SOME HORSES ARE CALLED STUMP-SUCKERS BECAUSE THEY have a penchant for chewing wood. Once they get the taste they’ll gnaw on stumps, fence posts, boards, and the corners of feed sheds. This neurotic habit is more apt to manifest itself in highly strung, overbred animals than in your common plugs.
Cowboys universally distrust the stump-sucking horse as being a beast with a mental disorder that renders them unfit for the long-term, trust-laden relationships they like to maintain with their mounts.
Boog seemed to hold the women of Washington in much the same distrust.
I have never learned to distrust women. For some reason the motion involved is foreign to me. However, I am quick to notice when I’ve wandered into a game whose rules are totally unfamiliar to me, as was the case with my first Georgetown dinner party.
The party was at the home of a senator named Penrose, and I was taken there by Cindy Sanders—a California princess I had met and become infatuated with only a few hours earlier. Cindy would not have been loath to instruct me in the niceties of social behavior, but unfortunately she was seated several yards away, across a good seventeenth-century table covered with equally good nineteenth-century damask. She had been placed there to entertain an aged statesman named Dunscombe Cotswinkle, an old man with a jaw like a Carolina mule.
It was obvious even to someone as naive as myself that Cindy had been assigned Cotswinkle because she was the most beautiful woman there, whereas he was the most important man. Unfortunately, the appropriateness of the matchup was lost on Cotswinkle—his mind was elsewhere, or at least I judged it to be, since he kept looking down the table and shouting “Is that you, Winston?” at a nervous little French journalist whose name was not Winston.
I was seated between two well-dressed ladies, neither of whom gave the slightest indication that they knew I was there. They were not young, but both were too modishly done up to be described as old. Evidently they were somewhat testy about their placement at the table, and it was hard to blame them, since each had an ugly congressman on the side not occupied by me.
It was not lost on my dinner partners that the younger and prettier women had been distributed among such senators and minor press lords who happened to be there.
“Pencil will never learn,” one whispered to the other, across my coq au vin.
Pencil Penrose was our hostess, an ostensibly giddy blonde whose real name was Penserilla.
“It doesn’t matter,” the other lady said. “There’s no one here anyway except Jake and Dunny, and I don’t want to talk to them. Dunny’s deaf as a brass pig, and Jake wouldn’t even talk to me when I was married to him.”
Dunny was obviously old Cotswinkle, whereas Jake was the eminent columnist John C. V. Ponsonby, who was seated directly across from me, so deeply bored by the deficiencies of the company that he had lapsed into what appeared to be a coma. He ate no food, but retained enough motor reflex to empty his wine glass into his mouth from time to time.
Ponsonby, by no means unimportant, had his hostess on his left and Lilah Landry on his right. Lilah was the beautiful if somewhat gangly widow of a former Secretary of State. Her tumbling red hair, dizzy smile, and trend-setting wardrobe could be seen daily on the local talk show she hostessed.
Luckily, I had seen it that very morning, while breakfasting at Boog’s. The show was called Win a Country and matched a panel of columnists, ex-Cabinet members, and socially prominent diplomats against a computer called Big Hank. In order to win the country in question the panelists had to make instant choices between bribery, trade benefits, military aid, covert infiltration, saturation bombing and the like, though all Lilah had to do was exhibit her hair, wardrobe, and cleavage, and occasionally employ her abundant deep Georgia gift of gab to get some taciturn diplomat to talk.
If either of the ladies beside me had turned and suddenly required speech of some kind, I guess I would have dropped Boog’s name, for despite his vulgar talk and silver ties Boog’s was a name to conjure with, in Washington. His big Victorian house in Cleveland Park was constantly filled to the gills with politicians, lobbyists, aides of all species, committee persons, agency persons, journalists, and lawyers. Some of them were there because Boog had a special faucet in his kitchen that ran Jack Daniel’s, while others came because they lusted after Boss, Boog’s famous wife; but whatever their individual compulsions, they all liked and respected Boog, the professional’s professional when it came to Hill politics.
Of course, the minute I had stepped into the Penrose mansion that night I began to canvas the objets, a habit I can’t control. A scout scouts, even when purchase seems hopeless. It was hard to concentrate on Pencil Penrose when she happened to be standing next to the magnificent Belgian hall clock in her front foyer.
It’s not that I dislike people, or that I’m incurious about them, either. I want to look at the people, but their objects keep jumping in front of them, demanding my attention. Sometimes I tell myself that the best way to get to know people is to first study the objects among which they place themselves, but for all I know that may be pure bullshit. It may simply be that I’ve been subsumed by my vocation. Until I’ve sized up a place and separated the good pieces from the fillers I just can’t seem to concentrate on the people.
Cindy Sanders was long of limb, but short of patience. Her approach to life was emphatic, an approach she shared with my two former wives.
After ten minutes of watching me eye the ormolu, Cindy expressed herself by coming over and giving me an elbow in the ribs that would have done credit to an NBA guard. In fact, she had once been involved with an NBA guard.
“Stop looking at the furniture,” she said. “You’ll never own any of it.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t deal in French furniture much.”
She gave me a smile that would have sold about a million tubes of any toothpaste.
“Stop yukking around and talk to these people,” she said. “You said you knew Big John. They’d love some fresh poop on Big John.”
“Is that the only reason you brought me?” I asked. “Because I know Big John?”
The question seemed to interest her. She tilted her head to one side for a moment, a gesture I took to be introspective. A moment was enough. Her purse might be a jumble, but not her soul.
“Naw,” she said. “It wasn’t decisive, which doesn’t mean you can just stand around. I expect a little social support when I ask a man out.”
“I see,” I said. “If I turn out to be a dud people will think you’re slipping, right?”
Cindy laughed, a loud California laugh that boomed right out into the room, startling a number of pale people who were sipping drinks and having muted conversations nearby. I loved it. It was such a healthy laugh that it even affected my scrotum, which immediately tightened. Her laugh reminded me of the absolutely confident way she had ripped a check out of her checkbook that afternoon, when she paid me for a carful of cowboy artifacts.
“I’m not slipping,” she said, faintly amused by the thought that anyone could suppose she might be.
Then she turned on her heel and marched off to start a conversation with our hostess, Pencil Penrose.