Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (23 page)

 
          
 
Now he had to force himself not to smile, for
now he knew who the third person was whose presence, whose guidance he had
almost tasted since he walked through the door, the force that had staged this
scene. "How's Sonja?" he said.

 
          
 
Sarah blushed, instantly and lividly. She
said, "Sonja has nothing ..." But then she stopped, for the lie was
absurd.

 
          
 
Sonja was Sarah's guru, a term that Sarah
despised and denied.

 
          
 
Nor would she accept "counselor,"
"therapist," "leader" or even "moderator." She
insisted that Sonja was nothing more or less than a friend, although, pressed,
she would concede that Sonja was the wisest, kindest, most perceptive friend
she and the other members of the Thursday afternoon reading group had. Sonja
was a freelance copy editor, and she had edited a huge tome that discussed,
analyzed and evaluated every one of the mental, psychic, pseudoreligious and
psychosomatic disciplines that had surfaced since the sixties. She knew
everything about EST and Esalen, biorhythms and biofeedback, multimodal therapy
and the Moonies. She knew techniques for everything, from fifty ways to leave
your lover to regulating blood pressure through breathing to talking yourself
into or out of an orgasm.

 
          
 
"She conned you into this Dress for
Success number, right?" Burnham gestured at the tweed suit and said,
attempting to imitate Sonja, "If you have an impression to convey, a
strong appearance can be a strong ally."

 
          
 
Sarah stiffened. "I don't intend to argue
with you."

 
          
 
"Who's arguing?"

 
          
 
She took a deep breath. "When I married
you ..."

 
          
 
Oh-oh, he thought. The big guns are firing
already.

 
          
 
"... I knew that you were not a man of
high principle, that you functioned in response to what could be called a
situational ethic."

 
          
 
She was beginning to piss him off "Don't
say 'what could be called.' Say 'what Sonja calls.' "

 
          
 
"Damn you!"

 
          
 
He looked at her eyes, and he saw the telltale
signs that tears were trying to escape and that she was trying to contain them.
He felt sorry for her. What she was doing was important enough to her, and
frightening enough, to have led her to seek help and to follow Sonja's loopy
instructions. The least he could do was let her play herself out.

 
          
 
"Okay," he said, but couldn't stop
himself from adding, "We were at the part where I'm not Patrick
Henry."

 
          
 
She seemed not to hear. She pressed on. ''I
could deal with that because you were smart and clever and fun. And you are
basically a good person. You care for me and the kids, and you don't go out of
your way to hurt people. I allowed myself to hope that as we grew together, we
would develop strong beliefs and that at least some of them would be in the
same things."

 
          
 
Politics again, he thought. Warmed-over
horseshit. Mentally, he sighed a martyr's sigh and steeled himself for a
tedious replay of one of their standard arguments. "I never once said that
wording for the President was ..."

 
          
 
"Let me finish. Please." She waited
until he nodded assent. "To have you work for a man for whom I have no
respect, for whom none of my friends have respect, for whom no civilized human
being can have respect—''

 
          
 
"—except fifty-six percent of the
American people—"

 
          
 
"—has not been easy. The children were
right. We have been fighting more. But I could live with that, because I loved
you, part of you at least, and I kept hoping that someday there might be a
miracle and you'd suddenly grow up,"

 
          
 
Inside Burnham's head. Dr. Johnson was
outraged. He begged to be released into the fray, he waved weapons of destruction
tantalizingly behind Burnham's eyes. Burnham had to swallow him back into his
guts.

 
          
 
"Then this morning I discovered that it
was hopeless." She stopped.

 
          
 
"This morning? You mean that petty little
argument in the kitchen? Come on ..."

 
          
 
"When I went around the comer for the
car, there was this couple, these two people, the most disgusting, filthy,
revolting creatures I have ever seen ..."

 
          
 
"Living in it!" Burnham laughed
aloud.

 
          
 
Sarah looked puzzled. "Yes."

 
          
 
"Usually they're gone by then. They
must've had a bad night."

 
          
 
Now Sarah was amazed. "You admit it? You
know them?"

 
          
 
"I don't know them, for crissakes. I ran
into them just the way you did. But at six-thirty, not
nine o'clock
. They're harmless."

 
          
 
"I see."

 
          
 
Burnham stopped laughing. “They're what all
this is about?"

 
          
 
"No." Sarah put a hand into one of
her suit pockets and left it there. "They left, but not before showering
me with every four-letter word in the book, and I aired out the car for a few
minutes and came home and got some Glade for the back seat. I got in the car
and started it, and I must have had an anxiety backlash—"

 
          
 
Anxiety backlash! Dear Sonja.

 
          
 
"—because when I was backing up, I put my
foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, and I hit the curb and something
was knocked loose and fell on the floor."

 
          
 
"What was knocked loose?"

 
          
 
Sarah brought her hand from her pocket and
opened it. "This."

 
          
 
"What's that?" It looked like a
blazer button—round, silvery, with fine crosshatched striations.

 
          
 
"Please, Timothy. Don't insult me."

 
          
 
" 'Please' what? What is it?" He
plucked it from her palm.

 
          
 
"It's a microphone! A bug, they call it.
And you know it."

 
          
 
Burnham turned the button thing over in his
hand. On the back was a small magnet that would hold it to the metal beneath a
car's dashboard. "I don't understand," he said, and he didn't.
"What are you accusing me of?"

 
          
 
"You put it there! You, or your . . .
your people/' She spat the word, as if his people were a loathsome assembly of
vile creatures.

 
          
 
"Why? Why would I bug my own car?"
He shouted, "You're nuts!"

 
          
 
"It's not just your car. You know it;
they know it. They know that it's also driven by someone who works for one of
the few men with the courage to stand up to that . . . that grotesque who calls
himself the President."

 
          
 
"For God's sake, Sarah. Be serious."
But as he protested, Burnham searched his mind for alternatives: No question,
this thing was a bug. But who would be trying to bug whom? He wasn't worth
bugging. A monitor of his conversations with himself as he drove to or from
work would have heard an occasional curse at an inconsiderate motorist or a
vituperative reply to an inane news item on the radio. And surely Sarah didn't
spend much time in profound policy discussions with senior members of the
Kennedy staff as she drove back and forth across the
Key
Bridge
.

 
          
 
Maybe they hoped—who could they be,
anyway?—simply to gather dirt, gossip about something sensational, like a
Chappaquiddick for the eighties. Maybe . . .

 
          
 
Maybe they knew something he didn't. Was Sarah
having an affair with the senator?

 
          
 
He looked at her and saw that she was staring
directly and righteously into his eyes. The moment didn't seem propitious for a
descent to lubricity.

 
          
 
"I have never been more serious,"
she said.

 
          
 
"Sarah. ..." Burnham fingered the
bug, as if to rub it would force it to divulge its secrets. "Whatever you
think, I don't know anything about this. Instead of accusing me, let's try to
work it out together."

 
          
 
"Timothy." She wasn't listening. She
wasn't going to listen. "I have always known you were unprincipled. I did
not know you were unscrupulous, that no depth was too low for you."

 
          
 
"Hey! You haven't—"

 
          
 
"I don't want to hear a lot of lame
lies!" Sarah's fists were clenched, and she was trying not to shout.
"I told you, I don't intend to argue with you. I believe you were
responsible, directly or indirectly, for that microphone. But I am a fair
person. I want to give you a chance to prove that you had nothing to do with
it."

 
          
 
"How noble. How about taking my
word?"

 
          
 
"Here are your options: Tomorrow morning,
you resign from the White House and issue a public statement accusing the
Administration of having a Watergate morality and deploring its behavior.''

 
          
 
"You're crazy! How about proof?"

 
          
 
"The proof is in your hand," Sarah
said, pointing at the microphone.

 
          
 
"There's no proof of who did it. For all
you know" —Burnham was hoping his mind would keep pace with his
tongue—"those street people left it there by mistake."

 
          
 
"I believe they put it there, but not by
mistake. Those street people work for the President."

 
          
 
"Sure." Burnham snorted. "And
their job is to skulk around
Georgetown
bugging cars." Jesus, Burnham thought
as he spoke, can that be true? The creeps had been around for nearly a year. He
decided to try sweet reason. "I know that what you do is important to you,
Hon, and it may turn out to be important to the country, too. But don't you
think—won't you at least consider—that to imagine that the President of the
United States
has dispatched a bunch of hippies to bug
your car so he can overhear your every word, don't you think that smacks just a
little bit of paranoia?"

 
          
 
Sarah said, "Will you do it?" She
had no intention of listening to him. Sonja had programmed her just like a
floppy disc.

 
          
 
"What'll we live on?"

 
          
 
Sarah seemed to sense that she was winning.
She leaned forward, and her eyes shone. "Something. Anything. At least the
dollars will be clean. We can live with ourselves."