Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 Read online

  "Be reasonable. What classified material would be likely to come up in a . . . nuptial . . . conversation?"

  "Piece of cake^ My wife's involved with saving the whales. I say to her, 'Great, let's save the whales, but did you know that the only effective lubricant for the trigger devices for hydrogen bombs is sperm-whale oil? We can't save all the whales.' "

  Renfro burst out, "How did you know that?"

  "I read it somewhere. But suppose it was classified. What then?"

  “Suppose it was classified!? That's Category 7!"

  "I rest my case." Burnham grinned.

  "You weren't cleared for Category 7 till today."

  "It was in the paper. Or Newsweek. Or Omni. Anyway, suppose I said that to her.''

  "She'd have to say it to someone else, and we'd have to hear about it. But technically, if you did that, you could go to jail."

  "Great. Picture this: 'Hi, Hon, I'm home.' 'Hi, Hon, how was your day?' 'Shut your mouth, Sweetie, if you don't want me to spend Christmas in Leavenworth.' "

  "This is absurd," Renfro said, snapping his briefcase shut and starting to rise.

  "Oh, no you don't!" Burnham lunged across the desk and slapped Renfro's briefcase onto the floor. Renfro sat back, shocked.

  "Look here, Mister," Burnham said. "You're laying a big load on me. You're telling me that I have to learn how to blow up the world, which I don't want to know, that I have to learn to shut off a whole part of my life from my wife, which I don't want to do, and that if I make a single mistake I'm Benedict Arnold and you're gonna fry me like Caryl Chessman. Fuck it. I don't need it. I'm not flattered at being let in on The Big Secret. I don't like knowing secrets. They're obligations. So take your Q Clearance and your step 9 and your Category 7 and your forty-eight dollars every other week and go back to DOE and tell them to leave me alone."

  Blinking like a mechanical toy gone awry, Renfro said, "I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "You can't turn down a time-in-grade promotion."

  "What if I do? Forty-eight dollars is not exactly Xanadu."

  "You can't. It's already been programmed into the computers. It's stored on magnetic discs." Renfro paused, pondering. "You could resign. Resign altogether. You could commit some minor infraction."

  "Like?"

  Renfro shook his head.

  "It's never been done. Something that would get you demoted a grade. You could appeal to the President to have you transferred to the White House payroll."

  "It's full."

  "Don't I know. You think I like having to deal with you people? You people who think you're above it all just because you work in the White House? Give me a career man any time, someone who knows the rules and plays by them." Renfro bent down and retrieved his briefcase. "I'm afraid, Mr. Burnham, that you have no choice but to . . . grow up." He stood immediately, as if expecting Burnham to take violent umbrage.

  But Burnham merely smiled and said, "I've known for years that becoming a grown-up is a consummation devoutly to be avoided. You've said nothing to change my mind."

  Renfro wheeled and marched across the office, then stopped at the door, his hand on the knob, and said, "It's only fair to tell you: You worry me."

  "Hell, Renfro, I worry myself. But I don't lose sleep over it."

  "How did you ever get this job? You seem . . . unlikely."

  Burnham hesitated. He had no intention of telling Renfro the truth: luck, timing, a chance remark overheard at an editorial meeting about a rumor that the White House was looking for speech-writers at precisely the time when Burnham's hopes and ambitions were congealing into despair that he would never break free from the chains of weekly journalism. The truth would only confirm Renfro's appraisal of him.

  So he said, "Brilliance, Renfro. My star shone so brightly that I was chosen for the White House firmament."

  "Well ..." Renfro said, willing to appear skeptical but not to overstep the line into blatant rudeness, "... I do wish you hadn't gotten this promotion."

  "So do I. But merit will out."

  "I hope you learn to take it seriously."

  "Damn straight." Burnham winked at Renfro. "Loose lips sink ships."

  TWO

  A FLAMETHROWER, that was the answer. Quick, surgical, final. Carbonize the whole business.

  But where could he put his hands on a flamethrower? An Army/Navy store? Even here in D.C., where a pistol was as easy to come by as an Almond Joy, he doubted that a bartender or a junkie or a swart Levantine cab driver could produce a flamethrower for less than five figures.

  Of course, he could command one from the Pentagon—the utterance of the words "White House" had necromantic powers over the entire federal bureaucracy—but eventually he would have to explain why a typewriter jockey in the presidential stable had a need for an instrument of incineration.

  Maybe he could manufacture one himself. Fill a fire extinguisher with napalm and—

  Make one? Forget it. He couldn't tie a bow tie. He required a hatchet to gain access to a childproof medicine bottle. As animals are said to smell fear in people, so machines seemed to sense panicked ineptitude in Burnham. Clogged toilets overflowed; television sets fell into spasms of vertical rolling; light bulbs torqued themselves deep into their sockets so that at Burnham's touch they snapped off at their necks and left him to choose between laceration and electrocution.

  Punt the flamethrower.

  Something had to be done, though. Threats hadn't worked, nor promises, pleas, blackmail, extortion.

  As he stood at the door to this garage sale that passed as a bedroom, a puff of breeze entered the far window and swept his way, gathering and blending odors and finally slapping him in the face with a fetid stench that would have felled the Goth. It was a potpourri aroma of socks, sneakers, mold, wet wool, dirty cotton, damp rubber, sweat-soaked leather, milk, cheese, catsup, potatoes, bread, chocolate, cardboard, cat and girl-smells that Burnham refused to try to identify.

  But it was not the smell that bothered him; he was used to it, had been conditioned to accept as normal the fact that a twelve-year-old chose to live in a toxic waste dump.

  "Let her make her own space," his wife, Sarah, would say. "Biorhythms go in troughs and crests, like the sea. You can't tame the sea."

  "Who wants to be a neat freak anyway?" his son, Christopher, would say. "It sucks."

  "ShooWAH," would say Derry, the bog creature herself, casting his way a gesture reminiscent of a Haitian papaloi floating a curse.

  What bothered Burnham grinned at him from its place of honor stapled to the door—an enormous black-and-white poster of Che Guevara, complete with scruffy beard, jaunty beret and feline smirk.

  What bothered him also stared at him from the far wall of the foul room—the bulbous dome of Mao Tse-tung bobbing in the Yellow River, a hoary and patently phony photograph.

  And what bothered him sat in a crystal wineglass alone on a shelf, cradled in a bed of wilted ivy leaves, like a relic of the True Cross—a cigar butt sold to Derry as once having been chewed by the very teeth, caressed by the very lips, licked by the very tongue of Fidel Castro.

  And what bothered him filled the room like swarming gnats, pinned, pasted, nailed and hung on wall and ceiling— pictures of Arthur Scargill and Karl Marx and Lenin, newspaper clippings about the Red Brigades and the Shining Path and the Symbionese Liberation Army and Islamic Jihad, a homemade doll representing Ho Chi Minh as an angel, a shell casing from a Sandinista artillery round (authenticated by Cyrillic stenciling), and—most conspicuous of all, for it seemed to shout "J'accuse!" at Burnham—a blank square on the robin's-egg blue wall from which Burnham had one day (finally drawing the goddamn line) ripped down an idolatrous portrait of Joseph Stalin.

  "He was a maniac!" Burnham had said, as he tore Stalin into tiny pieces. "He massacred twenty million of his own people."

  "So?" Deny had said.

  ''So? What kind of argument is 'so'?"

  "Propaganda." Smiling serenely in her perceived t
riumph. Deny had retired to the den, there to take counsel from the avatars of MTV.

  Burnham tried every morning to avoid noticing Derry's room, but because it was the last room before the turn at the top of the stairs, he dared not accept the challenge and close his eyes as he passed the door, for fear of missing the first step and plunging headlong down the steep, narrow staircase. So every one of Burnham's days was launched with sour thoughts about his prodigal progeny.

  My daughter the Maoist. Didn't she know that even Maoists weren't Maoists any more?

  Castro worship, for Christ's sake! What did a twelve-year-old girl know about Fidel Castro? He knew about Fidel Castro. He had been at college in 1960, when McGeorge Bundy had sucker-punched an entire generation by parading Fidel around the campus as the savior of the downtrodden. Burnham would never forget the speech ' '/Queremos libertad! Queremos paz! Queremos pan!" He had hollered and cheered along with everyone else. Why not? No threat there. Less than two years later, a lot of those same college boys were having their heads shaved and learning how to fire M-14's because Fidel's list of queremoses had grown to include nuclear-tipped missiles.

  Why didn't the child fall in love with a rock star, one of those harmless hermaphrodites who look like fruit salad and write profound statements about the human condition, on which they are recognized experts, having lived for the better part of two decades?

  Why wasn't her room papered with posters of disaffected boys and material giris, all of them oozing with grim determination to slake their animal appetites?

  Burnham heard his Puritan forebears whispering from the beyond, but he defied them. His generation had been denied the joys of premarital sex, a deprivation for which he would never forgive America. He would not so torture his children. Let her have her sex fantasies. Let her have sex, even! At least it was natural. Unlike communism.

  But no. Her love was not boys but bolshevism.

  What had gone wrong? Why was she not following the path cleared by the "me" generation? Sure, a social conscience was a healthy thing: send money to Save the Children, join the march against hunger, picket apartheid. But to advocate the violent overthrow of everything?

  What had he done wrong? (This was the black thought he sought desperately to escape.) The fault had to lie with him, or at least with his job at the right hand of the Supreme Imperialist. How else could he explain pubescent radicalism?

  His wife called it commitment, and was proud of it. "She just has a healthy superego," Sarah said. "She sees right and wrong in everything."

  Indeed, Burnham thought: She sees wrong in everything right, and right in everything wrong.

  He pulled the door to Derry's room closed, took a pen from the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket and wrote on the door in large black letters: "Danger—this room is hazardous to living things."

  Then he walked downstairs, feeling like an utter ass.

  As in many old, unmodernized, skinny Georgetown houses, the kitchen in the Burnhams' house was small, dark, brick-paved and in the rear of the ground floor. It protruded, like a wen, from the back of the house, which led Burnham to conclude that it had once been a separate edifice, the slaves' quarters or the cookhouse or something else historically colorful. Sarah's only conclusion about the kitchen was that it was as cold as a penguin's buns in the winter, since the central heating struggled in vain to reach from the rest of the house into the kitchen, and hot as cheese fondue in the summer, since the room's jury-rigged wiring couldn't cope with the load demanded by a window air-conditioner.

  The entrance to the kitchen was topped by a six-by-six beam that capped the doorway at exactly six feet. The beam was decorated with red bicycle reflectors and tufts of hair from several mammals, meticulously applied by Burnham in celebration of the last times he had attempted to propel his six-foot-one-inch self erect through the doorway, pulping a section of his skull and bloodstaining the lemon carpet. He would have removed the beam and raised the doorway if he had owned the house, but as a renter he had neither inclination nor permission to make structural alterations.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs and folded his head down to pass beneath the beam and into the kitchen. He must have unconsciously closed his eyes, or he would have seen the rope of black fur under his Bass Weejun. He stepped on it, hanj, and the cat it was attached to, the cat that had been sleeping mostly inside the little bathroom off the kitchen; that cat screeched like a traffic accident and shot off the floor. Burnham's head snapped back and slammed into the overhead beam; he crumpled to his knees, grunting like a gorilla.

  In the kitchen, nobody moved. Derry yelled, "You stepped on Lehrer!" and then, as if content at having announced the day's lead story, returned to the Post's funnies.

  Christopher glanced up briefly from a National Lampoon photographic essay on tongues and said, "Swift, Dad."

  At the sink, Sarah stopped scrubbing scrambled eggs from a pan long enough to ascertain that Burnham was only stunned, not bleeding. "The bathroom floor's cool," she said.

  "Huh?" Burnham shook his head and lurched to his feet.

  "That's why Lehrer sleeps there."

  "Oh." Burnham poured himself a cup of coffee from the Toshiba brewer and sat at the small round table between his two children. He dropped a slice of bread into the Bauer toaster and reached for the front section of the Post. "Anything happen?"

  "The deficit jumped another ten billion last quarter, thanks to—"

  "Thanks to us, that's who."

  "What d'you mean, us?"

  "Look at this." Burnham held up his coffee cup. "You hire the Japanese to make our coffee, the Germans to make our toast, the French to squeeze our juice and the Hondurans" —Burnham grabbed a banana from a bowl on the table, ripped off its skin and dipped the banana in his coffee—"to feed us fruit."

  "That's not what the deficit's all about and you know it."

  "Balance of payments, then," Burnham said, pleased at having deflected, if only momentarily, an assault on his employer and himself. "The point is, you're subsidizing every country in the world except your own. What's wrong with General Electric? They make coffee, too."

  Derry said, "They're racists."

  "How do you—"

  "Hey, Dad!" Christopher shouted. "Get a load of your horoscope. Man, this is heavy!" He read aloud the wisdom of the oracle of the Lampoon. " 'Taurus: Your life isn't worth a plugged nickel. Your house, your job and your family are all forfeit, and unless you send a million dollars in unmarked twenties to the editor of this magazine, you will be cornholed to death by a tribe of Aleuts.' "

  Christopher rocked back in his chair, laughing in the peculiar way that made him sound like a novice with the Vienna Boys' Choir.

  Sarah snapped, "Christopher!"

  "I didn't make it up," Christopher insisted. "It's right here. What's an Aleut?"

  "Protected by the First Amendment." Burnham smiled at Sarah, who didn't smile back.

  "O ye guardian of our sacred rights," she said. "Look who's suing the Post to get at some poor reporter's notes."

  "That's not me. That's the Justice Department."

  "No, it's That Man." The words distorted her face as if she had sucked on a lime. "You're an extension of That Man."

  "No I'm not. I'm a flunky. A flunky is not an extension of anything." Burnham yawned. "Did you put wine in the piccata?"

  "Sherry. Why?"

  "I didn't sleep worth a damn."

  "That's conscience, not sherry. A teaspoon of sherry won't wreck your sleep."

  Burnham sighed. "What do I have to do, hire a taster? I am allergic to ethyl alcohol!"

  "That is a load of B.S."

  "Bullshit," Christopher advised Derry, who nodded sagely.

  "You think I quit drinking because I wanted to?" Burnham said. "I loved drinking—not wisely, maybe, but too well. The doctor—"

  "You believe everything that Albanian lulu you—"

  "He's Armenian. And just because you haven't heard of the specialty is no reason t
o dump on it. He's an orthomolecular—"

  "—lulu. I don't care what he calls himself. He's a blue-ribbon, prime-cut lulu. He has you convinced you're allergic to everything on the planet and he's the only one who can cure you."

  "You, madam," Burnham said, smiling, "are a medical Luddite."

  "What's a Luddite?" Derry asked without looking up from Bloom County.

  "Same as an asshole," Christopher said confidently.

  Sarah poured herself a final cup of coffee and pressed the "off panel on the Toshiba machine, which acknowledged her touch with an obedient beep. "I owe that yahoo one thing," she conceded. "Allergic or not, before you went to him you sure had a hollow leg. I've never seen —"

  Burnham held up a finger, and Sarah knew right away what was coming—not exactly, but generally. The raised finger gave it away every time.

  "That is the worse," he said. "A fortress which soon surrenders has its walls less shattered, than when a long and obstinate resistance is made."

  Sarah paused. "Is there anything that man didn't say something quotable about?"

  "No. Thank God. Like a dirty mind, Samuel Johnson is a perpetual solace. He argues all sides of every issue. He's ammunition for any battle. And the great thing is, he's always right. Always."

  "It's not fair," Sarah said. "I want someone on my side."

  "Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson."

  "Not bad. Who said that? Maybe I'll recruit him."

  "Guy named Hamilton. Not worth it. Shaw might work for you. Or Oscar Wilde. But he's too mean. I'll think."

  Burnham emptied the dregs of his coffee into the sink, rinsed the cup and filled it with cold water. He shot his cuffs and washed his hands and dried them, then held them up as if prepping for surgery, and strode to a comer cabinet. With two fingertips he opened the cabinet door. There, arrayed above him like a phalanx, labels facing front, were his bottles of vitamin pills.

  On the shelf below the bottles were seven clean Pyrex bowls, custard size, enough for a week. He took down the first bottle, the largest—vitamin C, ascorbic acid, 500 milligrams—and counted out the pills.