Past Perfect (2 page)

Leap forward a decade. Ten years after I enchanted the guests at one of my parents’ dinner parties by appearing in a pink flannel nightgown with itsy-bitsy unicorns prancing on the collar and cuffs and declaring how cool Einstein’s relativity theory was, I recognized an obstacle in my way of becoming a physicist. One ought to like physics. Or at least have a talent for it.

Ergo, I majored in economics. What with the obligatory differential calculus and statistics, it was a subject comfortably distant from my sister’s world of exquisite literature. Still, during my four years at Connecticut College, my true major was doomed relationships. I also educated my left hand to give my right a flawless manicure, and continued my life of intrigue going to spy movies and reading espionage novels. I read and reread the oeuvres of John Le Carré, Ian Fleming, Robert Littell, and, when in a rare philosophical humor, Graham Greene.

Upon graduation I was unable to find work reading spy fiction. I came back to New York to spend eighteen hideous months at Winters & McVickers, Investment Bankers. I worked eighteen-hour days among people who found discussions of the availability of government-enhanced equity for investment in venture capital more stimulating than either sex or going to Miami. I figured that was the price I had to pay for being an adult. (My sister, Maddy, by this time, had already had several poems published in Pleiades, one in The New Yorker, and had just gotten married to Dixon Cramer, man about town, gourmet, and a film critic for Variety.) All the above is the simplest explanation for how, shortly before my twenty-third birthday, I turned my back on family and the financiers of New York and ran into the open arms of the spooks of Langley, Virginia.

Even though the CIA had given me a fair idea of what sort of work I’d be doing, I was a little disappointed that when I arrived at Langley there was no Surprise! You’re going to be a secret agent! welcome. I was placed in the unemotional, spreadsheeted world of financial analysis. But at least I was investigating money laundering. And I was at the CIA! The stuff that dreams were made of, or at least my dreams. They gave me a security clearance and an identity card to prove it. I’d never been happier. Every morning as I passed through the security checkpoints, I felt the thrill of being precisely where I was born to be.

Born to be slightly bored, I decided after a few weeks. But only slightly. There was zero James Bond glamour in my work. Most of it entailed reading communiqués from our own people, reports from other agencies, and analyzing illegally obtained financial data on the assets of certain world leaders and their associates. I was figuring out stuff like how much of, say, our thirty-five million in military aid to a certain country in Central America wound up in el presidente’s offshore account in a bank on the isle of Jersey. (Ans: $7,608,300.) Then I’d write up my findings in snappy, don’t-fall-asleep language for reports to be read by congressional and executive branch staffers.

So snappy was I that my writing soon got me out of the Economic Study Group. Six months at the CIA and I got transferred to a completely different area. My new gig was working for the deputy chief of the Office of Eastern Europe Analysis, a congenial unit save for the über-chief, a nasty Kentuckian who had let his hair grow out with the Beatles and still, all those years later, sported giant gray sideburns and low-hanging bangs the color of aluminum foil. Nothing boring in this department. Every day I came to work feeling alive: something exciting will happen today. And usually something did. I walked through the halls with that confident, chin-up stride of an astronaut.

The nearly two years I worked for the Agency might have been a mere blip on the radar screen of anyone else’s life. But this was my bliss. Twenty-three months of knowing not just that I loved what I was doing, but that my work mattered. To me. To my country. Nothing else I’d done or would ever do would feel so right. Then suddenly it was over. And I had no place to go. I couldn’t find another job.

A prospective employer would call the Agency’s personnel department and all he would get was a terse confirmation that, yes, Katherine Schottland had once been an employee. Had I left of my own accord or been fired? Was I competent? Stable? A patriot? A traitor? No comment. This went on for nearly five years, until Nicky was born; his birth gave me a sweet though colicky excuse to stop looking for work.

Throughout that time, Adam was so decent about my not finding a job that it only added to my shame. “Stop worrying about it,” he told me. “Millions of women stay home and are perfectly happy. Go to museums, read, get a master’s in something. I can handle it as long as you don’t want a mink coat or rubies.” But I needed to know I could do something worthwhile, or at least earn money, so until my eighth month of pregnancy, I did cooking demonstrations in my father’s stores: deep-fried potato nests in Boston, food processor pastry in Palm Beach. I drove up and down 1-95, staying in chain motels that seemed to mandate their chambermaids not to clean under the beds.

When Nicky was three, Adam took a job as a pathologist with the Bronx Zoo, and we moved to New York, to City Island, a salt-sprayed, yellow-rain-slickered boating community, one bridge and a few miles from the zoo in the Bronx. When my parents visited our small and perhaps too cutely decorated (by me) apartment for the first time, my father had an ear-to-ear grin that was so phony it could have been painted on. He managed to say, “Very sweet,” as if that poor kid from Brooklyn he always talked about having been wasn’t him after all. My mother opened a window, took a deep breath, and said with a too-toothy cheering smile, “The air here is so wonderfully bracing!”

Not that I felt any pressure about living the wrong life in the wrong neighborhood, but we moved to Manhattan the summer before Nicky went off to kindergarten. I tried again to get a real job and, once again, potential employers who seemed so interested at my interview became cold after checking my credentials. Why didn’t I lie and say I’d worked for my father the whole time? He’d have me draft a brilliant recommendation he’d be glad to sign. How come I didn’t merely drop the Agency from my CV as if I’d never been there? I don’t really know. Maybe it meant too much to pretend it hadn’t happened. Maybe if I couldn’t have the CIA, I didn’t really want to work at all.

My only credential besides demonstrating overpriced cookware was that, from both fiction and life, I had some knowledge of spying. Desperate for something to do, I decided to write a spy novel. Had I always secretly burned to write fiction? God, no. But as I read more and more espionage novels, I began thinking, I could do this. And I did. Spy Guys, the novel, took me two years. Writing it was so lonely and tedious that, in comparison, my days in due diligence meetings in the Winters & McVickers, Investment Bankers, fourteenth-floor, windowless conference room seemed like Fun Fest USA.

Surprise, the book was published, and with some success. While I was trying to write the sequel (a task my publisher seemed only slightly more interested in than I), QTV came along and inquired: Was I interested in developing Spy Guys as a weekly, hour-long television show?

“Listen, Kathy,” the development executive I had asked five minutes earlier to call me Katie said, “let me be straight with you. Okay? Okay. You’ve got to be willing to make certain changes with one of the leads.” He told me I could keep Jamie the tough but beautiful and lovable streetwise New York cop turned CIA agent. But I’d need to change the other main character from Mitteleuropa deposed prince with a goatee into a clean-shaven, minor Spanish royal.

Not just any minor Spanish royal. Development Guy went on to explain that through some labyrinthine link to Queen Victoria, His Highness would be fifteenth in line for the British throne. That way, his dialogue could include witty Prince William and Prince Harry references. Oh, and best of all, he’d be played by Javiero Rojas, a gorgeous but not-very-good singer from Chile turned egregiously bad actor, though still gorgeous. Then Development Guy said, “The truth, Kathy. Doesn’t it sound like fun?” The truth was, creating a TV show sounded better than sitting alone in a room for a couple of years getting wired on Diet Coke and trying to write a book.

Back to the afternoon four weeks ago, when that voice from the past, Lisa Golding, called me. “Katie, you’re the only one I know who has big-time TV connections.”

If I hadn’t been so pressed for time, I would have laughed. As it was, all I did was hoist my lower lip over my upper so that the impatient sigh I exhaled traveled north of the phone’s mike. “Lisa, I’m really sorry but I’m in a huge rush to get out. Can I speak to you late tomorrow or—”

“Trust me,” she squeaked, at which I did have to smile: within a few days after first meeting her, I’d realized the words Lisa and truth did not belong on the same page. “Your friends at CNN or wherever will owe you forever when you give them this.”

“I don’t know anybody at CNN. I don’t know anybody at any other news outlet either. Spy Guys is aired by what’s probably the most obscure cable network in the country. And my show isn’t just not-news. It’s unreality TV.” Trust me, I was tempted to tell her: Spy Guys was a fluffy forty-seven minutes for viewers who enjoyed being willfully ignorant about the actual doings of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“What about your husband?” she asked.

“My husband has nothing to do with the media.”

“Katie, I know Adam. I thought he might have a friend or something. It is still Adam, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s still Adam.”

“Well then, remember when we were all in Washington? We were friends. How could I not know Adam?” The extent of her friendship with Adam, as I vaguely recalled, was when we once ran into her at a coffee place. She’d sat with us for the length of time it takes to sip a cappuccino.

“Anyway,” I went on, “he’s a pathologist at the Bronx Zoo. That isn’t a job that puts someone in the media loop. I haven’t had anything to do with anyone doing work of national importance for … whatever.” Not for the fifteen years since the CIA fired me without an explanation.

“Oh, Katie, please.”

“All right,” I told Lisa Golding, “I’ll be glad to listen to whatever you say, but honestly, if it truly is of national importance, I’m not your girl.”

“Look, I know you think I tend to be frivolous — ”

“Not at all,” I assured her. Shallow, yes. Amusing on occasion. Not trustworthy.

“ — and that, to be perfectly honest, you think I have a tendency to embellish the truth. And I do, or at least I did, to make for a more fun story. Believe me, I was dreading calling you because of the boy who cried wolf syndrome. But I’ve grown, Katie. And I swear to you, this is urgent. I need you to listen and I need you to help.” Unfortunately, even if I’d thought of her as an honorable and contemplative person, Lisa had one of those top-of-the-treble-clef voices that, had she been discussing Being and Nothingness, would have sounded like she was talking about hair gel.

I think that was the moment Nicky strolled into my bedroom with a handful of dried apricots. He extracted the piece he was chewing on from his mouth with such delicacy I had a two-second flash about what a good surgeon he’d make. “Mom, what if … Oh.” His voice fell to a whisper. “I didn’t see you’re talking.”

I held up my hand in a wait-a-minute gesture. “Lisa …” I said into the phone. What was making me feel even worse was that Nicky wasn’t fat. I studied him. A warm, smile-filled face. Okay, he was overly solid, and big for his ten years, five feet tall already, so his size seemed magnified alongside of his smaller classmates. But he wasn’t flabby. And he didn’t have the starchy pallor of a kid who was a couch potato. His ample cheeks were like peaches, warm gold tinged with red. Admittedly, his waist spread rather than tapered, but —

“Lisa, can I get back to you? I have to drive my son up to camp and I’m already an hour behind schedule.”

“Katie, didn’t you hear what I said? I swear, this is so huge …” Her high voice thinned, as if someone had taken the up and down line of an ERG and stretched it out until it was flat. “Please.”

Okay, Lisa Golding did sound stressed. And my natural tendency has always been to offer an outstretched hand or comforting pat on the head to someone in need. However, my years in TV, an industry made up entirely of overwrought people, had taught me it was not necessarily my obligation to be the primary easer of angst, especially for those like Lisa who were given to overdramatizing and under-veracity, who popped up after a decade and a half of silence. So I met her halfway: “I’m taking my cell phone,” I told her. “I could talk to you tomorrow afternoon, after the camp’s opening day activities.”

“Listen,” Lisa said, “besides the urgency … Things have happened. …” I was shaking my head in a she’s-hopeless gesture and Nicky responded with a grin of understanding, when she added, “Things are completely different now. I feel I don’t owe anybody anything anymore.” She took a deep and dramatic breath. “I feel absolutely free to tell you why the CIA fired you.”

My body began to tremble from the inside out. I recalled the expression: shaken to the core. Well, my core was definitely shaking. Here was Lisa, offering an answer to the question I’d come to accept as unanswerable, except I couldn’t really have accepted it—could I? — because at that instant all there was in the world was the woman on the phone who had the information I so desperately needed. My son had vanished from my consciousness as though he’d never walked into the room.

Truthfully, as though he’d never been born. My years as a mother dissolved and I was back in Personnel, thinking I’d been called in because I was going to get a promotion, given the title of communications coordinator. Ms. Schottland, the yellow-toothed placement officer would smile at me, your higher level of clearance went through, so now you can go to meetings off-site, at Congress and the EOB… . I almost floated into the office. Talk about job satisfaction! God, I was so happy. I greeted her with a smile.

She said, “Your clearance has been pulled.” It was like a dead person speaking. Zombie tonelessness, eyes open, on me but not seeing me. “You’ll have to leave the premises immediately. We’ll have guards accompany you upstairs so you can take any personal belongings.”