Calvin Trillin offers a different take on "the Affair attorney" hired by the current occupant of the Oval Office in an imaginary breakfast table conversation between Michael Cohen and "Mrs. C" his wife. (Laura Cohen, also an attorney, in real life.) If this is (fair & balanced) drollery at its finest, so be it.
[x New Yorker]
The Cohens At Home
By Calvin Trillin
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
As the breakfast dishes were cleared away, both Cohens remained at the table with their coffees. Mrs. C, who had been gathering material for the family’s tax return, was looking through a pile of financial documents. Michael Cohen was studying his daily list of people to threaten.
“I see here that the electric bill is up a bit this year,” Mrs. C said.
“Mmmm,” Mr. C murmured. He was trying to decide whether the first person on his list would be frightened more by “I will take you for all the money you still don’t have” or “What I’m going to do to you is so fucking disgusting”—both of which phrases he’d used to threaten a Daily Beast reporter (to no avail) in 2015.
“The bill from that gardener who replaced the rose bushes seems pretty reasonable,” Mrs. C said.
“Mmmm,” Mr. C murmured again. He was considering using another phrase from that same Daily Beast encounter—“I’m going to mess your life up for as long as you’re on this fuckin’ planet.” That threat, he thought, had a nice mob-enforcer ring to it, particularly if he used what he sometimes referred to as his “Corleone voice.”
“Michael,” Mrs. C continued. “Here, stuck to the receipt from those people who repaired the washing machine, is a payment of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to Essential Consultants. What is that all about?”
“That was hush money to a porn star,” Mr. C said.
“Michael,” Mrs. C said, in a weary voice, “I’ve told you before: people with no humor should not try to tell jokes.”
“That wasn’t a joke,” Mr. C said. “A porn star claimed to have had an affair with DJT, and, just before the election, I gave her a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to keep her mouth shut.”
“An affair with who?”
“With Mr. Trump. You might have seen Don Jr., on television referring to his father as ‘DJT.’ We thought that would make him sound right up there on the level of Presidents like FDR and JFK.”
“Donald Trump had an affair with a porn star?” Mrs. C asked.
“Definitely not,” Mr. C said. “D.J.T. is a happily married family man. He is a man of honor and integrity and one of our great Presidents. In fact, I’ve retained a fellow in South Dakota to do a title search on what seems to be some unused space on Mount Rushmore, just to Lincoln’s left. We could buy it secretly through a shell corporation—I know how to do that—and hire our own sculptor.”
“Let me get this straight,” Mrs. C said. “You paid a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to a porn star so that she’d remain quiet about something that didn’t happen? “
“Well, not directly. I paid the hundred and thirty thousand dollars through a shell corporation so it would stay secret.”
“Then how come we have here a Certificate of Formation for Essential Consultants, issued by the Delaware Secretary of State’s Corporation Division, and signed by you?” Mrs. C said, holding up a document.
“Well, it turned out to be not quite as secret as it might have been,” Mr. C said. “I made up really neat alliterative pseudonyms for DJT and the porn star, but I couldn’t think of a really neat alliterative pseudonym for myself.”
“How about Danny Dumbass?” Mrs. C said.
“I don’t want you to be upset about this,” Mr. C said. “I’m sure we’ll be reimbursed.”
“You believe that Donald Trump, known to every subcontractor, supplier, and banker in New York as the King of the Deadbeats, is going to pay you back?”
“As I was saying,” Mr. C replied, “We prefer to refer to him as DJT. It sounds more Presidential.” # #
[Calvin Trillin began his career as a writer for Time magazine. Since July 2, 1990, as a columnist at The Nation, Trillin has written his weekly "Deadline Poet" column: humorous poems about current events. Trillin has written considerably more pieces for The Nation than any other single person. Trillin also has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine published “An Education in Georgia,” his account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia. More than three hundred of Trillin’s pieces have appeared in The New Yorker. His most recent book is Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff (2012). A native of Kansas City, MO, Trillin received his BA (English) from Yale College in 1957. He served in the army, and then joined Time.]
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