Mark Costello - Big If

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. Where’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?