“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?
Tashmo lit a cigarette, sitting on a picnic bench. He knew that he had screwed up when he banged his best friend’s wife, and he had done his level best through the intervening years to cover up all traces of the indiscretion. He was following the model of his hero, Ronald Reagan. Tashmo as a bodyguard had watched Reagan in the last years, ’87, ’88, beat off scandal upon scandal, Ollie North, the Contras, missile shipments to Iran, the great man diminished by a web of shredded paper. There were some who even said that Tashmo in those years began to become Ronald Reagan, to walk like him (the jaunty rancher’s strut) and cock a six-gun smile in the Reagan way, and now it seemed that Tashmo was doomed to end his tenure as the Dutchman had, dodging allegations, shrewdly feigning cluelessness. It was a subtle danger of bodyguarding greatness. Exposure to that wattage of charisma seemed to hollow out the everyday. You came to see yourself not as a man with the duties of suburbia, but rather as the president of the country called your life.
The bench was cold on Tashmo’s ass. He took a walk around the yard.
Spring would be coming in a month or so, and he would start his spring routine, rising early when he was home, drinking coffee in his boxing gloves, doing sixty seconds on the speed bag in the basement, wearing nasty old swim trunks. In the summer, he would go outside, still shirtless, showing off his Buster Crabbe physique. He’d pull the hose like a mule from the bushes to the flowerbed, and water slowly, making the dirt dark, cigarette on his lips, the scene slowly building toward a climactic coffee piss, Tashmo in the garden, his back to the house, the trunks tucked under his nuts. If he saw Bo Gould going off to the black budget, Tashmo would wave with the hose, thumbing off a high Good morning! spray, pissing with the other hand as he waved to Bo. That would be a shining time — him going, hose going, Bo going; everything is good.
Jeanette moped through the kitchen, coming from the den, going to the john, carrying a melted icepack in her right hand, the TV remote in her left. Tashmo was sitting at the table, drinking his iced tea.
She said, “I need a ride to school tomorrow morning, Daddy.”
Tashmo said, “That’s nice.”
Jeanette went to the bathroom.
Shirl came in, fixed herself a plate of sloppy joe, and sat down to eat. She said, “Loudon called — I almost forgot. Loudon in L.A., he said. Is that old Loudon Rhodes?”
Tashmo said, “Of course it is. How many Loudons could a person know?”
“Well I asked him and he wouldn’t say. I kept saying, ‘Is this Loudon Rhodes?’”
“He was probably on a cell phone. He’s secrecy-obsessed.”