Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (14 page)

 
          
 
"I told you." Burnham gestured at
his trousers.

 
          
 
"That's not my job."

 
          
 
"What's not your job? To get me a
needle?"

 
          
 
"I don't have to sew anything."

 
          
 
"I'm not asking you to . . ."

 
          
 
"I don't even have to get you coffee.
It's only the goodness of my heart."

 
          
 
"Don't sew."

 
          
 
"I could file a grievance."

 
          
 
"I don't want you to sew."

 
          
 
"You don't?"

 
          
 
"I'll do it. Can you just get me a
needle?"

 
          
 
"Do you know how to sew?"

 
          
 
"Spare me your sexist drivel and get me a
needle."

 
          
 
Caught, Dyanna blushed, turned to her desk and
rooted through the drawers.

 
          
 
Burnham pulled off his trousers and sat behind
his desk and spread the split seat of the seersucker pants across the blotter.
It was agape from the base of the fly to the belt loops. The seam had a little
flap inside it. Where did that go, inside or outside? Did you sew from the
inside out or the outside in? How close together should the stitches be?

 
          
 
Dyanna returned with a needle and a spool of
dark-blue thread, and not until she placed the needle and thread in Burnham's
hand did she realize the implication of the pants on the desk. If the pants
were on the desk, what was on him? Another fuchsia flush started at her neck
and crept quickly up to her cheeks.

 
          
 
"I know what you're thinking," Burnham
said.

 
          
 
"You do not." Now the blush was
making her temples tingle.

 
          
 
"What color are the shorts? Are there
garters or knee socks? Knobby knees? Milky white thighs?"

 
          
 
"You're sick!"

 
          
 
Burnham tried twice to thread the needle and
missed both times.

 
          
 
"Here." Dyanna took the needle and
thread from him, threaded the needle, turned the thread, bit off the end and
tied it, and handed it back.

 
          
 
"Thanks." Burnham pinched the two
sides of the seam together and, from beneath, plunged the needle up through the
fabric.

 
          
 
"That's not the way to do it."

 
          
 
"That's the way I do it."

 
          
 
"It's not the right way."

 
          
 
"Hey." Bumham looked up at her.
"I don't think this is a team sport. Either I'll do it or you can do
it."

 
          
 
"It's not my job," Dyanna said
weakly, torn between the opposing forces of her femininity.

 
          
 
Burnham took another stitch. The phone rang.
Dyanna didn't budge. It rang again.

 
          
 
Burnham looked at the phone. "Is that
your job, or do I have to hire a specialist?"

 
          
 
"Oh," Dyanna said, as if coming to.
"Oh." She reached across the desk and punched the blinking light
button and picked up the receiver. "Mr. Burnham's office."

 
          
 
Like a dog sensing something preternatural,
Burnham felt a galvanic crackle coming from Dyanna, and he knew there was
trouble. He looked at her and saw her mouth hanging half open and her fist
clenching the phone. His mind galloped among the possibilities. One of his
children had been injured.

 
          
 
Sarah had been in a car accident. His mother
had been assaulted in the Ritz Carlton in
Boston
. War.

 
          
 
"Yessir," Dyanna said.
"Yessir." She hung up.

 
          
 
Burnham stared at her, holding his breath.

 
          
 
“The President wants to see you."

 
          
 
Burnham sighed. And chuckled. No war. No
kidnapping. No maiming. "Sure." He held up his pants.
"Thoughtless bitch always calls at the worst times."

 
          
 
"He does!" Dyanna was stunned.

 
          
 
No, Burnham thought. No. She's serious.
"What about?"

 
          
 
"He ... Mr. Cobb . . . didn't say."

 
          
 
"When?"

 
          
 
"Now. Right now!"

 
          
 
"I can't! I don't have any pants!"

 
          
 
"What do you mean? You have to!"

 
          
 
"Like this?" Burnham jumped up,
knocking his swivel chair spinning behind him, and waved a hand at his plaid
boxer shorts, at his pasty white thighs marred by tiny bruises from the allergy
shots he poked into himself four times every week, at his hairless, wrinkled
knees and at the navy blue cotton socks that came up just beneath them.
"You're not allowed to see the President of the
United States
without pants on. It's . . . it's
illegal!"

 
          
 
"Put 'em on, then. Just don't turn
around."

 
          
 
"And walk like a duck with a broom up its
ass? No thanks. Tell him I'm in a meeting."

 
          
 
"Are you crazy?” Dyanna shouted.
"Here. Gimme here. For pity sakes." She snatched the trousers from
his hands, looked at the ragged stitches he had made and tried to bite the
thread to draw them out. But he had double-stitched and pulled them so tight
that she couldn't get her teeth around them. "Give me some scissors!"

 
          
 
Burnham opened the top drawer of his desk.
"I don't have any scissors!" He looked at his watch, as if suddenly
aware that he was keeping The Most Powerful Man in the World waiting because he
had a rip in his pants. "Hurry!"

 
          
 
"I can't! I can't get the stitches
out!"

 
          
 
Burnham yanked open drawer after drawer. Pads and
paperclips and rulers and rubber bands spewed out onto the mg. No scissors. But
he spied a solution. He grabbed the trousers back from Dyanna and laid them
carefully across the

 
          
 
blotter. He placed her hands at the top and
bottom of the huge rip and told her to pull hard, keeping the rip closed.

 
          
 
He picked up his big desk stapler, fit it over
the top of the trousers and, woridng from the top downward, slammed the staples
into the fabric—bam! bam! bam! bam! He flung the stapler aside and examined the
pants: They would hold, unless the President intended to grapple with him.

 
          
 
"Remember now," Dyanna said, as she
watched Burnham hop delicately into the trousers, "whatever he wants, say
yes. I 'spect he wants you to do a special job of work for him, something real
important like where my contacts could come in real handy, and you can tell him
that. If it's travel, and they say he's thinking of going to
Europe
and maybe
Asia
at least one more time, don't worry about
Sarah and the kids 'cause I'll make sure someone looks after 'em while we're
away. It could be that he wants us to move into the White House so's he can
call on us more often, and that's okay too, it won't be as big as this but lots
more exciting and if we have to we can share an office 'cause there's not that
much phone-calling to be bothersome, you know that."

 
          
 
Burnham listened to her with one ear. Most of
his brain was engrossed in defense preparedness—trying to isolate the possible
areas of vulnerability. He had never before been summoned to see the President,
and he didn't know what such a summons meant. If a phone call was usually bad
news, what was a meeting? Potential catastrophe.

 
          
 
Burnham had met with the President several
times, but only as one of the group of writers. Usually, after the President
had expressed displeasure with a number of speeches ("My cat shits better
stuff than that!"), Cobb would counsel gently that it was difficult for
the writers to write a given speech unless they knew what the President wanted
to say, and since the President's normal response to an inquiry about what he
wanted to say to a group was "Oh, something nice," the writers were left
to guess what the President thought would be nice.

 
          
 
"They're my writers," the President
would say. "They're supposed to know what I want to say."

 
          
 
"But, sir," Cobb would reply,
"it's hard for them to anticipate you if they don't know you."

 
          
 
"If they don't know me, how come they're
working for me?"

 
          
 
"They're professionals, sir, the best
money can buy. That's what you ordered, after the . . .
Brandon
business ..." (The six professional
writers had been brought in as firemen, to douse the conflagration ignited by
Brandon Mundy, the President's second cousin, whom the President had brought
with him to the White House as his "personal wordifier." Mundy was a
mean, vindictive poetaster whose work had been published in The American
Rifleman, Grit and Velvet, and who worshiped Ezra Pound for his war-years
poems. The first speech Mundy had written for the President, to an
Italian-American group, had begun, "lo sono un WOP. And I'm proud of it,
'cause I know that WOP means you came to this country With Out Papers, and that
means you really wanted to get in." Mundy's second effort had been an
address to a right-to-life group, and it had contained the sentiment, "To
paraphrase Marie Antoinette: Let 'em use coathangers." There had been no
third Mundy speech.)

 
          
 
"You're right. I did." The President
would ponder for a moment and then say, "Warner, I want every one of the
writers to spend a full day right at my side, twenty-four hours stickin' as
close to me as my shorts. One by one, I want 'em to see me, hear me, smell me,
feel me, get to know my every mood, so when they get an assignment they can say
by instinct, 'This is what my President would want to say.' "

 
          
 
Cobb would agree, and a day later he would
write a memo to the President with a proposed schedule for the
writer-in-residence program. The memo would not be answered. Cobb would send
another one. It, too, would go unanswered. In three or four weeks' time, Cobb
would get a call from the Appointments Secretary, informing him that the
President thought that a more economical way to get to know the writers would
be to gather with them for an informal session in the Cabinet Room. "No
other staff," the President would be quoted as having said. "Just
some real give-and-take with my boys."