Past Perfect (10 page)

Three East Germans, I persisted. Nothing: a blank screen. Finally, I put back the textbooks, fluffed out the sheet as if I were doing a laundry commercial, recovering the books on the treadmill. Then I went upstairs, put on a sweatshirt, and enjoyed hot chocolate and a Mallomar.

Adam was in the room we’d called, after much discussion (on my part) and two shrugs (on his), the den. Sitting back in a recliner, his neck supported by a revolting blue velour-covered pillow he’d picked up in an airport, he was engrossed in a book on how we’d come to be in such a mess in Iraq. His eyes were on the page, and the reading light made his thick lashes cast a shadowy fringe on his cheeks. “When did you get that book?” I asked.

“Don’t know.” I guess my face suggested I needed something more so he added, “Last week.” He’d changed into shorts when he came home from work. Even at forty, Adam’s long legs and big bare feet gave him the air of a teenage boy in his final growth spurt.

“It’s funny,” I said. “You just go out and buy a book. I mean, if I’m going to read something serious like that, you know I’ll make an announcement three weeks before, like, ‘I want to read that book about Iraq.’“ He nodded once, as much as he could with a pillow behind his neck. He wasn’t sure whether I was making an observation or had begun a discussion —though from his longing glance down to his book, it was clear what his preference was. “Then the next week I’ll say something like, ‘Oh, I saw that Iraq book on Oliver’s desk and he said it was good.’ And the week after that, I’ll tell you, ‘Adam, I’m going online to buy that book on Iraq. Do you want me to get you anything?’“

“Uh-huh.” He was not one for casual conversation. Okay, that wasn’t fair. Adam didn’t make conversation just to fill a silence. In his family, it was considered not the least hostile to sit through an entire dinner saying only, “Please pass the potatoes,” and “Thank you.”

“You know, we can call Nicky tomorrow night,” I went on. “Remember, they said after ten days we could call? Or I can do it from the office late afternoon and conference you, because at about four-thirty, the lines won’t be as busy. Do you have any preference?”

“Four-thirty,” he said, and added, knowing my fondness for complete sentences, “is good.” I could see how much he wanted to get back to his book. After all, we’d had a genuine conversation during dinner. For him, more talk would not only be distracting, but draining.

My parents went through their entire marriage talking, and that’s what I’d always thought being married would be like. When my mother wandered into the kitchen, where my father was peeling apples, one of them would invariably blurt out, “Oh, you know what I forgot to tell you … ?” as if the last time they had spoken had been weeks before, not moments. On the other hand, soon after Adam and I started living together, I discovered the comfort of being in a room with another person who didn’t mind if I kept my thoughts to myself.

“I’m just going to flake out in here,” I said, grabbing a white afghan with white roses crocheted into it that I’d bought for fourteen dollars at a yard sale not far from my parents’ house in East Hampton. It was one of my treasures. “Feel free to read.” I stretched out on the couch to do some more three East Germans thinking, but fell into one of those states where your body remains but your mind checks out and goes someplace where you can’t follow it.

When my mind returned, it reported that the guy who was being sent to Cincinnati was named Manfred Gottesman. A major guy: he’d been third in command of the Stasi, the East German secret police, and had been passing us a few names of people spying against us or against West Germany. He’d also reported on the agendas of meetings between the head of Stasi and the then leader of the East German government, Erich Honecker.

I remembered Lisa showing me his “before” picture. Stylewise, Manfred looked like a casting director’s vision of a communist apparatchik: hair darkened and flattened by some oily commie pomade, shirt collar so ill-fitting it looked like it was compressing his trachea.

“You should see what I did with him,” Lisa had said. “I mean, seriously check him out. Can you see he has cuteness potential?” After a few seconds, I did. A box of a face, with roughly chiseled nose, cheeks, and chin. Gottesman looked like a movie actor who might never be a star, but who would still get lots of interesting roles. A manly man, intelligent-looking too. “And guess what?” she’d continued. “He’s Jewish, so now you can feel free to fall in love with him. Oh, I forgot you didn’t marry one. Anyway, his parents came from … wherever, someplace in Germany. They were communists. They must’ve been big communists because somebody helped them escape from Nazi Germany and into Russia. He grew up in Moscow and he’s fluent, almost no accent, in Russian, German, and English. You have no idea what a pleasure it is, because he can fit in anywhere and has a really, really good body. He looks great in a suit or jeans. Not your usual East German refugee who looks like Porky Pig no matter what you put him in. I loved doing him.”

That was all I could remember, but at least it was something. I couldn’t come up with any scintillating memory of the other two, though I was 75 percent sure one of them had been a woman.

Nearly a week went by. Even though I went down to the crypt twice more and reread my notes, nothing new occurred to me. On the phone, Nicky told us he’d lost three pounds, hated swimming because the lake was so cold one of the kids had seen actual ice near the raft, and totally loved basketball but needed sneakers. At work, Dani and Javiero got into their bimonthly fight in front of the entire crew. This happened after he said the line “I wouldn’t do that,” and she expelled an angry mouthful of air, then snapped, “I hate to say this, but for God’s sakes, it’s not ‘I wooden.’ You’re supposed to have gone to Eton and Oxford. You should be capable of pronouncing the letter T.” To which Javiero replied, “If I wasn’t a gentleman, I’d punch your fucking teeth down your t’roat.” To which Dani responded, “ ‘Throat,’” and they had to be pulled apart by the boom operator and a production assistant. We lost the day’s shooting when both their managers came to the studio to scream at Oliver and threaten litigation.

One evening I drove up to the zoo to see a four-day-old zebra foal. Adam had his arm around me, and I felt a surge of love for him not only for being tall and having really masculine hands, but because for all his science, he had tears in his eyes over this beautiful striped, leggy baby. The glow remained for a couple of hours over dinner, though it ended when he saw me in a sheer black nightgown and, after an appreciative “Hey,” felt somehow obliged to add, “Just give me a minute to floss.”

It would have been a perfectly normal late June/early July except for my being unable to get Lisa out of my head. My desire to know … no, my need to know whatever she could tell me about why I’d been fired, did not lessen in intensity with each passing day. If anything, it became stronger. Where was she? Why had she disappeared?

I guess I was desperate, because I put so much effort into trying to remember anything more she had said about Manfred Gottesman and the two other East Germans. To add to the problem, Manfred’s name would no longer be Manfred Gottesman. The three of them would have wound up in different cities with different identities, that was standard procedure. But nothing —no name, no place—came to me until I remembered an old trick I’d overheard my mother telling one of her friends years before: “Just imagine putting whatever it is you can’t remember into a car and watching it drive away. Then put it out of your mind. It often comes back when you least expect it.”

I stuck Manfred and the other two Germans into an imaginary BMW and pictured them driving off. The following day, while reading an e-mail about what great fun the Deering School’s twenty-first class reunion had been (“a reprise of our unforgettable twentieth, though sadly with fewer attendees …”), I had a genuine flash: Lisa complaining about Manfred’s insistence on calling his company Queen City Sweets: “Queen City is a nickname for Cincinnati and, okay, sweets are candies, but nobody calls them sweets except someone in England in 1922 and Queen City sounds so gay. It’s like calling it Cincinnati Boy Whores, Incorporated. I told him that straight to his face, and he told me, very, very snottily, like a real stick-up-the-ass German, that his business was none of my business. I mean, we were setting him up in candy distribution to the tune of … I can’t even begin to tell you what it’s costing us.”

After all those endless days of waiting for my cell phone to ring, this was a twinkle of hope. I Googled Queen City Sweets. Yes! It still existed! One thirty-four Corporate Drive. The home page of its Web site was framed by bouquets of lollipops, chains of candy canes, and beribboned boxes of chocolates. Could it be the Web site of an über-Stasi goon turned American entrepreneur? When I read the “About Us” page, I figured it was safe, though certainly not a given, to assume that QC Sweets was owned by my man Manfred. “About Us” was actually a long welcome letter that wound up with, “We think you’ll find sugar and spice and everything nice here at Queen City Sweets, the home of sweet deals!!” It was signed Richard (“Dick”) Schroeder, President, a name which definitely had a Teutonic ring. Because you couldn’t take a guy who had even a little German accent and call him Ciaran O’Connor. Of course not. You’d call him Richard Schroeder.

If life were like art—or at least like Spy Guys—we’d cut to a sign saying WELCOME TO CINCINNATI in an airport. There would be a rear shot of Javiero as His Highness carrying an elegantly well worn Vuitton garment bag over a hooked index finger and Jamie schlepping a too large suitcase close to bursting. In the next scene Jamie would be sitting in Dick Schroeder’s office wowing him not just with her hot body, but with her near-encyclopedic knowledge of candy-making and distribution that she’d mastered in twelve hours of reading. As Jamie was getting Dick to fall in love with her and reveal state secrets (ours and the East Germans’), HH would be collecting the gossip on him from the youngest daughter of the Duchess of Blenningshire, who had married a Cincinnati potato chip tycoon.

But life wasn’t like art. Sure (as my mother-in-law once observed in a birthday card accompanying a pen and pencil set), I was the creative type. Yet for all my supposed imagination, I couldn’t come up with a way I could meet Dick Schroeder—assuming he was the person who had once been Manfred Gottesman. Could I drop into his office on Corporate Drive and ask if he knew anything of the whereabouts of his former American Manners and Mores teacher, Lisa Golding?

Bottom line, Dick Schroeder didn’t look like much. But when you have nothing, not much starts looking good.

THE OFFICE SUITE in which my mother worked was too blue to be gray and too gray to be blue. Whatever its color, it was calming. If your psyche was unsettled, there were few other venues in all Manhattan so kind to frayed nerves as her gray-blue waiting room with its up-close and arty photographs of seaweed growing out of a sandy ocean floor.

Inside, her diplomas and certifications hung behind the slab of pale blue slate that was her desk. The other three walls of her office featured more undersea pictures, but taken by a different photographer from those outside. Starfish this time, and not just the usual five-armed guys: such diversity! Shells with spikes, shells like brown velvet. My favorite had always been a pinkish one with twenty arms. The creature seemed to me to be ridiculously lovely, as much flower as animal. But these starfish photos were murkier than the seaweed ones in the waiting room; you could see the undulations of water, tiny explosions of sand rising from the seabed. Three, however, had shafts of sun shining through the deep water gloom. That set them apart from the others. Despite the murk, if you looked in the right direction, you could find some light.

My mother stood out in the watery gray-blue. In all her life I’d never known her to wear anything that could blend into that color. Decoration was background. She was foreground. We were sitting on her analyst’s couch, which was upholstered in nubby gray silk. She sent it out to be recovered every August so those patients who wanted to lie down during their sessions wouldn’t be distracted by smells and smears of other patients’ hair products as she herself had been during her own psychoanalysis. She could have gotten a couch covered in leather or a dirt-hiding tweed, but while she approved of the moral fiber of people who bought long-wearing furniture and energy-efficient automobiles, her taste prevented her from becoming one of them.

As always, my mother was the total land creature—that morning, in black linen. Her dress was cut so elegantly that even if you knew next to nothing about fashion, you’d recognize this as the work of a preeminent designer. From their luster, you might even guess that those big white beads she was wearing around her neck truly were pearls. You’d be right. My father’s present for her fiftieth birthday. He’d confided in me —and in everyone he knew except my mother-that buying them had doubled Tahiti’s gross domestic product for the year.

“I love your shoes,” I told her.

“Thanks.” She stretched out a leg and swiveled her foot right and left. What looked like two slender grosgrain ribbons formed an X over her instep. They were all that kept the rest of the shoes —soles and four-inch heels —from falling off as she walked her usual half mile from home to office and back again. “I decided they were very practical, being black.” She smiled. “They had them in taupe too.”

“You were tempted to buy both,” I said.

“Of course.” Maddy and I had not inherited her chic gene. We dressed reasonably well only because we’d been raised by a woman with innate good taste and a long list of fashion dos and don’ts. In fact, I had no idea what we inherited from our mother other than mitochondrial DNA and some ambition. Physically, we both took after our father, which meant that if our school had had a girls’ wrestling team, we would have been recruited. Granted, I had one up on my sister because I had a discernible waist. But even though my sister and I were somewhere between okay-looking and pretty, with our high color and almond-shaped eyes, we appeared to come from people precisely like what our father’s family must have been before they left Hungary for America: small-town Jews who could carry fifty-pound sacks of chicken feed on their backs —and that was just the women. My mother, on the other hand, had the height and grace to look as if her antecedents had been Tolkien elves.