“That will be nice!” she said, smiling back.
“No candles, of course. Or forks. We will just have to grab the frosting and mash it into our eyes for blinding. Do you ever think about how at that moment of the candles time stands still, even as the moments carry away the smoke? It’s like the fire of burning love. Do you ever wonder why so many people have things they don’t deserve but how absurd all those things are to begin with? Do you really think a wish can come true if you never ever ever ever ever ever tell it to anyone?”
On the ride home she and Pete did not exchange a word, and every time she looked at his aging hands, clasped arthritically around the steering wheel, the familiar thumbs slung low in their slightly simian way, she would understand anew the desperate place they both were in, though the desperations were separate, not joined, and her eyes would then feel the stabbing pressure of tears. The last time her son had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, morbidly ingenious. He might have succeeded but a fellow patient, a girl from group, had stopped him at the last minute. There had been blood to be mopped. Once her son had only wanted a distracting pain, but then soon he had wanted to tear a hole in himself and flee through it. Life was full of spies and preoccupying espionage. Yet the spies sometimes would flee as well and someone might have to go after them in order, paradoxically, to escape them altogether, over the rolling fields of living dream, into the early morning mountains of dawning signification.
There was a storm in front and lightning did its quick, purposeful zigzag between and in the clouds. She did not need such stark illustration that horizons could be shattered, filled with messages, broken codes, yet there it was. A spring snow began to fall with the lightning still cracking, and Pete put the windshield wipers on so that they both could peer through the cleared semicircles at the darkening road before them. She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did. The fruit trees had bloomed early, for instance, and the orchards they passed were pink, but the early warmth precluded bees, and so there would be little fruit. Most of the dangling blossoms would fall in this very storm.
When they arrived at her house and went in, Pete glanced at himself in the hallway mirror. Perhaps he needed assurance that he was alive and not the ghost he seemed.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked, hoping he would stay. “I have some good vodka. I could make you a nice White Russian!”
“Just vodka,” he said reluctantly. “Straight.”
She opened the freezer to find the vodka, and when she closed it again, she stood waiting there for a moment, looking at the photos she’d attached with magnets to the refrigerator. As a baby her son had looked happier than most babies. As a six-year-old he was still smiling and hamming it up, his arms and legs shooting out like starbursts, his perfectly gapped teeth flashing, his hair curling in honeyed coils. At ten his expression was already vaguely brooding and fearful, though there was light in his eyes, his lovely cousins beside him. There he was a plumpish teenager, his arm around Pete. And there in the corner he was an infant again, held by his dignified, handsome father, whom her son did not recall because he had died so long ago. All this had to be accepted. Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless. Tenderness did not enter except in a damaged way and by luck.
“You don’t want ice?”
“No,” said Pete. “No thank you.”
She placed two glasses of vodka on the kitchen table and there they sat.
“Perhaps this will help you sleep,” she said.
“Don’t know if anything can do that,” he said, with a swig. Insomnia plagued him.
“I am going to bring him home tomorrow,” she said. “He needs his home back, his house, his room. He is no danger to anyone.”
Pete drank some more, sipping noisily. She could see he wanted no part of this, but she felt she had no choice but to proceed. “Perhaps you could help. He looks up to you.”
“Help how?” asked Pete with a flash of anger. There was the clink of his glass on the table.
“We could each spend part of the night near him,” she said.
The telephone rang. The Radio Shack wall phone brought almost nothing but bad news, and so its ringing sound, especially in the evening, always startled her. She repressed a shudder but still her shoulders hunched and curved. She stood.
“Hello?” she said, answering it on the third ring, her heart pounding. But the person on the other end hung up. She sat back down. “I guess it was a wrong number,” she said, adding, “Perhaps you would like more vodka.”
“Only a little. Then I should go.”
She poured him more. She had said what she’d wanted to say and did not want to have to persuade him. She would wait for him to step forward with the right words. Unlike some of her meaner friends, who kept warning her, she believed there was a deep good side of him and she was always patient for it. What else could she be?
The phone rang again.
“Probably telemarketers,” he said.
“I hate them,” she said. “Hello?” she said more loudly into the receiver.
This time when the caller hung up she glanced at the number on the phone, in the lit panel where the caller ID was supposed to reveal it.
She sat back down and poured herself more vodka. “Someone is calling here from your apartment,” she said.
He threw back the rest of his vodka. “I should go,” he said and got up and headed for the door. She followed him. At the door she watched him grasp the front knob and twist it firmly. He opened the door wide, blocking the mirror.
“Good night,” he said. His expression had already forwarded itself to someplace far away.
She threw her arms around him to kiss him, but he turned his head abruptly so her mouth landed on his ear. She remembered he had done this evasive move eight years ago, at the beginning, when they had first met, and he was in a condition of romantic overlap.
“Thank you for coming with me,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he replied, then hurried down the steps to his car, which was parked at the curb out front. She did not attempt to walk him to it. She closed the door and locked it, as the telephone began to ring again. She turned off all the lights, including the porches’.
She went into the kitchen. She had not really been able to read the caller ID without reading glasses, and had invented the part about its being Pete’s number, though he had made it the truth anyway, which was the black magic of lies, good guesses, and nimble bluffs. Now she braced herself. She planted her feet. “Hello?” she said, answering on the fifth ring. The plastic panel where the number should show was clouded as if by a scrim, a page of onionskin over the onion—or rather, over a picture of an onion. One depiction on top of another.
“Good evening,” she said again loudly. What would burst forth? A monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.
But there was nothing at all.
SUBJECT TO SEARCH
Tom arrived with his suitcase. Its John Kerry sticker did not even say “For President,” so it seemed as if John Kerry might be the owner or designer of the bag. “I have to leave,” Tom said, sitting down, scraping the chair along the pavement, setting the suitcase beneath the table.
“Before you eat?” she asked.
“No.” He looked at his watch.
“Then order. Order quickly if you have to. Or you can have my salad, if you’d like.” She indicated the watery romaine on her plate.
He scanned the menu, then put it down. “I can’t even read right now. Is there couscous? Order me the lamb couscous. I’ll be right back.” He grabbed his cell phone. “I’m going to the gents’.” His face had a grip of worry beneath the sun-beat skin; his body was lanky and h
is gait lopey but brisk as he wended his way inside. The suitcase stayed at the table, like a bomb.
She summoned the garçon with a gesture that was a hand flutter quickly pulled away lest the teacher actually call on you. She had no ear for languages—in that way she took after her mother, who once on her French honeymoon, seeing a “L’Ecole des Garçons,” had remarked, “No wonder the restaurants are so good! The waiters all go to waiter school!”
“Pour mon ami, s’il vous plaît,” she said, “le couscous d’agneau.” Was that right? Did one pronounce both esses, or just one, or none, as in cuckoo, perhaps requesting a small musical bird from the park? When lamb was a food, was it a different word, the way pork and pig were? Perhaps she had ordered a living, breathing creature mewling in broth and fleece. The waiter nodded and did not say, “Anything more for you, madame?” but turned quickly and left. The outdoor tables were apparently all his this afternoon. It was April and the weather had changed into something oppressively lovely, with an urban breeze of garlic, diesel, and hyacinth. Where she ordinarily lived, there was not the same oniony, oily air of possibility as you walked down the street. Winter prairies choked the air clean. And spring was a brief, delicate thing quickly overtaken by tornadoes.
“Here,” Tom said, when he returned, trying to lighten the mood. “I think you may have left your notebook in the loo.”
He handed her a small open notebook, clearly his own, in which he had written the lyrics to Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” Exclamation marks and curlicues decorated all the lines. As did a small game of tic-tac-toe. At the bottom a page read, “Fish bite the least / when winds blow from the east” and “What is destiny, if you have to ask?” Also, “I love your hair the way it is, for chrissakes.” That it seemed hilarious made her think, This has always been the man for me.
“I have to fly back to the States,” he said. He put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. She found the few people she’d known who moonlighted in the international intrigue business to be very high-energy, but there was also a price paid; Tom now seemed tired and defeated. He glanced up and added, “You know, the intelligence world: we’re not James Bond. We’re puny, putrid graspers and gropers, deciding things at home from our laptops, playing on a field that is far too large for us.”
“Didn’t Richard Burton make a speech like that in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold?”
“That was the speech.”
“The laptop part?”
“You gotta let a guy improvise. Did you order?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Merci.” He smiled. She knew that he liked it when she said anything in French. His specialty was languages, including Urdu and Arabic, although only an hour and a half of Urdu, he declared, and then his mind turned into a blank blue screen. “And actually only four hours of Arabic,” he said. “And maybe even only five of English: five hours is a long time to keep talking.” Decades ago he had driven cars for a living, from Holland to Tehran, a drug runner (though he had not said this, she had surmised). Then he was recruited by American officials to teach the Shah’s guards’ children.
“What did you teach them?” she had once asked.
“Critical theory,” he’d said, his face lit with a desire to amuse. “Movies and Marxism. Of course not real Marxism, nothing so practical as that. Nothing like here’s how you kill people and throw them in a ditch. No, we did very abstract Marxism. Very ivory tower.”
“Ha ha,” she’d said.
“I taught the kids English,” he mumbled in a defensive tone, “and some of their parents as well.”
“Did you feel the Shah was all that bad?” she had asked and then received a long strange lecture on Chiang Kai-shek and the doubtful, simpleminded shelvings of various historical figures. She believed that in the photographs of the embassy hostages, the handsome blindfolded one, tall and bright-haired in the embassy doorway, was Tom. She herself had been a teenager at the time and had only decades later stumbled upon the photo online; the likeness took her breath away.
But he had said no, he had gotten out a month beforehand. The closed-then-open-again secrets of his work enchanted and paralyzed her, like the frog who fatally acclimates to the heating water.
He paid for everything in cash.
“Everyone looks bad now,” he’d said. “Not just the Shah.”
Now he held up the carafe of Côtes du Rhône, raised his eyebrows optimistically, and cocked his head. His hair was the color that strawberry blond became in middle age: bilious and bronze, as if it had been oxidized then striped with white like a ginger cat.
“No wine,” she said. “It leads to cheese.”
She had hoped to lose weight in time for this trip, but alas.
“You must not say anything if I tell you this.” He paused, studied her, considering.
“Of course not.” Did she look untrustworthy? Why did she not seem like a person of integrity, which she felt she was. It was gracefulness she was perhaps missing; people confused the two.
Tom poured some wine and drank. “In London they are reporting torture incidents involving American troops in a Baghdad prison. Someone took pictures. It is a disaster, and I have to get back.” He took another swallow.
“Are the troops OK? What do you mean?”
“The troops are kids. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re sheep.” The waiter brought the couscous and Tom made a stab at his lamb. “It’s all about to blow. The British papers are getting ready to go to press with it. It’s going to be a scandal big as My Lai.”
“My Lai? Well, let’s not get carried away,” she said, though who was she to utter such an airy thing?
His hand was trembling and he slurped his wine. “I’m serious. Believe me: the name of this prison will be a household word.” And then he said the name, but it sounded like nonsense to her, and perhaps it was, though her terrible ear for languages made everything that was not English sound very, well, mimsy, as if plucked from “Jabberwocky”: “the mome raths outgrabe.”
He stabbed the air with his fork. “They are the same unit I was in when I was in the army thirty years ago. And taking their orders from military intelligence: the most notorious of oxymorons. I rue my time in Tehran and Cairo; I rue my ability to be consulted.”
“You needed the money—”
“I’m sorry, but there are no more lecture slots available at this time!” he said, spreading his mouth into a smile that was like a star shining its far illusive light from long ago. “All slots have been filled by contestants who auditioned earlier!” She would never see him smile like that again. In truth probably she wasn’t seeing it now. He looked through her a bit and lowered his voice. “I said to them, whatever you do, don’t flush Korans down the toilet. Whatever you do don’t have them be naked in front of a woman. Whatever you do don’t involve them in any sexual horseplay whatsoever. Do not pantomime fellatio—which is probably good advice for everyone. I warned, don’t take a Sharpie and write Children of Akbar on their foreheads or put women’s underwear on their heads. Whatever you do don’t try to reconstruct your memories of seeing Pilobolus at the civic center when you were eight. It will demoralize and degrade them.”
She thought she could see what he was telling her. Don’t code for do. It was what doctors sometimes did for the terminally ill who wanted to die: whatever you do, don’t take this entire prescription all at once with water.
“Where did they get their ideas from then? The Internet?” Did he himself believe these prohibitions were not articulated this way as cover? When you fled one room of moral ambiguity, it was good to have a nice, overstuffed chair awaiting you in the next. But you then perhaps became your spook self, your ghost self, restless in a house you never knew was quite this haunted—and haunted by you.
“The Internet!” Tom said, scoffing. “The Internet just reflects what’s already in the human mind. Perhaps a little less so. Cruelty comes naturally. It comes naturally to everyone. But if one is confused, and i
t’s hot, one’s bearings get even further lost. The desire to break something down so you can dominate it. Where did this idea come from? Whatever happened to simple cleverness? Instead we’ve got nude interrogations and sandbags soaked in pepper sauce?”
“But you—are MI.”
“IM?”
She shifted in her seat. She couldn’t recall if she had ordered any bread with her salad. “The whole planet is based on being at the right place at the right time,” she said, lost herself.
“No! No!” he cried, seeing her eyes narrow into a squint. “They were supposed to de-conflict, not gitmoize.”
“You are simply a consultant. You weren’t responsible,” she said, unsure. Tom, she knew, had had a close childhood friend on Mohamed Atta’s plane. Sitting right up in first class with the terrorists. “Oh, my God, what a horrible shock,” she had said when he had told her the tale in a coffee shop back home.
“Yeah,” he’d said, hopelessly, “you don’t expect things like that to happen except in coach.”
Now, again, she didn’t know how to console him. “You’re speaking as if you were Death itself.”
“Perhaps I am, little girl. Let’s go for a walk and see if you return.” He began to rub his temples. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, but! I have a good idea for a cure,” he added, smiling slightly, as if he were afraid he had made her nervous. He turned his hand into a pistol shape and placed it at his own temple, his thumb miming a trigger.
“That might only wound,” she said. “It might merely blind you, and then you’d never be able to find a gun again.”
“How about this?” he said and pointed his finger into his mouth. She could see the creamy yellow of his teeth, his molars with their mercury eyes.
“It’s really an extreme way to get rid of headaches, and it still might not work.”
“I’ve got it,” he said and with both hands placed each trigger finger on either side of his head. “That do it?”