Supreme Courtship

CHAPTER 4

The army deposited Pepper back at the Thirtieth Street heliport by five that afternoon. After the silence of the Camp David bowling alley, the bustle and roar of crepuscular Manhattan felt vibrantly reassuring. She decided to walk the couple of miles back to the apartment, wanting to think things over and postpone the inevitable moment of evasion with Buddy. The President had asked her not to discuss it with anyone.

“Even my husband?”

“Is he discreet?” the President asked.

“He’s a former TV newsman.”

“Oh, dear. Then especially not your husband. If this thing leaks, it’s over before it’s even begun. The first time the public hears of this, you need to be sitting next to me in the Oval Office.”

Pepper thought about discussing it with Buddy, but his record on discretion was anything but reassuring. And she had a hunch that he was not going to take this news well.

“Where the hell were you?” Buddy said crossly when the click of her heels on marble announced her return. “I must have called you four hundred times. You didn’t answer your cell or your BlackBerry. I was going to start calling emergency rooms.”

“I know, I know, sorry, baby.” She gave him a kiss, which he did not return. “I needed to spend a little quality time with myself. Clear my head. Woke up feeling kind of cobwebby up here.” She tapped the side of her head, which at the moment felt anything but clear.

Buddy was looking at her either incredulously or suspiciously. He was sixteen years older than Pepper and at that age when an older husband begins to worry about a younger, attractive wife-who has gone inexplicably AWOL for a day, and returned with an unconvincing explanation.

“But where were you?”

She flung her handbag onto an armchair, looked him straight in the face, and said, “With the President of the United States. At Camp David.”

“ Camp David,” Buddy said. “Really. And how is the President?”

“Fine. He’s into bowling. Sends his best. You hungry? I’m starved. Want to go to that tapas joint? Grab some sangria. Fool around?”

“First tell me where you were today. I was fucking frantic, for God’s sake.”

“Baby, I told you. The phone rang, it was the President. He wanted to see me. They sent this helicopter for me and everything.”

“Are you insane?”

“No, starving.”

“Pepper. Where. Were. You. All. Today?”

“Camp. David.”

“Dammit.”

“What?”

“You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Well, okay, then, and what did he want?”

“He’s a fan, turns out.”

“The President of the United States watches the show?”

“Apparently. Yeah.”

“Jesus. Why didn’t you take me along?”

“You were asleep, darling.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You were out. What time did we get in last night, anyway?”

Buddy hesitated slightly too long. “Oh, I don’t know. Late.”

Pepper said, “For a guy who divides his days into seconds, you sure get vague when it comes time to accounting for the nocturnal hours.”

“Whoa with the cross-examination, Your Honor. You’re the one who disappeared all day without a trace. All right, all right. Let’s get something to eat.”

“Not hungry.”

“You said you were.”

“Well, I guess I filled up. On bullshit,” she said, and stalked off to the bedroom.

“Pepper.”

“Kiss my ass.”

“I thought,” Buddy said after her, “we’d been over all that.”

“Well, I guess we aren’t over ‘all that.’ ”

“All that” being a blind item that had appeared some months past in Page Six [1]: “Which unjudicious reality TV producer has just hired his fourth young-lovely ‘personal assistant’ whose duties include more than keeping him supplied with foamy lattes?”

She slammed the bedroom door behind her, and then felt foolish for imprisoning herself while actually hungry. But then a few minutes later she heard the front door slam reciprocally. She walked to the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center and bought two shopping bags of books about the Supreme Court, including numerous autobiographies of justices. (There were a surprising number of them by sitting justices. She had been under the impression that they generally waited until later to sum things up.)

Pepper opted for takeout at Shun Lee and, now looking like an expensive, thoughtful bag lady, lugged her trove back to the apartment and holed up in bed with the books. She read them late into the night. It felt weird and illicit-she kept listening for Buddy-as though she were back at summer camp after lights out, with a flashlight under the blanket reading Nancy Drew and the Strange Supreme Court Nomination.

The next morning she found Buddy asleep on the couch. She crawled in beside him and by the time they got up the previous night’s shouting match seemed to have been forgotten or at least duct-taped over.

They mixed Bloody Marys and made a frittata and salad lunch while watching one of the Sunday talk shows with one eye each.

Chopping scallions, Pepper said, “What’d you make of all that Supreme Court hullabaloo?”

“They’re all assholes,” Buddy said thoughtfully.

“Whole process has become sort of a zoo, hasn’t it?”

“Who’d want it?” Buddy said, cracking eggs.

“To sit on the Supreme Court? Are you serious?”

“Nine old farts in robes sending footnotes to each other.”

“Rehnquist. Warren. Brandeis. Frankfurter. Harlan. Black. Holmes. Marshall. Old farts in robes? I’m beginning to see why you went into TV, darling. You have a genuine talent for the old reductio ad absurdum.”

“Don’t knock TV,” Buddy grunted. “It bought you this room with a view. By the way, I was thinking, what would you say to raising the show’s metabolism a little?”

Pepper said cautiously, “What did you have in mind?”

“I was thinking, you know, instead of handing out these civil-type penalties, what if we could actually sentence people to jail?”

“Buddy,” Pepper said, “we try civil-type cases. A, people don’t get sent to jail for those, and B, I’m not a real judge anymore. So I’m not getting how we could send them to jail.”

“I thought of that,” Buddy said. “Instead of people signing these wimpy-ass agreements where they’re contractually bound to abide by your decisions-if they lose, they have to serve actual time.”

“What time? I can’t send people to jail. I’m not a real judge. What am I supposed to do, call up the Metropolitan Detention Center and say, ‘Judge Cartwright here, do me a favor, would you, and put some folks in jail for me?’ ”

“No-we build our own jail,” Buddy said, smiling triumphantly.

“What are you talking about?”

“With cameras in every cell. Say you lose your case-you get sent to the slammer. Our own slammer. For, like, a week or whatever. We create a prison. Build our own. Somewhere grim. Down south. With guard towers and-a moat. A shark-filled moat. Throw in some alligators. Do alligators and sharks mix?”

“I’d have to get back to you on that,” Pepper said.

“I hadn’t even thought of that until now. The guards would have uniforms. Darth Vader-type. Scary. And the prisoners-they’d have uniforms. They’d get points for good behavior, et cetera, so you could get out a day early or whatever. And-Jesus!-a cash prize if they escape.”

Pepper tried to concentrate on chopping radishes for the salad. “And if they get eaten by the sharks and alligators?”

“I’ll talk to Legal about it. Figure something out. But don’t you see it? Oz meets Survivor. [2] It could be incredible. What do you think?”

“Well, darling, you sure are innovative on the weekends. Let me think about it,” Pepper said, continuing to chop.

HAYDEN CORK had been at his desk for only an hour on Monday morning and already he was having a bad day.

“Sir, all I’m asking is that we postpone further discussion until Mr. Clenndennynn returns. His plane gets into Andrews at-”

Dammit, Hayden caught himself. Bad slip.

“Andrews?” the President said, looking up from his paperwork. “Since when do private jets land at U.S. Air Force bases?”

“He’s coming in on a military plane, sir. I sent one to bring him back.”

Hayden Cork braced for a stern lecture on wasteful government spending. Instead the President said, “Good work, Hayden.”

“Sir?”

“He’s going to shepherd her nomination through the Senate. That is,” the President chuckled, “if he can tear himself away long enough from helping overpaid CEOs negotiate debt relief with Chinese commies.” The President was of the old school. He still called it Red China, in private.

“Sir,” Hayden said plunging deeper into gloom, “I’m not sure how he’s going to react to this… whole idea.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Graydon’s an old pro. He’ll get it straightaway. And if it goes down in flames, he’ll put the word out, What else could I do? The President asked me to do it as a personal favor. Crafty old badger.”

“Sir, would you consider just meeting with Runningwater?” Hayden said. “I really think you’ll be dazzled by him. His tribe was celebrated for-”

“Hayden,” said the President, “get with the program.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

IT IS A CLICHÉ in Washington that the most dangerous place to find yourself is between a politician and a TV camera or microphone, but in the case of Senator Dexter Mitchell the cliché had acquired a kind of Darwinian perfection. Dexter Mitchell loved-lived-to talk. He had uttered his first full sentence at the age of fourteen months and hadn’t stopped since.

Once, famously, on his way into a state funeral at the National Cathedral, a reporter for one of the smaller cable TV new channels stepped forward to ask for a brief comment. One hour and fifteen minutes later, Senator Mitchell was still talking as the casket emerged, carried by the honor guard. One of his fellow senators was heard to remark, “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to ask him to deliver the eulogy?” The tape of the interview is a cult classic and plays three or four times a year during the wee hours. Some consider it the best argument around for 24/7 cable TV.

Dexter was now in his midfifties, at the age when men begin to take cholesterol-lowering and penis-elevating medications. Now in his third decade of public service, he had a solid career behind him: prosecutor, congressman, three-term senator from the great state of Connecticut. For the last four years, he had been Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, generally referred to as “the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.” And true enough: if you wanted to wield a federal gavel, you first had to get past his.

He was good-looking, in a shiny sort of way. He’d had his front teeth capped. They were now so blindingly white that when he bared them, you could almost hear a little tingg! and see a star of light reflect off the incisor, just like in the commercials. He cheerfully admitted to having Botox injections, and even had a nice line about it: “I need all the help I can get. My job involves a lot of frowning.” He had an attractive wife named Terry, attractive children, and an attractive beagle named Amtrak. (Senator Mitchell sat on the Transportation Subcommittee and fought fiercely for subsidies for America ’s railroads, especially the one that ferried him from Stamford to Washington and back.)

If a computer were programmed to design a president of the United States, it might very well generate Dexter Mitchell. Everything about him seemed, indeed, calculated. And yet for all his qualifications, Dexter somehow added up to less than the sum of his considerable parts. His epic loquacity was not an asset. Successive campaign advisers had tried without success to get him to give briefer answers, but nothing had stemmed the logorrheic tide, the tsunami of subordinate clauses and parenthetical asides, the inexorable mudslide of anecdotage. His campaign “listening tours” were occasions of mirth among political reporters, since it was the people he met who did the listening. Dexter Mitchell would happily express himself on any issue, at any time, at any place.

He had run for president three times. The first time, he raised $12 million and came in third in the Iowa caucus. [3] The second time, he raised $20 million and came in fourth. The third time, he raised $22 million and came in seventh. He was undeterred. Somewhere over the rainbow he heard the people chanting, Mit-chell! Mit-chell! But by now he had begun to acquire a slightly used feel; “certifiably preowned,” as one pundit put it uncharitably.

When he declared his intention to run a fourth time, his wife, now working as a K Street lobbyist representing-as it happened-the U.S. rail industry, replied in no uncertain terms that she would not spend one more weekend, one more day, one more hour, one more minute at some coffee shop in Iowa, pretending to care about ethanol, or indeed any biofuel; or for that matter about the price of wheat, corn, soy, or anything that emerged from the loamy topsoil of the Hawkeye State. Dexter sulked off to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to drown his sorrow in feverish multilateral panel discussions on climate change and globalization.

Contemplating his thwarted presidential ambition, Dexter decided that a more sensible-and permanent-avenue to greatness would be to become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And why shouldn’t he? He was ideal for the job. In fact, he asked himself, why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? He berated his friends for not having thought of it first.

It was this conviction, along with a refreshing absence of modesty, that had prompted him to call Hayden Cork some months before and request an Oval Office meeting with the President. He gave an equivocal reason, saying only that it was “important and confidential.” The President groaned at the prospect, but agreed.

On arriving, Dexter plunked himself down and said to the President (we know all this from a tape recording in the archives at the Vanderdamp Library): “My information is that Brinnin’s gone nuttier than a granola bar. You and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I’ve always respected you.” (Three weeks before, Dexter had called President Vanderdamp “the worst president since Warren G. Harding.”) “But I say let’s put aside whatever philosophical disagreements we have. I’d like you to consider putting my name forward as a successor to Brinnin.”

There is a brief, perhaps eloquent, silence on the tape. Then Dexter continues: “Now, why do I propose myself? Frankly, because I think I’m the right person for the job. Why do I think that? I’ve narrowed it down to five reasons. Well, six. Don-if I may-when I first started practicing law over three decades ago…”

The tape continues on for twenty-six minutes. In the background, you can hear the President reaching for an imaginary-and much craved-EJECT button. At several points he tries to arrest the wall of sound with comments like, “I promise to give it the consideration it deserves.” But Mitchell, having only gotten as far as reason number three (paragraph four), soldiers on.

Eventually, a door opens and an aide advises the President that his next meeting is now imminent (an almost certain lie). Vanderdamp’s exhalation after the door has closed on his loquacious visitor is reminiscent of a man who has at long last reached a desperately sought urinal.

The President did not nominate Dexter Mitchell to succeed Justice Brinnin, for at least five reasons. When Cooney’s nomination was released to the press, the President told Hayden Cork to leak it that Mitchell’s name had not been on the short list-or even on the long list. (The ever-protective Hayden wisely ignored the instruction.) Mitchell was thus, to put it mildly, undisposed to treat the President’s nominees kindly. Nor did he. After wiping Cooney’s and Burrows’s blood and brain matter from his gavel, he smiled and said-with uncharacteristic concision-“Next?”