33
The insistent, prodding, overwhelming presence of Claire Coolidge in the same city almost violated Charley’s mind. The memory of her primary and secondary sexual characteristics was so strong that once, while he and Mary Barton were looking at a channel 13 presidential retrospective that showed footage of Calvin Coolidge, Charley was so overcome with the marginal lust that swept over him merely at the mention of the name that, with a hoarse cry, he fell upon Maerose and ravished her upon the unborn Persian lamb upholstery of the enormous sofa in the brobdingnagian study at Sixty-fourth Street. Mae was extraordinarily pleasured and, for once, utterly unsuspecting of Charley’s motives. It was all Charley could do not to cry out Claire’s name as he reached the dynamite apogee. It was so close a call that it forced Charley to do something about the danger. The lesson it taught him stayed with him until, the next morning, it pushed him into telephoning Miss Coolidge at the apartment in which Edward S. Price had set her up high in the Trump Tower off Fifth Avenue.
“Miss Coolidge, please.”
“This is she.”
“Ah, good morning, Miss Coolidge. This is Charles Macy Barton.”
“Mr. Barton. How nice.”
“Some people have been talking to me about perhaps proposing a new ballet and I thought of you.”
“Mr. Barton!”
“Do call me Charles. Or, as the president says it, Charley.”
“Whose ballet is it?”
“I thought we might chat about that at lunch—whenever you’re free.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m free today.”
“How fortunate. So am I. The Russian Tea Room?”
“That would be really convenient.”
“One o’clock then. The Russian Tea Room.”
Charley hung up, wondering why he automatically thought of the Russian Tea Room whenever he wanted to have lunch with Claire Coolidge. He knew why. Mae would be lunching at Le Cirque or La Grenouille. The West Side was out-of-bounds for his wife, castewise.
They had the same booth as they had had their first luncheon.
“My lucky table!” Miss Coolidge exclaimed. Charley finessed it.
“There is no music yet and, of course, no set designs,” Charley said easily, “but this young Argentinian librettist, Santo Calandra is his name, has this rather gripping conception for a storyline.”
“Really.”
“The ballet would be based on the Cherokee tragedy, the Trail of Tears, along which the Cherokee nation was forcibly moved by the United States Army in eighteen thirty-eight to be resettled on the Oklahoma strip after the disastrous Cherokee wars.” Charley had heard the arbiter, Mrs. Colin Baker, mention the possibility of such a ballet and he had dug the rest out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“How exciting.”
“Very sad, actually. Out of eighteen thousand Cherokees, four thousand died along the way, and when they got to the reservation in Oklahoma, feuds and murders with the white settlers began.”
“How perfectly tragic.”
“But it does have the makings of a moving ballet.”
“Oh, yes.” Miss Coolidge wasn’t taking any of this seriously. She was waiting for Charley to make his move.
“Do you think real tragedy can be expressed in the dance?”
“I think anything can be expressed in the dance, Charley.” She covered his hand with hers for an electric moment. The voltage she generated hit Charley as if some hooded executioner had pulled a switch. He stiffened, arching his back.
They stared at the menu silently. Charley ordered. Miss Coolidge said, “I have the most uncanny feeling that we’ve met before.”
“Before who?”
Miss Coolidge smiled. “I suppose you know about me and Edward.”
“People do talk about beautiful ballerinas.”
“Have you known Ed long?”
“Yes. I suppose so. In a business way,” Charley said. “I advised him on mergers and acquisitions for a number of years.”
“Do you think he’ll get the nomination?”
“Oh, yes.”
“The election?”
“I’m a Democrat, my dear.”
“I think he can win it. And, of course, if he wins it, I lose him.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Any number of our presidents have maintained their dear friends. Thomas Jefferson, for example. And it is said that JFK had outside friends.”
“Edward doesn’t have that sort of flair.”
“Well, he has a lot of things against his winning the election, too. He’s a widower and Americans like to think that a man has a wife who is really running the country. He’s an Eastern establishment banker. And he certainly doesn’t have what one could call a charismatic personality, does he?”
“I suppose not. But he’s sweet.”
“On the other hand he does have money.”
“God, yes.”
The food came, the wine was poured.
“Would you like me to see if I can—uh—mount—that ballet for you? The Trail of Tears, that is?”
She stared into his eyes with the large green grapes that were imbedded on either side of her perfect nose. Charley swayed in his chair. He fought the madness. He had to stop these little adventures. He was fifty-five years old. “Do you think,” he said slowly with a thick tongue, “that we might skip lunch and go back to your place?”
“That would be impossible,” Miss Coolidge said. “Edward has made a friend of every one of those building employees, and the last thing I want to do is to break Edward’s heart. Not right now. Not four days before Super Tuesday.”
“I have to be in Boston next Monday. I can have a plane standing by for you.”
“I will be dancing in New York at the Monday performance.”
“Do you have any objection to perhaps some champagne in a suite at a hotel?”
“Hotels are such an impermanent arrangement, Charles. But …”
“But—what?”
“Let’s wait out Super Tuesday. If Edward comes out of that with a clear chance at the nomination, then, well, he is really going to need me to help him through to Election Day.”
Eduardo did very well on Super Tuesday. He split twelve states evenly with Gordon Manning: the nominating votes of seven states went to Manning and six went to ESP. In terms of delegates, he was still very much of a contender for the nomination. Manning sent a team to offer him the vice-presidency if he would withdraw in Manning’s favor, so Eduardo sent his people to Manning to offer him a place in his administration as chief of protocol, an equally meaningless job, if Manning would withdraw.