Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (7 page)

Synchronized swimming was added to the roster of Olympic events, with Carlotta as honorary timekeeper, guilty memories of wounding Van assuring her enthusiasm. She declined the many movie offers that poured in, but she did do a series of public service announcements urging Americans not to panic.

Inflation, impatience, and global unrest mounted, and Van’s youth now came to be seen as a kind of weakness. He tried to meet with anyone who wanted to, but his schedule became decimated by crackpot retirees, star-struck checkout girls, and bored first graders fulfilling requirements. He came to bed drained but insomniac, and tried to absorb statistical abstracts to make the most of the night. Carlotta had skyrocketed into a sexless marriage.

Eventually, Julienne came to see Carlotta, and seemed contrite and friendly. She even identified herself as Julienne. She was now the honored sister of the First Lady in Vertigo Park, which was still depressed but was selling a few presidential souvenirs. She had her pick of roles at the Pompey Community Playhouse, and sometimes did the weather with Culvert. She was in charge of attaching the Partly Clouded Sun. However, Culvert was weakening, and she looked tired herself. She needed a project. Julienne
announced she wanted to write Carlotta’s biography, but asked if she might do it in the first person, like a ghostwritten autobiography. Disconcerted by such oblique devotion, and worried by her sister’s haggard appearance, Carlotta conceded. She offered to let Julienne come and live with her, but Julienne said it wasn’t necessary, that she had the whole book already written in her mind. As she was leaving, Julienne tremblingly asked if Carlotta had any news of Cliff. Carlotta had none, and pity and resentment welled up in her, plus the chilling epiphany that she and Julienne were not so different in this frailty. She shivered as they hugged in parting, and this palpable chip in Carlotta’s gilding reassured Julienne that she and her sister were not so different. Julienne left coughing but happier, and Carlotta was shaken to behold herself in one she pitied.

CHAPTER TWELVE
 

Van’s pledge of Christian cheek-turning made the Allies nervous, and in no time he was tested point-blank. A busload of reporters covering a movie thriller being filmed in the Middle East was hijacked by terrorists, and they were held hostage in a crudely rigged-up broadcasting studio in the trackless desert hills. Since the reporters and hostages were one, and the terrorists gave them free use of the camera, the coverage was excellent and impassioned, and stressed
the crucial importance of their own rescue. The terrorists made no specific demands, but asked that Van make them an offer.

In a messianic spirit, he offered himself, unprotected, in exchange for the reporters. This didn’t appeal to the terrorists, though, and they asked for Carlotta instead, since most of them had admired her in the dubbed version of
Blood Pressure.
At first Van wouldn’t consider it, but she, eager to do right, convinced him that since he had been willing, she had as much right to self-sacrifice as he did, and it would be vanity in him to forbid her to contribute. After complicated soul-searching, he let her go, “of her own beautiful free will,” to the desert to surrender herself. The public, and even the reporters who were thereby released, saw this as spineless and unmanly, to turn over your own wife to terrorists, and a thunderous outcry arose on their return to their customary newsdesks. People pointed out that Van was short for Vanilla, and Vanilla sounded like a girl’s name.

Her captors invited Carlotta to become their spokesperson, but before she could negotiate, there was a sudden outbreak of gunfire in the studio, and a group of mercenaries swarmed into the room, and incidentally onto live television. They had spotted the hideaway and, without any idea of its international significance, figured it might have some equipment worth plundering. Once again, her life was saved in a bloody minute, and once again her rescuer was Cliff Burns, the leader of these opportunistic soldiers of fortune. He had hooked up with some survivalists in
Northern California and ended up doing pickup jobs in war-torn areas. Everyone in the studio was killed but Carlotta, and the viewing public never realized she had been spared only by accident.

Van was hounded from office after her return, though it took several weeks for the convulsions to play themselves out. Carlotta stood by her husband, since she believed he had done the right thing, but her stance was unsteady with the reappearance of Cliff, who was posed hugging her by a jubilant press. Cliff had barely known Van in Vertigo Park, but he revived an old schoolyard taunt and teased the president as Van, Van, Born in a Can. A few faint voices pointed out that Cliff hadn’t even known Carlotta was in the terrorists’ studio, but people admired his sneering good luck. Beyond his own mortification, Van also sensed Carlotta’s electric response to Cliff, and, despite her pleas, he resigned and entered a monastery, renouncing worldly things. Haplessly, with his typical waffling, he reappeared a few days later to try to resume his office, an attempted reverse dive the Congress declared inadmissible. Carlotta was torn by Van’s torture and her own unresolved passion for Cliff, who had been installed as a guest of the White House by popular demand. Wanting to be strong for Van, trying to avoid encountering Cliff, she nonetheless found herself gasping and dizzy, as if spinning on an amusement park rotary ride, where the floor drops away but one hangs motionless, pinned to the wall by air. She and Van spent a night together weeping as proof of their love, but then he vanished definitively, supposedly to Sri Lanka, though
no one was ever quite sure. There were later reports of a blue-eyed penitent there who had taken a vow of silence, and so could not explain himself.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 

Nestor Haze, like the sentimental painters drawn to plagued frontier towns, traveled to Washington to appropriate what seemed an epic tale to him. He offered to write dialog for Cliff during the Senate hearings on the violent rescue of the First Lady. Surprisingly, Cliff accepted, and the two proved well matched. Cliff was the perfect terse loner to speak for blabbermouth, clubby America’s wishful image of itself, and Nestor’s niblets of corn sounded pithy in Cliff’s monotone.

Since Van had trimmed the vice-presidency as needless fat, an immediate election was called for on a write-in basis, out of necessity and as a token of electoral reform; besides, the country was virtually broke. August Dodd Woodhead ran on an I Told You So platform, but this time his son Win decided to run against his father himself, despite the presumption that his acidic manner was unelectable. The family conflict was a sensation, but it made the public tired of Dodd and alienated by Win’s witticisms and his tawdry revelations about his childhood spankings. Natural momentum put Cliff in the race, running without any party’s support but with the defense that
he owed nothing to any machine. His slogan, crafted by Nestor, was Be Proud—He Is. Nestor was also his vice-presidential choice, since Cliff didn’t want to meet any strange men in suits and pick one to work with. Also, Shep Woodhead emerged briefly from Lilly Willow, not to endorse his father or his brother, but to reminisce about what good care Cliff had taken of him, and what a good job he’d done running the farm. In Shep’s anesthetized mind, it had been a farm.

The public hoped against hope that Cliff and Carlotta would get together romantically, especially since they were high school sweethearts who had dated briefly later. Tabloids urged her to hear his plea, though as always he seemed to desire her without any particular neediness. She resolved to resist him, and announced she could not keep falling under his spell, only to be abandoned. He grinned and shrugged.

The next day Cliff called a press conference and announced he was marrying Carlotta, that her husband had been declared not only dead but already dead for several years, so she was free to wed without criticism. Carlotta was half thrilled and half affronted, since although this was her dream come true, he hadn’t asked her first. The country went wild for it, and as it had been with Van, the luster of others’ approval burnished Cliff to a husbandly hue. Besides, he seemed to be civilizing his Dodge City heart, thanks to Nestor’s gulch-brown banalities and his own taste for authority. Anyway, she reasoned, the system of checks and balances would keep him, if not in line,
then at least on hand. They were married in the Rose Garden, and Cliff wore a suit. Julienne was invited to the wedding, but she claimed she had already written the chapter about it, and the trip would be superfluous.