“Adulteress!” hissed Jim as they drove home from the airport. His voice was low so the children, in the back of the station wagon, would not hear. Susan flinched.
“Adulteress,” he repeated. “Assassin. You have assassinated our marriage.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
It was the adultery that overwhelmed him; he had a sudden memory of himself at the age of ten, watching from the third floor of the embassy in Rome—his beautiful mother in a black velvet evening gown, his father with his strong moustache. They faced each other on the staircase below him; and he, Jimmy, held the banister posts as if in a cage and pressed his face to the slats, listening, wide-eyed, as his father shouted to her: “Shame!”
“Shame!” Jim cried, to clear his mind. “I’ll see you get nothing out of this,” he threatened Susan. “Not one penny. Not the house. Not the children.”
“They’re my children too.” She spoke through gritted teeth, voice low, not to wake them. “My house.”
Then the appalling silence.
“Don’t drive like a maniac,” said Susan. “Slow down.”
In the backseat the children exchanged frightened looks and curled into the pretense of sleep.
That night she called Scotty on the downstairs phone.
“I have to see you.”
“Now?”
“No, no. I can’t come now. But, oh Scott, talk to me. He called me an adulteress. He wants the children.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“He’s been violent before,” she whispered into the phone, listening for his step. “Tomorrow. Can I see you tomorrow?”
So they made their assignation, exchanged their lovers’ vows and waited, lunging between ecstasy and despair, which is the condition of humankind in the grip of love or war.
Meanwhile Jim had declared war against Scotty, and his anger extended to the President, who was shilly-shallying about war and the Barbarian Empire.
The story of war is always the same. It is a strategy, a chess game of how to kill without being killed. Feed Scotty lies. Let him print part truths that Jim would then correct; let Scotty get bombed—egg on his face—kill his reputation. It was a vicious, secret, covert war that Jim led, unannounced, but no less real for that.
Jim put his attention to it with all the brilliance of his law school career. A word dropped to an aide—a leak suggested—a little packet of poisoned meat thrown out from the sleigh onto the snow behind. A cautious war. No one must trace it back to him, because if the source were known, the running wolf would pass the bait. While thinking of animals, Jim decided he could kill two birds with one stone, disgrace Scotty and push his own foreign policy. The stories he was foisting onto Scotty were of Matt’s increasing thrust toward war: The President was held in check only by his military advisors. It was easy for Scotty to believe it: Hadn’t he heard the President teasing at dinner at the Adirondack retreat?
That was how Jim set up Scotty, the lover of his adulteress wife.
And meanwhile Jim still sneaked at night into other people’s offices, read their memos, answered the mail, signed their signatures, burying himself in work, to keep from thinking of the adulteress back home; and if Susan screamed at him at night, locked him out of the bedroom, while he pounded furiously on the door, if the neighbors woke from the noise of their quarreling, and the children crouched in their beds, hugging each other in tears, he felt justified in the fact that it was all her fault. He refused to give her a divorce. She refused to leave the house. She insisted it was hers as much as his, and twice she changed the locks, so that he had to break a window to get inside (the same one twice).
He drank a lot.
Meanwhile, Matt’s condition did not go unnoticed. Jim was concerned enough to convene a secret meeting of advisors, after which a series of small meetings with two members of the military and Chief of Staff, with Steven Dirk and a senator from Wyoming, and the Majority Leader of the House. A secret conclave, respectfully considering the removal of the President. There was cause for concern. The President had gone sour on the job.
Perhaps he had. By much care, Matt had managed to extricate himself from certain duties, so that every day after lunch he stole time for himself, but this time was not productively spent in athletics or games, in chasing women or tasting wines or in reading history or government reports. It was spent doing nothing. That’s what Jim found disconcerting. The President sat on the White House balcony, wrapped in a blanket against the chilly weather, and gazed unseeing across the lawn to the Washington Monument and thence to the Jefferson Memorial. Or he sprawled in a chair in his private rooms and stared at the fire in the hearth. Forty minutes later Frank would knock discreetly, bringing him a demitasse of espresso or a hot China tea in a Limoges cup. Then the President’s day would begin again, rushing to ceremonies, meetings, photo sessions, and more meetings with advisors, with congressmen or senators, with members of his cabinet, with lobbyists and constituents, conferences over breakfast, over cocktails, over dinners, and more ceremonious events and formal appearances at theaters or concerts at which, being President, he never got to stay to the end.
To an outsider observing him on the balcony, wrapped in his blankets (the secret service nightmare), he might have appeared to be brooding darkly. Actually, he was praying for God’s will.
This is what Emily had told him about prayer:
Imagine there’s a dog that is attacked by a pack of wild dogs, tearing and biting. The dog manages to pull away and run for its life. Limping, it drags itself home and drops at its master’s feet. What does it do? It cannot speak. It can only look miserably at its owner, whine, beat its tail in the dust. And what does the man do? He picks up the dog, takes it inside, washes and bandages its wounds and gives it food and water, antibiotics, a warm bed to sleep on, maybe some brandy down its throat. He takes it to the vet. Every day he changes the dressings, and soon the dog is well.
The dog has asked for none of these things. All it did was to present itself and beat its tail in the dust. That (said Emily) is how you pray to God. Because if you ask for a shirt, you will get a shirt, and if you ask for a pair of pants, you will get a pair of pants. But if you merely present yourself, then God will give you … everything.
“That’s how you pray,” she’d said. “You ask to know God’s will.”
“I can’t do that,” he had muttered.
“Then pretend.”
So he prayed, black dog.
I said he found decisions hard, lives hanging in the balance. He comforted himself that his intentions were good, that purity of intent sufficed. But did it? Slyly, he asked advice. Sometimes he ignored the counsel once given, and made no decisions, but meekly deferred to the nonaction that was a form of action too, the decision to do nothing. Other times he took the advice of the majority, or sometimes of the counselor he liked best, independent of political consideration.
Sometimes, in private, behind closed doors, he flipped a coin. Or he took a pack of cards and turned up two (or three), the high card being winner (or the red, or the diamond of the suit).
There were people who thought the country was never better run than during this time when, going mad, the President left decisions to the angels with the flip of a coin. His wisdom was praised, especially by those whose advice he took. But he was walking on eggshells all the time.
Did he know the Party was divided into factions, waiting for his mistake?
Meanwhile other items hit the Press: a famine below the Equator, an earthquake in Turkey, a typhoon that wiped out two Pacific islands. Attention focused on finding food for refugees. Little wars broke forth and were stamped out like brushfires.
And then there were the personal cruelties inflicted by ignorance or mistake, and these flared truer, brighter, for being isolated horrors of abnormal moment, and not all of them were crimes.
A Montana man murdered his two daughters and fed them to his pigs. He was judged insane.
A son shot both of his violent and abusive parents with a double-barreled 20-gauge. He was charged with murder.
A runaway girl, only fourteen years old, telephoned her mother, begging to come home. “I want to come home,” she sobbed, and the way she hovered on the word home, holding the sound in her mouth, spoke of her yearning. Her mother told her no, she’d found a man she was living with and he wouldn’t put up with a child. “Mom, I want to come home!” A pimp took her in and treated her relatively decently, meaning he beat her only when he could not afford his drugs. The girl was picked up by the police and jailed dozens of times. Her mother was never charged with any crime.
Oh, there were many things to occupy our minds, lawsuits and taxes and diseases and eighteen-year-old sons who left college to play the guitar as traveling minstrels; and the family men who engaged their little daughters in sex. One of these was a violinist who accosted his niece from the ages of nine to fourteen, and afterward went to the symphony hall, where he played like Orpheus. Women wept at his rendition of Beethoven’s violin concerto. So emotionally removed was he from his acts that when, at fifteen, his niece slashed her wrists, it never crossed his mind that his gifted hand had held her knife. He played at her funeral so poignantly that everyone agreed his powers were increasing with every passing year.
Pain lay everywhere. There were vandals and street gangs shooting themselves with dope or their enemies with guns, and terrorist bands that took hostages for ransom or threw bombs, sublimating their helpless rage into political acts, and feeling nobler, thereby, than the common rapist or gangster; and in almost every country of the world there were secret police who were paid by their governments to inform against the very people whom they served.
Just as you despaired, you saw babies were born in all the colors and tones of the earth, each with their tiny fairy fingernails and lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows. There were heroes in hospitals returning the dead to life, and heroines battling against disease, and common folk who merely held out daily hands to one another, giving heart.
Yes, the world was a fascinating place in which to live in those years, and not much different than in other periods, though it was burning up. Hardly anyone, man or woman, had learned to eliminate anger from his heart. Or loneliness. Or jealousy. Or any of the excesses of compulsive desire. So everything continued burning up.
Like Jim. Like Susan. Like Scotty. Like the President himself, burning up with longing to see God.