Chapter 5
My next two weeks at Smells of the Season were informed by my adventures with the Tuxedo Society.
As I sat behind the checkout counter, and advised customers on why their homes should reek of Gently Crushed Bayberries or Line-Dried Vermont Towels, I became convinced that tourists were a squad of ninjas disguised as retirees from Omaha and about to take me hostage.
Each shopper was a potential Putin mercenary or runaway Saudi princess, but none of my paranoia turned out to be true.
Over coffee with Brock, I asked, “Do you ever hallucinate? How do you compartmentalize everything?”
“Well, at Ralph Lauren everything’s already surreal, because people are trying on fifteen-thousand-dollar trucker jackets made from vintage quilts.
Reggie’s had me track anyone with bodyguards and shipping addresses in Moscow.
But mostly, when I’m with the Tuxes, everything gets heightened, and when I start to get shaky or scared out of my mind, I tell myself I’m in a new Ralph ad campaign with suave international cat burglars in black cashmere turtlenecks and leather trenchcoats. ”
“Have you ever gotten hurt?”
“So far just a sprained ankle, a cracked rib, and a terrible haircut from when I had to stake out this Istanbul barbershop that specialized in Julius Caesar bangs. But there’s the adrenaline rush whenever Reggie gets in touch.
He’s so level-headed, and he keeps surprising me with his skills, like fixing Julius Caesar bangs.
But you know how in a lot of gay movies, especially the ones that win awards, the heroes are always achingly lonely or rejected by their families or killed in a ditch by bigoted farmhands?
That’s not Reggie or the other Tuxes. It’s not like they’re imitating tough straight dudes, or Tarantino women with nunchucks, but it’s part of their arsenal.
That’s one of the things I love about queer people: the code-switching. We adapt.”
Which also defines being an actor. In my regular life I was still auditioning, but with an impatience.
The roles were usually stoners in wispy plays based on the writers’ college years, or a spokesperson for a “bank that cares about you” in a TV spot; there was also a five-hour tryout for a “group-dynamic colloquy” where the actors were expected to help “craft the narrative,” meaning there wasn’t a script—I was fine with stuff like this, except another actor will usually stage a sobbing “breakthrough” to get more lines.
Finally Reggie texted me to meet at the headquarters in Queens, which I hoped might mean another encounter with Dr. Huron, who’d become my nerd-crush.
The Tuxes gathered in a room I hadn’t been to before, a cross between a baseball team’s clubhouse and the lobby of a boutique hotel, with slate floors, battered armchairs, and interestingly handcrafted lamps (think clay urns with reptile scales and one-of-a-kinds made from carburetors).
Brock, Timothy, Terry the architect, and Daniel Narwell, the guy in his eighties, were there, along with some Tuxes I didn’t know.
“Ed?” said Reggie, as Dr. Huron held up the Uzbek bomber’s phone.
“Because it’s a burner,” Dr. Huron explained, “there was almost no way to identify individual callers.” I was trying my best to pay attention while swooning over how Dr. Huron tugged his thick, dark hair away from his horn-rims, like Clark Kent teasing Jimmy Olsen.
“But I was able to pinpoint a location for a call right before he entered the White House. It was coming from the Senate cloakroom, which unfortunately has no video surveillance or phone logs. But this means that the contact was either a congressional staffer or more likely a senator, whose presence in the cloakroom wouldn’t be questioned. ”
“I’ve made a list of possible turncoats,” said Reggie, “who could be either on the payroll of a foreign government or interested in a more localized disruption of the current administration, either as revenge or an undermining—without Reata Pershing, the Democrats would lose one of their brightest lights and campaign powerhouses.”
“And a potential future president,” said Dr. Huron.
Reggie continued: “At least three of our senators are members of the most influential and ultra-private conservative organization in the country, the Constitutional Committee, which supports only the strictest, most literal adherence to the Founding Fathers. They’ve been plotting for decades to put right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, and keep Democrats out of the White House.
And Daniel is a member in good standing. ”
“I was a senior partner at Stennings, Braithwaite, Taysman, and Forst for over thirty years,” Daniel explained, slowly rising to his feet with the aid of a cane.
“I didn’t just work with the Constitutional Committee, I shared their values.
I love the law, and I trusted our forebears, until it came to marriage equality.
The CC members wouldn’t hear of it, even though same-sex marriage isn’t prohibited or even mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.
I’d been with my friend Oliver Naismith since I was twenty-five, although we were very discreet, always maintaining separate homes, and Oliver married a deeply understanding woman.
But when she passed away, Oliver and I finally lived openly.
And the CC members were receptive, up to a point.
They’d include Oliver at certain cocktail parties but rarely private dinners at their homes.
They’d expect me to understand, claiming, ‘It’s a matter of tradition and Christian morality.
’ They’d say this to my face. I asked Oliver if I should resign, but he was getting quite ill, and by the time he died, I was nearing retirement and didn’t have the energy to confront the other members.
But when Reginald contacted me, about working from within the CC, I was intrigued. And grateful.”
“Daniel’s been fantastic,” said Reggie, “because he’s got such extraordinary access. And he’s friendly with the personnel department at the Committee’s building on East 84th Street, where there’s an annual summit next week. Which means they’ll be hiring a waitstaff.”
The night of the summit we didn’t wear tuxedos but white service jackets, bow ties in the Committee’s signature burgundy (for the blood of their pilgrim ancestors), black pants, and highly polished shoes.
Brock and I were already trained cater waiters, but benefited from Reggie’s tutorial in the most hushed behavior, including never addressing a member directly, disappearing through swinging doors set into the wallpaper, checking topcoats, and mixing archaic cocktails like Singapore Slings and Sloe Gin Fizzes.
We wouldn’t be moonlighting actors or students, but career servants who existed for the serenity of the select few.
The Committee Building, its clubhouse since the 1920s, was an imposing limestone sanctuary, a cross between an imperial embassy and something more fearsome, with high Doric columns and massive oak doors, to conceal and cosset.
We entered through a tucked-away side tunnel, already in our full uniforms, with any backstairs chitchat or laughter prohibited.
We were there not just to work, but to maintain a standard of obsequiousness.
“Circulate,” Reggie had said earlier. “Keep your noses clean and your heads bowed, so you can overhear conversations.” He’d pinned photos of our four primary targets to a whiteboard, to be memorized.
We gathered in an elevator that rose to a hidden hallway, where we were given silver trays and marched single file into a large mahogany-paneled room with a fireplace twice the size of my bedroom, set with a roaring blaze from logs laid across andirons featuring the Committee’s crest in hammered brass.
The windows were draped with burgundy velvet, and the floors were thickly carpeted, for an atmosphere of cloistered agreement.
There were at least thirty members present, from age forty to a gentleman who seemed already mummified.
There were exactly three women, in long-sleeved, high-necked dresses, heirloom pearls, thick stockings, and sensible pumps, and there were no people of any color besides a bleached parchment white.
While the membership was extremely accomplished, the room had the air of a coven, where highly educated, highly placed, utterly assured lawyers, billionaire CEOs, and career politicians would determine the future of America, and maybe sacrifice a goat or a Jewish waiter in the basement, with a pentagram chalked across the parquet.
“Very mansion of the undead,” I murmured to Brock, as we launched ourselves one by one into this genteel-yet-forbidding fray.
“These are the people who never shop at Ralph Lauren because it’s for social climbers and not-our-kinds,” Brock replied.
As I took drink orders and retrieved glassware, I heard:
“Diversity is out of control. Any Latina woman with a GED gets hired to run a university and she’s gone three months later.”
“Bill gave me the best tip: rent the motel room in the name of a Democratic congressman and after you’re done and the hooker’s gone, leak it to the press.”
“Edith and I are both disappointed in Tad Jr., but he insists on getting married to this Rebecca person. He says only her father’s Jewish, which doesn’t count, and she’s a neurosurgeon. But still.”
“It was priceless. I was standing there on the fifth hole in Palm Beach, and Louisa and Walt Brattles come roaring toward us in their new cart, and Walt’s so plastered he can barely steer, so they hit a tree and they both fall out onto the green, but Walt didn’t spill a drop of his highball.”