Wag the Dog (53 page)

“Taylor over there,” Joe said. “Hartman. Ray Matusow probably did the installation.”

“You've been listening to tapes of me?” Her face was a window that let them see every painful and shameful thought. She glared at all of them but focused in on Taylor. “You like that? You pervert. You scum.” Enraged, she advanced on him. “Does it excite you? Do you jerk off listening to me make love?”

Maggie swung to slap Taylor across the face. He had to know it was coming. Reflexively, he grabbed her arm. She started to swing with her other hand. Taylor began to twist the arm he held to force her back.

Joe pulled the 9-mm automatic from his belt holster, chambered a round, took half a step, and had the gun in Taylor's face.

Through the door, and through all the tumult and yelling, Sakuro Juzo heard the sound of the gun being cocked. He stepped into the room, a
shuriken
in his hand. Joe was aware of him but ignored him. “Go on, Taylor,” Joe said. “Hurt her.”

“Better not, Mel,” Bunker said, unperturbed, calm and slow. “After all, you deserve it, violating the privacy of such a lady. This is not some slut or cheating tramp.”

Taylor let go of Maggie.

Maggie slapped him. The room rang with the sound. The blow knocked Taylor's head back. It took an act of will, and the staring eye of a 9-mm in his face, to keep him from striking back.

“Broz, you're a dead man,” Taylor said.

“On behalf of—Bunker made a vague gesture that included everyone but made no explicit admissions—”I apologize to you.”

“Who else listened?” Maggie cried, full of hurt and wounded pride. “David?” She looked at Hartman. Then at Sheehan, who was red and sweating. “You did, you blushing
Catholic schoolboy. I hope you learned something.” Sheehan got redder, as if he had.

“I'm taking the wiretaps out,” Joe said. “You violated Ms. Lazlo's privacy. Think of her, now that we're being personal, as my wife. If the electronic shit comes back, I'm going to make it personal, Taylor. And you too,” he said to Hartman. He turned to the old man. “Any problem with that, C. H.? Come on, C. H., you owe me. I got Griff out. Got him home, didn't I?”

“That you did. Though he didn't last long. Not your fault. You did the best you could,” Bunker said, wisps of sadness around him. Then courtly: “You have a wonderful woman there and great expectations. Go with it, son, make the most of it. Brass ring . . . not there every time.”

“David?” Joe said.

“I don't really have any secrets. John Lincoln wants his privacy but—”

“However you want it, David,” Broz said emphatically, “that's how I'll play it. Deal?”

The agent came out from behind his desk. He had a file in his hand. He looked thoughtful, serious, friendly. “Here's the file they gave me on you.” He said it to Joe but handed it to Maggie. Then he looked back at Broz.

“Deal,” the agent said.

Joe nodded. He put the gun back in the holster. He put his arm around Maggie and they backed out.

The next morning Hartman flew to Tokyo. He had two days of meetings there. He continued eastward. He stopped in New Delhi. Several Indian film producers wanted to speak to him about representing them and their product in America. He continued eastward. To Baghdad.

L
INC WAS HAVING
a better time of it than he expected.

Jackie was being sweet. As if they weren't married. And she helped him with Dylan. She didn't play setup games, or maneuver for catastrophe. She seemed to understand, and more importantly, accept, that a man's attention span and tolerance for genuine infantalism is more limited than a woman's. In other words, she let him play with Dylan until he was bored or stressed, than she pitched in to relieve him.

The second day Linc decided to cook. He tried to pick a couple of good recipes. Their country kitchen, just remodeled for $42,950, not counting the hanging copper pots and the hand-painted tiles around the fireplace, had an entire set of bookshelves just for cookbooks. Actually, there were 148 of them. At first glance, they were very exciting. A sort of
pornographie gour-mandaise.
Image after image piled upon each other, each with its special demands and slightly incomprehensible instructions. Then there was the certainty that Jackie would hate whatever he made. Not just hate it, find a way to use it against him. He began to itch. His scalp and then his thighs. Then the itch moved around. It was a symptom—he was certain—of SASS, short attention span syndrome, a condition he'd read about only last month that he was now certain had ruled his childhood and affected his adulthood. It was SASS—possibly electrical, maybe chemical, could be glandular, but not psychological in the Freudian or Jungian neurotic sense—that made it difficult for him to deal with recalcitrant
physical objects, with teachers who had wanted to teach him stuff he already knew, teachers who had wanted to teach him stuff they thought they knew but didn't, with organizing closet space, filing, writing down his expenses every day, dumb fucks who wanted to talk about football as if it mattered.

He hastily put the cookbooks away.

Most men have two to six things they know how to make
¹⁰⁵
and, except during the chemically altered state of fresh courtship when they can read and execute recipes right out of the cookbook on the very first go-round, that's what they fall back on. Beagle could mix mayo with curry and canned tuna, he could make omelets and French toast, he had recently figured out rice, he knew how to grill meats and, by extension, fish. Oh, yeah, he could make a salad with packaged dressing and pasta with packaged sauce. He added his own stuff to the sauce so it didn't have that totally store-bought quality and was proud of it.

He asked Jackie what she thought of grilled fish, rice, and a salad. There were so many things that Jackie could have said: “I told you last week I'm on a diet of no rice, how could you forget?” “I bet you forgot that your son is allergic to that awful buttermilk dressing you always buy.” “I told you we're eating dinner with Francis and his wife tonight, you never pay any attention to anything I say, do you?” “I hope you don't burn the food, the way you always do.” “Don't let the fish man see how little you know about shopping or he'll sell you the stuff that's old and smelly.” But she didn't say a single one of those things. Or anything like them.

She responded as if he said something reasonable and that
cooking dinner was a sensible thing to do. She didn't correct him at all. “Can we shop together?” she said. “That'll be fun.”

Beagle agreed. So they got in their Saab Turbo—their country car—packed up the baby backpack and the stroller, put Dylan in the baby seat, and went off to market together. They bought fresh produce, fresh herbs and spices, mahimahi—which used to be called dolphin, but everyone got tired of explaining that it wasn't porpoise and it sounded more exotic and expensive anyway—some local chardonnay, a bit flinty, but coming into its own, and if one was truly objective about it, superior to the French. Nobody fought. Dylan was cute as the dickens. A bit like Dennis the Menace, but when it's your kid, and you like each other, if only for the afternoon, that makes it adorable. So what if he pulled some wine bottles off the shelf—they didn't break. He grabbed a peach at the fruit stand and flung it—it only bruised, it didn't splatter, and no one was hurt. Good arm. And he banged on the lobster tank. It didn't break, and if the lobsters minded, they weren't going to live long enough to write a letter to their congressman. When he got cranky, which he did, they gave him a bottle and put him in the backpack on Beagle's back, where he fell asleep. And wasn't that adorable. Jackie made Beagle stop in front of a mirror and look at his son, head flopped sideways at an angle impossible for adults, totally casual, completely trusting, a snot bubble expanding from his nose, drool dripping on Da-da's shoulder. It was heart-melting.

When they got home, Maria, the country cook and housekeeper, made them a light lunch and put the groceries away so that Beagle could cook with them later. She would have fed Dylan in the kitchen—it was easier to clean—but his parents wanted their one and only son with them in the breakfast nook. When John Lincoln got frustrated trying to explain to Dylan why he shouldn't fling food at grown-ups, Jackie took over and handled the situation.

In the afternoon they strolled through the vineyards admiring all that they owned.

John Lincoln cooked dinner. He made separate portions for Dylan and his nanny. They ate in the kitchen. Line wasn't
up to another experience like lunch quite so soon. Tomorrow he could try it again. Eating with the kid twice a day was pushing the outside of the envelope.

Dinner was successful. Jackie seemed to actually like it and ate most of her portion and didn't complain about anything, even his choice of wine. There was a fat moon when the sun went down, and a cool breeze. They strolled together, not talking. Not talking was the safest thing they could say to each other.

Jackie had some Maui-Wowie,
sensimilla,
really fine and exotic stuff with blue tendrils—some incredibly potent herbal mutation, $500 an ounce, a real one-toke smoke. So they each took a hit or two and . . . yeah . . . they turned out the lights . . . lit a candle . . . some soft music and he . . . he reached out . . . he touched her . . . she didn't flinch . . . or explain why she didn't want him to touch her . . . and by golly, John Lincoln Beagle had sexual intercourse with his wife. It wasn't any of your fancy fucking or inventive hinky-pinky Joy of Sex, Dr. Ruth strawberry gel and edible undies, but still! She even let him kiss her.

 

 

 

¹⁰⁵
There is no question that this is sexual stereotype. There is no question that there are many men who routinely cook, cook well, cook from cookbooks without flinching. Similarity, there are many women who can't or don't or won't do those things. This particular stereotype has been studied “scientifically”
(Food Industry Monthly,
11/89;
Psychology Today,
9/88;
Green Grocer; The Journal of the Retail Food Purveyor,
5/91), and in each case the hard marketing data states that a very large segment of the adult male population fit this profile.

I
CAN
'
T TELL
you what a treat it is to make love without goddamn country music blasting. The window open and nothing but the sounds of the surf and of each other.

After the Hartman confrontation I start tracing LDs and tearing them out. The next day I have a guy from Fleischer's Audio Security in to double-check my work, and he does in fact find two microphones that I missed. I also invest in a Micron 28-40 which broadcasts microwave and radio-wave interference patterns. It will prevent transmission from a wide variety of LDs to off-site listening ports, but don't get one if you have a short-tempered neighbor with a satellite dish.

That night we are alone for the first time since we met. The feeling of—relief I guess it is, relaxation or something—it's like getting out of Vietnam, to Tokyo, Bangkok, Sydney, or Oahu for R&R. 'Cause the thing about Nam was there were no battle lines, so it never stopped. You'd be in a bar, a whorehouse, somebody throws a bomb or a grenade. In camp, if there were Vietnamese in the camp, mama-sans who did the laundry or mess boys or any of that, even ARVN troops, some of them were always some of Them.