Big If Page 12

  He remembered the intermission at Mandy’s fourth-grade Thanksgiving pageant. Not a beer in sight and he found himself talking to a dad who said he worked for the FCC. Tashmo toyed with the man, asking intricate questions about spectrum auctions.

  “Like what if, for example, I wanted my own band. What exactly are the steps that are involved?”

  Shirl had made him go to the pageant. Mandy played a singing turkey and Tashmo wreaked his vengeance on this poor fake regulator.

  The guy-who’s-not-a-spy tried to duck the question. He said, “I don’t work in that part of the shop. The Commission, as you know, is quite the little empire.”

  “What part do you work in?” Tashmo asked.

  “The other part.”

  “What does your part do?”

  “Pretty much nothing about spectrum auctions.”

  Tashmo told his neighbor, Bo Gould, about the pageant dad, forced by his position to pretend to be a bureaucrat, when he was, in fact, a different kind of bureaucrat. They were drinking Sambuca shooters in the Goulds’ elaborate finished basement, playing with Bo’s HO train set.

  Bo was smashed that night. He said, “Want to know what I really do?”

  Tashmo said, “You work for Fannie Mae. You sing the fight song. Sing it for me, Bo.”

  Bo sang a verse—

  “O Fannie Mae, O Fannie Mae

  You spread the credit widely…”

  Then he waved. “Fannie Mae is bullshit. It’s called cover, Tash. I don’t even know why they assigned me that one. I requested the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, but they said that cover was taken. I’m on the waiting list, in case a spot opens up. But my real job is listening from space. My specialty is France. I could be fired for telling you this. Hope nobody heard me.”

  After Bo passed out, Tashmo wandered upstairs, taking one last beer from the fridge, making himself a quick burger with fried onions.

  To the living room. How do spies live? Picture-window views of other picture windows. A recliner chair, brown leather. He’d always wanted one of these. Test it out, tilt it back. They look so comfortable, but how the fuck do you get up?

  Sip the beer. Where’d I put that burger?

  He pushed himself up. Bookshelves always tell a story. He read the spines by the streetlights, Principles of Radio, Birding on the Chesapeake, Michener, Uris, von Clausewitz, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. He stepped back from the books and felt the burger squishing underfoot. He peeled it from the carpet and took another bite as Leah Gould, Bo’s wife, padded down the stairs.

  Tashmo nodded at her, chewing. “How’s it going, Lee?”

  Leah was a handsome woman. She played a bit of tennis at Patuxent Park and when she hit a forehand, she went Uh.

  She stared at him that night. She wore pom-pom slippers and a forbidding nightie. She said, “Have you been frying something, Tash?”

  It was clearly time to slide. He walked home under the trees, swinging his arms, finishing the beer. He felt it strongly, walking home, the funky hope.

  He woke Shirl up, climbing into bed.

  Shirl said, “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Over at Bo’s. We played with his train set, demolished his Sambuca. Turns out he’s a major U.S. spy.”

  Shirl said, “It’s three a.m.”

  “Already?”

  She rolled away from him.

  Tashmo said that Bo could listen to any conversation in the world.

  Silence.

  Shirl said, “What’s it like inside? I heard they were redoing their kitchen.”

  When the men went out with Carter, their families got together for potluck supper on Miss America Night, or had cookouts with games and prizes for the kids by the picnic shelter in Patuxent Park. The wives of the detail made an effort to be friends, even though they had nothing in common except the fact that their husbands had been thrown together by the whim of the assignments wheel, guarding a president none of them had voted for. The wives might not have picked the same husbands again, given the opportunity, and surely didn’t pick, as friends, the wives of men their husbands hadn’t picked, and the kids picked no one, not Carter, not their fathers, not their fathers’ coworkers, and not their fathers’ coworkers’ kids, yet everybody was supposed to bond at these events, and every family brought a dog. The dogs fought, humped, and ran away. The kids blamed each other’s dogs and screamed until they blacked out from the lack of oxygen. It seemed like perfect hell to Tashmo, but Shirl said it was good to get together once a month, eat potluck with Sue Rhodes and Lydia Felker. It was good to get together and watch the world broadcast premiere of The Way We Were or the Miss America, root for good old North Dakoty, the brave deaf girl from Oregon whose singing was disturbing, Hawaii’s always pretty but never seems to win, and what the heck is up in Massachusetts? Is Neet illegal there?

  He went to a few picnics, watched the wives. He didn’t jerk off at the picnics. No, he waited till he got home and Shirl was definitely sleeping. He had an iron rule: no Secret Service wives, look and lust, but don’t touch. He tried to obey this rule, to masturbate the urge away, but despite his diligence—well.

  He’d be packing to leave Camp David and another agent would catch him in the bunkhouse.

  “Hey Tash, you going back?”

  Tashmo would crack wise. “See me packing, dipshit?”

  “Listen, do a favor. Goddamn wife can’t change a fuse. She says half the house is dark. It’s on your way home, man.”

  Or: “I got some dirty shirts. Hey Tash, you heading back?”

  He’s thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, driving down the Balt-Wash in his suedest phase, smoking Trues, drinking beer, listening to Hot Country hits, pulling through the cloverleaf, heading like a missile for his buddies’ bedrooms.

  This happened many times: the wife is under Tashmo, cradled in his arms, his St. Olaf medal falling on her breasts. The doorbell rings, a pair of sweaty Seventh-Day Adventists. They showed up every third day in that part of Maryland.

  The wife looks toward the door. “Let’s not get it.”

  “No,” says Tashmo, full inside her, “I don’t think we should.”

  He didn’t feel too guilty, cuckolding agents his own age. He figured that after seven years or so, a marriage works or doesn’t, all by itself. Nothing he did when he dropped off the laundry could have any influence, and the last thing Tashmo wanted, ever, then or now, was influence. The junior agents were a different deal, Texans, Californians, and midwesterners, young husbands recruited out of Crim Division stations near their homes, where their wives could see their mothers and their sisters every weekend. The Service did these couples a disservice, he believed, bringing them east when their marriages were fragile, new and tenuous, untenured, dumping the wives in the Balt-Wash Corridor, putting the husbands on the road. The wives didn’t know anyone in Maryland and along comes Tashmo with his Trues, his boots, and his impressive mastery of fuses.

  The wife is barefoot, living in the dark, possibly unable to cook. She’s wearing jeans cut under her belly, her frizzy Orphan Annie hair tied up in a tube sock. It’s not like he came with anything in mind, but she offers to show him where the fuse box is, and her jeans and feet slap the floor as she walks, her ass going this way and that. The house smells like pot and pot pourri. He takes out the old fuse, screws in the new, and throws the knife switch. Nine lamps go on, two radios, a blender, and a blow dryer in the bathroom. Tashmo thinks this little waif must’ve gone around trying each appliance, thinking—what? It’s not the fuse?

  The wife’s a little sheepish in her jeans. “Takes a man’s touch, I guess.”

  Bullshit in the wicker chairs and they have a beer. She’s summarizing the latest issue of Esquire, which is open on the coffee table next to the clamshell ashtray, the lidless jar of Noxzema, and the digital clock which blinks 7:32, 7:32, 7:32, blinking as a warning so you’ll know that it’s not really 7:32.

  He hooks a finger in her belt loop. “These are fine. Whe
re’d you get ’em?”

  She names a store in Fresno and they tongue-kiss. Swiveling heads, all the yummy noises, the lift-off of the tank top, a joint operation, and, underneath, the blazing nurse-white glory of Maidenform bra. The jeans are wiggled out of—she turns her back shyly. Her panties are a color called mello yello. Her toenails are a color called pearl.

  There are far too many items on the bed, little Chiclet pillows for decoration, others with arms for reading on, and the normal sleeping pillows, which are also in the way, and it seems he’s pulling pillows from his ass.

  He mounts her.

  She says, “Ouchie.”

  Her legs are badly burned in back. She says, “I fell asleep in the sun.”

  They try again. She’s on top, jouncing titties swinging to her rhythm, nipples circling his face, making him a little dizzy. He grabs her nipples to hold them still and she cries, “Yes!”

  This was how he started with Lydia Felker. It was early summer, 1980. Carter was ahead of Reagan in most polls. Outside, the hired men were cutting lawns.

  Tashmo ate his sloppy joe alone. Shirl was in the ultraviolet closet off their bedroom, misting her orchids. Jeanette, Tashmo’s college daughter, was channel-surfing in the den.

  He rinsed his plate and plastic glass, left them in the sink, and went out through the sliding doors to the patio. He sat at the picnic table, looked out at the lawn and flowerbeds.

  He slept with Lydia Felker for seven months, into 1981. Lloyd, her husband, Tashmo’s best friend at the time, suspected nothing. It ended after Hinckley. Lloyd became a planner and Tashmo never spoke to Lydia again.

  The years passed. Then, after Felker’s disappearance in the spring, Lydia called the Movements Desk, left a message: Tashmo—call me, it’s important. She left another, left a third. Tashmo, fearing that some ball of dirty string was coming unwound, never called her back. He never called her back because it was over, Lydia and Lloyd, the green days of the suede phase, and Tashmo was now trying to rebuild a life with Shirl. How could it be good news, messages from Lydia, after all these years?

  Tashmo lit a cigarette, sitting on a picnic bench. He knew that he had screwed up when he banged his best friend’s wife, and he had done his level best through the intervening years to cover up all traces of the indiscretion. He was following the model of his hero, Ronald Reagan. Tashmo as a bodyguard had watched Reagan in the last years, ’87, ’88, beat off scandal upon scandal, Ollie North, the Contras, missile shipments to Iran, the great man diminished by a web of shredded paper. There were some who even said that Tashmo in those years began to become Ronald Reagan, to walk like him (the jaunty rancher’s strut) and cock a six-gun smile in the Reagan way, and now it seemed that Tashmo was doomed to end his tenure as the Dutchman had, dodging allegations, shrewdly feigning cluelessness. It was a subtle danger of bodyguarding greatness. Exposure to that wattage of charisma seemed to hollow out the everyday. You came to see yourself not as a man with the duties of suburbia, but rather as the president of the country called your life.

  The bench was cold on Tashmo’s ass. He took a walk around the yard.

  Spring would be coming in a month or so, and he would start his spring routine, rising early when he was home, drinking coffee in his boxing gloves, doing sixty seconds on the speed bag in the basement, wearing nasty old swim trunks. In the summer, he would go outside, still shirtless, showing off his Buster Crabbe physique. He’d pull the hose like a mule from the bushes to the flowerbed, and water slowly, making the dirt dark, cigarette on his lips, the scene slowly building toward a climactic coffee piss, Tashmo in the garden, his back to the house, the trunks tucked under his nuts. If he saw Bo Gould going off to the black budget, Tashmo would wave with the hose, thumbing off a high Good morning! spray, pissing with the other hand as he waved to Bo. That would be a shining time—him going, hose going, Bo going; everything is good.

  Jeanette moped through the kitchen, coming from the den, going to the john, carrying a melted icepack in her right hand, the TV remote in her left. Tashmo was sitting at the table, drinking his iced tea.

  She said, “I need a ride to school tomorrow morning, Daddy.”

  Tashmo said, “That’s nice.”

  Jeanette went to the bathroom.

  Shirl came in, fixed herself a plate of sloppy joe, and sat down to eat. She said, “Loudon called—I almost forgot. Loudon in L.A., he said. Is that old Loudon Rhodes?”

  Tashmo said, “Of course it is. How many Loudons could a person know?”

  “Well I asked him and he wouldn’t say. I kept saying, ‘Is this Loudon Rhodes?’”

  “He was probably on a cell phone. He’s secrecy-obsessed.”

  Loudon Rhodes, the ex-Reagan bodyguard, was living in L.A., running a private security firm, making millions in retirement. His agents guarded stars and hot directors, fending off stalker fans, paparazzi, aspiring screenwriters, and divorce attorneys. He called Tashmo from his hot tub or his boat, from Aspen, Sundance, and Cannes, just to chew the fat and talk about old times. He was always telling Tashmo that he ought to hang it up, retire, join the real world.

  Shirl ate the sloppy joe. “He kept saying, ‘The crow is flying.’ He said you’d understand. He said it twice, the crow. I said, ‘Loudon, is that you?’”

  Shirl had the local callback number on a scrap of paper. She gave it to her husband. She asked, “How is Sue-Bee?”

  Tashmo said, “They’re pretty much divorced. Loudon moved to Malibu. He’s dating Malibu Barbie.”

  Shirl said, “I never liked that man, even when I did. What happened to Kobe?”

  “Cokehead,” Tashmo said. “He was working for his dad, hanging out with stars, and they got him into the cocaine. Poor Loudon had to shell out for two rehabs.”

  Tashmo poured another tea and sat across from Shirl, trying to come up with a way to say that he wasn’t going north to bang other women, without admitting that he ever had.

  He said, “Can I get you something while I’m gone?”

  “Like what?” she said, still eating.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something special, something nice, something you’ve been wanting for a long time, something they only have in New Hampshire.”

  “Just don’t bring back the flu.”

  “I don’t control that, Shirl. I work the crowds, people sneeze. It goes with the territory.”

  “Remember how sick I was the last time? I was stuffed up for a month. I missed two book club meetings. They were good books too.”

  Jeanette emerged from the bathroom, changed her icepack ice from the freezer trays. Jeanette was a sophomore at Martha Custis College in the Shenandoah. Her sweatshirt said CUSTIS. She closed the fridge and headed for the den, holding the icepack to the right side of her face.

  Tashmo stopped her with his arm. “Let’s see.”

  Jeanette paused, slouching. He looked up at her eye, which was puffy and purple-yellow.

  He whistled. “It’s a beaut.”

  She said, “Daddy,” and went into the den.

  Jeanette had rushed a southern belle sorority called Rho Rho Rho, and had come back from pledge weekend (or Hell Fest as they called it at Custis) with a fat black eye and minor kidney damage.

  “God I’m proud,” said Tashmo after Jeanette had left.

  Shirl rinsed her plate and scraped the skillet, and slowly they returned to the business of the cars.

  “If it starts,” she said, “and if it doesn’t crash from having no brakes, how am I supposed to get home from Generoso’s? Any bright ideas?”

  “I never said it had no brakes. I only said there was an aaagh.”

  “I can’t walk home.”

  “I’d never let you drive a truck that had no brakes.”

  “You’re a sweetie.”

  Was she always this sarcastic? He said, “It’s simple, Shirl. You drive my truck, Jeanette follows in your car, and the two of you come home together.”

  Shirl said that Jeanette had class on Monda
y morning, and wasn’t that what they were paying Custis for, class?

  Tashmo said, “Call Mandy then. She can meet you at Generoso’s.”

  “Who’ll watch the twins?”

  “There’s always Nigel,” Tashmo said.

  Nigel was Mandy’s husband. He taught comp lit at UMaryland. They were going through a trial separation.

  Shirl said, “You’d trust the twins with Nigel?”

  “He’s their father,” Tashmo said.

  “He’d probably abduct them off to London and then we’d have to extradite them back. That could take years and hefty legal bills.”

  “The twins can ride with Mandy. They love the car. It reminds them of the womb.”

  “But Nigel has their car.”

  “You can drive my truck. Mandy can drive your car with the twins in back.”

  “What about the car seats?”

  “What about the car seats?”

  “The seats are in the car and Nigel has the car.”

  “I’ll call Nigel and tell him to drop the car seats off at Mandy’s. You can drive over to Mandy’s tomorrow, early, put the car seats in your car, then you, Mandy, and the twins can drive back here, pick up the truck, and Mandy and the twins can follow you to Generoso’s.”

  Shirl said, “It upsets the twins to see Nigel.”

  “He can come when they’re asleep.”

  “They’re never both asleep unless they’re in the car.”

  “He can drop the car seats here.”

  “I don’t want him here.”

  “You could pick them up at his place.”

  “What are we, his servants?”

  Tashmo went into the bedroom. He started undressing.

  Shirl cornered him. “And what about Jeanette?”

  Tashmo sat on the bed and took his pants off, leg by leg. “I’m not worried about Jeanette. She’s a winner—the way she took that whipping from those fancy southern belles, and told the dean of hazing compliance to stick it up his pity pot. The girl’s got moxie—she’ll never be a failure or a cokehead. I worry about Mandy, not Jeannette. Jeanette’s a winner. She’ll do just fine in life.”