"But what," Banion said, "are we supposed to do if we find out that there
is
an asteroid coming our way?"
"Well, in the unlikely event.
..
we'd want some sort of warning."
"I wouldn't. If the world's about to end, I don't want
any
warning."
"No one is saying the world is going to end," said the president, trying to smile. "This is about beginnings, not endings."
When he began to extol the racial and cultural diversity of the astronauts being launched, Banion interrupted him.
"We'll be right back with the president, after this."
The studio filled with the sound of Ample Ampere's theme music. The commercial showed a basset hound sitting staring hopefully through the glass door of an oven, inside which a juicy roast was baking. The president gestured to his press secretary to approach with his miserable, inadequate excuse as to why he, Leader of the New Millennium, was being made to endure a homey commercial message about the joys of electricity.
A makeup woman, modern-day medic of the TV battlefield, sprang forward to touch up glistening foreheads.
Banion, overhearing a snatch of perturbed presidential conversation, leaned forward and said, "I asked them myself if we could bank the commercials at the beginning and end, but" - he smiled dryly - "it seems 1 am as helpless as you, sir, in the face of the exigencies of Mammon."
Banion's wife, Bit
sey, reached him in the car on his way to brunch at Val Dalhousie's in Georgetown. The interview had made her nervous. After all, the president was coming for dinner, next week.
"He's going to cancel now."
"No he won't."
"They'll make it sound like.a last-minute thing. I've spent the whole
week
with the Secret Service."
"Bitsey, he's only a president." She would understand. She was fourth-generation Washington, a cave dweller.
Banion hummed along Rock Creek Drive, fairly throbbing with contentment over the entrance he would make at Val's. The car, made in England, had a burled walnut dashboard that shone like an expensive humidor. He could actually make out his reflection in it, and he liked that. He'd paid for the car with two speeches - one of them on how to revitalize the U.S. auto industry - and he hadn't even had to leave town for them. More and more, he hated to leave town. Everything he needed was here.
It was a bright, clear J
une day. He felt devil-may-care. He had just stuck it to the president of the United States in front of all the people who would be at Val Dalhousie's brunch: senators, Supreme Court justices, editorial-page pontiffs, bureau chiefs, an ambassador or two for seasoning, perhaps the papal nuncio, or at least a tony bishop. They added such nice color in their robes. It gave him a little thrum of pleasure that Bitsey was anxious. Dear thing - didn't she understand that presidents came and went?
TWO
"You were great," the press secretary said to the president as soon as they were inside the vibrating cocoon of
Marine One,
the presidential helicopter,
en route
from the
Sunday
studio to Burning Bush Country Club in suburban Maryland for eighteen holes with Prince Blandar. The chief of staff pretended to be preoccupied with his
presidential action
folder. "Your line," the press secretary tried again, "about how this is about beginnings, not endings. A home run."
The president, changing into his golf togs, tossed his suit jacket at his Filipino steward.
"I go to his studio on a Sunday morning, because John Oliver Banion does not
do
remote interviews, and I
get half an hour of abuse interrupted by
three
commercials showing toasters that talk to you and people smiling - smiling
- as they're being fed into MRI
machines. I've had an MRI, and you do not
smile
while you are having it, let me tell you. It's like being stuffed into a torpedo tube while waiting to hear whether you have cancer. You're not smiling. You're pissing down your legs. Why don't Ample Ampere's commercials show people being electrocuted in their new electric chair? That's it. No more
Sunday
with John O
. Banion." He flung his pants at the steward. "I don't care what his ratings are. 'Exigencies of Mammon.' Prick!"
The chief of staff's rule was never to interfere while the president was shredding the self-esteem of another member of the staff, but it was his job to save the president from himself. He looked up from the secretary of transportation's urgent memo about a bridge over the Mississippi that was about to collapse, halting all commerce on the river.
"Is Banion moderating the debates?"
The press secretary gratefully picked up the cue. "I talked to Jed Holcomb at the League of Gay Voters, and he says it's a done deal. This is their first time hosting the debates, and they're going out of their way to have as straight a moderator as there is. Banion's nothing if not straight."
"How did the League of Gay Voters get to sponsor the debates?" the president asked. "For Christ's
sake.
Where does it end?" "It was their turn." "We have no say in the moderator?"
"Theoretically. But if we veto him, it'll get out and we'll have elevated him into the Man the President Is Afraid Of."
'Afraid, my ass. While he was playing squash at Harvard -" "Princeton."
"- my unit was taking thirty percent casualties in the A Shau Valley. I am not 'afraid' of some pipe-sucking, bow-tied talk-show host whose idea of hell is finding grit in his Wellfleet oysters."
Marine One
was circling Burning Bush, preparing to land. The president was lacing his spikes.
The chief of staff said, "Of course we're not scared of him. But why give him a career boost by vetoing him in the debates?"
The president looked out his window at the small army waiting to receive him. 'Aren't Laura and I supposed to go to his house for dinner next week in honor of someone?"
"The British ambassador."
"Schedule something for right before the dinner. Something that might run late. Really late. CIA briefing on the Russian situation."
'"Okay," said the chief of staff. "But wouldn't it be cooler to smother the bastard in honey? What's the point of pissing him off?"
"When did these people get so goddamned important that the president of the United States has to suck up to them? Someone tell me."
They were saved from having to answer by
Marine One's
landing.
'All right, but you let him know: I'm not doing his show again. You
t
ell
him."
The press secretary nodded.
The president stepped out onto manicured grass and was immediately engulfed by entourage.
A staff car was waiting to take the staff to the white House. The press secretary lay back against the seat with his tie loosened and the thousand-yard stare of a freshly reamed presidential aide.
"What are you going tell Banion?" the chief of staff asked.
"'Great show, Jack. The president really enjoyed himself. He wants to do it again. Soon.'"
The chief of staff nodded and went back to his
immediate action
folder
The president sliced off the first tee into a stand of sycamores, narrowly missing the skull of a congressman. The ball made a loud
thok
before disappearing into poison ivy. Prince Blandar, desirous of the president's support with respect to congressional approval for the purchase of fifty shiny new F-20 jet fighters for his desert kingdom, urged him to take a mulligan.
Val Dalhousie, plump, two face-lifts into her sixties, voluptuous and billowy in a Galanos caftan, thousands of dollars of diamond-studded gold panthers chasing each other around her wrists, beckoned the late-arriving Banion into her Matisse-intensive parlor.
"I'm not sure any of us
dares
be seen with you." She gave him a peck on each cheek in the European manner. She whispered, "If I had known you were going to be
so
f
eral
with him, I wouldn't have invited so many of his cabinet."
Val had been a stage actress years ago. Before that, it was said that she had been in a different line of entertainment. She had married up the food chain, eventually reaching the rung occupied by Jamieson Vanbrugh Dalhousie, adviser to presidents, heir to an immense steel fortune, and twice her age. Jamieson had died ten years ago, leaving her a half dozen houses, a number of alarmed heirs by his first wives, a tidy collection of Impressionists, and $500 million in walking-around money.
Jamieson was a humorless old grouper with bad breath and hairy-ears whom official Washington revered for reasons no one, if pressed, could really explain. He had advised President Roosevelt that Joseph Stalin was really, deep down, a decent sort. Another president had wittily put him in charge of the Vietnam peace negotiations, resulting in years of negotiations about the shape of the negotiating table and a peace that quickly went to pieces,
Before Val entered his life, his houses in Georgetown and Virginia were temples of parsimony and gloom. Guests entering his dining room mumbled
to themselves, 'Abandon hope, al
l ye who enter here." The wine could have been mistaken for cough syrup; only the most determined alcoholic could swallow it without wincing. Over this grim mahogany domain, Jamieson Vanbrugh Dalhousie ruled, treating his guests to endless monologues on such riveting topics as Russia's projected uranium needs in the next century and Konrad Adenauer's struggle against fluctuations in the deutsch
e mark during the postwar era. J
amieson's untimely death at the age of eighty-eight, after stepping on a garden rake, was treated by the Establishment as the end of an era and the passing of a national treasure. In his eulogy at the National Cathedral, the president said how much he would miss his wise, dependable counsel.
Val, by contrast, loved to spend money - by the fistful, by the armfu
l. She practically used it to ma
tch her Georgetown garden. She sent helicopters to fetch her guests for weekends at Middleburg, in Virginia. She hired Pavarotti to sing for them, fed them caviar and quail eggs, flew
f
oiegras
and truffles from France. She spent money on presidential contenders the
way others bet on horses at the track. One of them was bound to win, after all. One of her horses eventually came in, and with it an ambassadorial appointment to the Court of St. James's. You could hear Jamieson moaning at the expense in his grave.
Thirty million? You could have gotten Italy
for half the price.
Val took Banion by the arm and led him into the parlor, bursting with peonies and reeking sweetly of perfumed candles. Banion scanned the room for his wife. It was a fairly typical Val Sunday brunch: two cabinet secretaries; several more former cabinet secretaries; one declared presidential candidate, one undeclared; a movie star (in town to testify before Congress against a stylish disease); Tyler Pinch, curator of the Fripps Gallery - ah, there was Bitsey, with him -a quorum of senators; the Speaker of the House, majority whip; the managing and foreign editors of the
Post;
ah yes - Banion was pleased to see these two: Tony Flemm and Brent Boreman, hosts of the other Washington weekend shows; a brace of Op-Ed pundits, one readable, the other un-; a husband and wife biographer team, a Nick and Nora pair, rather exotic; a former presidential mistress (several administrations ago) now heavily involved in the symphony; looming above them all, suave, immense, baritone-voiced Burton Galilee, lawyer, lobbyist, friend of presidents, who had turned down a Supreme Court appointment rather than give up, as he had actually put it to Banion, a confidant, "God's greatest gift to mankind
- pussy."
Who else? The State Department's new chief of protocol, what
was
her name, Mandy Something; the French ambassador, the Brazilian ambassador, the Canadian ambassador, the Indonesian ambassador, who was gamely trying to explain to the other diplomats his government's recent decision to "pacify" another ten thousand East Timorians; that architect and his wife Banion couldn't stand because she had announced to him that she never watched television.
A butler appeared with a tray bearing Bloody Marys, champagne, white wine, sparkling water with limes. Banion chose a sparkling water and took up his position, waiting for the homages to begin. He waved away the watercress sandwiches; too awkward, receiving compliments with a mouth full of verdure.
Bitsey reached him first, trailing Tyler Pinch. She was smartly turned out in a double-breasted suit, pearl necklace, gold earrings. Bitsey was petite, angular, pretty, in a slightly toothy sort of way, with large eyes conveying a permanently startled look. She had southern roots, as many Washington cave dwellers do. Her father could bore a man to death at a hundred yards tracing the family tree back to the Precambrian era.
Banion and Bitsey had met twenty years back when they were both summer interns on Capitol Hill taking part in an Excellence in Futurity program in which America's young leaders were brought to Washington to stuff the envelopes of the power elite. Banion, shy and bookish, had never been very successful with women, but he was attracted to her. At a time when women took pains to look their worst so that men would take them seriously, Bitsey always looked her best, arriving each morning fresh, in pumps, stockings, and smartly pleated skirts, smelling of a perfume (White Shoulders) that Banion found intoxicating. He finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. To his amazement, she accepted.