Christopher Buckley - Supreme Courtship

IF BLYSTER FORKMORGAN had imagined that he would be contending against the other gods of the bar in the rarified atmosphere at the summits of Olympus, he now found himself instead tramping about hip-deep in sheep turd and mud at its base. It was not exactly what Dexter Mitchell’s plangent phone call to him at four a.m. on Election Night had promised.

His client sat across from him, crossing and uncrossing his legs, nervous, sweating, pallid.

“I never explicitly told her,” Dexter jibbered, “at least I’m virtually sure I never… in so many words… Hell, I can’t remember everything I said to everyone… every promise made to every group…”

Forkmorgan stared through lidded eyes, a falcon watching a mole scrabbling across a field below.

He poured ice water into a cut crystal glass and handed it to Dexter, who took it and drank, as if more out of obedience than thirst.

“Campaigns,” Forkmorgan ventured soothingly, “are promiserich environments. The relevant question here is-did you in fact tell Ms. Alvilar that you were going to leave your wife and marry her?”

“No. No, no. No. Well… aack.” Dexter sighed. “Maybe… I don’t… in the middle of… I… Look, you say things in the middle of… It just comes… out… It doesn’t necessarily mean anything…”

To recap, then: you told your TV wife, probably during sexual intercourse in the midst of a presidential campaign, that you would divorce your actual wife in order to marry her and make her First Lady of the United States.

“Well,” Forkmorgan said, “these things happen.”

“Yes. Yes, they do. Yes,” Dexter said. “She’s, of course, Latina…”

Forkmorgan raised one eyebrow questioningly.

“Emotionally they’re, you know, all over the place. Voluble.”

Forkmorgan nodded. “They lack our Anglo-Saxon sense of reticence and decorum?”

Dexter frowned. “Something like that,” he said uncertainly. “I explained to her, I said, ‘Look, Ramona, for God’s sake… now is not the time to worry about that. Let’s take it step by step, okay?’ What am I supposed to do-announce in the middle of a Supreme Court case that I’m tossing Terry over the side?”

“And how did she respond to that argument?”

“By going totally fucking bat-shit. By threatening to go public.” Dexter shook his head at the iniquity of it all. “That’s when she told me she had me on tape.”

Blyster Forkmorgan’s eyes widened. “Does she have you on tape?”

“I don’t know,” Dexter said. “I was in the middle of a campaign, for God’s sake.”

“Yes,” Forkmorgan said, “I can see your mind might have been on… other things. Well, let’s ascertain whether such a tape exists.” He made a note on a pad. “Now, as to your wife. How do things stand with her at this point?”

Dexter sighed manfully once more at the unjustness of female wiles. “Terry? Well, now she’s gone bat-shit. On the other hand, she’s not some jalapeño like Ramona. She’s bat-shit, but logical. She understands that there’s no point in grabbing the wheel of this bus and driving it off the cliff.”

“Have you told her that you are not going to divorce her in order to marry Ms. Alvilar?”

“In so many words.”

“Tell me the actual words you used.”

“I told her, ‘Don’t worry about it. We need to stick together here. Team Mitchell. Team Mitchell.’”

Forkmorgan nodded. “And did she give you reason to understand that she is in fact on Team Mitchell?”

Dexter shrugged. “Well, she was running kind of hot when we last spoke. But she wants to be First Lady, so she’s not likely to do anything to screw that up.”

“No,” Forkmorgan said. “That would appear to be more on Ms. Alvilar’s agenda.”

“I was thinking,” Dexter said, sounding suddenly the politician, “we could offer Ramona a nice ambassadorship. Somewhere warm, Spanish-speaking. She’d be a hero down there. A queen. The Hispanics loved it when she disagreed with me about mining the border…”

Forkmorgan shook his head. “No, I think we’ve made enough promises to Ms. Alvilar for the time being. Not to mention it would be illegal.”

“I wasn’t suggesting it was a perfect solution,” Dexter sniffed.

Dear me, dear heavens, dear… dear,” Crispus said heavily after Pepper had recounted Agent Lodato’s discovery. His eyeballs flickered side to side. “Why do you bring this fifty-five-gallon drumful of squirming worms to me?”

“Who else am I going to tell?” Pepper said.

“Who else? Who else? How about your boyfriend, for one? The Chief Justice. He’s the one who called down the thunder in the first place. Why don’t you tell him? Why is this my business? Re-cu-use me.”

“I can’t tell him,” Pepper said.

“Why not?”

“He might do something about it. Something… injudicious.”

“Whereas I’m just going to rub my fevered brow and ululate?”

“Look, Crispy, help me out here. What do I do?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be hitting any more SEND buttons.”

“Thank you. That’s so helpful.”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Crispus frowned and drummed his fingers on the surface of his desk. “What would Hammurabi do?”

“Cut off everyone’s head, and call it a day. Is that your advice?”

“Let’s just call it option B for now.” He looked at her with what decoded for Pepper as a mixture of regret and rebuke. This made her, for the first time, think back on Mike Haro’s awkward moment in her chambers, when he’d extended a tentative invitation to come on down to his wine cellar. It came rushing in on her in one, unwelcome wave, that whatever other talents she possessed, men was not one of them. Had she not, after all, accepted a marriage proposal prompted by the launch of a TV show? She stared back at Crispus, thinking, Not you, too? He was saying something to her.

“This seems as good a time as any to ask you, was it the best possible judgment, leaping into the sleeping bag with the Chief?”

“I didn’t ‘leap’ into a sleeping bag with him. But okay. I stipulate maybe ‘judgment’ isn’t the right word, either. Look, Crispy, these things happen.”

“ ‘These things happen’ is, perhaps,” Crispus said, “the biggest intellectual and philosophical cop-out since Pontius Pilate washed his hands.”

“But practical, you have to admit.”

“Oh-urrr.”

“What was that?”

“That was a groan. They happen. Well,” he sighed, “the Rubicon appears to have been crossed. And peed into.”

“Stipulated.”

“What would the Chief be likely to do if he found out about this unfortunate information? Leaving aside your computer skills, it doesn’t appear to speak well of Brother Haro. On the other hand, he was under the understandable impression that you had petulantly instructed him to kiss your behind, which he doubtlessly viewed as poor recompense for having gone to the trouble of finding justification for your-may I say-deplorable vote in Peester.”

“I don’t give a church mouse fart about that. I understand why he was so pissed off. I don’t think justices ought to be leaking all over each other, but I understand why he did it. Over and out. It’s where we go from here. Chiefy’ll go nuclear if he finds out what the FBI found out. He takes that kind of thing very seriously. He’s an ethics wonk.”

Crispus considered. “Well, I imagine the first thing he’ll do is confront Brother Haro.” He held up the incriminating pieces of paper and said, “I must say, I would dearly love to watch him try to explain these away. Thing is, he’s so damn smart, he probably could. All right, so you present these to the Chief, the Chief goes through the ceiling like a helicopter, confronts the Last Samurai, and all this while a very large freight train is approaching our station.” He looked at Pepper. “You have to ask yourself: is this, as your Mr. Shakespeare would say, a consummation devoutly to be wished?”