Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (60 page)

 
          
 
"That's absurd!"

 
          
 
"Hey, man . . . I'm just the
messenger."

 
          
 
Pym looked at Eva and saw her looking at him,
and in her expression he saw reflected his own feelings of panic and impending
doom.

 
          
 
"What do you want me to do?"

 
          
 
"Find out the truth."

 
          
 
"But I know the truth! He's completely
innocent. He doesn't know he's working for anybody."

 
          
 
"I'm afraid your word won't wash,
man."

 
          
 
"What will?"

 
          
 
"Make them catch him. Make sure they have
to expose him publicly."

 
          
 
"How do I do that? They can cover up
anything they want."

 
          
 
"Not if you feed somebody first, like
your friend Peter Jennings, feed him enough so he can ask a lot of embarrassing
questions and back them up with a few hard facts. That's the great thing about
America
: We can keep the pricks honest.''

 
          
 
"Then what happens?"

 
          
 
"They expose him, they look like a bunch
of assholes, and the hostess knows you were telling the truth."

 
          
 
"To us, I mean. We're exposed, too."

 
          
 
"You don't think the hostess would
abandon you, do you? Once the machinery's in place, she'll have you out and on
your way home, safe and sound."

 
          
 
"Home," Pym said.

 
          
 
"You know."

 
          
 
"Yes, I know."

 
          
 
"Okay, man? You know what you got to
do?"

 
          
 
"I know," said Pym, who knew nothing
of the sort but who wanted to end the conversation before the numbness that was
creeping through his limbs rendered him stuporous.

 
          
 
"Good. And take my advice: Don't dick
around, get on it right away, 'cause when this sucker goes down, it'll go down
fast and heavy."

 
          
 
Teal hung up.

 
          
 
Pym replaced the receiver. He felt
eviscerated.

 
          
 
Eva watched him for a moment, then said,
"I have to warn Timothy."

 
          
 
"No!" Pym clutched at the dregs of
his fleeting spirit and said, "I forbid it."

 
          
 
"You forbid it," she sneered.
"Feel free. Forbid anything you want." She glanced at her watch and
looked around the room for her purse.

 
          
 
"You can't help him," Pym said.
"He can't help himself."

 
          
 
"I owe him the chance to try."

 
          
 
"Be smart, Eva, don't be noble. You may
think he's in love with you, but when it comes to saving his own life, believe
me, he'll throw you to the wolves."

 
          
 
"Maybe. If he does, I won't blame
him."

 
          
 
When Eva had left, Pym poured himself a glass
of sherry and sat on the couch. He should sort his options, locate some avenue
of escape. But instead of thinking, he gazed around the room and found himself
noticing things he hadn't paid attention to in years: an Andrew Wyeth print he
had bought at a suburban flea market; a chipped Boehm porcelain bird; a copy of
an Fames chair he had found in a secondhand store, whose leather seat had been
squashed into a perfect contour of Pym's reclining posterior—^the catalogue of
the life Pym had fashioned for himself in America, all taken for granted till
now. He regarded them with new affection, for they represented everything he
had—and everything he would soon surely lose.

 
          
 
BuRNHAM said, "Thanks, Emilio," and
hung up the phone.

 
          
 
Eva would appear at Cantina Romana in a few
minutes, and Emilio would give her the simple, terse message (never entrust a
complicated message to a man for whom English was not his mother tongue): Burnham
had been delayed by a sudden case of the B.T.W.s. No matter where they had
agreed to eat, she always stopped first at the Cantina, for Emilio was a
reliable romantic who delighted in playing broker for their liaisons.

 
          
 
She might have a salad at the Cantina and then
go to a movie, or browse in the bookstores or health-food shops that stayed
open till
nine o'clock
,
or wander through
Georgetown
and be entertained by the frenetic rutting rituals.

 
          
 
At ten or so, she would let herself into the
tiny furnished apartment they had rented on
O Street
. Their landlord, who lived upstairs, was a
decorator with exquisite taste and an abundance of antiques awaiting placement
in great homes. He refused to rent to students, couples with children, single
men with pets and single women, period ("Slobs," he averred,
"all slobs"), which limited his potential clientele. Burnham had been
honest about his situation: He was a White House employee in the midst of a
divorce proceedings, who kept a room at the Y in order to accommodate the legal
niceties, and who needed a quiet place to spend quiet evenings with his lady
friend. The landlord must have seen in Burnham a man desperate to avoid any and
all unpleasantness such as might arise from nonpayment of rent, breakage or
excessive noise, and so, upon receipt of two months' security and two months'
rent in advance, he gave Burnham the key and his blessing.

 
          
 
Eva would read or watch television until about
11:30
, and then, if Burnham had not arrived,
would go to bed, knowing that in any event short of planetary cataclysm, he
would be there before morning.

 
          
 
For Burnham, the arrangement was comfortable,
secure and flavored with the spice of tryst—perfect for the time being, which
was all he could ask since his entire life was being lived moment to moment.
His past had been stolen from him—he still couldn't believe that a fifteen-year
marriage had popped like a soap bubble, and somewhere within him was the knowledge
that it hadn't popped but had rotted, and someday he might invest the time and
the agony to uncover the roots of the rot. Right now, he couldn't plot his
future confidently beyond the next thirty minutes. He had no idea what he
wanted, much less how to pursue it. All he knew for sure was that now, this
minute, he felt good about himself, and that, at least, was a limb he could
clutch with some feeling of safety.

 
          
 
He looked at his watch. Two minutes to go. An
hour ago, Evelyn Witt had phoned to say that the President wanted to see Burnham
at exactly
eight o'clock
and that Burnham should cancel any plans he might have for the rest of the
evening. Burnham had said, "Fine," and, as he hung up, had smiled at
the recollection of how he would have responded to such a summons a month ago:
arhythmia, a rash, tension headaches and/or hyperventilation.

 
          
 
His reaction now was simple curiosity at some
of the unusual signals sent by the summons. For one thing, the President had
been scheduled to speak at a National Press Club dinner—Burnham had edited the
speech and added a few jokes he and the President had composed together—and
Presidents, no matter how roundly they loathed some or all of the press corps
at any given time, did not contemn lightly the whole Fourth Estate by backing
out of a major dinner at the last minute. This discourtesy would be costly, but
obviously the President had determined that it was a cost worth paying.

 
          
 
Then, too, there was the peremptory tone of
the call. Normally, the President would call himself, and ask Burnham to come
by around eight, and promise to try to be finished at a reasonable hour.

 
          
 
Whatever was up was of an import and urgency
sufficient to lead the President to dispense with all pleasantries.

 
          
 
Burnham decided that the leading candidate
among all the possible issues was
Honduras
. Congress was paralyzed by internal
bickering over
Honduras
, and a few senators—like Jesse Helms on the
right and Alan Cranston on the left—had capitalized on the President's
indecision by launching noisy campaigns that threatened to wrest the leadership
role away from the White House.

 
          
 
The President must have finally decided to
decide what to do about
Honduras
.

 
          
 
As he buttoned his collar and fiddled with the
knot in his tie, Burnham realized that not once in all his musings had he
considered that he, or something he had or hadn't done, might be the problem for
which the President had summoned him. A month ago, imprisoned by—what did they
call it? —infantile egocentrism (pumping paranoia was more like it), he would
have known that he was the problem.

 
          
 
Now he knew for sure that he hadn't done
anything reprehensible, and for certain that nothing he could do would be worth
the President's canceling a speech for.

 
          
 
Was this maturity or was it cynicism?

 
          
 
He tapped lightly on the connecting door to
the President's little office—a reflexive, unnecessary courtesy to which the
President, had he known about it, would have said something like, "Christ,
Tim, what you think I'm doin' in there, bangin' one of the cleaning
women?"—then opened it, closed it behind him and crossed to the door to
the Oval Office.

 
          
 
The President was standing alone, his back to
Burnham, looking out over the darkening South Lawn. The searchlights had been
turned on the
Washington
Monument
, and it gleamed like a golden needle in the
twilight. The President's shoulders drooped in a way that made him look too
small for his suit jacket, as if the unrelenting demands of the office were
sapping substance from the man and somehow shrinking him.

 
          
 
Burnham felt like a voyeur, and he cleared his
throat to let the President know he was there.

 
          
 
The President spoke without turning around.
"D'you ever think about the unborn, Tim?"

 
          
 
"The unborn, sir?" What are we
talking about here? Burnham wondered. Abortion? No, impossible. This President
didn't need any help formulating policy about abortion. He had long since made
clear his conviction that abortion was a nonissue, something cooked up by the
Catholic Church and the Protestant fundamentalists as a convenient banner
around which to rally their straying flocks. "Do you mean posterity?"

 
          
 
"No. 'Posterity' is a generality. Like
'the hungry.' Somebody asks you to help 'the hungry,' you can kiss it off
without any conscience. But if they plop a starving kid named Johnny down on
your doorstep and ask if you'll give him some food, that puts it to you. No. I
don't give a damn about posterity—that's a lie, of course, but what I mean is,
the thought of posterity isn't what makes me do something or not do something,
you can't spend your life sucking up to historians—but times like this, I
really do think about the unborn."