Wry Martinis (38 page)

That this article should have provoked so many disparate interpretations may mean that there are still a lot of people out there like her.

—
The Washington Post
, 1983

A Few More
for the Road

I read somewhere that air-conditioning was invented in order to provide a measure of relief for poor President Garfield as he lay dying during a Washington summer from Guiteau’s bullet. I feel bad for the man. Bad enough to be shot by a maniac with a French surname, but to linger on to spend your last July and August in Washington.… It was so hot on the top floor of the President’s House, as it was then called, that a crew of navy technicians was tasked with devising some means of cooling him down. They came up with a system of forcing air through pipes chilled by ice and salt. Valiant as this effort was, I can’t imagine it helped much. I’m convinced of this because I used to spend summers in the top floor of a house in Washington. I wasn’t able to call in the navy, but I called in just about everyone else, and it’s still hot enough up there to finish off a
healthy
president.

Air-conditioning did not become the most important thing in my life until I moved to Washington in July 1981, almost a hundred years to the day after President Garfield was shot. I soon developed the habit of opening the freezer of any refrigerator I passed and inserting my head in it.

To make matters worse, I lived for the first five years in Foggy Bottom, a part of the city named for the swampland it once inhabited. (The State Department is nicknamed Foggy Bottom, an often appropriate bit of metonymy.) In President Garfield’s day the army kept its stables there. There was also a slaughterhouse nearby, as well as a canal running along what is now Constitution Avenue, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Ellipse, just south of the White House. Apparently a lot of carcasses from the slaughterhouse ended up in this canal. The miasma would then waft on up to the President’s House. A few years later President Cleveland
decided, Enough already, and moved his summer residence to higher ground three miles to the northwest, where the air did not smell like cholera soup. A hundred years later, my wife and I followed him to what is now called Cleveland Park.

The first thing I asked the realtor was, Does it have central air-conditioning? Yes, she said. Sold, I said.

I set up my office in the small, third-floor attic room that gives out onto a rooftop deck from which you can see the towers of the National Cathedral and pluck apples from the branches of the old apple tree in our backyard, assuming you enjoy severe stomachache. I thought I had found Writer’s Heaven, an aerie it might please a passing muse to light upon.

It was early June, already well into the Washington summer. On my second day in my new office I noticed that by 9:00
A.M
. it was already a bit stuffy up there. By ten I was downright clammy, and by eleven I was starting the old summer striptease. Then I thought,
Hold on, you have central air-conditioning, schmuck. Turn it on!

I approached the control panel with some trepidation. I’d never had central air-conditioning, only the window “units” that shake, rattle and drip and cause the lights to dim. I turned the switch to On. The whole house shook for about five seconds. I took this for a good sign. I imagined a great polar bear stirring after a long winter’s hibernation. I went back up to my office and put my hand under the register and there, by gum, was a cool stream of air. Soon the house would be a veritable igloo. I sat down contentedly and went back to work.

I spent the next few days trying to convince myself that I was keeping cool, but Lucy kept coming up to the third floor and saying, “
Boy
it’s hot up here.” And the reason she was coming up was to ask if she could please turn the air-conditioning off, because the floors below were now so cold that icicles had formed on the bathroom faucets. There followed a period of acute marital stress. If you put one spouse in a refrigerator and the other in an oven, this results.

I called in the experts. They ranged from people like the guy in those “Hey, Vern” commercials to refugee German rocket scientists. The former said, “Whutcha do is, block off yer intaykes on the second floor, but not so’s ya brayke the whole system ’cause then you’re gonna hafta replayce the whole
thang
.” The latter said, “You haf an imbalance in ze zyztem. You require a new zyztem, ezzentially,” which they said they would be able to install for five thousand dollars.

Five thousand dollars being five thousand dollars, I called in more experts. They advised putting in a separate “unit.” That meant gouging a large hole in the roof. (The attic office had no windows and forty-five-degree-angle sloping walls.) It also meant rewiring the whole house for reasons I still don’t understand and the certain prospect of rain getting in.

I had a brainstorm: rearrange the entire floor plan of my office so that my chair was directly underneath the register. It worked! As long as I sat bolt upright in my chair, I was enveloped in the slender shaft of cool air, leaving only my forearms, extended toward the keyboard, to glisten and bead with sweat. There were drawbacks. If I wanted to turn on my printer, which writers tend to do from time to time, it meant getting down on my hands and knees and crawling under my desk to reach it. But it seemed a small inconvenience.

More serious were the muscle cramps. Within a week I couldn’t get out of the bed in the morning owing to the spasms that ran from my neck to my waist. Lucy was not as sympathetic as usual because of her now-chronic rheumatism from living in the refrigerated downstairs. I went to a doctor, who prescribed ibuprofen and Flexeril, which helped with the muscle spasms but had a tendency to put me to sleep. This did not do much for my prose style. Assignment editors stopped calling. I began drinking heavily. Water, I mean. I thought I could air-condition myself internally by drinking continually from a pitcher of ice water, but all this really did was make trips downstairs necessary at the rate of approximately one every ten minutes.

Faced with being divorced by a pre-pneumonic wife, addiction to muscle relaxers and the demise of my writing career, I wondered if the time hadn’t come to spend that five thousand dollars on ze new zyztem. However, a chance encounter with my next-door neighbor architect promised a brilliant solution to the problem: convert the low-lying, shaded garage into an office. Of course! Why hadn’t I seen it?

I’ll call my architect friend Hobart, because he is a fine man and I don’t want to do anything to impede his career. Hobart said it could be done for $25,000. A lot of money, sure—five times more than a new zyztem—but I’d end up cool and with three times the space. “Let’s do it,” I said. (The same words, now that I think of it, Gary Gilmore said on his way to the firing squad.) Hobart drew up five thousand dollars’ worth of blueprints and put it out for bids. The bid came in at $57,000.

I swallowed a few extra muscle relaxers and asked myself how such a thing could be. Then I remembered the Law of Rusher’s Gap. Named for its formulator, author and columnist William A. Rusher, it goes like this: Say you want to convert your garage into an office and they tell you it’s going to cost $25,000. Now you know, in your heart of hearts, it’s going to cost $40,000, right? Well, Rusher’s Gap is the difference between $40,000 and what it
actually
ends up costing.

Hobart and I and the contractors entered into negotiations. We drew up new plans for enlarging the existing office, etc., etc. Looking back, I wonder if we couldn’t have brought about peace in Central America if we’d spent as much time and effort on that problem instead. The negotiations broke down when the contractor came in with a bid so astronomical only Copernicus could have made sense of it. But it wasn’t the money that did it. It was the asterisk at the bottom of the contract that said, “Does not include new A/C
if required
.” (Italics mine.)

I wrote out a good-bye check to Hobart, whose total bill had come to just under $10,000, and said to Lucy, “We’ve tried the liberal solution and hurled large sums of money at the problem. It still won’t go away, so why don’t we?” I said, “Let’s go someplace really cold for the summer, like Maine.” Lucy agreed, and we rented a bungalow in the woods in Maine. There was moss on the roof and it was so dark we had to turn on the lights at 10:00
A.M
. Perfect, I said. Perfect.

The temperature hit ninety and stayed there. The radio said it was the hottest summer in Maine’s history, at least in living history, and people in Maine live forever. Most of them remember the Spanish-American War and none of the ones I spoke to could remember a hotter summer. When we got back to D.C. in mid-September it was still in the high eighties.

One day while I was inspecting the joists in the basement to see if they were strong enough to hang myself from, it struck me how very … cool the basement was. I thought, Aha … I wouldn’t even need to have to put in air-conditioning. It’s cold enough down here to keep hamburger fresh, why not me? It is a little dark and damp and it does tend to flood when it rains, but so does Venice, and what’s a little arthritis?

So now I’ve solved my problem of keeping cool during the D.C. summers. My new basement office is nearing completion. We found a wonderful contractor who said it could be done for $40,000 and it looks like
it’s only going to end up costing $105,000 by the time the paint dries. A lot of money, you say? Well, yes. Yes it is a lot of money. It’s twenty-one times what a new zyztem would have cost. But this is how it works in Washington. How do you think the deficit got so big? It’s not so bad as long as you take enough of these muscle relaxers. Here, have one. See? Nothing to it. You just take out your checkbook and write zeros. It’s got so I hardly notice. And when I go down to the basement and stand there and look out the new windows and see the heat waves vibrating off the pavement outside and I feel how nice and cool it is, I think how comfortable President Garfield would have been down here. Yes. I think he might even have pulled through. I’m going to go drink some more water now. The doctors say it’s important for me not to have stress and to drink a lot of water.

—
Architectural Digest
, 1989