Things You Should Know (22 page)

“It's all right,” he says, going into the closet for more. “I'll be back.”

Soledad, having heard the scream, charges through the door.

The place is a mess, ransacked.

“Sundowning,” Philip says, arriving after the fact. “It's a common phenomena.”

“Where the heck are all my clean shirts?” he asks. At the moment he is wearing four or five, like a fashion statement, piled one atop the other, buttoned so that part of each one is clearly visible. “I'm out of time.”

“It's early,” she says, leading him out of the room. On one of the sites she read that distraction is good for this kind of disorientation. “It's not time for you to go,” she says. “Shall we dance?”

She puts on an old Glenn Miller record and they glide around the living room. The box step is embedded in his genes, he has not forgotten. She looks up at him. His chest is still deep, his pompadour still high, though graying at the roots.

“Tomorrow, when Philip gives you your bath, we'll have him dye your hair,” she says, leading him into the night.

“I don't want to upset you,” he whispers in her ear. “But we're being held hostage.”

“By whom?” she whispers back.

“It's important that we stay calm, that we not give them any information. It's good that I'm having a little trouble with my memory, Bill Casey told me so many things that I should never have known…Did I have some sort of an affair?”

She pulls away from him, unsettled. “Did you?”

“I keep remembering something about getting into a lot of trouble for an affair, everyone being very unhappy with me.”

“Iran Contra?”

“Who was she? A foreign girl, exotic, a beautiful dancer on a Polynesian island? Did my wife know?” he asks. “Did she forgive me? I should have known better, I should not have put us in that position, it almost cost us everything.”

She changes the record to something faster, happier, a mix tape someone made her—Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer. She spins in circles around him.

He looks at her blankly. “Have we known each other very long?”

 

They have dinner in the bedroom on trays in front of the television set. This is the way they've done it for years. As early as six or seven o'clock they change into their night clothes: pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers for him; a zipped red housedress with a Nehru collar and gold braiding, like a queen's robe, for her. They dress as though they are actors playing a scene—the quiet evening at home.

She slips into the closet to change. She always undresses in the closet.

“You know my mother used to do that,” he says while she's gone.

Red. She has a dozen red housedresses, cocktail pajamas, leisure suits. The Hummingbird, the elf, the red pepper, cherry tomato, royal highness, power and blood.

“Why is the soup always cold?”

“So you won't burn yourself,” she says.

He coughs during dinner, half-choking.

“Chew before you swallow,” she says.

After dinner she pops one of his movies into the VCR. A walk down memory lane is supposed to be good for him, it is supposed to be comforting to see things from his past.

“Do you recall my premiere in Washington?”

“Your inaugural? January 20, 1981?”

“Now that was something.” He stands up. “I'd like to thank each and every one of you for giving me this award.”

“Tonight it's
Kings Row
,” she says.

He gets a kick out of watching himself—the only hitch is that he thinks everything is real, it's all one long home movie.

“My father-in-law-to-be was a surgeon, scared the hell out of me when he cut off my legs.”

“What are you talking about?” she asks, offended. “Dr. Loyal never wanted to hurt you,” she said. “He liked you very much.”

“Where's the rest of me?” he screams. “Where's the rest of me?” He's been so many different people, in so many different roles, and now he doesn't know where it stops or starts—he doesn't know who he is.

“What movie are we in?”

“We're not in a movie right now, this is real,” she says, moving his dinner tray out of the way, reaching out to hold his hand.

“What time does the flight get in?”

“You're home,” she says. “This is your home.”

He looks around. “Oh yeah, when did we buy this place?”

 

At eight, Soledad comes in with her knitting, trailed by Philip with a plate of cookies, four glasses of milk.

Philip flips on the game and the four of them settle in on the king-sized bed, Philip, the President, she, and Soledad, lined up in a row, postmodern Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. When the game begins, the President puts his hand over his heart and starts to sing.

“Oh say can you see…”

“Did you see that?” Soledad asks him. “He had that one on the rebound.”

Philip, wanting to practice his reflexology, tries it on the President. He slips off the President's bedroom slippers and socks.

“Hey, quit tickling me.” The President jerks his feet away.

Philip offers his services to her.

“Oh, I don't know,” she says. “My feet aren't in good shape. I haven't had a pedicure in weeks.” She pauses. “What the hell,” she says, kicking her slippers off. He is on the floor at the bottom of the bed. “That feels fantastic,” she says after twenty minutes.

Soledad is crocheting a multicolored afghan to send to her mother for Christmas.

“What color next?” she asks the President. “Blue or orange?”

“Orange,” the President says.

At night she is happy to have them there; it is a comfort not to be alone with him, and he seems to enjoy the company.

He sits on his side of the bed, picking invisible lint off himself.

“What are you going for there?” Philip asks.

“Bugs,” he says. “I'm crawling with bugs.”

Philip uses an imaginary spray and makes the spraying sound. Philip sprays the President and then he sprays himself. “You're all clean now,” Philip says. “I sprayed you with disinfectant.” The President stops picking.

At a certain point he gets up to go to the bathroom.

“He's getting worse,” she says when he's gone.

They nod. The slow fade is becoming a fast forward.

He is gone a long time. After a while they all look at each other. “Are you all right?” she calls out.

“Just give me a minute,” he says. He comes out of the bathroom with black shoe polish all over his face and red lipstick in a circle around his mouth. “My father used to do this one for me,” he says, launching into an old Amos 'n' Andy routine.

“What did you use?” she asks, horrified.

“Kiwi,” he says.

“I'm sorry,” she says to Soledad, mortified that she is having to watch. Luckily, Soledad is from the islands and doesn't quite understand how horrible it is.

At eleven, Philip puts the rail on his side of the bed up, turns on the motion detector pad on the floor, tucks him in, and they call down to the gatehouse and tell them that the package is down for the night.

“Good night,” she says.

“See you in the morning,” Soledad says.

She stays up for a while, sitting next to him reading while he sleeps. This is her favorite part of the night. He sleeps and she can pretend that everything isn't as it is, she can pretend this is a dream, a nightmare, and in the morning it will all be fine.

She could remove herself, live in another part of the house and receive reports of his progress, but she remains in love with him, profoundly attached. She doesn't know how to be without him, and without her, he is nothing.

 

The motion detector goes off, turning on the light by her side of the bed. It is six-thirty in the morning.

“Is this conversation being taped?” He speaks directly into the roses, tapping his finger on the open flower as if testing the microphone. Petals fall to the floor. “Who's there? Is someone hiding over there?” He picks up the remote control and throws it into the billowing curtains.

“Hey, hey,” she says, pushing up her eye mask, blinking. “No throwing.”

“Go away, leave us alone,” he says.

She takes his hand and holds it over the vent.

“It's the air,” she says, “the air is moving the curtains.”

He picks up the red toy telephone that he carries around everywhere—“just in case.”

“I can't get a goddamned dial tone. How can I launch the missiles if I can't get a dial tone?”

“It's early,” she says. “Come back to bed.” She turns the television on to the morning cartoons, pulls her eye mask down, and crawls back into bed.

He is in the bathroom with the water running. “There's someone around here who looks familiar.”

She pops her head in. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yes,” he whispers. “That man, I can't remember that man's name.” He points at the mirror.

“That's you,” she says.

“Look, he waves and I'm waving back.”

“You're the one waving.”

“I just said that.”

She notices an empty bottle of mouthwash on the sink.

“Did you spill your mouthwash?”

“I drank it,” he belches. Hot, minty-fresh air fills the bathroom.

 

In the morning, she has to locate him in time and space. To figure out when and where he is, she runs through a list of possible names.

“Honey, Sweetheart, Running Bear, Chief, Captain, Mr. President.”

He stands before her, empty, nonreactive. She sticks a finger first into one ear and then the other, feeling for his hearing aid, they're both in, she plucks one out, cranks up the volume until it squeals.

“I'm checking the battery,” she yells. “Can you hear me?”

“Of course I can. I'm not deaf.” He takes the hearing aid from her and stuffs it back into his ear, putting it into the ear that already has one.

“Wrong ear,” she says, fishing it out. She starts again. “Mr. President, Sir, Rough Rider, Rick, Daddy, Dutch.” There is a flicker of recognition.

“Now that sounds familiar.”

“Do you know who you are?”

“Give me a clue.”

She continues. “Mr. P. Junior, Jelly Bean.”

“Rings a bell.”

“Jelly Bean?”

“That's me.”

“Oh. Jelly Bean,” she says, relieved to have found him. “What's new?” She hands him his clothing one piece at a time, in order, from under to outer.

 

Soledad rings a bell.

“Your breakfast is ready.” She urges him down the hall. “Send the gardener in when he gets here,” she instructs Soledad as she steps into a morning meeting with Philip and the agents.

“Don't call him Mr. President anymore—it's too confusing. It's best not to use any particular name; he's played so many roles, it's hard to know where he is at any given moment. This morning he's responding to Jelly Bean and talking about things from 1984.”

“We're not always sure what to do,” the head agent says, “how far to go. Yesterday he cleaned the pool for a couple of hours, he kept taking the leaves out, and whenever he looked away we just kept dumping them back, the same leaves over and over.”

She nods.

“And then there were the holly berries. He was chewing on the bushes,” the agent says.

“Halle Berry? George and Barbara?” Philip asks.

“The shrubbery—like a giraffe he was going around eating—” The agent stops in mid-sentence.

Jorge, the gardener, is standing in the doorway. He has taken off his shoes and holds them in his hand. He curtsies when he enters.

“Thank you,” she says. She takes out a map and lays it on the table for everyone to see. “We need a safer garden; this is a list of the plants—they're all nontoxic, edible.”

In the distance there is a heavy thump. The phone rings. She pushes the speakerphone button.

“Yes?”

“The President has banged into the sliding glass door.”

“Is he hurt?

“He's all right—but he's got a bump on his head.”

She sends Philip to check on him and she, Jorge, and the agents go into the yard and pace off where the wandering garden will be.

“Everything poisonous has to come out,” she says. “Azaleas, birds of paradise, calla lilies, and daffodils. No more holly berries, hydrangea, tulips, poppies. No wisteria. No star-of-Bethlehem.”

Jorge gets down on his knees, ready to begin.

She stops him. “Before you get dirty. I need you to put a lock on my dressing room door.”

 

He is in the sunroom with a bag of ice on his face.

“Are you in pain?” she asks. He doesn't answer. “Did you have a nice breakfast?”

Again he belches, mint mouthwash.

“It won't happen again,” Philip says, using masking tape to make a grid pattern on the sliding glass door, like a hurricane warning, like an Amish stencil in a cornfield, like the bars of a cattle crossing. “For some reason it works—they see it as a barrier and they don't cross it.”

“Soledad, may I have a word?” She refrains from saying more until they are out of the room. “We need to make a few changes.”

“I will miss you very much,” Soledad says.

“It's time to get the house ready,” she says, ignoring the comment, taking Soledad from room to room, pointing out what's not needed, what has to go in order to make life simpler, less confusing, safer.

“Put it away, send it to storage, keep that for yourself, this goes and this goes and this goes. Up with the rug, out with the chair.”

They put safety plugs in every outlet, toddler latches on every cabinet. She moves quickly, as though time is limited, as though preparing for a disaster, a storm front of some sort.

“Send someone to one of the thrift shops and get a couple of Naugahyde sofas and some chairs.”