell Surprise! and watch him spaz off all over the place. Take pictures, hand them around the high school. Sort of an initiation thing. He’s very distubed now. The only way he can deliver the payload is before a moderately large audience.”

  “Well that’s no good!” I was following this.

  “Pretty awful. Any combination of things is possible, kid. Always remember that.”

  “Must be hard on Recky.” Call it lightning intuition, call it genius, I don’t know.

  “Well, she—”

  He looked at me. His smile melted.

  “That wasn’t very professional, kid.” Suddenly he was sober.

  I got up and shook myself like a wet cocker spaniel. I could almost walk.

  “Not what you’d call ethical.”

  “I don’t have time for ethics right now, Finkle.” I tucked my shirt in. “You should have warned me.”

  “Go in peace, my son. And may all your gestures be insignificant.”

  “Scooba-dooba.”

  22.

  It was a matter of the most delicate timing getting back into the building. Had to be done on the night of the tryst or W.T. might have brought someone else there in the meantime and sensed the set-up, found our stuff. And going in and out twice would have doubled the risk, to say nothing of the nervo
us strain.

  We sat behind the parking lot with binoculars all evening trying to figure out who wasn’t home. There didn’t seem to be any extra security on since our last break-in. I mean we hadn’t taken anything and we’d put the door back on. The only sign of our presence the next day would have been the dog’s hangover. He’d probably eaten the baggie.

  But you can never tell.

  W.T. wasn’t in there, we knew that. Norman was following him and phoning in his movements.

  Retribution was gaining on Norman. After the shoot-out with the police Charlie had been fairly incoherent. His interrogators had extracted some rant about the sanctity of the family but otherwise he spoke in beatitudes.

  But they had the VENDOR badge. And who had passed in the forms to the General Service Admin applying for the VENDOR badges? Norman.

  On whose authority had he done that, the Secret Service wanted to know. Madly smoking plain-end cigarettes Norman pled bureaucratic screw-up. The new equipment, the confusion of contractors, what did he know? He was just trying to help the Vice President!

  So far it was working, officially. Bureaucratic screw-up was a way of life on the Hill. But Reb and W.T. grew silent and watched him when he entered a room. In the film noir of his life he was a trembling silhouette threatened by dark forces.

  “They’re going to get you, Norman,” I whispered.

  And of course he couldn’t turn us in without compromising his own position. Slim as our chances were, we were all he had.

  “Don’t worry, Norman. You can always go on TV and testify to putting out for W.T.”

  He lit a cigarette and sucked the cinder down to his fingers in one drag.

  Timing. The whole thing was timing.

  We couldn’t move before dark but if we waited too long they’d be there before us. She was meeting him in a bar at exactly nine-forty-five, and then she’d have to hold him off in the car.

  Timing.

  As soon as it was blue-black we moved. I carried the camera, the mikes, the masking tape. He carried the ladder. We walk-ran across the back lawn.

  Shoop hadn’t actually seen much cash yet. He was working on spec. But he could tell from the penthouse that there was a whole imminence of money and at this stage payment was beside the point.

  This was his shot at the title. We positively promised him he’d make the hearings. The quiet suit, the desk full of microphones, the considered answers. After that he could open his own office, go into consultancy.