Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (24 page)

Since rediscovering my Nixon paper dolls, I’ve made a plan.
I imagine a centerpiece on my dining room table: some small vases of summer flowers and a few Nixons standing around: Dick in a “midnight blue” tuxedo; Pat in the blue, ankle-length outfit she wore in Liberia in 1972. The matching blue headdress swirls upward like one of those twirling candles that are thought to be an improvement on simple vertical candles. Flanking the demitasse cup filled with short-stemmed cosmos would be Julie, wearing a knee-length green and white dress with a sash at the waist (green) and edging at the hem (green), along with modest heels (green). This was the dress she wore for her last Christmas in the White House, and it is very neat and proper. Her husband, David, who had been called to duty, wore his naval uniform. He could be standing beside Julie with the saltshaker lined up beside him in a gesture toward military formation. Moving to the pepper grinder—rather formidable in case anyone started to list to starboard—we would see older daughter Tricia (very appropriate, in this context, as Dolly) and Edward Cox. Tricia, a bit in the background (she was reticent about public appearances), would be wearing a pink dress with matching headband and shoes, and her husband would have on the formal morning suit with striped pants that he wore to his wedding. There’s no middle ground for Edward Cox: we get him either in his underpants or in his wedding suit. Alas, there are no paper-doll pets, so neither the poodle nor the Irish setter can be with them.

Even
more
amusing might be the depictions of them in their underwear. There are notes on the underwear, informing us that “the President and Mrs. Nixon are shown in underwear typical of the period.” Mr. Tierney seems to have had a bit of editorial fun with the underwear of Edward Cox. He wears “a paisley-patterned knit A-shirt with matching knitted briefs, typical of the ‘Peacock Revolution’ of the sixties when bold patterns and vivid colors became
fashionable for men’s undergarments.” A real peacock would blanch. The underwear, in shades of dark purple paisley, suggests fluorescent sperm swimming under a microscope, inside a lavender petri dish. He wears matching dark purple socks.

Laughing at the Nixons. Haven’t we all done that? The little Nixons in all their sadly recognizable finery, standing around some tabletop, put there by someone who can’t even get it together to buy apples and place them in a bowl for a centerpiece, but who has silver candelabra (inherited) and sterling silver salt dishes (inherited)—a writer who has taken the time to place cutouts of the Nixon family in their underwear amid summer flowers.

Writers like to do funny things decorating tabletops. You would not see such decorations in
Elle Decor
. What writer owns an obelisk? No writer I’ve met has any small topiary. They might have a DVD of
Edward Scissorhands,
but topiary has negative associations because it is so often plunked on tables so you can easily talk around the trunks during tedious fund-raisers. Florists go crazy when told to decorate tables at which writers will sit. It seems to bring out their most frighteningly whimsical thoughts, with icing that spells out the name of the author’s book piped around containers that hold noise blowers, or disposable cameras placed on the tables so the authors can take candid photos as their fellow writers set to serious drinking (who wouldn’t?). In their homes, some writers are rather discreet and have on the table one beautiful object, or candles. Some do have a vase of flowers. But you’ll also find a collection of fifties clip-on earrings in a little Limoges dish, or a geode on a tiny stand, and of course unpaid bills. Poets have stones. Little plastic animals are common, pushed into position sniffing each other’s backsides. Among writers, high seriousness does not preside at table. And as any hostess knows, putting out little things that can be fiddled with (plastic
gorilla atop salt dish, elevated to confront miniature pewter water buffalo) makes people feel at ease and breaks the ice. Writers, generally, either are very good cooks or do not cook at all. Little place cards (swiped from Important Occasions: “Mr. DeLillo”; “Ms. Nesbit”) can be oh so merry, though they do not mark the places of people attending.

The following is a list of other truths about writers, rarely discussed:

1. They take souvenirs of Important Evenings for their “mother.” This is like taking leftovers home for the “dog.” Of course, some mothers do get the souvenirs and some dogs do get the scraps. However, it is not likely.

2. If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness,
they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be abandoning if they left the book behind. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.

3. It makes the writer’s day if he or she can include the opinions of a truly stupid character or text in the story, punctuating those announcements with exclamation points, which are the icing on the cake. This situation is to be found in novels, too, but novelists are less likely to be immensely flattered if you have noticed their needle in the haystack(!). For particularly adept and judicious uses of the exclamation point, see the works of Joy Williams and Deborah Eisenberg.

4. Without these things, many contemporary American short stories would grind to a halt: fluorescent lights; refrigerators; mantels. They are its gods, or false gods. In that it is difficult to know Him, these stand-ins are often misspelled.

5. Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The habits of playwrights are unknown.

6. Writers are very particular about their writing materials. Even if they work on a computer, they edit with a particular pen (in my case, a pen imprinted
BOB ADELMAN
); they have legal pads about which they are very particular—size, color—and other things on their desk that they almost never need: scissors; Scotch tape. Few cut up their manuscripts and crawl around the floor anymore, refitting the paragraphs or rearranging chapters, because they can “cut” and “paste” on the computer. As a rule, writers keep either a very clean desktop or a messy one. To some extent, this has to do with whether they’re sentimental.

7. Writers wear atrocious clothes when writing. So terrible that I have been asked, by the UPS man, “Are you all right?” An example: stretched-out pajama bottoms imprinted with cowboys on bucking broncos, paired with my husband’s red thermal undershirt (no guilt; he wouldn’t even wear such a thing in Alaska) and a vest leaking tufts of down, with a broken zipper and a rhinestone pin in the shape of pouting lips. Furry socks with embossed Minnie Mouse faces (the eyes having deteriorated in the wash) that clash with all of the above.

If the Nixons came to my house in Maine, they would be overdressed. Thin people, they would be cold on the back porch and sweaters would have to be brought out, some quite ratty. Music they did not recognize would be playing on the boom box in the
kitchen. (Music I do not recognize, either.) There would be a lot of food, but they wouldn’t be able to figure out the majority of the ingredients. There would be mismatched plates, and wine would be served in the wrong glasses. The ice bucket would be holding a plant, rather than ice. The view would be of a lovely field that is zoned commercial, with only two restrictions on its use as a business: no head shops; no auto dump. (Recently, we were lucky enough to turn aside plans for a proposed twenty-four-hour lighted storage facility with razor wire, but only on a technicality: the turn onto our street is so dangerous, the sight lines so deficient, that such a business would pose a liability.) The Nixons could take off their shoes, as we do, and when it was time for dinner, they could sit at our square picnic table, with its so-bad-it’s-hip sixties tablecloth (more sedate than Edward Cox’s underwear, but still pretty deranged). I would of course know to pour superior French wine for Mr. Nixon, though the rest of us could drink plonk.

My mother used to rock me to sleep. One of the songs was about paper dolls: “I’m gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own, a doll that other fellows cannot steal.” She had quite a repertoire of old songs. A nice voice, too. Once, she got so enthusiastic we rocked over backward. That same rocker—the one she’d sat in while pregnant, the one she’d later rocked me in—is still rocking on my back porch, badly in need of repair.

That might be a conversation starter. At least, with Mrs. Nixon.

“A
Howard Johnson’s. We’ve eaten at Howard Johnson’s. They have good ice cream. It reminds me how much I loved ice cream when I was a girl.”

“In a cone?”

“Oh, yes. Strawberry.”

“I liked ice cream sundaes when I was a kid, without whipped cream. I never developed a taste for that.”

“And that’s the building? All of that, over there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There were some Cubans, and some other people?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s quite large, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“The group of them got together and went there at night. And broke in.”

“That’s apparently what happened.”

“That person cut in front of us without signaling.”

“Passed on the right, too. That’s against the law.”

“I saw an accident on Constitution Avenue a few weeks ago. Someone hit another car from behind at a red light. I kept walking.
I didn’t think they’d need a witness because with that sort of accident it’s obvious what happened.”

“That would have been a surprise: the President’s wife, just strolling along.”

“Camp David is a better place for it. Sometimes I just have to get some exercise, though.”

“I know. If I could be better about that, I’d take off the ten pounds I packed on last Christmas.”

“Everyone comments on how thin I am. I did weigh more when I was younger. It’s a very modern building, isn’t it? Is this where the restaurant is that they say is so good? We could come for dinner after an evening at the Kennedy Center. Or maybe we couldn’t now. What am I thinking.”

“You can’t give them any opportunity for a photo, because they don’t miss an opportunity.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Would you like me to turn around and drive past on the other side?”

“No. I’ve seen it.”

“There are some businesses there. There’s a barber. That sort of thing.”

“Yes, I’d think so, with so many people needing services.”

“So that was it. That’s all you wanted to see?”

“More than I wanted to see. At least, for this reason. I should probably know more about the city. I’m sure there are many new architectural sights all the time.”

“Look! Another one! Nobody’s using his turn signal tonight.”

“I used to love to drive, but driving here doesn’t seem appealing.”

“No, ma’am.”

“So the guard caught them. That’s when it all started.”

“As I understand it. Yes.”

He’ll never get any credit for anything he says on the subject anyway. I wanted him to just state frankly that he didn’t know, that no one knows, the full story of Watergate.

—Mrs. Nixon

W
riters might sometimes think they are pretty competent discussing what they’ve researched, but generally, writers are the first to admit there might be more evidence or another perspective. Having the complete picture isn’t necessarily the objective. Finding out as much as you can might be a goal—no different with fiction or nonfiction. But writers tend toward skepticism, extrapolating information not just from words, but from what’s withheld, from body language, from facts that seem to exist in opposition to one another. What someone tells you will usually be her understanding of the truth. The next person tells you what he or she believes. A fact-checker might save you (every day there is less fact-checking, and more misinformation because of people’s reliance on the Internet). It’s difficult for fiction writers to reconceive dialogue because they’ve written it as they’ve heard it. You set a trap for yourself, of course, by seeming to control the external circumstances: you invent the room in which the characters have their exchange;
the snowstorm—because you didn’t expect it, either—seems inevitable, but something else has determined the conversation. To some extent the writer is only recording.

In theory, you can move your characters out of the ski lodge and into the desert, but such revisions are so radical that I’d fear losing hold of the material and would rarely be tempted to make such radical shifts, though it is interesting that writers, themselves, move often or live in several places. (Hamptons envy: pictures from the party you weren’t invited to; houses you’ll never own.) Yearning is a necessary component to Americans’ conception of themselves. Something always has to be the faraway green light at the end of the dock. New York–based publications could not fill their pages without this assumption. Capitalism would stagger and fall.

When Mrs. Nixon wanted her husband to say that the Watergate mess could not be understood, she was tapping into the American spirit, counting on the complexity and validity of alternating opinions, rather than offering a rationale for the bizarre break-in.

Why
couldn’t
RN say, embarrassing as it might be, that he had no idea of the number of people involved in Watergate, and he had no way of questioning everyone? President Kennedy, used to poking fun at himself, could have passed it off as something that, yet again, he did not know enough about so that he had, of course, not acted promptly enough, then found some way to say this was because he was always outwitted by his charming wife, fluent in French and in the ways of the world. At least JFK knew how to appear abashed and to let the nation know that while they might be dazzled and charmed, he was (aw, shucks) just a hapless fellow: the guy who was always eclipsed by his wife and photogenic children. RN brought himself into everything and could admit no
distance between his person and the presidency. He didn’t believe it existed. Surprisingly, this Quaker thought he’d been born for the stature he finally attained, whereas Kennedy could afford to joke.