Past Perfect (11 page)

“Look at it this way, Mom. You can congratulate yourself on your restraint, not buying the second pair.”

“Believe me, I’ve been patting my own back for a week. And it allows me to deceive myself that somewhere up there”—she pointed heavenward —“it’s written that I’m owed another pair of Manolos.” She thought a moment, shrugged, and said: “It’s a blessing I’m not Catholic, because I’d probably believe there was a tenth circle in hell for people who spend on shoes as I do.”

Looking at my mother, I couldn’t believe she had just turned seventy. That was a number that had nothing to do with her. She was still as willowy as she was in her wedding pictures, in which she’d worn an unadorned ivory satin gown that fit her body so perfectly it seemed to have first been poured onto her skin in liquid form before turning to fabric. Her eyes were a lively green. When I read Gone with the Wind for the first time, I was thrilled that Scarlett O’Hara had my mother’s eyes.

My mother’s hair was dark brown, expertly dyed now, and she wore it as she had all her adult life: she pulled it back as if to make a long ponytail, but instead she looped her hair into a knot at the base of her neck. It was kept in place by four tortoiseshell hair combs. When I was little, I’d stand beside her, watching as she sat at her vanity in the morning putting on makeup. I’d play with her four combs, pretending they were Mommy, Daddy, Maddy, and me. No doubt, given her training, she knew more about me than it was necessary for any mother to know.

She wasn’t vain in that Upper East Side of Manhattan laser/dermabrasion/face-lift way of women whose skin is pulled so far back that they wind up looking like trout. She had minor wrinkles and a softening around the jawline, but somehow she’d reached seventy with only deep smile lines around her mouth and undeniable worry furrows between her brows. Her face said what she probably believed: life is neither all good nor all bad, but it always takes a toll. Looking at her, though, it was evident her life had been mostly good.

“I’m so glad my ten o’clock canceled,” my mother said. “And then you called! I love spending time together, just the two of us. How are you? Missing Nicky?”

“Very much,” I said. “Although part of me is starting to think of myself as a free woman instead of a mother. Don’t worry, I feel appropriately guilty.”

Naturally, my mother said, almost word for word, what I expected: “Ambivalence is human, sweetie. I’ve always said summer camp is for parents as well as children.”

Simultaneously, we each sipped from our cans of Diet Coke, then set them on the floor where her rug stopped and the wood began. “Listen,” I said, “I need your professional advice.”

Her subtly mascaraed lashes flickered twice, the only sign she feared I was about to give her bad news. Otherwise she remained bright-eyed. I’d seen her I-am-a-mental-health-professional expression enough times in my life to know it well. It declared: I’m interested but I don’t want to smile in case you’re about to inform me of some sickening secret that’s lacerating your soul. “Sure,” she said pleasantly. “For you, my rates are cheap.”

“There’s a woman I used to work with at the CIA, Lisa Golding. I don’t think I ever mentioned her because I wasn’t all that friendly with her. She was a shopping friend, not a confidence-exchanging friend.”

“Jewish?”

“No. Anyway, the Agency would occasionally bring foreigners over here to live—because we owed them something, and it might be dangerous for them in their old country. Lisa’s job was showing them how to blend in to American life in whatever part of the U.S. they were settled.”

“Did she teach someone who was going to be settled in Mississippi how to talk like a Southerner?”

“No. Because if she’d taken someone from Romania who barely spoke English to Mississippi, no matter how much she trained him, he wasn’t going to sound as if he’d been born in Biloxi. What she did was give them some tools so they could behave as if they were ordinary immigrants. They couldn’t appear to be special cases who came out of nowhere and were suddenly plopped down in a community. They had to act as unremarkably as possible. Lisa taught them how to dress American, given where they lived and what their social class was supposed to be. I’m not sure if she worked on their cover stories, but it was up to her to make the person and the story match. She lived with them for a few weeks, took them driving and grocery shopping, to movies, fast-food restaurants —or concerts and four-star restaurants if that was the case —and tutored them on how to behave, what to expect. A person from the Balkans might view a line of highway tollbooths as a border crossing and suddenly feel threatened.”

“Well, that’s interesting! One job description I never heard before,” my mother said. Even as kids, Maddy and I noticed that her voice took on an upbeat tone, what my sister called “the wows,” when she talked to us. Maddy said that was because she was trying to compensate for the fact that though she loved us, she found us slightly boring. I told Maddy she was crazy, that our mother just got happy being with us. But after Maddy’s revelation, or maybe before, I always did feel slightly boring in my mother’s presence. While I made a cute and/or insightful observation on occasion, nothing I ever said was worth such an ardent wow.

“Lisa had a theater background, set design. She also had a terrific eye for style. Not necessarily good style, like how to pick shoes like those.” I pointed to her feet and she nodded a thank-you, pleased with the compliment. “She could take a walk through any neighborhood in the country and when she was done, she’d have absorbed amazing knowledge of how the people there lived —clothes, furniture, what they watched on TV, what they ate for breakfast.”

“Uh-huh,” my mother said encouragingly.

“The first time I met Lisa was to interview her for a report on how some big shot from the Polish labor movement was handling life in the Midwest —Chicago, I think. I thought she was cool. Lively and fun-loving, in a non-CIA sense. No har-har at witty observations about the Bundestag. On the other hand, no throwing parties built around tasting flavored vodkas.”

“That’s a party?” my mother demanded.

“It happens outside New York. Anyhow, I never thought Lisa was terribly bright, but she was good company.”

“How come you never got past being shopping friends?”

“Lots of reasons. I’d just met Adam, so I wasn’t all that anxious to go anywhere without him. We both were working hard and had so little free time that we wanted to spend it together.” I looked down at my shoes. Black, but they were to my mother’s shoes as a minivan is to a Ferrari. “But mostly, my relationship with Lisa never got past shopping and going to whatever play I couldn’t drag Adam to because …” My mother was good at waiting. Finally I said, “I never could be real friends with her, well, because she was a liar.”

“Oh.” She gave a wise nod. Of course, I never really knew whether my mother’s nods were wise, but they always looked it. “What kind of lies did she tell?”

“Dumb lies. About what her father did for a living. She told me he was an army officer. But then she told someone else he was a troubleshooter for a multinational company —the idea both times being that she’d been raised all over the world. Sometimes she made it sound as though her family just got by financially, but were no great shakes. Other times she talked about how her mother’s family had been bankers in California since gold rush times. One time she said she spent Memorial Day weekend in Paris, except someone mentioned something about seeing her that Saturday at Bloomingdale’s in Tyson’s Corner. I don’t get it. Why would someone lie like that?”

“Lots of reasons.” She lifted her Diet Coke and sat all the way back on the couch. “It may have given her a temporary sense of power, presenting herself in the way she wanted to be presented at any one time. Typical American middle-class kid one day. Child of wealth with an upper-class pedigree another.”

“But why would she lie to people she worked with? I mean, we weren’t employed by a used car dealership. We worked for the CIA. Remember how thoroughly they investigated me before I got hired?”

“She might have told the truth on her application because she wanted the job, and then passed whatever security clearance with flying colors. But the truth might not fit her emotional needs. Look, children tell a type of wish-fulfillment lie all the time. ‘My parents really aren’t my parents. They adopted me, but I’m the daughter of a Hawaiian princess who’s going to come and reclaim me any day now.’ It gives them a feeling of gratification for a little while, even if it’s unsustainable. But when that kind of lying continues into adulthood, it’s a sign of pathology.”

“But the weird thing was, sometimes she’d tell you something you were positive was a lie, like she was putting her condo on the market to buy a row house—out of Georgetown proper but still in a great area. I thought, Yeah, right. Then I got an invitation to her housewarming. Okay, it wasn’t a mansion, but it was an absolutely incredible house. It wasn’t a house you buy on a government salary. None of the people I worked with lived like that. So maybe her mother’s family were bankers.”

My mother nodded. She was waiting for me to go on, but as I had fifty thoughts roiling about my head, nothing came out. Should I tell her about Lisa’s call? Sure. Except then I’d have to tell her how I couldn’t let go of getting fired and for a nanosecond she’d get a look in her eye as in, Oh God, if you’d only told me about this obsession a year or two ago I could have helped you. Now that youre going to be forty, it’s too late. Then her customary cool would reassert itself and she’d look at me compassionately as if to say, I understand. Go on.

“Lisa called me about two weeks ago,” I said.

“You hadn’t spoken to her in all these years?”

“No. When someone is fired from the Agency, they’re tainted.”

“That’s asinine!” my mother said. “‘Tainted.’ What is there, the mark of Cain on your forehead? I can’t believe—”

“Mom, please just believe me.”

Reluctantly, she nodded, then reached for a silk pillow and stuck it behind the small of her back. “So why was this Lisa suddenly free to call you? Is there an expiration date for taintedness?”

“It was a really weird call. She knew I worked in television. She wanted me to get her to someone high up in TV journalism.”

“Do you know anyone — ?”

“No! I mean, the only journalists I know cover entertainment, and then the story is usually about Dani or Javiero. Anyway, Lisa said it was a matter of national importance and it was terribly urgent that I get her to someone.”

“Did she sound as if she were under a great deal of stress?”

“Definitely. But I still didn’t take it all that seriously. Sure, it was someone from the Agency, but not someone of substance. A lightweight. I hadn’t thought about her in years. Even if I had, I’d have thought, yeah, a lot of fun, but the second after thinking fun, I’d have gone, Yeah, fun, but what a liar—and not a very good one. Also, when she called I’d just gotten home from the studio and was rushing around, throwing a few things into a bag to stay overnight when I took Nicky to camp. Maybe I should have been amazed that someone from the Agency was calling me, but this was Lisa, Miss Trivial. So I blew her off.”

My mother’s head moved up and down as if to acknowledge, Oh, I see. Except she didn’t. Her eyebrows moved a little closer together. She seemed confused, as if someone had forgotten to film the fourth act of a TV show and was trying to pass off three as the complete story. What was this all about?

“As it turned out, I didn’t blow her off,” I explained.

“Oh. What made you change your mind?”

“She said if I would help her, she would tell me the reason why I was fired. I mean, it was like this: she said she no longer had any reason for loyalty or to keep quiet, and essentially would trade her knowledge for my help.”

My mother peered into the depths of the diamond ring my father had bought for her sixtieth and asked, “Would she have been in a position to have had such knowledge?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if there was anything in her job description that went beyond what I saw. The three little words at the Agency were need to know. Unless it was necessary to have information to do your job, you didn’t get that information. It’s possible that I knew only part of what Lisa did. Or after I got canned in 1990, her job could have changed, or she could have been given broader access to what was going on. She could have found out months or years after I was gone.”

I’d always noticed that when people aren’t ready to look you right in the eye, and when staring past you would be a dead giveaway of that reluctance, they get busy checking out the manicure situation. My mother stopped examining her ring and began studying the streaks of light reflected from the silvery sconces over the couch that glinted in her clear polished nails. “Is it possible,” she asked her nails, “that Lisa made up the whole business about a matter of national importance?” Her tone was gentle, as if she didn’t want to unsettle her manicure.

“It didn’t sound like an act,” I replied. “She sounded genuinely scared.”

“When someone repeats an exaggeration or a lie often enough, it can change from personal myth into a kind of truth for them. It can be as powerful as a real memory. That’s because, in essence, it becomes a memory.”

“It’s possible. I can only tell you that I heard conviction in her voice.”

My mother sighed. To give her credit, it was not one of those passive-aggressive sighs other mothers give that demand, Why can’t I get through to you? Hers was more like, Gee, I’m at a loss. I don’t know what to tell you. “So you decided not to blow her off,” my mother finally said. “What did Lisa say?”

“Nothing, because she knew I was in a rush.” I had a feeling I sounded a little pathetic, that I was trying to hide the fact that I’d been gulled or humiliated. I talked faster. “It was like this: I said I was in a mad rush to get my son up to camp, but that I was really willing to talk to her and help her. And she seemed incredibly relieved and said something like, ‘It can wait till tomorrow. I’ll call you.’”

“How would she call you if you’d be up with Nicky and staying at a motel?”