American Subversive (11 page)

“Look at us,” Cressida said. “We're becoming one of
those
couples.”

“Apparently.”

She peered up at me then, shifting her eyes without moving her head. “I'm sorry,” she said softly. “But I just want you to be honest with me.”

“There's nothing to lie about.”

“But if there
were,
then you
would
? Is that what you're saying? That's just—”

“No!”

“—perfect! Look, let's just get through the rest of this, okay?” She reached into the envelope, pulled out the two remaining folders, and slid them across the table. As casually as I could, I opened the one labeled
RODERICK.
“As you can see,” Cressida continued, “there are lots of Paige Rodericks, but none of them strike me as terrorists.”

The familiar list included a few new additions. I read through their brief bios, but they were all too young or too old. The last three pages were a compilation of photos from a high-tech
Times
image search. Cressida started talking about Kimball LeRoux as I quickly scanned the rows of anonymous Paige Rodericks, plucked at random from the American landscape like—

There she was!

Did Cressida see my eyes widen? For a fleeting moment she might have, before I recovered, before I narrowed them again and ground my teeth to conceal my astonishment. It was a small photograph, and I tried to look closer without raising suspicion. Paige Roderick!
My
Paige Roderick! Same face, same dark hair, but now she was wearing a cocktail dress and had her arm around an Ivy League type in a coat and tie. They looked like a well-heeled young couple dutifully posing at someone else's wedding. There was a tiny caption, but I couldn't read it without attracting Cressida's attention.

I picked up the third folder and tried to appear interested. Kimball LeRoux, Cressida was explaining, was a middle-aged blogger from the Gulf Coast who'd made a name for himself several years back by exposing various governmental lapses during Hurricane Katrina. He'd broken into the national consciousness for a few news cycles and hung on as long as he could—expanding his blog and writing opinion pieces—before fading back into American oblivion.

That's
where the name must have come from.

“—I mean it must be him,” Cressida was saying excitedly, as I flipped through the file, a man's life laid bare in a dozen scattered pages.

“I'm sure whoever sent the e-mail was just
pretending
to be LeRoux,” I said.

“But why? Look at some of the antigovernment stuff he's written. Don't you think we should follow up?”

“On what? There's nothing here. Half the country hates the government. It doesn't mean they're blowing up buildings.”

“I can see why you didn't become a fucking journalist,” Cressida said. “Do you know what your problem is? Or one of them, at least? A complete lack of curiosity. You spend your life waiting for people to make mistakes, and then you publicize them. And when, God forbid, something interesting comes your way, a story you could actually chase down, you let it pass right by. Look! We have his address, his phone number! Don't you think it's worth fifteen minutes?”

Here it was: all the ardor and zeal that had first attracted me to Cressida. We'd been introduced almost a year ago, at one of Derrick Franklin's dinner parties. He'd seated us beside each other in the hope that she might fall for my slight charms and write about Roorback. But she hated blogs, she told me, before the appetizers had even arrived, and hours later, when we'd jousted for long enough and she'd decided I'd do (at least for the evening), it was too late: the veneer of objectivity was gone. The sex was fine that first night, but what got me was the morning after. While most girls would have scurried around collecting clothing, mumbling excuses, Cressida lay clear-eyed and comfortable in my barely unpacked room on Weehawken Street (I'd relocated from Brooklyn the week before), the creeping sun revealing in her eyes a measured calm, as if we'd done this a hundred times before. I kissed her neck and she moved in close.

“What's your name again?” she whispered. I laughed, thinking she was kidding, and laughed harder when I realized she wasn't.

It was a marathon weekend, a whirlwind of comings and goings, sex and sushi, galleries, cocktails, a concert, and late Sunday night, when we finally said good-bye, we were on the phone within the hour, talking quickly, slowly, softly, about how easy everything suddenly felt.

I don't think it was love, even in those first beaming months. We were both too experienced for anything so unambiguous. But the physical attraction was real. And we liked each other's stories. She'd clambered her way up from a local newspaper in the British Midlands to the rollicking Fleet Street tabloids, where she spent her late twenties chasing celebrities through hotel lobbies. She had a
disarming way of getting people to talk. David Beckham, Kate Moss, Prince Harry—they'd all spoken into Cressida's tape recorder and regretted it the next morning. By this time, she'd become a name herself, a sought-after entity on both sides of the Atlantic. She was approached by a half dozen stateside gossip pages and celebrity magazines, but she'd grown tired of chronicling the detritus of fame. She was after something else, and only the rebranded-for-the-masses
Times
could offer it: a job reporting real news, with a saucy column on the side.

Now she stared me down above the rim of her wineglass, challenging me as she challenged everyone whose lies or lapses might slow her own progress. She wasn't telling me anything new. I was aware of my faults and had tailored my life so as not to magnify them. And in New York you almost could. But the world eventually catches up, confronts you, offers up a choice. I could have come clean then, saved myself in her eyes. Because I
was
chasing the story. I was doing exactly the thing she accused me of never doing—being the
very person
she was begging me to be—and yet I couldn't let her know it. Not yet.

Cressida was stuffing the
LEROUX
folder into her bag. “If you won't do anything about him, then I will,” she said, standing up in front of her half-eaten pasta. She paused, as if to say something else, then shook her head, kissed me quickly on the cheek, and strode out as she'd strode in, her heels hitting the sidewalk with rhythmic determination.

She'd left the other two folders on the table.

I paid the check, grabbed them both, and hurried the few blocks home. Cressida and I had fought enough to become masters at making up, so it seemed strange that we hadn't even tried. It had been like a business dinner, two wary competitors discussing a potential merger, tentatively trading information before deciding against the idea and quickly going separate ways. But I couldn't blame her. She was one thing before the other—I'd always known that—and now she was heading home with a folder of information she thought might lead somewhere. What should I have expected?

That's why the text she sent me as I walked up my dark stairwell took me by surprise.
You used to make me laugh,
it said.

Three stubborn locks later I was sitting in my living room—my
only
room—spreading the
RODERICK
folder out across the coffee table. I peered down at the image I'd spotted earlier. It was Paige,
that
Paige, I was positive. She was wearing what looked like a vintage dress, bare-shouldered and tight through her torso. I squinted at the tiny caption:
Brendan Carlyle and Paige Roderick enjoy the smooth sounds of Ernie Lombardi's Jazz Quartet at last Saturday's Fishers Island Club Gala.
That was it—no date, no context.

None of this felt right. Over the course of the day Paige Roderick had evolved in my mind, become someone obscene and extraordinary—a bomb-building revolutionary mocking the poisoned culture that consumed the rest of us. But now here she was, just another girl in a fancy dress, advancing effortlessly down the primrose path of blue-blooded courtship. I peered again at the photograph, at the faded face, the impassive eyes. They looked distant, empty. She wasn't smiling or posing, but she was hardly defiant. I reminded myself that photographs were only captive instants—the briefest flickers of history—and they lied just as people lied. But they told great truths as well.

She existed, though, and wasn't that something? A kind of journalistic progress? But toward what? At NYU, I'd heard well-known reporters talk about an indefinable force that propelled them through investigations, one improbable lead to the next. At the time, I'd scoffed at such self-important nonsense, but there I was, staring again at the photograph as I considered the progression of events, and there
was
a logical rhythm to it. Questions were supposed to come before answers, frustration before understanding.

Then I was looking for my cell phone. I had my next move.

Touché answered on the fourth ring. “You don't sound good,” I told him.

“That fucking DJ. We were up until dawn. Lord knows what I told her. Hasn't she learned never to listen to a Latin man after two in the morning?”

“The girl last night. She's real.”

“Very much so.”

“And I have a picture of her on Fishers Island.”

“No, she lives in Brooklyn somewhere. Red Hook, I think.”

“She does? How do you know?”

“Because she told me,” Touché said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“What are
you
talking about?”

“Paige Roderick.”

“That wasn't her name.”

“Not the DJ!”

“Oh. Who then?”

“You don't remember? The e-mail I opened in Cressida's room?” There was silence on the other end. “You thought she looked like Jennifer Connelly.”

“Ah, yes! I almost forgot. I
did
forget. The beautiful mad bomber. So she did it? You caught her? And here I thought we'd wasted the evening chasing—”

“I'm being serious. I just saw her in another photograph. She was with some preppy guy at a ritzy dinner-dance on Fishers Island.”

“Fishers Island?”

“That's what I'm saying! I think it was the golf club your parents belong to.”

“What was her date's name?”

“Brendan Carlyle. Do you know him?”

“I know his sister,” said Touché. “Brendan was a bit younger. Banker, maybe.”

“He looks like a banker.”

“When was it taken, the photo?”

“There isn't a date.”

“And you're sure it's her?”

“Positive.”

“Well, then, there's only one thing to do.”

“What's that?” I asked.

“Are you free this weekend?”

PAIGE
 

THE HOUSE WAS A SLANT-ROOFED SALTBOX BUILT IN THE 1960S WHEN THE nearby ski resorts were still in vogue, and it bore the effects of hard weather, the cedar sides beginning to rot, the roof speckled with replacement shingles. The ground floor was separated into living and dining areas by a pretty stone fireplace, and an adjacent staircase led up to three small bedrooms tucked into the roof like a crawl space. It was nice enough, though all personal flourishes or effects, anything that might hint at the owner's tastes or identity, had been stamped out by years of renters up from New York and Boston.

What the house did have was privacy—thickets of dense foliage that protected us from the road and the vacation houses on either side. It was early summer and the ground was a mud-caked sponge. Nearby streams flowed fast with mountain runoff, and the nights were still cold enough to make me miss the South. The few locals we came across seemed dazed and half-asleep. It was the low season.

The location was convenient; the garage was a necessity. It stood alone, a dilapidated concrete structure fifty yards from the house. When we pulled open the paneled, two-car door on our first morning in residence, we were greeted with great piles of rusted tools and rotting furniture—lawn mowers and Weedwackers, a stained rug, a cushionless couch. Keith waded bravely in, past decades of
castoffs—vintage bicycles, a dollhouse, telemark skis, parts of a Ping-Pong table.