Bobbie Taylor-Niles was a presence in a bar, a beauty and a bombshell and a magnet for the guys, less a woman than an ocean liner of desire, continuous and sleek, with long, knifing legs and hair a shade her colorist called sand, short for Streisand. Bobbie called herself the scenic route and men seemed to agree. She was not exactly young these days (she was frank about her age, which was thirty-nine-and-seven-quarters), but young men found her sexy in the older-woman way and old men found her sexy, period. This last fact was strategically important, Bobbie said, because she planned to marry a distinguished man of years and reputation, wealthy or at least well-to-do, a carnal, cynical arrangement maybe, but Bobbie had tried every other kind of marriage.
She numbered her ex-husbands I, II, and III, like movie sequels or world wars. Husband I was her first supervisor in the Criminal Division, El Paso station, a guy named Doyle Doak, who did rope tricks in his office and crossed into Mexico for eyeglass appointments, saved a couple bucks that way, no wonder he was always sea-sick, fucking cheap-ass dick, Bobbie said. In Washington, she met Husband II, a Senate lawyer who wrote banking regulations, who was quite a force in banking regulation, but who lost his job when he forgot to put not in a certain crucial sentence, accidentally abolishing all private debt in the United States. Bobbie, disappointed, left Husband II for Husband III, a surgeon in Virginia, an oral surgeon — actually a dentist, which was pretty much the same thing as a surgeon, Bobbie said. The dentist, Dr. Potter Niles, had a spreading practice in the suburbs and was certainly not poor. Vi had never met the dentist, never heard his voice, and Bobbie rarely spoke of him except to ridicule his taste in things, which was, she said, ultra—Reader’s Digest. Dr. Potter Niles read the Reader’s Digests in his own waiting room and Bobbie sometimes caught him lounging in his waiting room at night, like it was a real living room. She left the dentist and moved in with an old flame, the man she called the Admiral, a two-star Navy surgeon, a true medical surgeon, the former personal physician to the president.
Vi knew that Potter Niles still loved Bobbie. Vi knew this from the support checks he sent every month. Bobbie, whose personal finances were often chaotic, asked Vi to cash these checks. Potter always wrote a little note on the memo line—Come back to me, or words to that effect. Bobbie got the checks in the mail, tore the envelopes, sometimes tearing the checks too in her impatience, and never read the long, anguished letters Potter included with the checks. He must have guessed this, for he wrote a Cliffs Notes version on the paper she did read. Bobbie endorsed the checks on the back in lavender ink, scrawled No! next to Come back to me, and gave the checks to Vi, who endorsed them for deposit to her NOW account. Vi’s bank cleared them and sent them on to Potter’s bank, which cleared them again, debiting his account, and so Bobbie’s reply came back to Potter canceled with his monthly statements.
Come back to me/No! — this was the exchange for May, when Vi started acting as Bobbie’s banker.
Give me one good reason, said Potter on the memo line for June. You’re boring, Bobbie scrawled and gave the check to Vi.
July was: But I love you/Even this is boring.
Come back to me/I hope you find someone special—August.
I have: you/So have I: someone else—September.
Who is this Vincent Asplund, the man who keeps depositing my checks — is he your lover now? asked Potter in October. We sleep together yes, said Bobbie cruelly.
Come back to me—and so on through the calendar to Christmas and beyond.
Vi knew that Bobbie would not go back to Potter Niles. Bobbie dreamed of being Mrs. Admiral, living the gracious life she saw in magazines, throwing tinkling drinks parties for the NatSecCom set. She talked about it often, drinking in the bars — her future perfect life. This was the real Bobbie Taylor-Niles. The rest of her biography — three divorces, four abortions, seven maxed-out credit cards, one personal bankruptcy — was an accident, a draft. She would quit the Service on her wedding day and say goodbye to Vi and the crowds.
Some nights, Vi and Bobbie sat alone in hotel bars, talking about men or bullshitting with the other agents coming in, or the campaign hangers-on, the preppies of the press pool, a stray congressman or two. Bobbie, seven years an agent at the White House, a moth at the ballpark lights of power, seemed to know every man who ever had a bit of it, and it was entertaining, watching Bobbie flirt.
Other nights they stayed in the room. Vi would do her isometric exercises, pushing on the walls, as Bobbie had a cigarette and a Stolie from the minibar. Then Vi would do her crunches as Bobbie had a cigarette and called the Admiral back in Georgetown. Vi would take a shower, come out, towel down, and check her e-mails as Bobbie had a cigarette and watched a movie from the in-room entertainment menu, talking from a cloud of smoke, telling, in installments, the story of the struggle that was Bobbie Taylor-Niles.
Bobbie had grown up poor in a Tulsa trailer park. She fucked her way into the Air Force at the age of seventeen (she was a minor, her stepfather wouldn’t sign, the recruiter was willing to be flexible). She joined the base police, liked the white armband, the way she looked in the white armband, went to college on the Vandenberg-Cal State extension program, made decent grades (Bobbie wasn’t stupid), joined the Service after her discharge, did her rookie tour in Crim, married Doyle Doak (thinking he was somebody important because he had his own parking space; she was so unworldly in those days), took a transfer to Protection, trying to move up, to get closer to the real people, the ones who run the world and have the money. She spent seven years inside the White House, guarding the first daughter — happy years for Bobbie. The famously feminist first lady was busy with her teas and her causes, leaving the first daughter, a doggish teenager, completely in the dark on basic woman things (the poor kid was bursting into puberty wearing baggy overalls and cotton boxers, for God’s sake, Bobbie said), and Bobbie, who loved the kid, took it upon herself to educate the first daughter in the things that every woman needs to know, how to win and keep a man, how to keep him satisfied, how to slip a condom on his hog without him knowing it, using just your lips and tongue and one index finger. The first lady caught Bobbie and the daughter in the Lincoln Bedroom covering the G-spot and its meaning to a girl, and the old witch hit the roof, sending Bobbie into exile, the Siberia of crowds.
Bobbie told these stories in the motel rooms, talking from her cloud, gray layers in the lamplight at her head, as she had perhaps another vodka for her nerves. Vi would listen as she ironed her clothes and kevlar for the morning, and Bobbie’s too, and cleaned their weapons on the bedspread if she was in the mood. They talked and watched TV until one of them could sleep, usually Vi, and then they killed the lights and Bobbie watched the movie end. Sometimes — more and more, it seemed — Vi would wake up before dawn and find Bobbie in her bed, a shock the first few times, but not after that. Vi would close her eyes and drift away, and, through the night, the women found each other in the sheets, sleeping thigh-to-pelvis, sweating, flinching, jerking, dreaming of two ropelines, guarding each other in their dreams.