BILL 'N' HILL OUT OF LIP SYNCH AS THE PARTY'S ODD COUPLE

By ANDREA PEYSER
BOSTON — These two really need to talk.
The VIP room was crowded and the champagne flowed as Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites) moved her lips up to her husband's face. Bill Clinton (news - web sites) puckered up gratefully, apparently believing the woman he married was greeting him with a smooch.
Not a chance.
Bill and Hillary Clinton (news - web sites) breezed into town Sunday night, to a party thrown in their honor high atop an office building. They arrived separately.
They barely seemed to know one another.
Where Hillary was radiant, smiling, coyly batting away questions about her presidential hopes, Bill appeared thinner than I've ever seen him and introspective, bordering on morose.
At one point, he announced, quite bizarrely, that before his arrival at the party, "I felt pickled and old and half-dead."
Bill arrived before 9 p.m. and began holding court at one end of the VIP room. Hillary spotted him and wafted over to his side. And as I watched, in amazement, the pair who have been wed more than 20 years engaged in one of those embarrassing physical misunderstandings that usually occur between strangers.
Hillary leaned in to Bill's face, and he responded by giving her a little kiss. But Hillary completely bypassed her hubby's willing orifice, and instead moved her own maw up to his ear, into which she whispered, curtly, "That's John's brother."
Bill looked momentarily confused.
"John Kerry (news - web sites)'s brother!" she said sharply, and she pointed Bill in the direction of Cameron Kerry.
And then she was gone.
It was plain as the embarrassment on Bill Clinton's face. The power sinew that has joined this couple has changed.
Bill lingered in the VIP room for a long while, chatting, signing his memoir, posing for pictures. At one point, he placed his hand on my bare shoulder.
"The senator is ready when you are," a staffer informed him, telegraphing Hillary's impatience.
"She's ready!" another staffer shouted, more urgently this time.
Any remaining doubt of the weirdness between them was removed when the couple finally took the stage in the main party room, next to Chelsea in curly hair and a Pucci-print silk get-up. Her parents linked hands and smiled like an actual couple.
Hillary spoke first. "Let me introduce you to Chelsea's father, a best-selling author, the man who taught the Democrats how to win again. A great, great president for the country we love . . . "
No mention of the fact she was married to him.
Bill was far stranger.
"I want to say thank you for being so rowdy and irreverent and loud," he told the crowd, saying that before he arrived at the party, "I felt pickled and old and half-dead — and you were having such a good time."
The pickled, old ex-prez then turned attention back to Hillary.
"She's the only one who can do anything for you anymore. She's got a real job."
I fear he needs help.
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