Past Perfect (4 page)

“Why should you care if she doesn’t call back?” Adam said. He eyeballed his sunny-side-up egg and expertly cut it so that not only did the yolk not run, but the piece fit perfectly atop his toast triangle. In vet school, his professors said he’d make a brilliant surgeon.

“I don’t know,” I muttered, trying to think of some topic that would make him believe I wasn’t trying to avoid talking about Lisa. I sliced a humongous strawberry into my yogurt and quickly dismissed such potential conversation gems as Nicky’s adjustment to camp, the war in Iraq, and the health of the duck population at the zoo.

“You told me you let go of this CIA stuff years ago,” Adam said. “I hope you’re not going to ruin your summer worrying about it again.” He was cutting another egg triangle to match his toast, but even though he was concentrating, I could tell he was irritated. A couple of months into 1990, after I’d been fired, he’d advised me, “It’s over. Give it up, Katie,” and I guess he thought that was that.

“How can I ever say it’s over and done without understanding why?”

“You have to for your own good. You were writing for the CIA, not Ladies’ Home Journal. The Agency’s a crazy outfit. You know it, Iknow it, the whole world knows it. I thought we agreed back then that you’d be wasting your time trying to make sense of what happened. You’ll never find out. Can’t you accept it?”

“Obviously not.” But I offered a sad, ingratiating little smile. As soon as it passed my lips, I knew I’d spend all day wishing I could take it back. Okay, not all day, as most of my energies would be spent on agonizing over why I hadn’t heard from Lisa Golding. Listen, I wanted to shout at my husband, I was canned from the CIA without explanation. Cut off. Half my life was ripped away from me. You were there! Don’t you remember how traumatic it was?

Forget how all of a sudden I was kicked out on my butt and couldn’t find a job anywhere. Forget that on some government computer network there were probably terrible things written about me and nothing I could do would ever get them erased. Imagine how so many colleagues I’d cared for and respected now thought of me as a bad apple. Two years of cordial relationships with some of the smartest people in government, then, abracadabra! Katie Schottland went from respected colleague to a security risk. Maybe they guessed it was just crummy judgment on my part, or dubious associations. Perhaps I crumpled a page stamped “CONFIDENTIAL NATIONAL SECURITY” and stuck it in my pocket instead of feeding it into the shredder. Or they might have wondered whether, overburdened in the office, I’d tried to sneak work home on a floppy.

Or maybe they’d concluded I was genuinely bad, though there was not evidence enough of my badness to prosecute.

“Don’t tell me to get over it,” I said to Adam.

“Whatever you want.” He went to the cabinet, reached for his New York Giants car mug. But instead of sitting back down, he poured some coffee, grabbed his second piece of toast, uncut and unbuttered, and (with a pleasant nod to show he was not an unfeeling bastard), headed off to the zoo.

Driving to the studio across Manhattan and over the Triborough Bridge, I didn’t listen to NPR out of fear of getting engrossed in an essay on loganberries and missing a call from Lisa. Print Rite Studios, where we shot most of the interiors for Spy Guys, was a sprawling building of pockmarked yellow brick on a dead-end street in northwest Queens. As evident in its clever name, the building had housed a printing plant that closed in the early sixties. Now, whenever it rained for more than two days straight, the nostril-burning stench of midcentury ink would rise through cracks in the foundation up into the soundstages.

That day, however, was cloudless and brilliant. The only smell permeating the first floor was the ham and cheese from someone’s fast-food breakfast reheating in a microwave. I climbed the two flights of steep, ink-blackened stairs to my office because the elevator was —cell phone-wise —a dead zone.

Starting right then, while climbing the stairs, I should have focused on the reality I was about to face: I’d missed a day of work taking Nicky to camp. That had left the producer, Oliver Waters, a man probably more suited to running a torture corps in Guantanamo than a TV series, to tyrannize the newest director and overrule him on any script issues the first day of taping a new episode.

However, reality and I had never enjoyed spending much time together, so my mind reverted from Oliver to its usual occupation, fantasy. As the riser of each stair was steep enough to qualify as step-aerobic gear for an advanced class, I had plenty of time to imagine my cell ringing. I would answer a little breathlessly and Lisa would say, Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I had to locate a safe land-line. A pay phone. These days it’s so hard to find one that’s working and not totally, totally crudded up so you don’t even want to touch it.

For some reason, that thought kicked off a memory of going to a big shoe sale with Lisa not long after we met. I’d watched as, with the concentration of a chef examining produce for a three-star restaurant, she’d scrupulously checked over the size sevens. She was in the middle of outfitting an East German national the Agency had spirited out and was resettling in the United States in some state that (the émigré’s personal request being honored) had no harsh winters. Anyway, somewhere between flats and heels, Lisa got into a conversation with a woman about our age who was also checking out the size seven racks. Innocuous chatter about the fad of displaying what they were then calling “toe cleavage.” As Lisa spoke, the woman, who’d been the one to initiate the conversation, started backing away.

Why? Something about Lisa’s delivery put people off. I’d watched, fascinated that after retreating from Lisa’s mile-high voice, the woman picked up a short brown boot and clutched it to her chest, almost like a shield. She edged back so far that she banged into a six-and-a-half rack just as Lisa was droning, “… makes your feet look crippled because the front, where your toes are, looks so wide and …”

I could hear too the personality glitch that was disturbing that other shopper. The unnatural slowness of Lisa’s delivery. This tic might have been an asset working with foreign nationals who couldn’t speak much English, but her too-slow talking obviously made her fellow Americans uneasy. No matter what she was saying, it began to come across as inappropriate after a minute or two. Flirtatious? Could “the front, where your toes are, looks so wide” sound like a fetishistic sexual innuendo? Or maybe the slowness made her every word sound teasing or snide: There’s more to what I’m saying than what I’m saying.

Well, maybe there was.

LISA WASN’T AROUND the day the CIA got rid of me, or at least I didn’t see her. She was probably in New Mexico or North Dakota teaching some ex-Polish commie big shot how to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. But everyone else, from my boss, Benton Mattingly, to the woman wheeling the mail cart, had observed me being more conveyed than escorted to my office by two guys from the Office of Personnel Security, both of whom could be mistaken for albino gorillas. They were not all that tall, but they were hulking. Also, both had those small eyes and cone-shaped heads that connote the lack of a subscription to THE NEW REPUBLIC.

They stood offensively close to me, glaring as I gathered up my mug and my pictures. Adam and I were scheduled to go to Wyoming to visit his family and there was a shopping bag full of presents for them I’d bought the day before during an overly long lunch hour— that couldn’t be the reason for my disgrace, could it? —and had forgotten to bring home. The two gorillas made me take off all the ribbons and wrapping paper and pawed over my mother-in-law’s blue flannel robe with green piping and my niece’s white-gowned Barbie while half the unit, no doubt, hearing that something big was afoot, came sauntering by.

Even though I couldn’t think of anything I’d done wrong, I felt so ashamed. I spotted my friend Martha, an Albania specialist, in the back of the group watching me leave and I tried to give her the look and a smile that would demand, Isn’t this the craziest thing? Except my mouth wouldn’t smile and the instant after we looked at each other, her eyes didn’t move while mine began darting around as if I had hundreds of crimes on my conscience.

By the time I got home from Langley late that afternoon, I realized no one I’d worked with would ever speak to me again. And if I picked up the phone and called them at their homes? They’d cut off any conversation, plus, two seconds later, report my contacting them.

Those work friendships that lead to after-hours socializing: gone. No more women friends for drinks and dinner and movies. No more guy buddies who needed a smart woman to talk to when they wanted to show how sensitive they were. The people I’d worked with at the CIA weren’t in Clandestine Services —operatives living overseas where people have a different identity and sometimes have to avoid each other to maintain their cover. We in Intelligence got together. We knew each other’s lives.

Yet all those losses—job, friends—seemed small when it dawned on me that I’d also be cut off from Benton Mattingly for the rest of my life.

Okay, here goes. Benton Mattingly: The Explanation. Look, there’s not a heterosexual woman alive over age fifteen who doesn’t have some guy permanently in residence in the back of her mind —or hardwired directly to her heart. The one who could have been. Sometimes it’s simply an old crush that still has an overwhelming feeling of Tightness about it: If only he’d gotten to know me, he would have loved me precisely the way I imagined he could love me. The guy could be someone she said no to, only to change her mind too late. Other times, it’s the great love that never worked out; that moment when you could finally say, Whew, glad I finally got him out of my system, never happened. Benton Mattingly was my boss at the CIA, second in command in the Office of Eastern Europe Analysis. He was the man who gave me my assignments, evaluated my work, and passed it on to higher-ups in the Agency, members of congressional oversight committees, big shots in the executive branch.

And for a few months, he was also my lover.

Yes, dumb to start up with my boss —a married man seventeen years older than I was. I should have just worn a T-shirt announcing, Not only immature, but self-destructive! It wasn’t as if I were a large-eyed waif—the tremulous, can’t-wait-to-be-victimized type who’d be played by Winona Ryder. Early on, I heard all about Deedee Dudek Mattingly, Washington hostess, the big-boned, big-voiced, nonpartisan party-giver and partygoer. She’d inherited millions from her father’s foot care business (Dudek’s Tween the Toes Creme, Dudek’s Cutting Edge Nail Clippers). The word around the Agency was Deedee was so rich that even Ben, who’d won the gold in upward mobility, hadn’t had the grandiosity to dream of the life he wound up living.

I knew all this about his life not just from office gossip and the “Chronicles” column in The Washington Post, but from the teary confidences of a Czechoslovakia analyst and, five months later, from witnessing a microrage by a macroeconomist. These encounters both occurred in the tiny antechamber to the ladies’ room, the lone bathroom area reputed not to be bugged by Personnel Security, a unit said to be committed to the axiom that the nearer a conversation is to a toilet, the more reason to eavesdrop.

Ergo, before my affair with Ben began, those two fuming and weepy women he had dumped had smartened me up. From the outset of those flings, he’d told them he would never leave his wife. “He said so over our first drink, days before we even slept together,” the Czechoslovakia analyst had confided in me, sniffling delicately. Yet apparently Benton’s every word and act in his paramours’ company persuaded them not to believe his words. He would indeed leave his wife and her money to marry them. Their delusions lasted around six months, which according to office gossip was how long it took, typically, from the beginning of one of his affairs until he said good-bye — reportedly with utmost civility.

So how could I not know? Willfully, that’s how. Two and a half months into our affair, Ben began complaining about not being able to sleep. Sometimes I believed him: Ah, his knowledge of unspeakable government secrets keeps him awake; he’s terrified of his own nightmares. Other times I was convinced his lust for me was so powerful he could not bear to sleep beside Deedce —the woman he was on the verge of walking out on for me.

One night Ben said, “Kate, I can’t take it anymore.” He was lying on his back, his arm around me as I rested my head on his chest in postcoital languor. What a chest! He was big, a former college athlete, but not one gone to seed. Okay, not rock solid, but he hadn’t turned into one of those massive mounds of middle-aged flab. He had a chest the size of the Ozark Plateau, Popeye arms, with muscles both above and below the elbow. Maybe his legs weren’t like twin sequoias, but they were damn impressive.

But it was Ben’s face that got to women. His coloring was pretty much what you’d expect to come across in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he grew up — gray-green eyes that in bright sunlight turned a wan hazel, skin more sun-roughed than tan, hair a short-cropped mix of blond and gray. Yet the bone structure beneath the skin might be described as Asian, with broad, high cheekbones and a wide-bridged nose. But Asian was too commonplace an adjective. Ben was exotic and beautiful, like a Mongol king: not what Mongol kings probably looked like historically, with blackened teeth and features disfigured by smallpox, but those triumphant Mongol kings on the covers of paperback romances who are always carrying off some virgin with waist-length hair.

With his free arm, Ben reached down to the floor beside my bed and patted the rug, searching for his undershorts. As there was that big age difference between us, I assumed by his gesture he was saying he couldn’t do it again. But then I glanced up: gray shadows hung beneath his gray eyes. In an explosion of joy, I understood why he’d said he couldn’t take it anymore: He couldn’t take living without me! Yes! For him, every night was Insomnia City. My own eyes, brown, and at that point, shadow-free, must have started glowing because he almost tripped over his own tongue adding, “As much as I love you, we have to stop seeing each other.”