Past Perfect (17 page)

“It’s always nice to be a muse,” Huff said. I was pretty sure he wasn’t serious, but saying something even vaguely amusing seemed alien to everything I knew about him. So I smiled, but refrained from chuckling. “You asked me to see if I could get a name for you,” he murmured, “someone who knows what was going on in eighty-nine, with the East Germans and all.”

“Right.”

“Jacques Harlow,” he said. “Ever hear of him?”

“No. I’m not sure.”

“He was with DIA.” Defense Intelligence, the agency that provided military information and assessments for the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Started out as a military attaché in Eastern Europe, midsixties, I think, but went civilian.” Huff rubbed the side of his face as if checking his shave. I read the gesture as a passing instant of embarrassment about the scar on his cheek in the bright morning sun. He stuck his hand into the pocket of his slacks. It was strange that I didn’t feel sorry for him. “Jacques wound up being their point man on East Germany. He called it right.”

“Called it that the East German government was going to implode?”

“Yeah.” He actually peered around to see if anyone had overheard this vital information.

“Would he have known what was going on at our Agency?” I asked more circumspectly.

“Some of it. He liaised with the intelligence community.”

We had reached the garage and I wasn’t too keen on having Huff walk down the ramp with me. The guys who worked there might, God forbid, think he was my boyfriend, and they were extremely fond of my husband. Adam was amazingly patient in answering their questions about their pets, sometimes bringing them information he downloaded. One of them—a guy who owned a couple of fighting cocks — always sang a song from Dr. Doolittle every morning when Adam came into the garage: “… If we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals, dum, dum, dum …”

I stood on the sidewalk beside the entrance to the garage as if I planned on opening an office right there. “Would this Jacques guy have known any of our players?” I inquired. Lisa, I was afraid, hadn’t been at a level to be dealing with someone like Jacques Harlow.

“The ones dealing with the …” His voice fell. “East Germans, I suppose.”

“Do you have contact information for him?”

Huff handed me a folded Post-it. The sticky part had picked up some gray pocket lint. “Jacques took early retirement.” Oy, I thought. That means he’ll have no current connection to the intelligence community. “He has a place in the Blue Ridge Mountains.” I nodded as if I knew where the Blue Ridge Mountains were. Virginia or Tennessee, I guessed. My mind’s eye could see a picture of a guy who left his teeth in a glass in the bathroom. “Call, see if he’ll talk to you. He’s funny about people.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Who he’ll see, who he won’t see.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t even think of going there unannounced.”

I had to smile. “What is he,” I asked, “one of those guys who shoots first and asks questions later?”

“All I’m saying is you’d be better off not finding out firsthand.”

USUALLY, I LOVED GOING to the studio and not just to do what I was good at or what earned me a living. I treasured the tiny routines that figured into the sum of the workday. Buying my lunch, hearing the guy behind the deli counter announce, “Here she is, Miss No Liverwurst,” since each day I gazed longingly at the liverwurst, so fat it looked ready to burst out of its skin, then never ordered it. I liked deciding whether to drive through Central Park, across the Upper East Side, and over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge or up through East Harlem and take the Triborough. My ritual of choosing between the news on NPR or “The Big 80s” on my new satellite radio was a comforting self-delusion that I could let in as much of the world as I wanted. It pleased me that when I drove into the studio parking lot in Astoria, I got the security guard’s unsolicited report on Dani Barber’s mood: “Hungover and mean,” he’d say. Or, “She smiled. Must have found a new drug.” Or, “Dangerously quiet.”

I loved getting out and about, being part of the city I was born in. The deadest period of my life was when I was writing Spy Guys. I was stuck in the apartment. Nearly all I’d seen of my city was with Nicky when he came home from school. What I’d experienced then was Soccer Mom Manhattan, the diminished borough a parent sees when accompanied by a child who needs attention —playground, school, Museum of Natural History, Sneaker Street.

Alone at the computer all those hours, writing the novel, numbed me. Even if I took a break, there was no one to talk to. My only relief was the rare few hours when I was transported into the universe of the story, and was more in HH’s world than in my own. In one chapter, he was working the room at a party at the Moroccan embassy in Moscow. I wrote those few pages while glancing over at pictures in a book on Moorish architecture. But the room I was creating inside my head was far more real than all the photos and drawings in the huge book on the table, more tangible than my actual desk, computer, and mug of tea. I saw the room as HH did, with the discriminating taste of a deposed royal, an outsider who had grown up studying the accoutrements of wealth and privilege. But I could also view the world through Jamie’s ex-cop’s eyes. Fused with her in that cosmos of the book, I was as frightened as she was in her first meetings with the more worldly and sinister informants a CIA op depends on. With her, I longed for the foul-smelling, two-bit snitches she/I had known as an NYPD detective.

But most of the time, I hated the lonely life. Each day when I sat down to write, I couldn’t believe I’d been stupid enough to announce to everybody that I was going to try a novel. Sure, I’d known it would be tough: I’d read all about first-time writers getting blocked by fear of failure. Still, I had to have a job, pay my own way, and that didn’t mean earning a living doing deep-fryer demos in my father’s stores. Once I started working on what would become Spy Guys, my problem wasn’t fear of failure. It was fear of success. What if this book actually got published? What if they wanted a sequel? Two sequels? Twenty-five? Reading spy novels and thinking, I could do that, had initially felt like a challenge. Now I saw it could be a life sentence. What good was making money if you were doomed to do it locked in solitary? My TV gig was my ticket out.

The morning after I saw Huff I decided I had to tolerate one day of home confinement. Having determined that I wasn’t going to get involved with a crazy person who lived in the mountains named Jacques, it was time to face the unpleasant fact that because I’d been playing the Find Lisa game, I hadn’t done my job: produce a reasonably clean first outline of the season’s last episode to show to Oliver. Now I had only one day in which to do it. Deciding what to write about was a no-brainer because, short of having the Spy Guys mutilate their genitals or mock God, I could let them do anything. But I couldn’t afford a single distraction.

In the fifth year of writing the show, I found I was running out of new villains and whimsical plot twists that held my interest. No matter what crazy concepts I brought forth —like a demented entomologist in Azerbaijan raising toxic carpenter ants to attack campers at Acadia National Park—no one stopped me. True, no one said, “Great!” but no one ever had. Viewers weren’t writing to the president of Quality TV complaining of the diminished quality of the scripts either. What was worse, I knew if I told Oliver that I wanted to leave, to develop another show, he’d either offer me a close-to-irresistible raise or the coproducer credit I’d been pining for since I signed for the job.

Sure, by this time I’d made enough money that I could take a walk for a while and smell the roses people were always talking about. Except where would I go after that? I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to write except spy stories. But a dark espionage drama, one that alternated anomie and angst with the occasional set of teeth being punched out, the kind of show that HBO would go for, wasn’t my style. And I wasn’t good enough at plotting to come up with a spy thriller like 24 or The Bourne Identity. And forget ripping-out-eyeball spy fiction: describing torture would be too disgusting for words. As for espionage erotica, I sensed I could write a graphic sex scene with words like throbbing, but Nicky would inevitably read it, or some mean critic would write that it lacked vérité or verisimilitude or one of those words in my sister’s everyday vocabulary. I took my laptop into the den, sat in Adam’s recliner, and began an outline about terrorists trying to form a cell in the United States by having their people masquerade as Hasidic tourists from Poland. No doubt it would bring in the usual letters, invariably in boring Times New Roman font, that would begin, “I am disgusted that you would be so insensitive …” I finished the outline in three hours or so, interrupted by some bathroom breaks, making two cups of green tea, neither of which I drank, and downloading the audio of a spy novel, Prince of Fire, onto my iPod. That’s when I decided to call Jacques Harlow. I dialed.

I heard a click on the phone. A definite click. Then a close-to-subliminal hum, followed by a basso buzz. As I waited for his phone to ring I pictured the signal going through a series of silicone chips and cyber switches up to a Cingular satellite a thousand miles below the moon, then bouncing back to Earth only to be captured by the NSA, where cryptographers would … Would what? I chewed off most of my lip gloss. A long cleeeek. I took a deep breath. Cut it out, I ordered myself. Is this the first time in your long life on the phone that you’ve heard a click? Half the time I was talking to a friend, one of us would hear a noise on the line. We’d mutter: “Did you hear that? What was it?” But what could it be? Some minor digital disturbance? Or a unit of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency whose sole purpose was to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens who were nattering on about why they hated sharing a bathroom with their husbands?

I heard another click. For all I knew, Jacques Harlow could live in some backwater where they hadn’t yet changed from rotary dial to touch-tone. Or maybe he had a thunderstorm over his house. As his phone began to ring, I realized I hadn’t rehearsed what I was going to say to him. But if I hung up now, he could have a record of my calling. Who cared? Hang up now! I clutched the phone with both hands. If my right hand fumbled, my left could come to its aid, slamming down the receiver before the two syllables of his hello emerged.

“Hello,” a man’s voice said.

“May I speak with Jacques Harlow, please?”

“This is Harlow.”

I wasn’t bad at reading voices, or maybe I was just good at reading things into voices. But I couldn’t get much from his. Maybe calling himself Harlow was his protest against the informal generation for whom “Hi! I’m your server, Scott” was the measure of distance between strangers. It could have been some snappy holdover from his military days.

“Mr. Harlow, my name is Katherine Schottland. I’m the writer of a TV show about two spies who work for the CIA.” I was hoping for an uh-huh or some acknowledgment that at least he was still on the line. I didn’t get any, so of course I immediately pictured him rolling his eyes at the imminent idiocy of what I was about to ask of him. How could I describe Spy Guys? Not with a word like lighthearted, which he might interpret as frivolous. I decided on: “It’s a good-natured show. Not a Three Days of the Condor take on the Agency.” I had to assume someone who’d been in Defense Intelligence had at least heard of that movie, one of the first—and best—about an evil conspiracy within the CIA. “I was speaking with Harry Van Damme … Huff…” I took a deep breath and went on. “I mentioned I needed to speak with someone who has a sense of what was happening in the Agency in 1989, when the Wall — ”

“I know something about that.” He said it matter-of-factly. So far, he didn’t sound mentally unhinged.

“I have some questions I’d like to ask you. I realize this may not be a good time. I’ll be glad to call back at your convenience. Really, whenever — ”

He didn’t let me finish. “We’ll talk about that when you get here.”

“Oh.” I brought the recliner up to sitting position. “I actually didn’t factor in the time to come and see you, Mr. Harlow. I was hoping we could do it on the phone.”

“Don’t think so. Do you have a fax line?” I gave him the number. “I’ll fax you directions for getting here. I’m about three-quarters of an hour from the airport in Asheville.”

“That’s in North Carolina?”

“Yes.” It was a cautious yes, but at least he didn’t ask me if I thought I could follow directions.

“I’ll have to check my calendar and get back to you,” I told him. “We have a pretty tight shooting schedule right now. I honestly don’t know if I have time — ”

“I’ll fax directions. If you show up, I’ll know you were able to make time.”

MY SISTER AND I didn’t get together because we relished each other’s company. Both of us, I think (because naturally we never talked about it), wanted to be able to tell our parents, Oh, I saw Maddy/Katie the other day, to reassure them that despite the psychological axiom of sibling rivalry and our vastly different takes on life, they had done a terrific job bringing the two of us up. See? We voluntarily spent time with each other!

Why both of us felt that we needed to buck up these two adults who seemed more richly endowed in the ego department than we were was an interesting question. I probably figured that if I pondered that question too much, I’d decide my parents could live with reality and I’d wind up telling my sister to fuck off permanently. I assumed Maddy never answered the question either, not even with her higher IQ, not with the help of any of the eight thousand psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers to whom she’d gone since I’d been born. She called me to get together as often as I called her. We were due, I decided.

So, after I hung up with Jacques Harlow, I wrote a first draft of the script in a couple of hours. Then I wrote a long letter to Nicky. That calmed me: my son was the antidote to all that could be odd or dangerous. I ate a yogurt and a plum for lunch. Finally, I couldn’t avoid my sister. “I’m working at home today and finished early. How about I come downtown to you?” I asked. “We could take a walk or something.” She ruled out a walk —the angle of the late afternoon sun made her head pound —but yes, of course, come over. She wasn’t writing. She was blocked, though she had promised to read some new work at Bread Loaf in August. But now she would have nothing.