Free No Way to Treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley Page B

one pundit to venture that the only jury Boyce would be satisfied with would be one consisting of blind deaf-mutes with an IQ of 75. Not at all, Boyce countered cheerfully. All he wanted was "a level playing field." Was it unreasonable to seek out jurors whose minds had not been "hopelessly polluted by the daily diet of deplorable lies, innuendos, and vilification manufactured by the government's agents of smear and malediction"? If finding an unbiased jury required a little patience, who could object?
    A "little patience" ended up taking four months.
     

Chapter 11
    "You should have been there," Boyce said. "I thought he was going to stab me with a Dutch letter opener. This is going to be fun."
    "I'm glad you're enjoying yourself," Beth said.
    Boyce put his hand on hers. "I'm just trying to get you to relax."
    Beth looked anything but relaxed. She'd lost the weight Boyce had ordered her to shed. Her cheekbones were more prominent now, and the eyes had the darty intensity of someone dreaming of deep-crumb coffee cake. Looking at her, Boyce suddenly felt guilty. He wanted to pull the motorcade over and rush in and get her a chocolate milkshake.
    "You okay, kiddo?"
    "Fine."
    "You look great, for someone who hasn't eaten in six months." The beauty magazines had tracked Beth's change in physical appearance. Vogue had done an article entitled "Diet of the Millennium." It quoted a leading Hollywood "aesthetic consultant"—formerly "makeup man"—saying, "If this is what killing your husband can do for you, then more women ought to considering clubbing their husbands to death."
    Vanity Fair magazine pined, "If only Natalie Wood were still alive to play her in the movie. That limpid sexuality, the steel hidden beneath the puddly dark eyes, the tragic glamour."
    Variety reported that Catherine Zeta-Jones was "desperate" to play Beth in the movie. Further, that Joe Eszterhas, the dramatically hirsute and extravagantly compensated screenwriter, was holed up in a bungalow on Maui pounding out draft number seven of his script, entitled Spittoon.
    All this Boyce had tried to keep from Beth. He needed her focused. She rolled down the window.
    "Ma'am," said Hickok, the Secret Service agent in the front passenger seat. Hickok was jumpy these days. The death threats had been increasing.
    Beth ignored him. The air was June—humid and sweet with moldering blossoms. She'd been a virtual prisoner since last fall in the house in Cleveland Park, under permanent surveillance by a press camp that never dropped below fifty people, even during the Christmas holidays. The house, built by a friend of George Washington, had the happy name of Rosedale but had been renamed Glamis by a pundit, after the castle in Macbeth.
    Beth left the window down. She'd be damned if they'd deprive her of a few gulps of fresh air on her way to be tried.
    They drove along Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia at Third and Constitution. She thought of the January day three years before when she and her husband, freshly sworn in as President, had walked past the spot, waving to cheering crowds. Normally this would be enough to make a couple happy. Not the MacManns. The night before, at Blair House, Beth picked up the phone to make a call and heard her husband on the line talking to a well-known society woman in New York, the trophy wife of a billionaire. They were making plans for an afternoon hump at his New York hotel while Beth was across town at the United Nations, addressing a conference on the role of women in the new millennium. She reflected that the role of women in the new millennium seemed to resemble the role of women in the last millennium: on the wrong end of the screwing.
    She put down the phone, went into the next room, picked up a lamp, and was about to conk him with it when a vision made her stop—the vision of herself twelve hours later holding the Bible as Ken took the oath of office, looking at him