Kamala Harris Redecorates The White House - The First Executive Order Of The New President

 'Well, now that's over with', the new American President sighed, mock-wiping her brow and smiling broadly to her assembled staff. 'We did it, we made it, and we will make history'.  A large round of applause, handshakes, embraces followed, and a general feeling of good will filled the Oval Office. It was now Madame President, the first and only one in the two hundred some odd years of the Republic. 'Now, these curtains have to go'. 

During the campaign and in the four years of the Biden presidency, Kamala had had many meetings in the Presidential chambers and each time, she winced.  'What God awful taste', she thought.  A hodgepodge of curios, old furniture, and uncomfortable chairs.  'It all has to go', and each time she sat patiently while the President rambled on about something or other - the border, Putin, or Zelensky - her eyes wandered around the room.  

That ridiculous cowboy - a bronze Remington - would have to go and some flouncy Dresden figurines the lacey, embroidered kinds would replace it.  And that God-awful painting of Gainsborough - why Joe wanted a picture of a cute little boy all dressed up in a frilly blue suit is beyond me, except perhaps....well, no, I won't go there...but still the painting has to go back to whatever airless museum he got it from. 

Now that she thought about it, just about everything would have to go.  This was to be her office, not the man cave forty-odd presidents decorated, or rather threw together as men do, never a thought to matching or complementary colors.  Ugly, ugly, ugly! Those ghastly yellow curtains! And that ridiculous florid valence! And those flags! This is the President's office not some army barracks with sweaty men saluting at reveille.

Here the President shook her out of her reverie with some nonsense about the bloody border. What in God's name was she supposed to do?  Rush right down to Nogales or Piedras Negras and put up her hands and yell, 'Stop!'?  Hardly, and of course he won't go down there by himself, can barely make it off the bus let alone down to the river, and here he was asking her of all people to tell these brown and black people to go back where they came from?  Hell, no, they are my bread and butter, my people, my votes. 

Joe of course wandered off message and began talking about his childhood summers in Rehoboth, and Kamala took a good look at the miserable carpet under her feet - this ghastly thick blue thing with the Seal of Office right in the middle.  Ok, it's emblematic, I get that, but why something so big that you felt you would trip over it.  No, a nice silk Bukhara would do nicely, a bit of the exotic East, a nod to my oriental origins and exquisite. 

She had seen the carpet she wanted at the Met in New York, displayed as a wall hanging, alone underlit, and magnificent - an ancient installation piece which the moment she saw it, she wanted it and knew exactly where it would go. 

As Kamala left the President with warm goodbyes - especially warm because the old fool had no idea what was coming, soon to be left on the curb by none other than yours truly, and about time.  I've waited four years for him to topple over into his soup, and he's still standing so getting rid of him is the only way.  

'Four more years', she said disingenuously, a big smile on her face. 'Four more years of greatness'.  Old Joe smiled back, gave her a wave, and out she walked into the Presidential corridor past photographs of Democratic luminaries- all men except Rosa Parks, that bloody woman who did nothing but refuse to give up her seat when I, as Senator and Vice President have done more for my people than she ever did, and had just the portrait of herself in mind to hang after relegating Rosa to somewhere less conspicuous. 

The time for old icons has come and gone, she reflected - Rosa Parks, King, Abernathy and the rest of them.  This is the dawn of a new age, one in which the black man will ascend to the top of the human pyramid where he - or she - belongs, heroic, primal, an example of the best and brightest of humanity, and I will be the one to put him there. 

A Tiffany lamp here, a Chiparus there, a Mucha above the door, she thought as she proceeded westward and to her own chambers - chambers which she would have to occupy for only a few more impatient months, but such was life on the Potomac, and she could wait, for Destiny awaited her.  

All that was history of course, and now that her victory had been won and she sat in the President's chair the real business of governing would begin; but as she shuffled the briefing papers on her desk, she couldn't help noticing the sofas, nasty-looking things as uncomfortable as a Shaker chair and without a note of style.  If people have to sit, let them sit in something elegant.  Here she thought of Macron's Elysees offices - the French had the right idea, show off the magnificence of la fille  ainee de l'Eglise.

A bit busy perhaps - I would tone it down a bit - but I would retain its....Here as she searched for the right word, she looked around the Oval Office and shuddered.  A misshapen bust here, a scratchy 17th Century drawing there, and those posed, archaic, dull photographs...splendor.  Yes, splendor, that's what I'm looking for. 

'Madam President', began Kamala's chief aide, 'I'm sorry to disturb you, but it's time for your Cabinet meeting'. 

Ah, yes, in her reverie she had forgotten the Cabinet, her Cabinet, a Cabinet that looks like America, too many gay boys if you ask me, but that I had to do and I must attend to business; but all she could think about where those bloody curtains again and those military-looking flags, and those stuffy, formal presidential portraits.  If we have to be together in this room, she thought, it should have a woman's touch, something pretty - not frilly and cute, but queenly, that was it.  Here she thought not of Queen Victoria, that stodgy old biddy who lasted far beyond her pull-by date, but of Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, her hero, her Doppelganger, her idol.  Something regal, something imposing, something jeweled and...

Again her reverie was interrupted by her Vice President who was opening the session.  He droned on for what seemed an hour, thanking each and every member of the Cabinet in advance for their contribution to the new Presidency and the health of the nation, touching on every item of interest to Education, Social Welfare, Interior, yada yada until finally he sat down and waited for her to speak, which she did, summarily for a change, for these meetings were as boring as ice melting and she had other more important things on her mind. 

It felt good to be President, far better than it ever felt as Vice President, a cipher office, a nothing, an add-on in case the President cashed in his chips.  No, this felt good, really good, and when her planned redecoration was finished, she would be sitting on her throne on her barge

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.

 

When A One-Man Woman Takes A Lover - The Inevitability Of Infidelity

She met him at Dooly's bar after one particularly hectic day at the office.  Nothing on time, desultory promise from a young hire, nastiness from the front office, and a prickly exchange with her supervisor led her to her favorite watering hole, this time without the martinis and oyster crew who crowded into the bar on Fridays for happy hour.  

A single woman alone always was a dubious proposition, but Dooly's was in the toniest neighborhood of Washington, a well-heeled and temperate place, progressive, and gender-aware, so she never hesitated to stop in, especially in the summer when Dooly kept his A/C on high and she would shiver in the first few minutes while her eyes grew accustomed to the light. 

It was an old-fashioned Irish bar, unusual for Washington, better suited to the Lower East Side than to Woodley Park - Miller Light neon behind the bar, PBR on draft and a few regulars nursing a shot-and-a-beer.

Dooly's had been in Woodley Park long enough for Dooly to remember the day when the regulars had their pack of Camels and dollars and change on the counter and would chat him up about the 'Skins, always leaving a generous tip to take care of the cheap beer and long hours at the bar.  Times change and he with them, and his retro look, very Fifties, down to the Formica table tops in the back and Bobby Darin on the music loop kept customers coming. 

Although he was partial to the old crowd, the plasterers and pipe fitters from Maryland, the lawyers Luke - Lucretia - Fanning were just fine. 

 

He wasn't used to seeing Luke on a Tuesday, earlyish, four-thirty or so, looking like she needed a drink, but she was a good customer, and the Friday martinis-and-oyster tab was well over five-hundred a night so he treated her as bar royalty. 

Roland Pierce was a newcomer.  Clearly one of Luke's set but an infrequent customer. Lawyer probably, maybe aide to someone on the Hill, nice enough, good tipper, polite. 

'Roland', she thought when he introduced himself.  Not many men named Roland these days nor Ronald or Donald, names as retro as the ambience at Dooly's, but he was courteous and respectful - the profile of the sensitive new age men working in her part of town. 

Luke was married and had been for many years. She and her husband from a well-known Boston Brahmin family -  the Chippendale, Revere, Townsend, Beacon Hill, and Nantucket Fannings - had met at a reception at Piping Rock, and after a short affair were wed in Southampton.  'Lancaster-Fanning Nuptials' announced the New York Times, and the wedding and the years of social whirl which followed. 

 

Yet all was not well with the Fannings.  Two children had taken a lot out of Luke and her husband who was spending more and more time at the office currying favor with prospective clients, and was largely out of the picture when it came to social or family engagement. She pursued her career with the same enthusiasm, but in her case it was Freudian displacement.  What she wanted was at least a modicum of sexual satisfaction if not romance.  

Her relationship with her husband had been all it was supposed to be - cruises of archeological discovery in the eastern Mediterranean, moonlit drives over the Bosporus etc. - but it lacked 'oomph' for lack of a better word.  A prosaicism at best. 

She, despite being distracted - lured - by some dime-store fantasies had never taken a lover.  Infidelity would have been a rude disruption to a very settled and comfortable life; but as she approached forty, and sat at Dooly's bar with a yet unknown, very appealing stranger, she wondered why. 

Affairs were as common as peach cobbler, especially in Washington where the currency of the town was sexual favor, power was an aphrodisiac, and entitlement included sexual dalliance. Yet...and still...

She and Roland drank another beer and then moved on to Dooly's famous blood orange Margaritas. Rollie talked about India and the Sri Ramakrishna ashram in Hardwar effortlessly, simply, naturally, until she felt completely comfortable with this man who was at ease sharing, not impressing, and most of all was interested in her. 

 

She got home well before her husband even though she had stayed longer in Petworth than she had intended.  In fact she had intended nothing of the sort.  This sort of thing comes up without notice, without anticipation, and without fanfare, but there they were and there she was in bed with him as delighted as a schoolgirl and as satisfied as a mated sow. 

Why was it that she felt no shame, no guilt, or no remorse as she opened the door home?  Hadn't she broken a social, Biblical, and moral rule?  Hadn't she crossed an uncrossable line?

She greeted her husband warmly and with only slightly less enthusiasm than usual.  Affairs, she was learning quickly, were easy to have, and harder to hide; but she was a quick learner and negotiated the tricky currents of an extramarital encounter with ability.  

The affair went on for months, but the trickery - there really was no better word for it - was getting tiring and offensive; and the afternoons in Petworth were becoming routine.   A trip to Miami while her husband was in Chicago did less to stimulate dissipating passions than to exaggerate the fanciful sexual idolatry of the affair. 

 

Now that it was over, she wondered, what was next?  Would she return to the settled, predictably happy life of marriage-with-children? Or would she take another lover? If so, to what ends? For what purpose? Never one to ponder existential questions, she still had to ask them. 

Age decided it all - no need to either ask or answer existential questions when wrinkles and sags solve the equation.  There were fewer and fewer Rolands in her repertoire and her future, and without ever even thinking it possible, she was a suburban matron. 

She never regretted her dalliances.  There had been, despite her concerns about age and sexual interest, a number of affairs after Roland, all of which had diminishing returns - and never once did she wish that she had never married.  Marriage after all was society's anchor and without it we all would be drifting without a port; and so she and her husband carried out their days, their duties, and their fidelity until the end. 

Luke never asked her husband about his affairs - whether or not he had any, with whom, and for how long.  That was his business just as Roland and his successors had been hers.  Matters of little importance in the scheme of things. 

Infidelity is as human as birth, death, and children.  Never to be regretted or forgotten.  A part of life and a part of marriage.  Society does its part in keeping the lid on infidelity, tamping down our intemperance, and keeping us sexually quiet; but it never succeeds.  Men and women like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich reflect on lives misspent but quickly turn to preparing for their end.  Ivan was crestfallen, shocked, and disappointed at a past poorly led; but Luke never, ever would be.

The Tale Of A Natural Courtesan - From Iowa Farm Girl To The Silks Of A Turkish Harem

Alicia Thomas grew up in Bolivar, Iowa, a settled, good place in the rural Midwest - a place of rectitude, solid principle, hard work, family, and faith; but to this young, precociously mature girl, a deadly, boring place. She was tired of cornstalks, the smell of milk and dung, and the endless routine of chores, pot roast, and early bedtime. 

 

By the time she was twelve, she had blossomed, a sensuous, sexually aware Delilah, an impossibly irresistible nymphet.  Her mother's own sexual precocity had been nipped in the bud by a Faulknerian zealot - a father who locked her in an airless closet and harangued her with shouts loud enough to shake the rafters of their cobbled, hand-strung, mud and wattle house on the Iowa prairie. 

 'Jezebel! Harlot! Whore', he howled, followed by verses from Samuel, Ezekiel, and Kings, spoken in hysterical tongues like a crazed Biblical prophet, while Elmira cowered in the closet, choking with the smell of camphor and breathing in dust devils and prairie mites from the cracks of the out-of-kilter raw oak floorboards. 

 

Alicia's mother saw herself in her young daughter, but let the bird fly free.  No daughter of hers would have to suffer anyone's mad ravings.  She at forty had barely recovered from the assaults of a wild man, married a staid, dumb, dray horse of a man forced upon her by her father; and glad only to be rid of the father, left with her husband and settled in Bolivar, had Alicia, and then slept as far away from him as possible on the corn cob mattress under the hay in the ramshackle, half-slatted barn. 

And so it was that Alicia Thomas began her life as a courtesan, accepted favors from an alderman, a legislator, and a Congressman, all of whom had marveled at her cornflower blue eyes, silken blond hair, and sensuous body.  Every one risked marriage and career for a night with her, and once taken, returned for many more until she tired of them, their increasingly doggy, simpering love, and their awful, pretentious male egos. 

Never in the course of her sexual escapades did she have one iota of shame, guilt, or regret.  Her sexuality was no matter for discussion with either preacher or God.  She was her own woman, an Eve, a Sarah Bernhardt, a Mata Hari, the consort of the Sultan of Izmir, a Cleopatra.  Her sexual ambition knew no bounds and as she matured, she learned the art of feminine wiles, the sexual immaturity of men, and the sexual determinants of power. 

 

Women had always bested men, sussed and vetted them with ease, enticed, seduced, and manipulated them with grace and enthusiasm, always came out on top, and left them crying on the curb.  The political fol-de-rol about misogyny, the glass ceiling, and the patriarchal dominance of men was sheer nonsense.  Shakespeare had it right in one.  His women were regal in bearing, absolute in ambition, canny in understanding, and indomitable in will.  Ibsen and Strindberg derived their heroines from the women they knew, not uncommon women of intractable will, intelligence, and authority. 

Whether queen or courtesan, woman was meant to rule.  When she left Bolivar, she left behind not only chicken feed and pig sties, but that particularly staid and settled moral rectitude of the Midwest - that sense of American originalism, the faux fantasy of the real America, the heart and soul of the republic. She was now not only her own woman, freed from the arbitrary, confining, presumptuous moral codes of her youth, but an expansive one, a woman whose ambition knew no bounds. 

The men she serviced in Washington were no different than any other.  The Governor of New Hampshire, after a cinq-a-sept in the Presidential Suite of the Mayflower hotel, came back for seconds and thirds and confessed to her that he had found his soul mate. Paid or not, she was beyond reproach and almost beyond reach for all her seductive beauty. Thanks to him, her stock in trade rose, her bank account swelled, and her already supreme confidence increased. 

Her fortunes were never more imperial than when she was visited by Ahmed Emiroglu, direct descendant of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Suleyman I, the greatest Turkish ruler of that country's long and storied history.  Emiroglu was a fine and unpretentious man in his late fifties, a businessman with significant holdings in the Caymans, properties in Dubai ands Bahrain, a pied a terre in Bebek, and a home in McLean overlooking the Potomac.  A gentleman, a courtier, and a prince of a man. 

He, no different than other men who had been taken by Alicia's sexual charms and farmgirl beauty, offered her the chance to accompany him to Istanbul, be his companion and sexual consort and join his household.  

Now, although Ahmed Emiroglu affected a commoner simplicity and businesslike eagerness, he was the true heir of emirs, pashas, and sultans.  Although the republican leaders of modern Turkey did not want to admit it, Emiroglu lived in the style of his forbears - in a luxurious palace overlooking the Bosporus, attended to by a fleet of liveried servants, and accompanied by a harem of beautiful women from Iran, Palestine, and Jordan.  

Of course it was not a harem in the historical sense of the word - these women were not cloistered behind closed doors, visited whenever the pasha so desired, but free to come and go as they pleased but always at the beck and call of the master. 

 

It was an ideal arrangement for all concerned.  The women, well-taken care of by Emiroglu, were happy enough to be chauffeured here and there, squired by him at theatre openings and vernissages, photographed by Turkish paparazzi and sought after for the elegant soirees at the Presidential palace.  

Turkey may be an increasingly fundamentalist country but it has never lost the Roman sense of the sybaritic East.  Emiroglu was not the only man in Istanbul living the life of an Ottoman pasha, you only had to know who was who. 

 

Alicia was not disappointed, for what better place for a modern day courtesan than the harem of a latter-day pasha? 

And afterwards? What then? The thoughts of most aging women, but irrelevant to the likes of Alicia Thomas who, confident and unabashedly uncontrite and without regret until the day she died, never lost a beat in her retirement with stops in St. Tropez, Palm Beach, and eventually back to Bolivar whose farm-bred simplicity now appealed. To its credit the town welcomed her back without recrimination or worse.  She was one of theirs after all, all gussied up and famous but still the same, old Alicia.