Andersen, Kurt (11 page)

I force a laugh. “Not exactly.”

He’s pissing me off, which feels good, because it makes me want to stop beating around the bush and tell him the truth about the truths I intend to tell. Or maybe he’s baiting me, trying to provoke me into doing exactly that. I was a litigator. However, Alex’s own knack for negotiation has helped him make several fortunes—not just producing movies but, earlier, in technology (video-editing software) and retail (two clothing store chains he cofounded and sold, One-Dimensional Man and, for women, S&O, which secretly stood for “stylish and overpriced”). Steady, girl.

This isn’t the first time in a stressful, delicate human encounter when I’ve found myself thinking of the two flying lessons Chuck Levy gave me over Lake County when we were eighteen.
As you start your descent, think of the glide path and maintain a consistent approach to the runway.

“It’s about growing up, yes, being kids. Wilmette but also college, freshman year, all the craziness.
All
the craziness.”

Too much speed is what messes up landings—you’re going too fast, bring up the nose.

“And my life afterward.”
Control your rate of descent.
“You know, the roads taken and not taken, there but for the grace of God, etcetera.”
Keep lowering the flaps, but increase your power.
“Mistakes were made. And I’m writing about those. We don’t need to keep the old secrets anymore.”
You’ve touched down.

The pause lasts so long that I start to think the call dropped or he’s hung up.

“I am not trying to lay off the blame on you or Chuck or Buzzy. We each did what we did. What happened, happened. It was 1968, for God’s sake. We were eighteen, nineteen. I mean, it’s not as if, you know …”

“Hollander? I’m afraid I’m losing the plot here.”

“I’m not recording this call, Alex.” Although I ought to be.

“I’ve no idea at all what you’re talking about,” he says. “None. Zero.”

“You know
precisely
what I’m talking about.”

“Easy-peasy, darling, don’t get all … shirty. I haven’t a
clue,
honestly. I do sometimes have some
short
-term memory issues from the Topamax, which I take for the bipolar, but nothing long-term.” I learned only recently, from
Vanity Fair,
that he was diagnosed ten years ago with bipolar disorder, which led to his investments in biotech. “ ‘Dreams and fantasies,’ you said, Hollander. I think maybe you’re mixing up the real and the fantastical, sweetheart.”

“Alex, stop it. Don’t do this.”

“Are you feeling all right? I think you could be a tad low. Maybe you need a fizzy drink or something? Test your blood?”

“Don’t.”

“What? Of all people,
I
know how strange you can get. I’ve seen it. I’m just worried about you, Hollander.”

“You’re really going to play it this way, huh? Deny, stonewall, deny? Christ
,
Alex, I figured you might be freaked out by what I’m doing, but I never thought you’d do
this.
”

“You really are sounding a little barmy. If I didn’t know your assistant was there with you, I’d be arranging to get you to hospital right now, calling Cedars-Sinai to send over the EMTs. You’ll realize later I’m right. I love you. Go get some sweets. See a doctor.”

“
Fuck you,
Alex.”

I hang up the phone, open my top desk drawer, stick a test strip in the meter, prick a finger, squeeze out blood, watch the five-second countdown—98, absolutely normal—and slam the drawer shut.

8

During the year before the first Bond movie appeared, the world had come to seem even more like an Ian Fleming concoction—the resumption of nuclear weapons testing by the U.S. and USSR, the Soviet missiles in Cuba, the new hotline between the Kremlin and the White House, the defection to Moscow of the British intelligence agent Kim Philby, the British war minister caught having an affair with a nineteen-year-old who was also a Soviet spy’s mistress.

Our Bond devotion had become even more elaborate. We performed half a dozen more missions. For one, Chuck mounted a little camera on his radio-controlled airplane—I hadn’t realized how gigantic the thing was—and we flew it near the navy base by Highland Park, taking spy pictures.

And then came the movie
Dr. No.
Starting that summer, 1963, all the other kids suddenly knew about James Bond. Wendy Reichman owned the 45 of the
Dr. No
theme song before I did. At the Crawford twins’ pool party, everyone said Susie’s white two-piece suit made her look just like Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, and Jimmy Graham pretended his glass of 7-Up was a cocktail and introduced himself repeatedly as “Graham … 
James
Graham.”

Chuck and Alex and I didn’t say so, but our private world of fictional violence and glamour paled pathetically in comparison to Hollywood’s official version. The movie explosions in particular made Chuck yearn to blow up stuff. We had been a secret cell of cognoscenti performing a secret homage, taking actual risks out in the real world, inventing everything on the fly, scaring and surprising ourselves. All at once Bond was like a Barbie doll or a Disney-branded Davy Crockett coonskin hat, everywhere and available to everyone for a dollar. We no longer felt so knowing and subversive. We had been demoted to … fans.

Also, we knew we were getting too old to be doing this. When we’d discovered Bond, we were barely twelve, but in the summer of 1963 we were fourteen, headed for New Trier in the fall. Twelve-year-olds pretending to be spies and make-out artists was clearly a fictional conceit, but now that we were going to be in high school, racy behavior was supposed to be on the menu for real.

One night that summer, the three of us went bowling at the alley near my house. Alex and I were drinking Fresca—new, like everything that year. Including my romantic interest in Chuck, unleashed when he played the
Dr. No
theme song on his Stratocaster.

When I sat next to him on the bowling alley bench and our thighs touched, I wanted to believe he was excited, too.

I pretended not to know how to fill in the scorecard so that he would lean over me from behind, his chest against my shoulder, his warm right arm rubbing against my left as he wrote. Did he feel my goose bumps rising?

For no reason in particular, I suggested that on the next mission, I might be a man.

“No, no, no,” Chuck said. “I mean, without a girl character, we might as well just play
army.
” No self-respecting boy older than eleven, twelve max, would ever play army.

“We could invite another girl,” I suggested.

“It’s too late.”

By which he meant that our club and its rules were too well established to assimilate an outsider, and that anyone our age was either too old to buy in to it or too uncool if they would.

Chuck’s ball guttered. As he walked back toward me, I watched him rub his hands together, then rub them on his hips and his rear.

“Also?” he said to me. “
You’ve
got
blue eyes.
Almost all the female characters do.”

Chuck Levy knew my eyes were blue!

“One of you guys could play a woman,” I said. Maybe I was serious. Mostly, I was messing with them. “That’s what actors did in Shakespeare’s time.”

This prospect amused Chuck. “Yeah, Mr. Fresca,” Chuck said to Alex, “you could be Rosa Klebb.” Uh-oh. “
Some Like It Bond.
” Alex had made the mistake of telling Chuck that
Some Like It Hot
was one of his favorite movies.

Chuck rolled again and got a spare. Even before he punched a fist in the air, the sight and violent sound of him knocking down all the pins made bowling more thrilling than it had ever been.

“Hey,
you’re
the one who thinks the
Crawfords
are
gross,
” Alex finally retorted. “You’re the one who likes ‘em
flat.
”

Chuck scowled at Alex as he walked back, sat down, and penciled in his score. He was pissed. I was thrilled. (I was flat.)

The carnal tang of our Bond hobby was undoubtedly part of why we found reasons to put off the next mission for most of the summer. We were all busy. I had summer school in the mornings—touch typing and, as a sop to my mother for leaving the Church, advanced Esperanto—plus, I worked afternoons at my uncle’s law firm in Evanston. Alex had youth theater and took two family vacations, to Toronto and Acapulco. Chuck mowed lawns almost every day.

One Saturday morning when Alex was in Canada, Chuck phoned.

“I’m going down to Evanston to see the first showing of
The Great Escape.
Want to come with?”

Finally.
Not lunch in the cafeteria or an after-school snack at Bob’s with Chuck and Alex, or a study session at the library with Chuck and Alex, or watching TV with Chuck and Alex, or a mission. A
movie.
With
Chuck.
I grinned. I tingled.

“Sure!” I said, already imagining us making out, as I had imagined many, many times during the previous three months.

“Great.”

Yes:
great.

After the movie, Chuck and I wandered toward Northwestern. Being by myself with him—really by ourselves, outside school, outside Wilmette—made me nervous, which I attributed to his sudden, shocking maleness. I opened my purse and took out Dad’s transistor radio, which I’d borrowed for the day to deal with exactly this one-on-one contingency. Music could fill the dead air.

But Chuck was talkative. The movie had made him jitter with boy-man excitement, the way he got after missions. “God,” he said, “that was so
unbelievably
great, wasn’t it? I think it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen.” The last best movie he’d ever seen, a year earlier on TV, was
Rebel Without a Cause.
He was grinning and breathing heavily. “And Steve McQueen
not
getting away at the end, back in the camp, back in the cooler with his baseball and glove! Man oh man. Can I have a cigarette?”

Chuck, who swam competitively, had been conscientious about smoking only on missions. A few months earlier, I would’ve teased him about this transgression. He leaned in toward me and I lit him, his hands cupped around mine to keep the flame from blowing out, his fingers touching my skin for three, four splendid, breathless seconds.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling, then stepping back and taking a deep drag.

It was as if we had just made love. Ian Fleming had taught me that people smoke after having sex.

“I liked it a lot better than
Dr. No,
” I said, “because it was actually funny and actually serious. Instead of never quite funny and never quite serious.”

“Yes, right, that’s exactly right, Karen.”

Exactly right. And not Hollaender—
Karen.

“That’s a problem with Bond, you know?” he said. “Not just the movie but the books get so unbelievable. I mean,
this
was so cool because that actual story,
The Great Escape,
it really happened.”

“Yeah. But SMERSH was real. MI6 and the KGB are real. Ian Fleming did intelligence and espionage.”

“Yeah, twenty
years
ago, during the war. Everything about the Russians, he probably makes up. And SPECTRE? Come on. It’s such phony baloney. Also? Every single mission Bond goes on, he gets caught by the villain.”

That afternoon, two years into our worship of Bond, I found his heresy exciting. “Alex’d be going nuts if he were here,” I said. “His ‘Fiction can be truer than facts, you retards,’ and all that.”

“Yeah, well, he’s not here, is he? And I’m not saying the missions haven’t been fun.”

Secrets from one another within our secret cabal, doctrinal fissures, Chuck entrusting me alone with his doubts. Thrilling. Almost too exquisitely thrilling. “I never really liked
Maverick,
” I said, “but he was great, James Garner.” He’d played one of the POWs in the movie.

“He kind of reminds me of your dad. He’s funny like that, and he knows German.” Chuck took a last drag on his cigarette, and as he flexed his arm to flick it into the gutter, I noticed his biceps, lightly draped by his T-shirt sleeve, bulging. Had he always had such muscles? Could six weeks of pushing lawn mowers account for it? Chuck Levy had turned into Steve McQueen. “I wonder if his Nazi prison camp, your dad’s, was like the one in the movie.”

“With secret tunnels and guys sewing disguises? I don’t think so. But he never talks about the specifics. The only thing he says is that it could’ve gone so much worse for him, that he was just unbelievably lucky.”

After a pause, Chuck said, “You know, I don’t care if your dad’s Jewish or not—”

“He’s not.”

“—and you know that even if he was,
you
wouldn’t be Jewish.”

“What?” I snapped, realizing immediately I was upset that this new information somehow may have reduced my chances of living happily ever after with Chuck Levy.

“It goes through mothers, Jewishness. God, I would
love
to have a motorcycle.” He held his fists out on the invisible handlebars. He was imagining himself as McQueen, racing across the Bavarian fields, jumping a barbed-wire fence ahead of Nazi pursuers. I watched his muscles again as he throttled and swerved.

I swooned.

Just as quickly, he deflated and turned back into a fourteen-year-old boy in the suburbs, loping into the university where his father was an engineering professor. “My goddamn parents would kill me if I even
rode
one.”

After a little while, I asked, “Do you think you could kill people?”

“What, you mean like in the movie, Nazis, in the war? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t you?”

“Maybe. If I was convinced it was good versus evil. But even then, jeez, you don’t necessarily have the big picture.”

“What, you’re worried about your whole ‘unintended consequences’ thing?” I’d written a short story in which the teenage American heroine travels back in time to 1929 to seduce and assassinate Hitler, but when she returns to 1963, she finds her family imprisoned in a Soviet gulag in Montana—because she had killed Hitler and prevented World War II, she had also enabled the Soviet Union to develop more quickly, create the first atomic bomb, and then defeat the U.S. in a war in the 1950s and take over the world.