Ian Slater - Payback

Eleanor smiled at the mention of the stuffed piglet, “Billy Bush,” a name suggested to Jennifer jointly by Eleanor’s husband, Tom, an ardent Clinton fan, and Eleanor, who’d voted for the first President Bush in college. It had been a fun political compromise by a couple whose marriage, friends had said, wouldn’t last more than a year because of Eleanor’s stressful position as an advisor in the White House. They were wrong — it had lasted eleven years, five months, and four days, the couple’s mature approach to “no politics at home” having held until the 2003 war against Iraq. The strain over that one was too much. What had begun as a domestic “spat” over what neighbors would cattily refer to as the “flowers” incident, seemingly patched up between Eleanor and husband Tom Prenty, in fact marked the beginning of a fissure in their relationship. In time it became a gulf between them into which poured a flood of recriminations and mutual complaints hitherto put on hold and subsumed by the sheer pressure of Eleanor’s work as National Security Advisor and Tom’s job as critic of the administration for a Washington think tank.

Eleanor and Tom Prenty had tried to stay together for that most ubiquitous of reasons, the children — in their case, Jennifer — but a bright young psychiatrist had emphasized what they already knew, that the effect of the constant guerrilla warfare at home, which had already caused one nanny and two temporaries to quit, was undoubtedly having a much more severe effect on their only child. A trial separation, “to cool down, regroup,” the doctor suggested, might be in order.

“Won’t that hurt Jennifer even more?” Tom had asked.

“Not if you explain your absence as job-related and if you part on amicable terms. Half of upper-income earners in the Beltway spend long periods away from home. If you get back together, fine. If not, we’ll discuss how to proceed further.”

“How about — you know, weekend visits?” suggested Eleanor.

“In my experience,” responded the counselor, “children — Jennifer’s eleven, right?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, well, ironically, they see these weekend visits as the end. Dad or Mom away on business keeps hope of reconciliation alive. And if that doesn’t happen, then they’ve already been weaned somewhat for the divorce. Besides, she’ll be busy at school. St. Andrew’s, right?”

“Yes,” said Eleanor, with a twinge of guilt. She was a big proponent of public schools — publicly — but St. Andrew’s was private.

“And there’s another benefit,” the psychiatrist continued. “Time out will give you two a chance to get things into perspective. Absence may not make the heart grow fonder, but it tells you how important or not it is to have the other one around.”

They had agreed reluctantly and with Valda, a British au pair, age twenty, whom Jennifer adored and who was taking a year off from international relations at the London School of Economics “to see just what Americans were like,” things were working out pretty well. But there were nights — Eleanor’s feeling of loneliness exacerbated by her lack of sleep — when gazing down at her daughter and Billy Bush held tightly to her, she wanted Tom there, just to share the joy of looking at their child, silently reliving the excitement and sheer terror of the first weeks.

She’d read every prenatal book she could lay her hands on, and when Tom had brought her and baby Jennifer home and Eleanor had seen the profusion of congratulatory flowers and cards, she’d taken Jennifer into the luxurious Consumer Reports —prepared nursery, placing her down with exemplary care, and burst into tears. She didn’t have a clue what to do with this little human. Tom had tried to reassure her, but when he picked up his child he did so with such apprehension, so slowly, holding his breath, it looked to postpartum Eleanor that he could have been lifting a bomb ready to go off.

“Oh God!” she’d said suddenly. “Tom — Tom!”

He’d turned, whey-faced. “What’s wrong?”

“Get those flowers out of here.” She remembered a little girl in the French town of Grasse, when Eleanor and the busload of tourists were being shown through one of the small but famed perfume factories in the Côte d’Azur. Suddenly there’d been a terrible commotion. The young girl was frantic. She couldn’t breathe, the perfume aromas, combined with the smell from a purple rush of lavender growing by the roadside, so intrusive that they were overwhelming her lungs, her face starting to turn blue, becoming cyanotic.

“Tom, get the flowers out!”

A neighbor watering his lawn, though loath to interfere in a domestic dispute, hearing Eleanor screaming, dropped the hose and ran to the Prentys’ door to see if he could help. Eleanor opened it. He’d been shocked by her distorted features. “Get rid of the flowers!” she’d shouted.

The neighbor, Nick Jensen, took one look at her face and did as she ordered, rushing past her, grabbing the bunches of flowers, and dumping them on the front stairs, which quickly became festooned with the variegated bouquets. Nick Jensen was fined $225 for disobeying Rockville’s watering restriction ordinance: “failing to attend sprinkler.”

“But it isn’t a sprinkler, it’s a goddamned hose!” Nick told the stern female conservation official.

“It’s a sprinkler when you leave it running by itself,” the resolute officer had replied sternly.

Nick explained that he hadn’t had time to turn it off. “There was this emergency next door—”

“Right!”

“No, go and ask them, miss. Go and ask them.”

She did. It didn’t matter. “You should have turned off the hose first,” the official told Nick. “We’re experiencing a very severe water shortage.”

Nick, a banker, gave up, but Tom insisted on paying the fine. The banker refused. They were good neighbors.

“How’d she know about the hose being on?” asked Tom. “I mean, it was beside the house. You can’t see it from the street. Did someone phone it in?”

“That’s what I thought,” said Nick. “But apparently it was spotted by a police chopper.”

“ What? I never heard a chopper.”

“Neither did I. They’ve baffled the engines so much now that you can’t hear them above three hundred feet till they’re right on you.” The banker looked around, making sure no one was within earshot. Even then he’d spoken so quietly that it was difficult to hear him. “Everyone’s being watched, Tom.” He’d paused, forcing a smile. “Have Eleanor tell the White House I’m not a terrorist, will you, Tom? That the flowers weren’t bombs.”

“I will,” Tom had said.

“Y’know, Tom, seriously, I tell all my people at the bank — unofficially, of course, nothing on paper — that when they’re on the road, if they want to have any poon tang, never do it in a hotel or motel room. Go out in a field, a barn, but not inside a hotel or motel.”

“You think it’s that bad?” Tom had asked, looking around again before he spoke.

“Tom, this country is wired like you wouldn’t believe. Cams — you know, the digitized pinhole cameras they put on everything from a Grand Prix driver’s helmet to bunging them into a quarterback’s helmet? Revolutionized sports coverage. It’s also revolutionizing spying. The people doing it call it ‘surveillance.’ ”

The bank executive glanced about. He had the hose going again, attending it, its pulse jet making a soft, stuttering noise. “One of my guys, mortgage assessor, got a knock on his door one night ’bout a week ago. Two FBI guys wanted to have a ‘chat’ about my mortgage guy having once reportedly said that the administration is full of loonies, that they sell arms to the Arabs, then the Arabs use them against us. And that he also said, ‘Gee, Olly, what’s going on?’ and they wanted to know what that meant.” Nick had paused and then asked Tom Prenty, “You remember the old Laurel and Hardy movies?”