Me Talk Pretty One Day (26 page)

My friends and family are shocked to learn that I had sex with a world leader. “Why didn’t you tell us?” they ask, though
they know it’s a silly question. I’ve always been admired for my ability to keep a secret. I had a baby in high school, and
no one ever found out about it. I gave birth in the woods behind my house and put the infant up for adoption just as soon
as I’d cleaned myself off. Actually, I just left him in a box outside the agency door. It was a comfortable box, lined with
blankets, and I hung around long enough to make sure he’d been found and taken inside. I’m not heartless, I just didn’t want
to leave a paper trail and have to worry that the child would grow up and come knocking at my door, expecting me to put him
on my Christmas list.

Before it became front-page news, I’d almost forgotten that I’d had an affair with the president. It isn’t that I sleep around
a lot, it’s just that, aside from the fact that he is the president, the relationship wasn’t terribly memorable. I’m at home,
defrosting my freezer and watching TV when my president interrupts a lousy speech on education to say, “I never had sex with
that woman.”

Yikes.
Okay
, I think,
so maybe I made a mistake
.
He’s obviously not the man I thought he was
. I refill my ice cube trays and realize that life as I knew it is now officially over. Sixty years from now some doctor will
tell his friends that he’s just performed a hip replacement on the girl who slept with the president. That’s what they’ll
call me from here on out, and the most I can do about it is try to set a good example. This will be accomplished by concentrating
on my best assets and giving the country what it needs rather than what it wants.

With reporters camped outside my door, I can’t really go anywhere, so I find a hardware store that delivers, and decide to
paint my apartment. I’m going after the hard-to-reach places behind the radiator when the independent counsel arrives, promising
that if I cooperate, I won’t have to go to jail. “Well, that’s a new one,” I say. “Since when does anybody go to jail just
for having sex with the president of the United States?” I tell the independent counsel exactly what I’ve told everybody else,
which is nothing. Then I finish painting between the radiators, eat one last block of fudge, and lose twenty-five pounds.

When told I’d better hire a good attorney, I ask them to give me a public defender, whoever’s available — it makes no difference
to me. Why spend the rest of my life paying off my legal fees? I say nothing to the federal prosecutors and nothing to the
reporters who call and send exotic flower arrangements, hoping I’ll grant an interview or release a statement. They’re claiming
that I’ll talk sooner or later, and it pleases me to know that they are wrong. I will never, for the rest of my life, say
one word about my unfortunate affair with the president. I won’t even mention the man’s name. If it comes up in a crossword
puzzle, I’ll leave the spaces blank and work around them. He can run his mouth all he wants to, but someone needs to exercise
a little control.

My public defender means well, but there’s no way I’m going to testify in an outfit designed by Liz Claiborne. He’s hoping
to promote an image of quiet conservatism, but please! I’d rather go to the chair than appear before the entire world dressed
like a department manager at J. C. Penney. Rather, I take my cue from Gone with the Wind: the scene in which Scarlett is forced
to attend Miss Melanie’s birthday party. She’s just been caught behind the lumberyard with Ashley, and the whole town is talking
about it. If she’d had her way, she would have stayed home, but Rhett Butler forces her to attend wearing a dress that screams
guilty yet looks so good that you’re left wondering why she’d ever lowered herself to chase after Ashley Wilkes.

Given the high visibility factor, every designer in the world wants to dress me for my grand-jury appearance. I go with one
of the young English upstarts and choose a slightly exaggerated, magnificently tailored suit that emphasizes my new, waspy
figure. Accessorized with the right mix of confidence and haughtiness, it reduces my audience to a world of leering carpetbaggers
and gasping Aunt Pittypats. The moment I enter the courtroom it is understood that I am the most audacious and beautiful woman
in the world. When called to the stand, I give nothing but my first and last names. The transcription will record that all
subsequent questions were answered with either “You’ve got to be kidding” or “I honestly don’t see how that’s any of your
business.” The judge holds me in contempt, and the fashion press notes that my suit jacket neither strained nor bunched when
my hands were cuffed behind my back.

I don’t know how long they might sentence someone for refusing to disclose the details of an affair, but I imagine it wouldn’t
be more than a year or two. I do my time quietly but maintain a polite distance from those who would like to profit from my
friendship. It looks really bad that the president allowed me to go to prison, and people will often try to tap what they
imagine to be my considerable wellspring of anger. As always, I say nothing. In keeping my mouth shut, I become an anomaly,
an icon. My name is now a code word, not for a run-of-the-mill sex act but for someone who displays an inordinate amount of
dignity, someone beautiful and mysterious and slightly dangerous.

After prison I publish a novel under an assumed name. The book is Lolita word for word, and I’m allowed to write it because,
under the conditions of the fantasy, Vladimir Nabokov never existed. Because it is so magnificent, my book creates a huge
stir. Reporters go hunting for the author; when they discover it’s me, I think,
Goddamnit, can’t you people find anything better to do
? I now have a reputation as both a dignified enigma and a genius, but I don’t want people reading
Lolita
because I wrote it. My masterpiece is demeaned by their pointless search for a hidden autobiographical subtext, so I give
up writing, live off of the money I’ve made from careful stock investments, and quietly spend the rest of my life sleeping
with professional football players.

In reviewing these titles, I can’t help but notice a few common themes. Looks seem rather important, as does the ability to
enlighten, disappoint, and control great numbers of people who always seem to be American. In a city where every woman over
the age of fifty has blond hair, my Mr. Science miracle soap would surely have the Parisians lined up all the way to Bethlehem.
But it doesn’t interest me to manipulate the French. I’m not keyed in to their value system. Because they are not my people,
their imagined praise or condemnation means nothing to me. Paris, it seems, is where I’ve come to dream about America.

My epic fantasies offer the illusion of generosity but never the real thing. I give to some only so I can withhold from others.
It’s fine to cure the leukemia sufferers but much more satisfying to imagine the parade of opportunists confounded by my refusal
to cooperate. In imagining myself as modest, mysterious, and fiercely intelligent, I’m forced to realize that, in real life,
I have none of these qualities. Nobody dreams of the things he already has. I’m not sure which is more unlikely: the chance
that I’ll sleep with the president or the hope that I will one day learn to keep a secret.

There are other fantasies involving magic powers, impossible wealth, and the ability to sing and dance. Though I can hypnotize
the mafia and raise the dead at will, I seem incapable of erasing the circles beneath my eyes. My dramas don’t help me sleep,
they simply allow me to pretend that I’m somebody else, someone who’s not lying saucer-eyed on a sweat-drenched mattress,
watching the minutes flap forward and awaiting the dawn of another dry day.

W
E’RE IN PARIS
, eating dinner in a nice restaurant, and my father is telling a story. “So,” he says, “I found this brown something-or-other
in my suitcase, and I started chewing on it, thinking that maybe it was part of a cookie.”

“Had you packed any cookies?” my friend Maja asks.

My father considers this an irrelevant question and brushes it off, saying, “Not that I know of, but that’s not the point.”

“So you found this thing in your suitcase, and your first instinct was to put it in your mouth?”

“Well, yes,” he says. “Sure I did. But the thing is…”

He continues his story, but aside from my sisters and me, his audience is snagged on what would strike any sane adult as a
considerable stumbling block. Why would a full-grown man place a foreign object into his mouth, especially if it was brown
and discovered in a rarely used suitcase? It is a reasonable question, partially answered when the coffee arrives and my father
slips a fistful of sugar into a pocket of his sport coat. Had my friends seen the blackened banana lying on my bed, they might
have understood my father’s story and enjoyed it on its own merit. As it stood, however, an explanation was in order.

For as long as I can remember, my father has saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities,
and, most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people’s martinis — he hides
these things in strange places until they are rotten. And then he eats them.

I used to think of this as standard Greek behavior until I realized that ours was the only car in the church parking lot consistently
swarmed by bees. My father hid peaches in the trunk. He hid pastries in the toolshed and the laundry room and then wondered
where all the ants were coming from. Open the cabinet in the master bathroom, and to this day, you will find expired six-packs
of Sego, a chalky dietary milk shake popular in the late sixties. Crowded beside liquefied nectarines and rock-hard kaiser
rolls, the cans relax, dented and lint-covered, against the nastiest shaving kit you have ever seen in your life.

There are those who attribute my father’s hoarding to being raised during the Depression, but my mother was not one of them.

“Bullshit,” she used to say. “I had it much worse than him, but you don’t see me hiding figs.”

The reference to figs was telling. My father hid them until they assumed the consistency of tar, but why did he bother? No
one else in the family would have gone anywhere near a fig, regardless of its age. There were never any potato chips tucked
into his food vaults, no chocolate bars or marshmallow figurines. The question, asked continually throughout our childhood,
was, Who is he hiding these things from? Aside from the usual insects and the well-publicized starving people in India, we
failed to see any potential takers. You wouldn’t catch our neighbors scraping mold off their strawberries, but to our father,
there was nothing so rotten that it couldn’t be eaten. It was people who were spoiled, not food.

“It’s fine,” he’d say, watching as a swarm of flies deposited their hatchlings into the decaying flesh of a pineapple. “There’s
nothing wrong with that. I’d eat it!” And he would, if the price was right. And the price was always right.

Because she fell for words like
fresh-picked
and
vine-ripened
, our mother was defined as a spendthrift. You couldn’t trust a patsy like that, especially in the marketplace, so, armed
with a thick stack of coupons, our father did all the shopping himself. Accompanying him to the grocery store, my sisters
and I were encouraged to think of the produce aisle as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Tart apples, cherries, grapes, and unblemished
tangerines: he was of the opinion that because they weren’t wrapped, these things were free for the taking. The store managers
thought differently, and it was always just a matter of time before someone was sent to stop him. The head of the produce
department would arrive, and my father, his mouth full of food, would demand to be taken into the back room, a virtual morgue
where unwanted food rested between death and burial.

Due to the stench and what our mother referred to as “one small scrap of dignity,” my sisters and I rarely entered the back
room. It seemed best to distance ourselves, so we would pretend to be other people’s children until our father returned bearing
defeated fruits and vegetables that bore no resemblance to those he had earlier enjoyed with such abandon. The message was
that if something is free, you should take only the best. If, on the other hand, you’re forced to pay, it’s wise to lower
the bar and not be so choosy.

“Quit your bellyaching,” he’d say, tossing a family pack of anemic pork chops into the cart. “Meat is supposed to be gray.
They doctor up the color for the ads and so forth, but there’s nothing wrong with these. You’ll see.”

I’ve never known our father to buy anything not marked
REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE
. Without that orange tag, an item was virtually invisible to him. The problem was that he never associated “quick sale” with
“immediate consumption.” Upon returning from the store, he would put the meat into the freezer, hide his favorite fruits in
the bathroom cabinet, and stuff everything else into the crisper. It was, of course, too late for crisp, but he took the refrigerator
drawer at its word, insisting it was capable of reviving the dead and returning them, hale and vibrant, to the prime of their
lives. Subjected to a few days in his beloved crisper, a carrot would become as pale and soft as a flaccid penis.

“Hey,” he’d say. “Somebody ought to eat this before it goes bad.”

He’d take a bite, and the rest of us would wince at the unnatural silence. Too weak to resist, the carrot quietly surrendered
to the force of his jaws. An overcooked hot dog would have made more noise. Wiping the juice from his lips, he would insist
that this was the best carrot he’d ever eaten. “You guys don’t know what you’re missing.”

I think we had a pretty good idea.

Even at our most selfish, we could understand why someone might be frugal with six children to support. We hoped our father
might ease up and learn to treat himself once we all left home, but, if anything, he’s only gotten worse. Nothing will convince
him that his fortunes might not suddenly reverse, reducing him to a diet of fingernail clippings or soups made from fallen
leaves and seasoned with flashlight batteries. The market will collapse or the crops will fail. Invading armies will go door-to-door,
taking even our condiments, yet my father will tough it out. Retired now and living alone, he continues to eat like a scavenging
bird.