Sixty Days and Counting

‘Your clothes are still visible?’ Charlie inquired, oppressed by these thoughts.

‘To me they are. But look,’ passing on a full riposte, as being understood in advance – although Phil could no doubt see the comedy of omnipotence as well as the comedy of constraint – ‘I wanted to talk to you about your position in the administration. Roy says you’re being a little balky, but obviously we need you.’

‘I’m here already. I can talk twelve hours a day, if you like.’

‘Well, but a lot of these jobs require more than that. They’re in-person jobs, as you know.’

‘What do you mean, like which ones?’

‘Well, like for instance head of the EPA.’

‘WHAT?’ Charlie shouted. He reeled, literally, in that he staggered slightly to the side, then listed back to catch himself. ‘Don’t you be scaring me, Phil! I hope you’re not thinking of making appointments as stupid as that! Jesus, you know perfectly well I’m not qualified for that job! You need a first-rate scientist for that one, a major researcher with some policy and administrative experience, we’ve talked about this already! Every agency needs to feel appreciated and supported to keep esprit de corps and function at the highest levels, you know that! Isn’t Roy reminding you? You aren’t making a bunch of stupid political appointments, are you?’

Phil was cracking up. ‘See? That’s why we need you down here!’

Charlie sucked down some air. ‘Oh. Ha ha. Very funny. Don’t be scaring me like that, Phil.’

‘I was serious, Charlie. You’d be fine heading the EPA. We need someone there with a global vision of the world’s environmental problems. And we’ll find someone like that. But that wouldn’t be the best use for you, I agree.’

‘Good.’ Charlie felt as if a bullet had just whizzed by his head. He was quivering as he said, very firmly, ‘Let’s just keep things like they are with me.’

‘No, that’s not what I mean, either. Listen, can you come down here and at least talk it over with me? Fit that into your schedule?’

Well, shit. How could he say no? This was his boss, also the President of the United States, speaking. But if he had to talk to him in person about it … He sighed. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course. Your wish is my demand.’

‘Bring Joe, if you can, I’d enjoy seeing him. We can take him out for a spin on the Tidal Basin.’

‘Yeah yeah.’

What else could he say?

The problem was that Yeah Yeah was pretty much the only thing you could say, when replying to the President of the United States making a polite request of you. Perhaps there had been some presidents who had established a limit there, by asking for impossible things and then seeing what happened; power could quickly bring out the latent sadism in the powerful; but if a sane and clever president wanted only ever to get yeses in response to his questions, he could certainly frame them to make it that way. That was just the way it was.

Certainly it was hard to say no to a president-elect inviting you and your toddler to paddle around the Tidal Basin in one of the shiny blue pedal boats docked on the east side of the pond.

And once on the water, it indeed proved very hard to say no to Phil. Joe was wedged between them, lifejacketed and strapped down by Secret Service agents in ways that even Anna would have accepted as safe. He was looking about blissfully; he had even been fully compliant and agreeable about getting into the life jacket and being tied down by the seat belting. It had made Charlie a bit seasick to watch. Now it felt like Phil was doing most of the pumping on the boat’s foot pedals. He was also steering.

Phil was always in a good mood on the water, rapping away about nothing, looking down at Joe, then over the water at the Jefferson Memorial, the most graceful but least emotional of the city’s memorials; beaming at the day, sublimely unaware of the people on the shore path who had noticed him and were exclaiming into their cell phones or taking pictures with them. The Secret Service people had taken roost on the paddle boat dock, and there were an unusual number of men in suits walking the shore among the tourists and joggers.

‘Where I need you in the room,’ Phil said out of the blue, ‘is when we gather a global warming task force. I’ll be out of my depth in that crowd, and there’ll be all kinds of information and plans put forth. That’s where I’ll want your impressions, both real-time and afterward, to help me crosscheck what I think. It won’t do to have me describe these things to you after the fact. There isn’t time for that, and besides I might miss the most important thing.’

‘Yeah, well –’

‘None of that! This task force will be as close to a Department of Science or a Department for the Environment as I can make. It’s going to set the agenda for a lot of what we do. It’ll be my strategy group, Charlie, and I’m saying I need you in it. Now, I’ve looked into the daycare facilities for children at the White House. They’re adequate, and we can get to work making them even better. Joe will be my target audience. You’d like to play all day with a bunch of kids, wouldn’t you Joe?’

‘Yeah Phil,’ Joe said, happy to be included in the conversation.

‘We’ll set up whatever system works best for you, what do you think of that?’

‘I like that,’ Joe said.

Charlie started to mutter something about the Chinese women who buried their infants up to the neck in riverbank mud every day to leave them to go to work in the rice paddies, but Phil overrode him.

‘Gymboree in the basement, if that’s what it takes! Laser tag, paint-ball wars – you name it! You’d like paint-ball wars, wouldn’t you Joe.’

‘Big truck,’ Joe observed, pointing at the traffic on Independence Avenue.

‘Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn.’

‘Monster truck.’ Joe smiled at the phrase.

Charlie sighed. It really seemed to him that Joe should be shouting big trucks right now, or trying to escape and crawling around among the turning pedals underfoot, or leaping overboard to go for a swim. Instead he was listening peacefully to Phil’s banter, with an expression that said he understood just as much as he wanted to, and approved of it in full.

Ah well. Everyone changed. And in fact, that had been the whole point of the ceremony Charlie had asked the Khembalis to conduct! Charlie had requested it – had insisted on it, in fact! But without, he now realized, fully imagining the consequences.

Phil said, ‘So you’ll do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You more or less have to, right? I mean, you’re the one who first suggested that I run, when we were over at Lincoln.’

‘Everyone was telling you that.’

‘No they weren’t. Besides, you were first.’

‘No, you were. I just thought it would work.’

‘And you were right, right?’

‘Apparently so.’

‘So you owe me. You got me into this mess.’

Phil smiled, waved at some tourists as he made a broad champing turn back toward the other side of the Basin. Charlie sighed. If he agreed, he would not see Joe anywhere near as much as he was used to – an idea he hated. On the other hand, if he didn’t see him as much, he wouldn’t notice so often how much Joe had changed. And he hated that change.

So much to dislike! Unhappily he said, ‘I’ll have to talk to Anna about it first. But I think she’ll go for it. She’s pretty pro-work. So. Shit. I’ll give it a try. I’ll give it a few months, and see how it goes. By that time your task force should be on their way, and I can see where things stand and go emeritus if I need to.’

‘Good.’ And Phil pedaled furiously, almost throwing Charlie’s knees up into his chin with the force of his enthusiasm. He said, ‘Look, Joe, all the people are waving at you!’

Joe waved back. ‘Hi people!’ he shouted. ‘Big truck, right there! Look! I like that big truck. That’s a good truck.’

And so: change. The inexorable emergence of difference in time. Becoming. One of the fundamental mysteries.

Charlie hated it. He liked being; he hated becoming. This was, he thought, an indicator of how happy he had been with the way things were, the situation as he had had it. Mister Mom – he had loved it. Just this last May he had been walking down Leland Street and had passed Djina, one of the Gymboree moms he knew, biking the other way, and he had called out to her ‘Happy Mother’s Day!’ and she had called back, ‘Same to you!’ and he had felt a glow in him that had lasted an hour. Someone had understood.

Of course the pure mom routine of the 1950s was an Ozzie and Harriet nightmare, a crazy-making program so effective that the surprise was there were any moms at all in that generation who had stayed sane. Most of them had gone nuts in one way or another, because in its purest form that life was too constrained to the crucial but mindless daily chores of child-rearing and house maintenance – ‘uncompensated labor,’ as the economists put it, but in a larger sense than what they meant with their idiot bean-counting. Coming in the fifties, hard on the heels of World War Two’s shattering of all norms, its huge chaotic space of dislocation and freedom for young women, it must have felt like a return to prison after a big long break-out.

But that wasn’t the life Charlie had been leading. Along with the child care and the shopping and the housework had been his ‘real’ work as a senatorial aide, which, even though it had been no more than a few phone conversations a day, had bolstered the ‘unreal’ work of Mr. Momhood in a curious dual action. Eventually which work was ‘real’ had become a moot point; the upshot was that he felt fulfilled, and the lucky and accidental recipient of a full life. Maybe even overfull! But that was what happened when Freud’s short list of the important things in life – work and love – were all in play.