The Sweetman Curve Page 7

  Horace Ossenbacker had died in 1951, but not before he had gotten his money’s worth out of Carl. Ossenbacker Steel was cleared of anti-trust charges in 1948 in a manner which The Wall Street Journal described as ‘almost miraculous.’

  For his part, Carl X. Chapman plunged into the dirtiest of political fights with the greatest gusto. His name came up in scandals of big business payoffs to Representatives; in Communist witch-hunt trials; in vote-rigging investigations. Now there remained only one honour that Carl X. Chapman wanted, to crown a career that had been brawling, spectacular and profitable. He wanted to be President in 1980. He wanted to be President so deeply that he had never once seriously considered that he wouldn’t be. Art Buchwald had once remarked that he had ‘a mental mortgage on the White House.’

  ‘Will Carl Chapman be President in 1980?’ Carl asked, at receptions and dinner parties. ‘Does the Potomac flow to the Chesapeake?’

  This morning, Carl jogged around the roof of the Doral-on-the-Ocean Hotel, his belly jumbling up and down with every step, and he turned over the moves he was already making to take him up to the White House door in 1980. Some of the key supporters he was counting on were still perched on a variety of fences, and he knew that his foreign policy wanted licking into much more attractive shape. But these were problems he could tackle as the primaries came closer, and as the issues of the next Presidential contest began to clarify themselves.

  What worried him, though, was what he considered to be an unhealthy grass-roots changing of America’s political feelings. He claimed he could sense it in the wind; the wind that blew across the Midwest from the Rockies, and the wind that chilled the East. It was a gradual turning-away from national ideals to personal ideals, a laying-down of shared responsibility for America as a family, a weakness of society’s spirit.

  Carl abhorred this change, and he also feared it. The people who would elect him into office in 1980 would have to be people who believed in a collective national dream, America’s dream, Carl Chapman’s dream. Those who dreamed their own dreams, at the expense of the greater ideal, were his enemies.

  It was almost nine. The low-lying cloud had frittered and fizzled away in the sharp heat of the sun, and he was sweating now. Down below, on the pool deck, the first of the Miami widows had ventured out, an eighty-year-old woman in a harlequin-coloured beach-robe and sunglasses like the back end of a ’59 Buick.

  He kept on jogging, until he reached the low parapet that overlooked the beach. Then he slowed down, and stopped, and touched his toes a couple of times. He was breathing hard, and he could feel his heart rising and falling like someone wading through the shallows of the sea. He picked up his striped towel from where he had left it on the wall, and dabbed at his face.

  A dry, ladylike voice behind him said, ‘Good morning, darling.’

  Across the roof, with a faintly supercilious smile on her face, came his wife Elspeth. She was wearing an embroidered white kaftan that ruffled in the breeze like the sail of a boat, and her black hair was curled into loose bubbles. Her face, under her huge light-tinted sunglasses, was pinched and lined. It was the face of a political and social huntress; a woman whose eyes are forever peering towards far horizons, and who will never quite believe, even in the presence of royalty and Rockefellers and Huntingtons, that she has actually arrived.

  She leaned against the parapet and looked down at the surf.

  ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said. ‘Working off the excesses of the night?’

  Carl didn’t answer, but folded up his towel and hung it back on the wall.

  Elspeth turned towards him. ‘How was Henry?’ she asked him. ‘Did he promise the extra funds? Or did he tell you that you were past it? Presidents are supposed to require a great deal of stamina, you know. Like adulterers.’

  Carl looked back at her with a tired, set face. ‘Are we going to have this conversation again? Don’t you think it’s time we talked about something fresh? About the weather, maybe, or the state of the nation?’

  She smiled, quite unfazed. ‘All you have to do is stop doing it, and then I’ll stop talking about it.’

  ‘Elspeth – you’re trying to make out that I’m some kind of rampant satyr. I wish I had half the energy to satisfy half the women you think I’m screwing. It’s all in your head, Elspeth. It’s all up there, in that nutty noddle of yours.’

  ‘Like Helen Pruitt, I suppose. Helen Pruitt, twenty-four-year-old secretary, was just a figment of my fevered imagination.’

  Carl gave a short, testy sigh, but he didn’t answer. Helen Pruitt was a sensitive subject.

  Elspeth said, ‘Listen, dear, I know what you’re going to say. I’m a scheming, suspicious woman, and I never loved you, and I’m only along for the ride to the White House. Well, believe it or not, that isn’t true. I happen to be quite fond of you, and if you ever gave me the chance, I might even be able to like you.’

  He grunted. ‘You’re very generous this morning. What’s gotten into you?’

  ‘Oh, spare me the sarcasm, Carl,’ she retorted. ‘I mean what I say, even if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘So what’s this adultery talk?’

  She took off her sunglasses, and screwed up her eyes against the glare. She had cornflower-blue eyes, and precisely-pencilled eyebrows. A long time ago, back in Minnesota, she had been almost beautiful.

  ‘It’s only worth my sticking around if you’re going to make it as President, dear, and make it as a husband, too. Right now, I’m not sure you’re going to do either.’

  ‘Oh, yes? On what grounds?’

  ‘Cheating will do for starters. Especially cheating as flagrant as yours.’

  Carl rubbed his eyes. ‘I look down a secretary’s cleavage and that’s cheating? I’m a man, Elspeth, and it’s about time you realised it. I’m a big man with big appetites. Just because you feel inadequate, don’t take it out on me. It’s not my fault you feel inadequate. Haven’t I told you enough times that you’re adequate?’

  ‘Adequate? That’s a compliment?’

  ‘It’s not an insult.’

  Elspeth sat down on the parapet and took out a cigarette, which she knew would annoy him. She cupped her hands over her gold-and-platinum lighter to shield it from the morning breeze, and then blew twin grey flares of smoke from her nostrils.

  ‘I thought we flew down to Miami to do business,’ she said. ‘That’s if you can call coaxing money out of Henry Ullerstam “business.”’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Henry. He’s backed us up for years.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Just so long as he’s gotten a dollar-fifteen’s worth of favours out of every dollar he’s handed over.’

  ‘He hands over the money, and that’s all that counts.’ Elspeth drew deeply at her cigarette, and looked at her husband with a mixture of affection and disappointment. ‘So the oil at Waurika didn’t count?’ she asked him. ‘Letting Henry drill in the plumb centre of an environmentally-protected area, that didn’t count?’

  ‘It was a deal.’

  ‘A deal?’ she asked. ‘It wasn’t a deal that the environmental protection agency knew much about.’

  Carl looked at her hard. ‘Elspeth,’ he said, ‘what are you trying to tell me? You’re not getting at Henry, are you? Because if you are—’

  She turned her face away. ‘I just thought we flew down to Miami to do business, that’s all. I guess I forgot that business has its little favours and its little gifts. It was silly of me, really. You’ve done so many favours for Henry, it shouldn’t surprise me so much when he does a favour for you.’

  ‘Favour? What favour?’

  ‘A shapely dinner companion, for instance.’

  Carl pursed his lips. ‘The only remotely shapely dinner companion we had last night was Olive Ullerstam. And damn it, Elspeth, at least she came along, as you should have done.’

  She shrugged. ‘Those money-grubbing affairs always give me migraine.’

  ‘Your migraine is a pain in the ass.’ />
  Elspeth laughed delightedly. ‘You’re wonderful. You talk in real life just like you do in the Senate.’

  ‘And you talk just like you do in analysis. You think I have a Jungian urge to screw collectively the brains out of every girl in America.’

  ‘He’s Freudian, my analyst, not Jungian.’

  ‘Whatever, he fills you with enough crap to choke the Panama Canal. I can hardly bring myself to pay the stupid bastard’s bills.’

  Elspeth was furious. ‘And what about your precious Dr Lipman? What has he ever done, except pour out two glasses of Old Crow, hand around the cigars, and charge you two-hundred-fifty dollars for two hours’ talk about marlin fishing?’

  Carl took a long, controlled breath. ‘Dr Lipman is a genius. Dr Lipman sorted out all of my identity problems and all of my virility problems.’

  ‘What did he tell you? That sleeping around with young girls restores an old man’s self-confidence? If he said that, he’s wrong. A thousand million times wrong. Young girls will drain away whatever manhood you happen to have left, Mr Ernest Hemingway Chapman, and bring you face to face with the dotard you really are.’

  ‘Elspeth,’ said Carl tiredly, ‘this is pretty heavy stuff for nine in the morning. Apart from that, it’s totally untrue.’

  ‘What’s totally untrue?’

  ‘Whatever you’re suggesting.’

  ‘I’m only suggesting that young girls are bad news for old men like you. What did you think I was suggesting?’ Carl looked at her steadily. ‘You’re suggesting that Henry provided a girl for me last night, aren’t you? That’s what you’re really trying to say – that I was unfaithful again.’

  She slowly shook her head. ‘I don’t know how you’ve got the damned nerve to look so wide-eyed and innocent,’ she said with a bitterness that was as soft as decaying fruit. ‘I don’t know how you can do what you do and protest that I’m misjudging you.’

  ‘Elspeth, if you think that last night—’

  She jerked her head away as if flinching from a horsefly. ‘Of course I do,’ she told him. ‘Last night and a hundred other damned nights. What do you take me for? You come back to my bed at three in the morning smelling of some strange woman’s perfume and you don’t think I notice? You have dinner in the same damned hotel where I’m lying sick, and you sit by the window with Henry and Olive and some damned floozie with a gold evening gown and red hair and tits that practically poke your eyes out, and you don’t think I’ll find out?’

  ‘Elspeth, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so damned childish,’ she begged him. ‘I know you don’t love me any more. I know you don’t even like me very much. But you need me, Carl, for your career; and for whatever I want out of life, I, God help me, need you.’

  Carl said, as evenly as he could, ‘All right, a redhead did sit at my table last night, but only for a while. She happened to come from back home, in Northfield. She wanted to know what I was doing to help out the local welfare programme.’

  Elspeth stared at him for a moment, and then laughed at the top of her high-pitched voice. It was like listening to glass breaking.

  ‘The welfare programme? Carl, what are you saying? Girls with gold evening gowns and pointed tits are interested in the welfare programme! If you’d said abortion, I might have half-believed you. Even dope addiction. But welfare! You want to be President, and you can’t even think of a good lie!’

  Carl stepped forward and gripped her shoulders. ‘Will you quit provoking me?’ he warned her, with eyes as hard as industrial diamonds. ‘Will you just quit it!’

  She looked up at him with undisguised sadness. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not for as long as you hold yourself up as an example to other people. Because if I ever did quit provoking you, you’d go your own sweet way, and this country would follow you all the way down to the pits.’

  He clenched his fist as if he was about to hit her in the face, but she didn’t flinch.

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she said softly. ‘The would-be Presidential candidate, punching the would-be First Lady?’

  He let her go. ‘I’m going for breakfast,’ he said in a cold voice. ‘Are you coming?’

  She shook her head. ‘I want to know that you’re going to be faithful before I eat breakfast with you, Carl. I want to know that you’re going to be honest and true in whatever relationship we have.’

  He looked down at his frayed, worn-out sneakers. ‘Elspeth,’ he said huskily, ‘we have to think of our country as well as ourselves.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  He looked back up at her. ‘It means that I’ve got myself a heavy burden to carry through life, Elspeth, and that sometimes I may stumble and slip. I’m not a saint. I freely admit that. But I’m always going to do my best for you, and I’m always going to do my best for America, and if I fail to live up to your expectations once in a while, or my country’s expectations, then I can only beg forgiveness.’

  She sat on the parapet in silence for a long, long time. Then she said: ‘Go have your sugar-frosted flakes, Carl, before you make me seasick.’

  Nine

  Carl Chapman showered, shaved, and changed into a red-and-green plaid sports coat, light green pants, and white shoes. Smelling of Aramis aftershave, he went up in the elevator to the twelfth floor, where Henry Ullerstam was staying for the weekend in his permanently-reserved suite. A bulky security officer from Bayshore Oil was standing by the door in a crumpled beige uniform, his expression as stolid as a fire hydrant, and he barred the door as Carl approached. ‘Mr Ullerstam home?’ asked Carl.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Tell him it’s the next President.’

  When Carl was admitted, Henry Ullerstam, the forty-eight-year-old chairman of Bayshore Oil, was standing by the window in a peacock blue silk bathrobe, eating an English muffin and looking down at a girl in a very small brown bikini on the sundeck of the adjacent hotel.

  ‘Hi, Carl,’ he said. ‘What do you make of that?’

  Carl glanced down. ‘Thanks all the same, not this morning.’

  Henry raised an urbane eyebrow. He was a tall, good-looking man, with swept-back hair and a hawkish nose. His wife, Olive, always said he looked more like Basil Rathbone than Basil Rathbone, although she herself looked remarkably like Barbara Stanwyck, but couldn’t see the similarity at all.

  ‘Young Lollie was all right, wasn’t she? She did her stuff? Showed you her specialty?’ Henry inquired.

  Carl nodded. ‘Lollie was fine. She’s a lovely girl. But the trouble is Elspeth. She found out about it, God knows how, and she’s doing her aggrieved but dignified number. We just had a spat on the gymnasium roof, of all places.’

  ‘I’m surprised at that – her finding out,’ said Henry. ‘I had Shapiro keep an eye on her door all evening, and he swears she didn’t appear once. Maybe she shinned out of the window on a rope of knotted sheets.’

  Carl sat down heavily in one of the yellow plush armchairs. He was beginning to feel the strain of his last-minute flight to Miami, his six hours of hard negotiation with Henry, his rich dinner of lobster tails and marinated steak, and his strenuous struggling in Lollie’s bed, all breasts, legs, arms, and a greedy mouth that wouldn’t let him alone. And on top of that, jogging.

  ‘Maybe one of the waiters tipped off Elspeth at breakfast,’ Henry said. ‘That’s possible. But if it’s true, I’ll have his bow tie snipped in half, his menus torn up, his shoelaces tied together, and make sure he gets discharged with dishonour.’

  Carl coughed. ‘It’s not a joke, Henry. Elspeth can make or break me.’

  Henry brushed muffin crumbs from his bathrobe. ‘I know it’s not a joke. But maybe you’re letting her scare you too much. She’s only a woman, you know, and whatever she says, she wants to be First Lady just as desperately as you want to be President.’

  Carl bent forward gloomily. ‘I wish I had your confidence in her.’

  Henry smiled, and sat in the chair opposite, propping hi
s bare feet on the low, glass-topped table. His toes were crooked and there was a prominent bunion on his left foot. ‘Perhaps you should pay her a little more attention,’ he suggested. ‘Woo her with diamonds and furs and frequent kisses. Make love to her now and again.’

  Carl sighed. ‘I have a feeling you may be right. I wish you weren’t.’

  Henry reached for the Indian marble cigarette box on the table, took out a cigarette, and lit it. Through the twisting blue smoke, he said, ‘It has never ceased to surprise me how the men who yearn to handle the lives of two hundred fifty million people have such elementary difficulty in handling their own. Roosevelt, Kennedy, you name them.’

  Carl did not answer. There was nobody else in the universe he would allow to speak to him like that, and even with Henry he didn’t trust himself to respond with anything jovial or witty. Instead, he said harshly, ‘Did you speak to your finance people?’

  Henry blew smoke rings. ‘Oh, sure. I had them all out of bed at five this morning.’

  ‘And?’

  Henry made a moue. ‘They like you, and they like what you say. They particularly like your promise to allocate drilling rights in most of the federal oil fields to private operators.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But, well, they do have some reservations,’ said Plenry. ‘What reservations?’ asked Carl. ‘You didn’t have any reservations, last night.’

  ‘No,’ said Henry carefully, ‘but then I’m not an accountant. I don’t have one of those grim, unimpressible accountant’s minds.’

  ‘What’s making them feel so grim and unimpressed?’ Henry smiled again, more distantly this time. ‘It’s hard to put this kindly, Carl, but please understand that it isn’t a reflection of my personal feelings towards you as a politician. Or as a man. But my accountants feel that your estimate of your popular support in 1980 is a little on the high side. They think you’re – well, how shall I put it? – overconfident.’