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affair with Lyndon Johnson, something that everyone in Washington, yet no one in California, seemed to know. But Dick didn’t go in for that sort of thing—not even against Jack Kennedy. He’d ended the ’50 campaign saddled forever with “Tricky Dick” as a nickname, but he’d been the one to go to the Senate.
    “We’re so thrilled you could be here!”
    Oh, golly, the name: a redhead, but which one? Arlene Dahl? Rhonda Fleming? She and Dick had always seen a lot of movies but could never keep those two straight.
    “That’s so sweet of you to say! But I know you’d all be
more
thrilled if Dr. Kissinger had been able to make it after all!” She winked, a woman-to-woman tribute to Kissinger’s supposed charm and magnetism, which Pat couldn’t say she’d ever really experienced. Henry had been the administration star promised for this fundraiser by the Committee to Re-Elect; she was aware of herself, a bit painfully, as the second choice, and she hoped it didn’t look like a bait-and-switch—Kissinger really did have to attend to something that had come up in the Far East. Still, she wished that the Committee had asked Julie or Tricia (well, Julie) to substitute instead, and that Dick hadn’t pushed her so hard to come out here at the last minute.
    “We’re so happy to have you!” said the redhead, maybe even meaning it. Of course the real commotion here tonight was being provided by Martha. By now she was probably a bigger draw than either the first lady
or
the national security advisor, but enough protocol remained in politics that they couldn’t make a cabinet wife the official guest of honor—no matter how many times Martha made the evening news. Poor John: there he was, not thirty feet away, his hand gently on his wife’s back, trying to keep her from skyrocketing into another burst of hilarity or rage.
    “And you look so beautiful in that dress!” said yet another executive’s wife, moving up the line behind the redhead.
    “Well, look who’s talking!” said Pat, with an up-and-down appraisal of the gal’s flouncy chiffon outfit. Sleeveless, of course. She herself neverhad the nerve for it, not even in California in June. She was always getting compliments, or protective cluckings, about how thin she was; well, she might have the waist to wear anything, but not the arms.
    The executive’s wife wasn’t smiling. Her mouth was open in a little “o” of disbelief—shock, even—that the first lady was capable of making a joke. Not even a joke; just a funny figure of speech:
look who’s talking
. Good Lord, thought Pat: Was her image (she hated the word) really
that
bad?
That
“plastic”? Well, there was nothing she could do to change it. Every couple of years the press talked about a New Nixon, but that was Dick. She was stuck where she was with the reporters. Especially when it came to clothes. That
beautiful
inaugural gown with the golden jacket! On anyone else it would have been deemed magical, but once she stepped into it,
Women’s Wear Daily
pronounced: “schoolteacher’s night out.” She’d felt so bad for poor Karen Stark, who’d done such a beautiful job designing it. Dick had been furious, and gone on a toot about pansies in the fashion business, which of course had nothing to do with the sharp-clawed lady cats in the fashion
press
.
    Actually, they were half right. The dress
was
beautiful, but in some ways the whole past twenty-five years had been a schoolteacher’s night out, an improbable recess from what still seemed the real life she’d been settling into as Miss Ryan in the classrooms of Whittier Union High. When she’d made this observation to Dick—as a joke with some truth in it, just to have a laugh and get him off the subject of
Women’s Wear Daily
—he’d only gotten madder.
    Taft Schreiber was cutting the line. She hadn’t yet met the host, and before she could thank him for this lovely party and his generosity to the campaign, he was all over her with