Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

We passed an NHK satellite truck beaming to Tokyo and then a BBC truck, and I said to my handler, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price.”

“Mr. President?” he said, pressing me to prove I wasn’t rambling. He was a very young man.

“You probably never even read my inaugural address,” I said.

He was reaching for his cellular phone.

“Dave, you don’t have to call. I’m just having a little joke. It’s all right. The Director and I talked it over. There’s no better place to hide than the glare.”

Dave pulled his hand back to the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

“That’s okay, Dave. In case of domestic insurrection, the president has contingency plans to go to a safe house in Arlington, Virginia.”

His hand went for the phone again.

“Chill out, Dave. That was President Johnson’s plan. Old news. I said that on purpose as a joke.”

“I respectfully request that you don’t joke like that, Mr. President.”

My handler is right to be nervous. After all, loose talk is why I’m in the position of having to sneak into the public auction of the effects of my late wife. It’s why my long-suffering Jackie was led to live, unaware, as a bigamist, the wife of a Greek who had a face that could stop a thousand ships.

The bullets fired on that fateful afternoon in Dallas killed only the editor in my brain. After that moment, I could not hold my tongue about anything. I woke up on the gurney rolling into the hospital and began at once to disclose all the state secrets of that very secretive time. Of no use now. But it’s far too late to explain any of this to a world that the Agency determined quite quickly must never have even momentary access to me.

I completely agreed with the decision. It’s only the editor that’s gone. My powers to reason are still completely intact, and this was the only reasonable course. Anyone who came near me would become a security risk. And of no import to the CIA but critical to me, I would have talked endlessly to Jackie about the things that we agreed would never be spoken. Along with the secret details of our foreign policy, the smells and sights and tastes of all the women I’d ever known would come tumbling out. There was no choice but to bury the wax dummy in my place. Not only is my faculty of reason untouched, so are my powers to remember. Sweet memory. It’s been the great comfort of my confinement.

Still, I’m very glad now to be sliding to a stop in front of this white awning. I know I can meet my commitment to silence. I realize that it’s still important. I say that what I know is of no use. But I suspect that if I were to speak now of the doomsday rocket silo twenty miles north by northeast of Burgdorf, Idaho, in the Gospel Hump Wilderness, I would be speaking of something still in place, though perhaps the target agenda of Moscow, Peking, Pyongyang, and Hanoi would have changed slightly. But I am determined to withhold even the faintest allusion to these things.

As I pointed out to the Director, I never asked to go to the funerals or the weddings. I didn’t ask to go to Teddy when he left that girl in the dark water at Chappaquiddick or to my nephew, who never even had a chance to know me, when it was clear to me that he needed to speak honestly of what he’d done to that girl in Florida. I didn’t even ask to go to John-John to warn him about the magazine business. But this auction was a different thing.

I step out of the car. I suspect the Director has watchers in the crowd. I am never out of sight. But for a moment I feel alive again. I feel that I am living in my body, in the present moment. How sweet that is, I’ve come to realize in these thirty-two years of exile. How often in the life I used to lead was I in a place that could have filled me with memories, but my mind carried me elsewhere. I missed the moment. Now, on the sidewalk in front of Sotheby’s, I head to the end of a long line of people whose faces once would have turned to me, whose hands would have come out to touch me. It took me a long time to get used to that touching. I never quite did. But I crave it now. They touch me now in my dreams. Hands trembling faintly from excitement, warm with the flush of desire. I touch them back, each one.

But here, the TV lights glare and the crowds line up and they yearn to touch only the things I touched. I think this is similar to what Abraham Lincoln dreamed the week before he was killed. He dreamed that he awoke from a deep sleep and he heard distant sobbing. He arose and made his way through the empty hallways of the White House to the East Room, where he found a great catafalque draped in black. A military guard stood there and Lincoln asked, “Who is dead?” The man replied, “It is the President.” I could ask anyone now in this line, “Whose French silver-plated toothbrush box with cover is this, being auctioned off to strangers?” And the reply would be, “It is the President’s.”

I pass all these hands stuffed in pockets or clutching purses or fluttering in conversation. I pass all these faces turned away from this bearded man with close-cropped hair and the faint line of a scar on the side of his skull and the hobble of a very bad back. And I know I should be glad that there is not the tiniest flicker of recognition. The Director and I are in complete agreement. He’s stuck his neck out for me. Pity for an old man and his past. Trust that old age has slowed my tongue, which it has, somewhat. But part of me is ready to tell, at the slightest glance from a stranger, how Mayor Richard Daley found fourteen thousand votes in the cemeteries of Chicago to swing a state and elect a president. And I would point out the debt of gratitude the whole planet owes those dead voters. None of us knew at the time of the missile crisis of 1962 that the Soviet general in charge of troops in Cuba was authorized to use tactical nuclear weapons. After the Soviet Union broke up, the general appeared on TV–I get all the cable channels — and he said if the American President had chosen to send troops to the island, they would have been nuked. If Richard Nixon had been the President, he certainly would have sent those troops. What does this mean? It means those dead Chicagoans prevented a nuclear holocaust. My impulse to talk about these things aside, credit should be given to this necropolis of American heroes.

But no stranger gives me a glance. I go to the end of the line and my back is hurting, but out here in public, the pain reassures me somehow. A woman up ahead in the line turns her face idly toward me. She has hair the color of the old Red Grange model football we used in Hyannis the same autumn I made love on the overstuffed chair in my Senate office, to a woman who was all bones and freckles and teeth and her thick hair was the same color, a roan color, and she sat on my lap and thrashed her hair around me. She has spent time with me often these past years, in my memory. And this woman in line turns her eyes briefly to me and then her attention passes on. She is perhaps thirty-five. In my memory I am thirty-five, but this woman before me now sees only an old man. But I’m still sitting on that overstuffed chair and the leather squeaks beneath me and I’m sweating and smelling the woman’s hair and I tell her about its color, the color of a Red Grange football, and she laughs. The woman in line laughs now. She is with someone near her, but I don’t look to see who it is. I watch her face dilate sweetly in laughter and if she were standing next to me, I know I would speak to her of this other woman, whose name I can’t remember and whose eyes I can’t remember, though I’ve often tried in these years of exile. I would like to remember her eyes, because remembering these other things as vividly as I do makes me feel as if the memory of her eyes should be there too but it got put aside and then sold off or given away and it was a big mistake. I want it back.