Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (24 page)

 
          
 
Who does she think I am? he thought. Jesse
James? "I don't have any trouble living with myself."

 
          
 
She stiffened again. "I do."

 
          
 
"You said options. Plural."

 
          
 
"You leave."

 
          
 
"Leave what?"

 
          
 
"Leave here. Leave the house. Leave
us."

 
          
 
Doctor Johnson was not in the game, so, in his
anger, Burnham called on David Mamet. "Fuck you, Joan of Arc! You're not
happy, you leave."

 
          
 
"All right." Sarah stood and
smoothed her skirt and walked to the closet beside the front door. "If you
believe you can feed the children and do their laundry and take them to their
lessons and remember when their dentist appointments are and be home every
night by seven, I'll leave." Sarah opened the closet door. Inside were two
suitcases, packed and standing side by side. One was Sarah's heirloom Vuitton,
plastered with Cunard and French Line stickers. The other was his own heirloom
Mark Cross that his father had passed on to him when he went away to college,
its oiled leather and brass hinges gleaming even in the dim closet light.

 
          
 
"Your choice," she said. She held
the door open and stood aside, reminding Burnham of Betty Fumess doing a 1950s
Westinghouse commercial.

 
          
 
She had thought of everything. Rather, Sonja
had thought of everything. He had no room to maneuver. Either, or. Two
absolutes. One would spell poverty, the other loneliness.

 
          
 
He knew that, really, he had no choice. He
could not be the one to stay and care for the children, and he would not quit
his job. He did not commit the crime of which he had been accused, and (the
determination blossomed within him) he was damned if he would let himself be pussy-whipped—
especially not by that dingbat surrogate, Sonja—into pleading guilty.

 
          
 
He walked toward the closet. He wanted to ask
a thousand questions: What would she tell the children? When would they speak
with one another again? Was this a separation, or was she planning to file for
divorce? What had she packed in his suitcase? Where was he supposed to go?

 
          
 
But all he did was pick up his suitcase and
open the front door and walk outside.

 
          
 
"I booked a room for you," Sarah
said.

 
          
 
"Where?"

 
          
 
"TheY."

 
          
 
Burnham took a step away, and then stopped,
for at last Dr. Johnson had joined him. "Nobody has a right to put another
under such a difficulty," he said. "You and Sonja should remember
that it's always much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing."

 
          
 
Sarah slammed the door.

 
          
 
Once, in prep school, Burnham had been hit in
the testicles by a lacrosse ball, a pound of hard rubber traveling at forty or
fifty miles an hour. He had collapsed, and just before he vomited he imagined
that his insides were being torn from him by a clawed hand.

 
          
 
He felt the same way now. He retched in the
gutter, but because he had not eaten in many hours, all that came up was bile.

 
          
 
He was dreaming he was on a school bus. All
the other kids were fully dressed, but he was naked. They didn't seem to
notice, certainly not to care; they chattered merrily away. But he cared. What
would happen when he got to school?

 
          
 
He couldn't remember why he was naked. Had his
mother sent him out of the house without clothes, or had he taken them off at
the school-bus stop? If he knew why, maybe it would be all right.

 
          
 
The dream was familiar; he knew what would
happen next. But he was scared nonetheless. The bus turned into the school
driveway. A pretty girl with a pony tail, a girl for whom he had been showing
off for weeks, got up and took her bookbag from the overhead rack and walked
down the aisle toward him. When she reached his seat, she looked down and
smiled and said, "Don't hide your dick," then moved up to the front
of the bus.

 
          
 
Obediently, he removed his hands from his lap,
and the kids around him all laughed and pointed at the shriveled little worm
hiding between his legs.

 
          
 
A door banged shut, and someone screamed,
"Asshole!"

 
          
 
This wasn't in the script. He looked around,
but he couldn't see a door, couldn't locate the screamer.

 
          
 
"Asshole!"

 
          
 
It wasn't part of his dream. He opened his
eyes.

 
          
 
Everything was gray. He could tell by the feel
of the sheets that he wasn't in his own bed. The room held a faint astringent
odor, like Mr. Clean. Was he in a hospital? Jail? Dear God, had he done it
again, gotten wasted and blacked out and been lost downtown and gone to some
skid-row dive of a flophouse? Had his buddies put him on a plane again, like
that time in college, with no money, no driver's license, just a one-way ticket
to
Pittsburgh
? Fearfully, he put out a hand and felt the
sheets beside him, praying he would touch no other body, no glutinous thigh of
a sodden slut who would giggle and recall for him the noisome misdemeanors of
the night before.

 
          
 
No. He was alone.

 
          
 
He sat up, and there was no pain, no foul
taste, no sensation that his brain had slipped its moorings and was floating
free in the cabinet of his skull.

 
          
 
All at once the pieces came together, like a
backward-run videotape of a shattering glass. He knew where he was and how he
had gotten there, and he felt grateful and strong, grateful at being strong
enough to have weathered the storm with Sarah without being compelled, as once
he would have, to repair to a dark saloon where a sympathetic anesthetist would
help him remove himself from himself.

 
          
 
Out in the hallway, the door that had slammed
now opened on creaky hinges, and an Oriental voice said something Oriental that
was undoubtedly so poisonous that, in the Orient, it would have resulted in
bloodshed.

 
          
 
Burnham looked at his watch. It was
6:30
. The rising sun might have shown in his
window, if his window hadn't been opaque with grit and facing an air shaft. He
flicked the wall switch behind the bed, and the cold light from the bare
ceiling bulb brought out all the character in the room's decor: That is, it
revealed the room as suitable as a holding cell for a psychotic killer. There
was the steel-framed bed on which Burnham sat, whose hard-used springs had
given up and now formed a pocket as deep as a first-baseman's glove. There was
a straight-backed chair and a square wooden table, on which every hooligan who
had ever lived had carved his initials.

 
          
 
There came a knock on Burnham's door, three quick
raps of a knuckle.

 
          
 
"Just a sec!" Burnham hopped up and
scrambled for his trousers. He wasn't about to answer a door in his boxer
shorts. Not here. Who knew what were accepted practices in the corridors of the
Y? He was no fool; he had seen The Ritz.

 
          
 
There was no one at the door, but at his feet
Burnham saw a copy of the Post and a brown paper bag. He picked them up. Inside
the bag was a container of coffee, a stirrer, a cup of dairy substance and a
packet of Sweet'n Low. On the bag, scribbled in pencil, was a note:

 
          
 
Why you're here is your business. My business
is to welcome you. See you at
noon
.

           
 
Hal. Burnham smiled. He must have checked the
register.

 
          
 
Burnham arrived at his office at eight. He had
finished the coffee and the paper, shaved, showered and dressed, had breakfast
at a cafeteria, and still it was only
7:45
. He had nothing to do, nowhere to go and
nothing to read, so he went to work.

 
          
 
He dialed Cobb's number—Cobb might be able to
help him begin his inquiry into the likelihood (however remote) that the bug in
his car had been planted by someone in the Administration —but there was no
answer.

 
          
 
He decided to go have a cup of coffee at the
Mess. For company, he took along a volume of Boswell's Life of Johnson. Another
great thing about Johnson: You could reread him forever and always find
something new. Open Boswell to any page, and you were sure to find something
Johnson said that hadn't etched itself on your mind the first time you read it,
or the second or the third. It was Burnham's bible.

 
          
 
He had never before been in the Mess in the
morning, and he was surprised to find it crowded. There were no seatings in the
morning; serfs sat cheek-by-jowl with knights.

 
          
 
Evelyn Witt waved pleasantly to him as he came
in, but she didn't beckon him to join her. She was sitting with two of her
deputies, and from the chastened looks on their faces, Burnham guessed that
Evelyn had been giving them hell.

 
          
 
Three Air Force officers sat together. Burnham
recognized one of them: Brigadier General Woody Ravenel, who was the pilot of
Air Force One. One of the others was a bird colonel, the last a light colonel
who was obviously older than the other two. Burnham assumed that the light
colonel was the infamous Clip Dixon. Eighteen months ago,
Dixon
had been the President's pet pilot. He was
sure to become a general officer before the end of the President's term. But
one day,
Dixon
had been escorting the President off Air
Force One at Andrews, and the President had started toward the wrong
helicopter.

 
          
 
*'That's your helicopter over there,
sir,"
Dixon
had said.

 
          
 
"Son," the President had smiled,
"they're all my helicopters."

 
          
 
They had both chuckled at that one. The
trouble was,
Dixon
had repeated the story at the Mess, and one of the people he had told
had told someone else, and the next morning the anecdote appeared in the Post.

 
          
 
There was no penance he could do. He had
sinned and been caught, and this lord was a lord not of mercy but of vengeance.
Dixon
would end his career as a light colonel,
and because the spread between the retirement pay of a light colonel and a
brigadier general is the difference between ease and penury, the sins of the
father would be visited upon the wife and the children and the parents-in-law.

 
          
 
Two members of the National Security Council
staff played pocket chess over their cups of tea.

 
          
 
Four women from the "east side"—the
social office in the East Wing—huddled in grave conference over the seating
plan for tonight's State Dinner in honor of the dictator of some Asian ministate.
From what Burnham could overhear, an Asia scholar from Columbia had had the
tacky brass not only to first decline the invitation, but then to accept, and
finally to renege at the last minute, after his card had been printed and his
seat assigned—at the right of one of the poo-bah's wives. Evidently, the
scholar had objected to an esoteric point in the Administration's Asia policy
and had decided to shaft the President publicly, not realizing that the
President had no idea who the man was and that the only people he was shafting
were four overworked young women who had nothing to do with policy and, in
fact, couldn't have pointed to Asia on a map.