Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (13 page)

 
          
 
"Sir?"

 
          
 
"I'm gonna tell you something that I
would tell Cobb if he wasn't out tomcatting when he should be at his desk
working like the taxpayers pay him to do. I want all you goddamn writers to
stop jerking off . . ."

 
          
 
"What?" What's he talking about?
Burnham waited, and the President continued.

 
          
 
"... with chicken-shit names like
Katmandu
. . . and . . . the rest."

 
          
 
Now the silence was of a broken connection.
Burnham stared at the telephone receiver, as if willing it to surrender more
information, not realizing that he had been given a substantial clue.

 
          
 
The next day Burnham and Cobb together
reconstructed the few minutes that preceded the phone call. The President had
been walking from his office back to the mansion when he had spotted a copy of
the "Style" section of the Post lying open on a table. He stopped and
turned the pages till he found the gossip column, the Disposall of Washington
tripe that always gave him a lash to use against some member of his staff.
There was nothing of interest until the last item,

 
          
 
White House Coup

 
          
 
The President tried to score points with
another Third-Worid nation last night, but as usual, to use one of his own
favorite phrases, he just "slobbered abibful."

 
          
 
At a small dinner for the Prime Minister of
the Himalayan nation of Nepal, the President praised the Prime Minister, the
King and the country, citing contributions made to the worid community—and then
proceeded to pronounce the name of the country "Nipple."

 
          
 
Some pacifier.

 
          
 
The Secret Service man with the President told
Cobb that the President had dropped the paper "like it was covered with
maggots" and had lurched so spastically toward die nearest phone that he
feared the President might have had a stroke.

 
          
 
BuRNHAM'S secretary, Dyanna Butler, was thirty
years old and single, which meant that at the core of all her moods were
confusion and a sense of betrayal, anger and feelings of resentment. Everything
in her upbringing had conditioned her to believe that it was impossible to be
thirty years old and single; the two states could not exist together; they were
contradictory. She was from a "good"
Virginia
family, in which care in breeding and
documentable height of family tree were acceptable substitutes for wealth and
talent. She had gone to Foxcroft and Sweetbriar, had been presented to society
(a second mortgage on the family home. Fox Knoll, had seen to all three), had
impeccable taste in clothes, was a creditable cook (people praised her gazpacho
and salmon mousse), held a relatively prestigious (for a young woman)
government job and was good-looking in a clean, Olivia Newton-John way.

 
          
 
Try though she often did, she couldn't figure
out what had gone wrong. Granted, she worked in a town where single women
outnumbered single men by two or more to one. But she had beaten worse odds
than those in college; she had been a standout. "Always remember,
Honey," her father had told her, "wherever you sit, that's the head
of the table."

 
          
 
Burnham could have given her a couple of
pointers, from the perspective of a disinterested older observer, had she
sought his counsel, but she wasn't about to confess that any cog in her
transmission had slipped, and he wasn't about to involve himself in anything
that would complicate his existence.

 
          
 
One simile that had crossed Burnham's mind
about Dyanna was that she made Narcissus look like Mother Teresa. Her nails
were honed and tempered
Toledo
blades; the several elements of her eyes were plucked, highlighted and
outlined as if they were to be presented to a sheik on a plate; her hair was
washed, set, combed and, finally, sprayed into
Carrara
permanence. She was a Barbie-Doll pieta.

 
          
 
As a conversationalist, she was an enraptured
listener and a fascinating raconteuse, as long as the subject was herself. When
the subject of the conversation wasn't herself, she attacked and wrestled with
it until it became herself.

 
          
 
Too cruel, Burnham admitted. Dyanna was
amiable and often thoughtful, and she did protect him, however much to protect
him was also in her interest. She knew a lot about the federal government and
the people in it. She was a superb typist, a mistress of the IBM Correcting
Selectric III as Casals was a master of the cello. She was polite on the
telephone, didn't spend all her time yakking with friends and didn't (so far as
he knew) gossip about him, not that there was much to gossip about.

 
          
 
Because Dyanna was incapable of assigning
blame for any part of her dilemma to any flaw in herself, she decided that the
reason she hadn't met Mr. Right was that she didn't move in the right
circles—meaning the circles traveled by men who were bright, sophisticated,
wise and wealthy enough to appreciate her manifold assets. And the reason she
didn't move in the right circles was that fate had cursed her with a succession
of second-rank bosses.

 
          
 
The acquisition of Top Secret clearance had
not, as she had assumed it would, been her passport to glamour and romance. Her
first job had been in the typing pool, where she worked nights tapping out
routine messages to Congress. Then she was promoted to the office whence
emanated routine presidential correspondence, where she typed letters that were
sent out over a presidential signature inscribed by a mechanical pen, form
letters that responded to comments from citizens, special blessings to couples
celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversaries, and, in one instance that
cost her boss an official reprimand, a message congratulating a rabbi on his
fifty years of Christian endeavor.

 
          
 
Her next job had been as one of two
secretaries to a special assistant to the Vice-President, which meant that at
least she was in daily contact with other living human beings, although most of
the contact consisted of placing phone calls to people in
Louisiana
who treated her like a hooker.

 
          
 
And now she worked for Timothy Burnham—definitely
better than the Vice-President's office, but still not in the White House
itself, which was where she longed to be. She knew she couldn't reasonably
aspire to work for the President directly—each of his secretaries had been
handpicked from a retinue of long-time retainers—and she was smart enough not
to want to work for the President: The men who went in to see the President
were so intense, so distracted, so nervous or so exalted (kings, for example)
that they wouldn't conceivably notice a pretty young thing, no matter how
striking she might be.

 
          
 
Her ideal was to work for someone like Mario
Epstein— surrounded by a large staff of eligible men on the way up; visited by figures
of renown and power in and out of government, people who would appreciate a
secretary putting them through before someone else; with instant access to, and
constant contact with, the President.

 
          
 
At this rate, though, Dyanna would be fifty
before she reached the level of secretary to an Epstein. So she had reluctantly
hitched her star to Burnham's and was forever urging him to reach higher, to
volunteer to write the most difficult messages to Congress, which would mean
weeks of late-night involvement with Epstein's staff, to write memos to the
President suggesting ingenious ways to attract public support for favorite
programs, to have confidential lunches with media biggies and submit perceptive
reports to the Oval Office.

 
          
 
These suggestions she made in the name of the
common weal, and Burnham would nod solemnly and take notes, which he would tear
off the pad and stuff in his pocket, since

 
          
 
he didn't want her to discover that his notes
were line-drawing speculations about how she would look in a series of sexual
contortions with a variety of land mammals.

 
          
 
This morning, as usual, Dyanna sat at her desk
with a mug of coffee, a manicure set and the society pages of the Post spread
before her. She looked up, startled, as Burnham flung the office door open,
popped quickly inside, shut it behind him and stood, panting, against the wall.

 
          
 
"Good morning?" she said.

 
          
 
"No, no it isn't," Burnham replied.
"Have you got a needle and thread?"

 
          
 
"Why?"

 
          
 
"Because I have had a small
misfortune." He turned his back and pointed at his trousers. "I would
show you the extent of the damage, but I fear that the sight of an expanse of
boxer shorts would throw you into a fever. Do you ..."

 
          
 
"I remember once, it was prom night,
senior year, and I had this brand-new dress on, a copy of a Galanos I think it
was, Mama said I looked so pretty she couldn't remember when, and I was
reaching up to do something to my hair, it had just been styled and all, and
..."

 
          
 
Burnham walked through the door into his
office, letting her yammer on. There would be no stopping her; her monologues
had the momentum of a locomotive. He checked Ijjs desk for phone messages
(there were none), for mail (none) and for work. His IN box was a teak
rectangle to which was affixed a pewter plaque inscribed with Burnham's
favorite quote from Dr. Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever' wrote,
except for money." A gift from Sarah in the days before she had been
infected by principle.

 
          
 
The shallowness of the stack of papers in the
IN box told Burnham that his workload was light—a couple of personal letters
for the President, a proclamation for something like National Self-Abuse
Prevention Week, and one or two 200-word addresses that might be delivered, or
might be released as if they had been delivered, to groups from the districts
of some congressmen to whom the President owed a favor. ("Representative
Whipple has told me a great deal about the fine work you ladies are doing in
the Leesburg Macrame and Dialysis Society. As you know, Dick Whipple is one of
my closest friends and most trusted advisors, an American who . . .")

           
 
He could knock off the whole day's work by
noon
, which meant that he could safely leave the
building for lunch. Maybe if, as seemed likely, the workloads of McGregor and
Butterworth, Burnham's two good friends among the other writers, were as light
as his, they might conspire to discover the President's schedule for the rest
of the afternoon, and if the coast was clear they might abandon ship for a
Lucullan two- or three-hour curative lunch, which itself would call for the
cure of a two-hour nap.

 
          
 
Perhaps the day could be rescued, after all.

 
          
 
". . . no time at all for a proper sewing
job," Dyanna droned on, "so Mama jig-timed it upstairs and found some
safety pins, can you believe it, and pinned me from the inside out, and not a
soul ever knew. Not even Trevor, he was my date, and we were not exactly
strangers if you get my meaning, even though nothing ever really happened.''

 
          
 
Burnham waited a beat or two, to make sure
Dyanna hadn't stopped only to get a fresh breath, then said, "Do you have
a needle and thread?"

 
          
 
"What for?" Dyanna arose from her
desk and stood in the doorway.