Philip, running for a pass, stumbles over a lounge chair and plunges into the pool.
The President instantly dives in, wrapping his arm around Philip’s neck, pulling. Philip, afraid to fight, afraid he will accidentally drown the President, guides them toward the shallow end. Philip climbs out, pulling the President out of the water, the President’s arm still wrapped around his neck, choking him.
“They call me the Gripper, because I don’t let go.”
“I think it was Gipper, sir. They called you the Gipper, as in ‘win one for the Gipper.’”
“Seventy-eight,” he says.
“What’s seventy-eight?”
“You’re the seventy-eighth person I saved. I used to be a life guard,” he says, and it is entirely true. “Hey, does that count as a bath?”
She is in her dressing room. It started as a walk-in closet and kept expanding. They broke through a wall into one of the children’s bedrooms and then through another into the guest room, and now it is a dressing suite, a queen’s waiting room. The carpet is Wedgwood blue, the walls white with gold trim, calmly patriotic, American royal. It is her hide-away, her fortress, command and control. She’s got a computer, fax, private telephone lines, and a beauty parlor complete with a professional hair dryer. There’s a divan that used to belong to Merv Griffin, photographs of her with everyone — the little lady with the big head standing next to Princess Di, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Gorbachevs.
In her favorite velour sweat suit, she mounts the contraption — a recumbent bike with built-in screen — she can watch TV, go online, surf the Web, write e-mails, or pedal her way down an animated bucolic country lane.
She needs to be in motion — constant motion. That’s one of the reasons they call her the Hummingbird.
She logs on, checking in with her secretary — would she be willing to host a Los Angeles event with the head of the Republican Party? “OK as per N.R.,” she types. She reviews a proposed album of photographs and sends a message to the chief archivist at the Presidential Library. “Dig deeper. There is a better picture of me with Raisa, also a nice one of the President and me waltzing. That should be the closing image.”
She e-mails the lawyer, the business manager, the White House Alumni Office. Nothing happens without her knowledge, without her approval. She is in communication because he can’t be.
Using a series of code words, she moves in further, signing into the First Ladies’ Club, a project started by Barbara Bush as a way of keeping in touch; trading helpful hints about difficult subjects such as transition times — when you’re not elected, you’re not wanted — and standing by your man when indictments come down. They keep each other updated on their special interests, literacy, mental health, addiction, “Just Say No.” They all talk about Hillary behind her back — she’s a little too ambitious for them. And Hillary doesn’t update her weekly “What I Did for the Good of the Country” column, instead just sending impersonal perky messages like “You Go Girl!”
The communications man has her wired up, six accounts under a variety of names — virtually untraceable. This is her solace, her salvation. This is the one place where she can be herself, or better yet, be someone else.
Under the name Edith Iowa she logs into an Alzheimer’s support group.
“What do you do when they don’t recognize you anymore? ‘I know you from somewhere,’ he says, looking at me, worried, struggling.”
“He asked for more light. He kept asking more light, more light. I turned on every light in the house. He kept saying, Why is it so dark in here? Don’t we pay the electric bills? I grabbed the flashlight and shined it in his face — is this enough light for you? He froze. I could see right through him and there was nothing there. Am I horrible? Did I hurt him? Is someone going to take him away? Do I ever say how much I miss him?”
She reads the stories and cries. She cries because she knows what they’re talking about, because she lives in fear of the same things happening to her, because she knows that despite everything it will all come true. After a lifetime of trying not to be like everyone else, in the end she is just like everyone else.
When the doctor told them it was Alzheimer’s, she thought they’d deal with it the same way they’d dealt with so many things — cancer, the assassination attempt, more cancer. But then she realized that it was not something they’d deal with, it was something she would deal with, alone. She cries because it is the erasing of a marriage, the erasing of history, as though the experiences, the memories which define her, never happened, as though nothing is real.
“How brave you are,” Larry King said to her. What choice does she have?
She orders products online, things to make life easier: plastic plugs for the electric outlets, locks for the cabinets, motion detectors that turn on lamps, flood alarms, fold-down shower seats, a nonslip rubber mat for around the toilet, diapers. They arrive at a post box downtown, addressed to Western Industries. She stores them in what used to be Skipper’s room. Like preparing for the arrival of an infant, she orders things in advance, she wants to have whatever he’ll need on hand, she wants there to be no surprises.
Under her most brazen moniker, Lady Hawke, she goes into chat rooms, love online. The ability to flirt, to charm, is still important to her. She lists her interests as homemaking and politics. She says she’s divorced with no children and puts her age at fifty-three.
— Favorite drink?
— Whiskey sour.
— Snack food?
— Caviar.
She is in correspondence with EZRIDER69, a man whose Harley has a sidecar.
— Just back from a convention in Santa Barbara — ever been there?
— Used to go all the time.
— U ride?
— Horses.
— Would love to take you for a spin in my sidecar.
— Too fast for me.
— How about on a Ferris wheel?
She feels herself blushing, it spreads through her, a liquidy warm rush.
— Dinner by the ocean?
EZ is asking her out on a date. He is a motorcyclist, a self-described leather man with a handlebar mustache, a professional hobbyist, he likes fine wines, romance, and the music of Neil Diamond.
“Not possible,” she writes back. “I am not able to leave my husband. He is older and failing.”
— I thought U were divorced?
She doesn’t respond.
— U still there?
— Yes.
— I don’t care what you are — Divorced, Married, Widowed. You could be married to the President of the United States and it wouldn’t change anything — I’d still like to take you to dinner.
It changes everything. She looks at herself in the mirrored closet doors, a seventy-seven-year-old woman flirting while riding an exercise bike.
A hollow body, an elected body, a public body. The way to best shield yourself in a public life is simply to empty the inside, to have no secrets, to have nothing that requires attention, to be a vessel, a kind of figurehead, a figurine like a Staffordshire dog.
She goes to the entertainment channel and gets the latest on Brad and Jennifer. They are all in her town, down the road, around the corner. She could summon any of them and they would come quickly, out of curiosity, but she can’t, she won’t. Like a strange Siamese twin, the more removed he becomes the more removed she becomes.
She changes screen names again — STARPOWER — and checks in with her psychic friends, her astrological soul mates. You have to believe in something and she has always loved the stars — she is a classic Cancer, he is a prototypical Aquarius. Mercury is in retrograde, the planets are slipping out of alignment, hold on, Cancer, hold on. The planets are transiting, ascending — she works hard at keeping her houses in order.