Past Perfect Page 2

  Throughout that time, Adam was so decent about my not finding a job that it only added to my shame. “Stop worrying about it,” he told me. “Millions of women stay home and are perfectly happy. Go to museums, read, get a master’s in something. I can handle it as long as you don’t want a mink coat or rubies.” But I needed to know I could do something worthwhile, or at least earn money, so until my eighth month of pregnancy, I did cooking demonstrations in my father’s stores: deep-fried potato nests in Boston, food processor pastry in Palm Beach. I drove up and down 1-95, staying in chain motels that seemed to mandate their chambermaids not to clean under the beds.

  When Nicky was three, Adam took a job as a pathologist with the Bronx Zoo, and we moved to New York, to City Island, a salt-sprayed, yellow-rain-slickered boating community, one bridge and a few miles from the zoo in the Bronx. When my parents visited our small and perhaps too cutely decorated (by me) apartment for the first time, my father had an ear-to-ear grin that was so phony it could have been painted on. He managed to say, “Very sweet,” as if that poor kid from Brooklyn he always talked about having been wasn’t him after all. My mother opened a window, took a deep breath, and said with a too-toothy cheering smile, “The air here is so wonderfully bracing!”

  Not that I felt any pressure about living the wrong life in the wrong neighborhood, but we moved to Manhattan the summer before Nicky went off to kindergarten. I tried again to get a real job and, once again, potential employers who seemed so interested at my interview became cold after checking my credentials. Why didn’t I lie and say I’d worked for my father the whole time? He’d have me draft a brilliant recommendation he’d be glad to sign. How come I didn’t merely drop the Agency from my CV as if I’d never been there? I don’t really know. Maybe it meant too much to pretend it hadn’t happened. Maybe if I couldn’t have the CIA, I didn’t really want to work at all.

  My only credential besides demonstrating overpriced cookware was that, from both fiction and life, I had some knowledge of spying. Desperate for something to do, I decided to write a spy novel. Had I always secretly burned to write fiction? God, no. But as I read more and more espionage novels, I began thinking, I could do this. And I did. Spy Guys, the novel, took me two years. Writing it was so lonely and tedious that, in comparison, my days in due diligence meetings in the Winters & McVickers, Investment Bankers, fourteenth-floor, windowless conference room seemed like Fun Fest USA.

  Surprise, the book was published, and with some success. While I was trying to write the sequel (a task my publisher seemed only slightly more interested in than I), QTV came along and inquired: Was I interested in developing Spy Guys as a weekly, hour-long television show?

  “Listen, Kathy,” the development executive I had asked five minutes earlier to call me Katie said, “let me be straight with you. Okay? Okay. You’ve got to be willing to make certain changes with one of the leads.” He told me I could keep Jamie the tough but beautiful and lovable streetwise New York cop turned CIA agent. But I’d need to change the other main character from Mitteleuropa deposed prince with a goatee into a clean-shaven, minor Spanish royal.

  Not just any minor Spanish royal. Development Guy went on to explain that through some labyrinthine link to Queen Victoria, His Highness would be fifteenth in line for the British throne. That way, his dialogue could include witty Prince William and Prince Harry references. Oh, and best of all, he’d be played by Javiero Rojas, a gorgeous but not-very-good singer from Chile turned egregiously bad actor, though still gorgeous. Then Development Guy said, “The truth, Kathy. Doesn’t it sound like fun?” The truth was, creating a TV show sounded better than sitting alone in a room for a couple of years getting wired on Diet Coke and trying to write a book.

  Back to the afternoon four weeks ago, when that voice from the past, Lisa Golding, called me. “Katie, you’re the only one I know who has big-time TV connections.”

  If I hadn’t been so pressed for time, I would have laughed. As it was, all I did was hoist my lower lip over my upper so that the impatient sigh I exhaled traveled north of the phone’s mike. “Lisa, I’m really sorry but I’m in a huge rush to get out. Can I speak to you late tomorrow or—”

  “Trust me,” she squeaked, at which I did have to smile: within a few days after first meeting her, I’d realized the words Lisa and truth did not belong on the same page. “Your friends at CNN or wherever will owe you forever when you give them this.”

  “I don’t know anybody at CNN. I don’t know anybody at any other news outlet either. Spy Guys is aired by what’s probably the most obscure cable network in the country. And my show isn’t just not-news. It’s unreality TV.” Trust me, I was tempted to tell her: Spy Guys was a fluffy forty-seven minutes for viewers who enjoyed being willfully ignorant about the actual doings of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  “What about your husband?” she asked.

  “My husband has nothing to do with the media.”

  “Katie, I know Adam. I thought he might have a friend or something. It is still Adam, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s still Adam.”

  “Well then, remember when we were all in Washington? We were friends. How could I not know Adam?” The extent of her friendship with Adam, as I vaguely recalled, was when we once ran into her at a coffee place. She’d sat with us for the length of time it takes to sip a cappuccino.

  “Anyway,” I went on, “he’s a pathologist at the Bronx Zoo. That isn’t a job that puts someone in the media loop. I haven’t had anything to do with anyone doing work of national importance for ... whatever.” Not for the fifteen years since the CIA fired me without an explanation.

  “Oh, Katie, please.”

  “All right,” I told Lisa Golding, “I’ll be glad to listen to whatever you say, but honestly, if it truly is of national importance, I’m not your girl.”

  “Look, I know you think I tend to be frivolous — ”

  “Not at all,” I assured her. Shallow, yes. Amusing on occasion. Not trustworthy.

  “ — and that, to be perfectly honest, you think I have a tendency to embellish the truth. And I do, or at least I did, to make for a more fun story. Believe me, I was dreading calling you because of the boy who cried wolf syndrome. But I’ve grown, Katie. And I swear to you, this is urgent. I need you to listen and I need you to help.” Unfortunately, even if I’d thought of her as an honorable and contemplative person, Lisa had one of those top-of-the-treble-clef voices that, had she been discussing Being and Nothingness, would have sounded like she was talking about hair gel.

  I think that was the moment Nicky strolled into my bedroom with a handful of dried apricots. He extracted the piece he was chewing on from his mouth with such delicacy I had a two-second flash about what a good surgeon he’d make. “Mom, what if ... Oh.” His voice fell to a whisper. “I didn’t see you’re talking.”

  I held up my hand in a wait-a-minute gesture. “Lisa ...” I said into the phone. What was making me feel even worse was that Nicky wasn’t fat. I studied him. A warm, smile-filled face. Okay, he was overly solid, and big for his ten years, five feet tall already, so his size seemed magnified alongside of his smaller classmates. But he wasn’t flabby. And he didn’t have the starchy pallor of a kid who was a couch potato. His ample cheeks were like peaches, warm gold tinged with red. Admittedly, his waist spread rather than tapered, but —

  “Lisa, can I get back to you? I have to drive my son up to camp and I’m already an hour behind schedule.”

  “Katie, didn’t you hear what I said? I swear, this is so huge ...” Her high voice thinned, as if someone had taken the up and down line of an ERG and stretched it out until it was flat. “Please.”

  Okay, Lisa Golding did sound stressed. And my natural tendency has always been to offer an outstretched hand or comforting pat on the head to someone in need. However, my years in TV, an industry made up entirely of overwrought people, had taught me it was not necessarily my obligation to be the primary easer of angst, especially for those
like Lisa who were given to overdramatizing and under-veracity, who popped up after a decade and a half of silence. So I met her halfway: “I’m taking my cell phone,” I told her. “I could talk to you tomorrow afternoon, after the camp’s opening day activities.”

  “Listen,” Lisa said, “besides the urgency ... Things have happened. ...” I was shaking my head in a she’s-hopeless gesture and Nicky responded with a grin of understanding, when she added, “Things are completely different now. I feel I don’t owe anybody anything anymore.” She took a deep and dramatic breath. “I feel absolutely free to tell you why the CIA fired you.”

  My body began to tremble from the inside out. I recalled the expression: shaken to the core. Well, my core was definitely shaking. Here was Lisa, offering an answer to the question I’d come to accept as unanswerable, except I couldn’t really have accepted it—could I? — because at that instant all there was in the world was the woman on the phone who had the information I so desperately needed. My son had vanished from my consciousness as though he’d never walked into the room.

  Truthfully, as though he’d never been born. My years as a mother dissolved and I was back in Personnel, thinking I’d been called in because I was going to get a promotion, given the title of communications coordinator. Ms. Schottland, the yellow-toothed placement officer would smile at me, your higher level of clearance went through, so now you can go to meetings off-site, at Congress and the EOB... . I almost floated into the office. Talk about job satisfaction! God, I was so happy. I greeted her with a smile.

  She said, “Your clearance has been pulled.” It was like a dead person speaking. Zombie tonelessness, eyes open, on me but not seeing me. “You’ll have to leave the premises immediately. We’ll have guards accompany you upstairs so you can take any personal belongings.”

  My mouth had dropped open. Somehow I made it say, “Listen, there’s been some — ”

  “There is no mistake. You are Katherine Jane Schottland, Social Security number is 124 — “

  “Why? What happened?”

  “You know we cannot discuss matters of Agency security.”

  “But I’m entitled to an explanation.”

  “No.” When you’re shot through the heart, you go into such shock that all analytical powers take flight. Yet I did have one thought: Just no? Not even a brusque sorry? She went on: “By regulation you are not entitled to anything.”

  I stood there, staring at the wall behind her because I couldn’t meet her eyes. Two nail holes from a picture that had once hung there stared back at me. She picked up her phone, punched three or four buttons, then hung up: probably the Agency code for Accompany security risk to desk to pick up coffee mug, cosmetic bag, and framed honeymoon photo of subject and husband on a Belize baboon preserve, then throw her off premises.

  “Please,” I said, but she ignored me.

  Desperate, I tried to come up with some explanation. But what in God’s name could it be? Before Adam, I had gone out a couple of times with a guy from the Israeli embassy, a trade attaché who knew his economics, if not much else. Could he have been Mossad? But why would they wait almost two years and then not even question me about him? What else could there be? All I could come up with was that my sister, Maddy, had joined a radical poets’ cabal that some genius in the FBI had determined was dedicated to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Nothing. I’d done nothing wrong. Right? Yet I flushed, hot with shame.

  And now, all these years later, Lisa Golding was on the phone offering me an answer. I was shaking so much that I had to sit on the bedroom’s only chair, a silly armless thing with a flouncy skirt. Like the rest of the room, it was a red and white toile. But I missed the seat and took a hard flop onto the floor. Nicky hurried over to me, but I waved him away. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I whispered, not looking at him.

  Half sitting, half lying on the rough sisal rug, I said in my casual voice, “Fine, let’s talk now, Lisa.”

  “No, not when you’re rushed,” she said quickly, as if she was already having second thoughts about calling me. “It can hold till tomorrow. I’ll speak to you then.”

  “Really, Lisa, if this is important to you ...”

  “It is, and I appreciate your trying to accommodate me.”

  Had I sounded too eager? “Well,” I said, trying to come across as casual, “I’d like to help.” I gave her my cell number.

  “Tomorrow will be okay. I’ll call you around four o’clock. Take care, Katie. And thanks so very, very much.”

  As it turned out, Nicky took to camp immediately. His counselor was a nineteen-year-old kid from Nîmes. When Nicky said something to him in French, he said something back like Lonnnk, lonnnk many times over, which, frankly, is what French spoken at a normal speed usually sounded like to me. Then they performed the latest, elaborately choreographed version of the High Five Internationale, which demonstrated to each other their mutual coolness.

  The other boys in the cabin ranged from chunky to morbidly obese, the latter a blond kid from Louisville whose complexion was the creamy yellow of a Twinkie; his eyes darted, as if trying to determine which of the other kids would be first to be cruel. He didn’t spend much time on Nicky, which told me his instincts were good. My son would not be unkind, and would no doubt wind up defending the kid by murmuring something like Don’t be assholes to the others.

  Nicky had always been one of those pudgy/hefty/husky boys with a buoyant personality that other kids recognized came from an innate cheeriness (his Wyoming antidepressant gene), not from any desperation to be liked. Nicky’s self-confidence earned him a respect that might have been denied a child whose gregariousness was forced. Back in fourth grade, Billy Kelly, the school bully who tormented the lives and dreams of all the other boys, left my kid alone. He saw what other people saw: my son’s gleaming smile, all white teeth and silvery braces. With Nicky’s irresistible grin, bright blue eyes, and the perfect number of freckles on his nose and cheeks, he could be cast as the pudgy, friendly, true-blue neighborhood kid in any American movie.

  So not having to agonize about my child beyond the usual mother worries about waterfront safety and bad mayonnaise, I sat beside him on a wooden bench during the parent-child Making Meals Count meeting in the arts and crafts barn and, gazing down at the planked floor, wondered what Lisa Golding would tell me about why my life had turned out the way it had.

  Chapter Three

  AFTER A DESSERT of fruit kebabs, and after kissing my son good-bye, I spent the requisite twenty-four hours close by camp, in and around the Woodsworth Motel (“All our rooms face beauty-full Manasabinticook Lake”), trying to think suitable maternal thoughts like, Oh my God! I won’t see Nicky for four weeks! while admiring the scenery—water behind a lot of pine trees. I tried to reread the spy classic Tears of Autumn.

  But pretty much all I did was obsessively check my cell phone for reception bars and battery stripes, of which there were always a bounteous number, and wait for Lisa Golding’s call. It didn’t come. Not at four. Not at five.

  Maybe Lisa had called our home phone. Could Adam have listened for messages and, without thinking, deleted it? Dubious. Besides, I was the designated voice-mail listener. Still, I called him at work to tell him someone I knew from my Agency days had phoned about a matter of national importance.

  “National importance? Is she serious or nuts?” Adam asked.

  “Probably nuts.” Then I tried a light laugh that came out as a choking sound. “But she did say she would tell me why I was fired.”

  My husband said, “I’m really busy now.”

  I drove the 350 miles back to New York with a hands-free device stuck in my ear, but heard nothing but the audiobook The Bourne Supremacy. I was playing it low, so I wouldn’t miss the call, and I couldn’t follow the plot. At home, wiped out from the long drive and ready for bed, I left the phone on and recharging on my nightstand. Adam, obviously exhausted from the duck plague crisis, was deeply asleep on his side. His shiny reddish-brown
hair, unstylishly long in this era of neofascist buzz cuts, fanned out on the white pillow.

  The next morning, he went out for his usual run with our two dogs, Flippy and Lucy, so there was no one to stand guard over my cell phone in case it rang. Not that I was a wreck or anything, fearing I would miss Lisa’s call, but when I took a morning shower, I began agonizing that my Bluetooth earpiece would not pick up my phone’s ring through the glass door. I moved the soap from its overpriced Gracious Home nickel-plated dish and rested my phone there, far from the spray. Naturally, it got wet. The second I emerged I frantically dried it. Despite being able to see the lighted display with Nicky’s smiley face as wallpaper, I panicked that some audio microchip had kinked from the steam, rendering the phone mute.

  Dripping all over the rug, I rushed to the bedroom phone on my nightstand and called myself. The cell jingled the opening theme of Spy Guys, an insipid tune the discount composer we’d hired claimed he had all but sold decades earlier to the Carpenters, except Karen died. As I stood there, the air conditioner blew iced air in the general direction of my knees, so within seconds my legs were covered with pink goose bumps and I was shivering. Pressing the “end” button only gave me the opportunity to brood that my call to myself had probably blocked one from Lisa, who, too fearful to leave a voice-mail message, had not only hung up, but had now given up on me in despair.

  Funny about Adam. When I saw him for the first time, that day at the National Zoo, my initial thought was along the lines of, Wow, he’s hot. Yet I thought I saw a world-weary sadness in his eyes à la Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. But his smiling and saying hi in a friendly, open manner quashed any full-blown spy fantasy I decided that the sadness in his eyes was because he was out of work, so instead of offering an encouraging hi, I nodded.