Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (12 page)

 
          
 
The one person to whom Epstein deferred
without hesitation was the President—in part because the President was his
employer and provider and could deprive him of his cherished power with a
single word, but also because Epstein did respect the office of the presidency,
and when the weight of that office was broadcast through the anger of a man who
stood six foot four and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, the man suddenly
became twenty feet tall and weighed a ton and was awesome and truly
frightening.

 
          
 
When Epstein's POTUS phone rang, he always
grabbed it immediately, because he knew that, to the President, the speed with
which you responded to his summons was an absolute indicator of your loyalty to
him.

 
          
 
And so it was with bewilderment that Epstein's
senior secretary, a condor named Esther Tagliaferro, who had been at the White
House since Eisenhower's second term, one day heard the POTUS line in Epstein's
office buzzing unanswered. She knew he was in the office: He had just returned
from lunch downstairs in the White House Mess and had told her to remind him to
call Commander Larsen, the Navy officer in charge of the Mess, which meant that
he had a complaint about the preparation of a certain dish, the quality of the
salad dressing, the limited choice of entrees on the day's menu, the freshness
of the bread, the presence in the Mess of a person or persons he considered
inappropriate to eat in company as august as the Second Sitting, or the conduct
of one of the Filipino messboys, as obsequious a covey of Orientals as had ever
confirmed the tacit racism in the American military.

 
          
 
Esther knew Epstein wasn't on the phone to
someone else: She had placed no call for him, and neither of his private,
direct lines was lit. Besides, he would have abruptly cut off anyone to answer
the POTUS phone.

 
          
 
That left only one possibility, and it put
Esther in an awkward position. If she went in and picked up the POTUS phone,
she risked a dressing-down from the President. No one but the principal was
supposed to answer a POTUS phone. If she let the buzz continue (she could
envision the muscles in the President's jaw beginning to twitch), the rest of
the day was as good as shot. The President would set sail upon a sea of rage.
Then, as apologies and explanations filtered through to him, he would slide
into a sulk. Then, as understanding nudged petulance aside, he would feel
guilty, and the last few hours of the day would be taken up with his attempts
to soothe all the feelings he had bruised.

 
          
 
Screw it, she thought. She had been
tongue-lashed by past masters. LBJ had once said to her, "Esther, I 'spect
you don't have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions
written on the heel." She could weather any salvos this President could
fire.

 
          
 
So she entered Epstein's office, eyeing the
closed door at the far end of the room, knowing he could hear the buzz,
imagining him frantically torn between personal need and professional duty, and
picked up the POTUS phone.

 
          
 
"I'm sorry, sir, he's ..."

 
          
 
"Epstein!"

 
          
 
"No, sir, he's ..."

 
          
 
"Who's this!"

 
          
 
' 'Esther Tagliaferro.''

 
          
 
"Goddammit, Esther, where is he?"

 
          
 
Her first impulse was to say, "I don't
know," but three decades of experience with seven Presidents told her that
response was not only unacceptable, it was impossible. An Epstein was never out
of touch.

 
          
 
So she said, "He's . . . indisposed, Mr.
President," and she thought: I bet that's a new one for you.

 
          
 
"He's what?”

 
          
 
"Indisposed, sir."

 
          
 
She heard a quick, incredulous suck of breath.
"Do you know who this is?" The voice was calm, as if it thought it
was dealing with a child or a deranged person.

 
          
 
The possibilities that rattled through
Esther's head included: "What number were you calling?" "Could
you spell that?" "May I ask what this is in reference to?"
"May I refer you to Mr. Epstein's assistant?" "President of
what?" and "Sure you are, and I'm Princess Diana."

 
          
 
"Why yes, sir."

 
          
 
"Tell me. Tell me who this is."

 
          
 
To her surprise, Esther found herself growing
angry, angry

 
          
 
at being patronized by the President of the
United States, angry at being sneered at by a man who had worked here for six
years when she'd been here for more than thirty, and to her amazement she heard
herself say, "Mr. President, do you want me to spell it out for you?"

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
"I said: Mr. Epstein is in-dis-posed.”

 
          
 
There was a pause, and the President said
quickly, "Oh. Oh." But his retreat was momentary. "Esther,"
he said, coming back strong, "I don't want you to go home, I don't want
Epstein to go home, I don't want anybody going home tonight, until there's a
phone in that crapper!" The line went dead.

 
          
 
The door at the far end of the room flew open,
and Epstein emerged looking like a fundamentalist Baptist caught in a raid on a
cathouse—belt unbuckled, zipper at half-mast, one trouser leg hitched in a
sock, face flushed, tie askew—from the only private lavatory in the West Wing
of the White House except for the President's own.

 
          
 
That was how Epstein got his second POTUS
telephone.

 
          
 
And that episode, the details of which leaked
from office to office, was why Burnham wanted no part of a POTUS phone. He held
the heretical belief that peristalsis was a private affair.

 
          
 
Furthermore, a POTUS line violated Burnham's
instinct for self-preservation. It permitted no time for a calculated response,
for the creation of excuses and evasions. It forced spontaneity and candor—bad
news for a person interested in survival.

 
          
 
Burnham wanted as many baffles as possible
between himself and the Oval Office. When he first arrived at the White House,
he had longed for proximity, had striven always to be accessible to the
President. Though a day's work was done, he would linger in his office into the
evening, until he could ascertain that the President had left the Oval Office
for the mansion. And even then he would call the White House switchboard and
tell the operators exactly where he was going and when he would arrive.

 
          
 
Just in case.

 
          
 
By now he knew that the only good news from
the President was no news. If the President wanted to deliver a compliment, he
sent it through Warner Cobb. If he wanted to see someone not on the POTUS
network, he would have the individual summoned by Evelyn Witt or the secretary
to the Appointments Secretary. Only if he was incensed or flustered or unable
at that precise moment to reach a particular high-level aide would he directly
contact a middle-echelon esne like Burnham.

 
          
 
It had happened to Burnham once, by accident.
He had stayed late at the office because he had a date to meet Sarah at
7:45
at a theater a few blocks farther downtown.
His secretary, Dyanna Butler (who came from Richmond, where, apparently, exotic
spelling of first names was mandatory), had long since left for her apartment
across the river in Arlington, so he was alone with Walter Jackson Bate's
biography of Samuel Johnson when the phone rang.

 
          
 
He picked it up and, because he detested the
military habit of answering with his last name, said simply, "Hello."

 
          
 
A voice thundered, "You a writer?"

 
          
 
In the next few seconds, Burnham recognized
the voice, assumed that he was wrong, wondered whether it was a joke or an
impersonation, decided that it wasn't, and concluded that, in fact, he was
being telephoned by the President of the
United States
. Who was waiting for a reply. From him.

 
          
 
"Sir?"

 
          
 
"I said, are you a goddamn writer?"

 
          
 
"Ah . . . well ..."

 
          
 
"Judas Priest! Goddamn Cobb has taken a
powder and now I can't find anybody speaks English." (Warner Cobb had left
the building to attend a retirement dinner for a State Department official, one
of the many details relevant to this phone call which Burnham would learn over
the next twenty-four hours and a fact that the President could have discovered
by calling the switchboard instead of impulsively using the POTUS system,
giving up and shouting at an operator, "Get me a writer!" The
operators knew that Burnham was the only writer still in the building.)

 
          
 
"Yessir. A writer."

 
          
 
The President seemed to take a deep breath,
for when he spoke again, his voice was calm, controlled. "I thought we had
a deal, son."

 
          
 
"Sir?" He doesn't even know who I
am, Burnham thought.

 
          
 
"I thought we agreed that you fellas were
going to help out your President ..."

 
          
 
"Yes, sir . . ."

 
          
 
"... by phoneticizing names that no goddamn
human being in the civilized world can be expected to pronounce right."

 
          
 
A clue. Something had gone wrong with a
speech, a name had been mispronounced. But which name? Burnham didn't know all
the speeches the President gave. Only Cobb knew the entire list.

 
          
 
"Yes, sir. We phoneticize them all."

 
          
 
"You do, eh?" The voice was rising
again, rearing back like the fat lady gearing up for the last aria of the
opera. "How about . . . Kat-Man-Fucking-Du?"

 
          
 
Oh, shit. It was his speech. Last night. A
short, inconsequential toast to the Prime Minister of Nepal. He had spoken to
Cobb about
Katmandu
. It was a rule that all foreign names were
to be phoneticized for the President, no matter how simple or familiar.
Sha-MEER; Gor-ba-CHOV. The problem with
Katmandu
was that it was phonetic as is. For the
sake of the gesture, in the text he had spelled it Kat-man-DOO.

 
          
 
"Yes, sir.
Katmandu
."

 
          
 
"You know where
Katmandu
is, son?"

 
          
 
"Yes, sir, I do."

 
          
 
"Do you suppose it would be fair of the
President to ask you to share that knowledge with him?"