No Way to Treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley

evidence that smoking was bad for you.
    "Why don't I get back to you in a day or two with some concrete proposals?"

* * *
    Perri Pettengill and Boyce lay in bed in Boyce's Fifth Avenue apartment with its view of Central Park, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and the Pacific Ocean. Scented candles burned on both bedside tables. She had on a cream-colored teddy, no panties, thigh-high stockings made of real silk, drops of Outrage perfume in just the right places.
    Thrilled as she was that Boyce was defending Beth MacMann, Perri wondered. Beth MacMann was an undeniably attractive woman. She and Boyce had been engaged. A long time ago, but still.
    So tonight, after taping Hard Gavel, Perri had come straight back to the apartment to make sure everything was ready when he got back from Washington on the last shuttle. Dinner had been waiting, his favorite, linguine alla vongole, with the teeny-tiny clams, bought that morning at an ungodly hour by Fung, Boyce's butler-cook-concierge, along with a glass of crisp, chilled Orvieto. Boyce permitted himself one glass of wine a night, nothing while trying a case.
    The Billie Holiday CD was on, Manhattan twinkled expensively through the window. During dinner she slipped off her shoe and stroked his ankle with a stockinged toe and made purry allusions to the waiting bed. A little squeezy-squeezy on the way into the bedroom, where the candles were already lit, the bed turned down like the Bower of Bliss, Eros' trampoline.
    She popped into the dressing room to turn herself into a Vargas Girl, and as she was putting on the finishing touches, dabbing Outrage on her inner thighs, what sound did she hear coming from the bedroom? Moans of anticipation? No. The TV.
    She emerged, looking hot enough to induce an erection in a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy, and he's on the bed, shoes still on, flipping through the channels with the remote.
    Hard Gavel came on. At least he was watching her show. That day she'd interviewed C. Boyden Gray, the very tall, distinguished Washington attorney who had been White House counsel in a previous administration. He said he was relieved that something like this hadn't happened on his watch.
    Boyce flipped past her show. She couldn't believe it. He flipped until he came to The Geraldo Rivera Show and stopped. Geraldo. Her competition.
    Geraldo's guests were Barry Strutt, Bill Howars, and Alan Crudman, an unholy trinity of trial lawyers. Each thought of himself as the best in the business.
    The fourth guest, piped in via remote from Harvard Law School, was Edgar Burton Twimm, the tweedy Wise Man still waiting for some president to nominate him to the Supreme Court. He was on to provide gravitas and to shift uneasily in his seat when the other guests said something provocative.
    Perri stood there, an Aphrodite in silk. And what did Boyce do? Asked her to bring him sparkling water. With ice.
    This left her with a choice of going into the kitchen and inducing a collateral erection in Fung or putting on a bathrobe. She was mad enough to get completely dressed and leave. But seeing Boyce intently watching Edgar Burton Twimm interjecting thoughtful harrumphs and cautioning against "throwing out the Fourth Amendment with the bathwater," Perri wondered if he would even notice that she was gone.
    They'd been seeing each other for six months now. If he was trying a case, you could pour lighter fluid on yourself and light a match and he wouldn't notice. But the trial hadn't even started yet.
    Well, he was Boyce Baylor and she was television's up-and-coming law honey and he had just signed on to the Trial of the Millennium and that made him her ticket to certain stardom.
    Take a deep breath. Get him his (damned) ice water.
    As she turned to go, Alan Crudman spoke up. Alan Crudman, the noted San Francisco attorney, was riding high these days. He had just gotten his latest client acquitted, an NBA basketball player who after a three-day cocaine binge had driven his Lexus