This is an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, VELVET, and you are reading Emily Writes Back, a 2022 Substack Featured Publication and a Substack favorite since 2019.
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The China Room
The meeting ended with some of the men hugging, exchanging fist bumps (which they’d only started doing when a Fox News talking head had called Michelle and Barack Obama’s a “terrorist fist bump”).
Then, near the front door, the group’s departure accelerated, with the men turning inward, checking phones, putting on game faces, letting the Caribbean women hand them their coats, beginning to think again about their investments. The gathering was over.
Paul Livingstone stood by a pedestal table that was nearly overtaken by its ridiculous floral arrangement. Snapdragons brushed his jacket sleeve. He was seeing the last members off and into their waiting cars. Wesley approached Paul to thank him and say farewell (he was stalling because his flight out of Botson back to Baltimore wasn’t until late that night and he would call an Uber only after he’d really left Paul’s house and found himself out on the pea pebbled circle drive). He should have rented a car at the airport, but he liked to travel light and frugally. Aggressive saving and then prudent, unwavering investment in index funds was Wesley’s only path to wealth, but he’d always be the church mouse among these fat cat tycoons.
Paul said, “Wait, Wes. I need to talk to you alone.”
Wordlessly, they walked back to Paul’s office, a booklined, octagonal room they’d entered through a hidden door in the next room’s bookshelves. The octagonal room had a skylight and a round window to the left of the built-in desk. Was it supposed to feel like a ship captain’s cabin? This was one side-effect of great wealth that Wesley didn’t know whether to admire or scorn, the masturbatory, meticulous satisfying of one’s own fantasies, the recreation in real life of daydreams, even ones that can’t have ever been that important to you. If you’ve always wanted to have an office like a ship’s captain’s cabin, or you’ve always dreamed of having an octagonal room, or three beautiful housekeepers in matching dove gray uniforms, you could do that if you were rich, at the risk of coming off like an overgrown kid. But Wesley was fair enough to concede that he would probably pay to make some of his own dreams come true too. A big piece of land in a pretty part of rural Pennsylvania or Maryland, with a two-story barn filled with beautiful horses, a wraparound porch, a young wife who could give him ten kids. Was any of that as embarrassing as an octagonal room with a hidden door? The horses. He didn’t ride, didn’t like horseracing—a cruel sport and also hard to get good at making money betting on, in Wesley’s brief experience.
Paul said, “I wanted to ask you about the President’s mental health. I have a friend, I think I’ve told you before, who goes as often as he can to Mar-a-lago, where you know he’s a member—has been for years—and he’s been telling me that he’s seeing signs that the President might really crack, I mean in a way that will make our current timeline to long.”
“He’s cracked,” Wesley said. “Short of not being able to speak and appear on television, I don’t see how he could get cracked more than he is now,” Wes’s reply came out testy because Paul’s concern struck him as obtuse. Members of the First Family were attempting to influence the President’s thinking, as well as his knowledge of facts, through raggedy amateur nighttime audio recordings. The President of the United States of America stayed up until two or three in the morning most nights watching TV and got up at six or seven, meaning he rarely got more than four hours sleep in a night. The President talked to himself so frequently that the staff had stopped remarking on it amongst themselves. They were now treating it as an acceptable quirk. The President and the First Lady hadn’t spent more than forty minutes in each other’s company for nearly a year. And craziest of all, the American President, as Wesley had explained to Paul in detail weeks ago, sincerely believed that Wesley himself was somehow entering his dreams and sleeping with someone named “Velvet” in front of the President in these dreams, to the President’s disgust and fury.
Wesley’s 39-year tenure at the White House was seriously threatened by this very cracked president’s wild notions. Wesley got up every morning in his restored Baltimore rowhouse, showered and shaved, gathered yesterday’s uniform to be laundered in the White House basement laundry, drove the speed limit to Washington, and parked in his spot in the Old Executive Building’s outdoor lot, all with the strong feeling that this would be his last day as a White House staff member. And yet, again and again, he was allowed past security, allowed into the changing room to don his uniform, and allowed to carry on work standing in the Green Room, the China Room, the Red Room, outside the Oval Office, in doorways, carrying things from one room to another, taking visitors’ coats, passing on messages to housekeeping, opening and closing the front door, attending meetings with the other butlers and housekeeping staff, acting as reliable scenery for the Secret Service details. He was a fixture. A human lamp or chair.
Paul liked being talked back to, Wesley could tell. It made him feel relaxed, that he was still getting straight dope, that he was still one of the guys, even if he was richer than a king and isolated as one too. Wesley reminded Paul of his days at college at Yale.
“Okay, okay,” Paul said, grinning and resting a heavy hand on Wesley’s shoulder. “You’re alarmed. I hear you. But our timeline only requires that he stay in office, that he keep riling up his base. Remember, the way to master a situation like this is to formulate our plans around all its craziness. We just don’t want him to suddenly not be in office, you see?”
“I think we’re good,” Wesley said, avoiding Paul’s eyes. He didn’t want to see that Paul knew he wouldn’t be their inside man in the White House much longer, but he must have guessed. How could the President think you’re sleeping with his imaginary girlfriend, and you get to keep your job? Made no sense.
That night, Wesley had a dream that he was in his daddy’s bar sitting at one of the three tables in the back. Across from him sat Donald Trump and a stunning woman who seemed twenty percent more alive than a normal person. She was looking so intently at him. Her eyes were large and dark grey. Her hair was short and curly, a reddish brown. She leaned toward him and said, “Wesley, where are we? Is this a favorite place of yours?”
The President glowered at him, but looked away, distracted by the jukebox’s movement. It was changing songs. Wesley’s Daddy, he now saw, was behind the bar drying glasses. The place was so dark and empty, except for their one table, with the vibrant woman and the President.
“This is my Daddy’s place, called Smack’s after his nickname,” Wesley told the woman. He didn’t know he was dreaming, although maybe there was something nagging for his attention at the edges.
“Should we stay?” the woman asked, in the most glorious way. He didn’t know what it was, but he loved her, felt very attracted to her and was sure it was mutual.
The President pulled out a hammer and began to savagely smash a pile of dishes on the table in front of him. He was still seated next to the woman and his blue suit jacket impeded his movements, but he was managing destruction. Shards flew out. One cut at Wesley’s eye. Those plates! He looked closer at the pieces—they were all in pieces now—and recognized his favorite plates, the botanical, pale green rimmed plates from President James Polk’s administration. Wesley cried out in agony. It was too late to save them.
The woman who’d been so alive, so connected to him, was now leaning back in her chair with her arms tightly folded. She looked up at Wesley and said, “Do you see what I have to live with?”
***
It is your one chance in life to design or commission, with utter lack of guilt or fear of being accused of frivolity, an exquisite china pattern brought to life in a 435-setting set containing over two thousand individual pieces of china at the cost of nearly a half-million U.S. dollars. And yet, and yet … the Trumps were forfeiting their chance, saying it was too costly. Strange, that, since the bill for presidential china was always picked up by the White House Historical Society. But the truth was that they had forgotten. The White House Historical Society President had called the First Lady’s office repeatedly, sent letters to the President and the President’s secretary and to the Chief of Staff, with no reply. Instead, the Trumps used the china Hilary Clinton had commissioned and used in her two terms as First Lady.
Wesley felt sad for them, the non-flatware-having Trumps. To him, this was the clearest sign of insanity yet. He stood in the China Room, as he often did when he wanted to cheer himself—it was such a bright room, and visitors were kept out by a velvet rope, made to peer in from the hallway.
With his hands clasped behind his back, Wesley perused for the thousandth time the presidential china on display in the glass fronted cabinets. His favorite pieces were the two plates from the Polk presidency, one featuring a large pink peony blossom drooping heavy on its stem and surrounded by three buds, and the second Polk plate with its three yellow daffodils. He also admired the McKinley Wedgewood plate with its dark, blue-green border covered in gilt scroll work—curling leaves and lace like delicate star constellations, and the subtle curves of the plate’s edge. Presidential china should contain gold, really. It should be bold yet elegant, rich yet not ostentatious. He didn’t care for the Reagan set because it featured the presidential seal big and centered on each navy-blue plate. Too literal.
Why was he so melancholy today, he wondered?
He heard talking in the hallway and the unmistakable voice of the President. Then the President stood in the doorway to the China Room and jabbed his finger in the air at Wesley.
“The President said. “You are finished.”