Past Perfect (3 page)

My mouth had dropped open. Somehow I made it say, “Listen, there’s been some — ”

“There is no mistake. You are Katherine Jane Schottland, Social Security number is 124 — “

“Why? What happened?”

“You know we cannot discuss matters of Agency security.”

“But I’m entitled to an explanation.”

“No.” When you’re shot through the heart, you go into such shock that all analytical powers take flight. Yet I did have one thought: Just no? Not even a brusque sorry? She went on: “By regulation you are not entitled to anything.”

I stood there, staring at the wall behind her because I couldn’t meet her eyes. Two nail holes from a picture that had once hung there stared back at me. She picked up her phone, punched three or four buttons, then hung up: probably the Agency code for Accompany security risk to desk to pick up coffee mug, cosmetic bag, and framed honeymoon photo of subject and husband on a Belize baboon preserve, then throw her off premises.

“Please,” I said, but she ignored me.

Desperate, I tried to come up with some explanation. But what in God’s name could it be? Before Adam, I had gone out a couple of times with a guy from the Israeli embassy, a trade attaché who knew his economics, if not much else. Could he have been Mossad? But why would they wait almost two years and then not even question me about him? What else could there be? All I could come up with was that my sister, Maddy, had joined a radical poets’ cabal that some genius in the FBI had determined was dedicated to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Nothing. I’d done nothing wrong. Right? Yet I flushed, hot with shame.

And now, all these years later, Lisa Golding was on the phone offering me an answer. I was shaking so much that I had to sit on the bedroom’s only chair, a silly armless thing with a flouncy skirt. Like the rest of the room, it was a red and white toile. But I missed the seat and took a hard flop onto the floor. Nicky hurried over to me, but I waved him away. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I whispered, not looking at him.

Half sitting, half lying on the rough sisal rug, I said in my casual voice, “Fine, let’s talk now, Lisa.”

“No, not when you’re rushed,” she said quickly, as if she was already having second thoughts about calling me. “It can hold till tomorrow. I’ll speak to you then.”

“Really, Lisa, if this is important to you …”

“It is, and I appreciate your trying to accommodate me.”

Had I sounded too eager? “Well,” I said, trying to come across as casual, “I’d like to help.” I gave her my cell number.

“Tomorrow will be okay. I’ll call you around four o’clock. Take care, Katie. And thanks so very, very much.”

As it turned out, Nicky took to camp immediately. His counselor was a nineteen-year-old kid from Nîmes. When Nicky said something to him in French, he said something back like Lonnnk, lonnnk many times over, which, frankly, is what French spoken at a normal speed usually sounded like to me. Then they performed the latest, elaborately choreographed version of the High Five Internationale, which demonstrated to each other their mutual coolness.

The other boys in the cabin ranged from chunky to morbidly obese, the latter a blond kid from Louisville whose complexion was the creamy yellow of a Twinkie; his eyes darted, as if trying to determine which of the other kids would be first to be cruel. He didn’t spend much time on Nicky, which told me his instincts were good. My son would not be unkind, and would no doubt wind up defending the kid by murmuring something like Don’t be assholes to the others.

Nicky had always been one of those pudgy/hefty/husky boys with a buoyant personality that other kids recognized came from an innate cheeriness (his Wyoming antidepressant gene), not from any desperation to be liked. Nicky’s self-confidence earned him a respect that might have been denied a child whose gregariousness was forced. Back in fourth grade, Billy Kelly, the school bully who tormented the lives and dreams of all the other boys, left my kid alone. He saw what other people saw: my son’s gleaming smile, all white teeth and silvery braces. With Nicky’s irresistible grin, bright blue eyes, and the perfect number of freckles on his nose and cheeks, he could be cast as the pudgy, friendly, true-blue neighborhood kid in any American movie.

So not having to agonize about my child beyond the usual mother worries about waterfront safety and bad mayonnaise, I sat beside him on a wooden bench during the parent-child Making Meals Count meeting in the arts and crafts barn and, gazing down at the planked floor, wondered what Lisa Golding would tell me about why my life had turned out the way it had.

AFTER A DESSERT of fruit kebabs, and after kissing my son good-bye, I spent the requisite twenty-four hours close by camp, in and around the Woodsworth Motel (“All our rooms face beauty-full Manasabinticook Lake”), trying to think suitable maternal thoughts like, Oh my God! I won’t see Nicky for four weeks! while admiring the scenery—water behind a lot of pine trees. I tried to reread the spy classic Tears of Autumn.

But pretty much all I did was obsessively check my cell phone for reception bars and battery stripes, of which there were always a bounteous number, and wait for Lisa Golding’s call. It didn’t come. Not at four. Not at five.

Maybe Lisa had called our home phone. Could Adam have listened for messages and, without thinking, deleted it? Dubious. Besides, I was the designated voice-mail listener. Still, I called him at work to tell him someone I knew from my Agency days had phoned about a matter of national importance.

“National importance? Is she serious or nuts?” Adam asked.

“Probably nuts.” Then I tried a light laugh that came out as a choking sound. “But she did say she would tell me why I was fired.”

My husband said, “I’m really busy now.”

I drove the 350 miles back to New York with a hands-free device stuck in my ear, but heard nothing but the audiobook The Bourne Supremacy. I was playing it low, so I wouldn’t miss the call, and I couldn’t follow the plot. At home, wiped out from the long drive and ready for bed, I left the phone on and recharging on my nightstand. Adam, obviously exhausted from the duck plague crisis, was deeply asleep on his side. His shiny reddish-brown hair, unstylishly long in this era of neofascist buzz cuts, fanned out on the white pillow.

The next morning, he went out for his usual run with our two dogs, Flippy and Lucy, so there was no one to stand guard over my cell phone in case it rang. Not that I was a wreck or anything, fearing I would miss Lisa’s call, but when I took a morning shower, I began agonizing that my Bluetooth earpiece would not pick up my phone’s ring through the glass door. I moved the soap from its overpriced Gracious Home nickel-plated dish and rested my phone there, far from the spray. Naturally, it got wet. The second I emerged I frantically dried it. Despite being able to see the lighted display with Nicky’s smiley face as wallpaper, I panicked that some audio microchip had kinked from the steam, rendering the phone mute.

Dripping all over the rug, I rushed to the bedroom phone on my nightstand and called myself. The cell jingled the opening theme of Spy Guys, an insipid tune the discount composer we’d hired claimed he had all but sold decades earlier to the Carpenters, except Karen died. As I stood there, the air conditioner blew iced air in the general direction of my knees, so within seconds my legs were covered with pink goose bumps and I was shivering. Pressing the “end” button only gave me the opportunity to brood that my call to myself had probably blocked one from Lisa, who, too fearful to leave a voice-mail message, had not only hung up, but had now given up on me in despair.

Funny about Adam. When I saw him for the first time, that day at the National Zoo, my initial thought was along the lines of, Wow, he’s hot. Yet I thought I saw a world-weary sadness in his eyes à la Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. But his smiling and saying hi in a friendly, open manner quashed any full-blown spy fantasy I decided that the sadness in his eyes was because he was out of work, so instead of offering an encouraging hi, I nodded.

Except as I turned back to look at a lemur, my mind’s eye was still seeing his strong, squared-off features and the way he knew how to fill out a pair of jeans. It made me reconsider— Well, maybe he’s just between jobs, not down and out—so I amended my nod with a smile. It took only about three minutes of my native New York nosiness to learn that A) Adam Grainger of Thermopolis, Wyoming, had his Ph.D. and was a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Pathology and B) the Burtonesque resemblance wasn’t due to existential sadness, but to blue eyes (light blue with sparkles of darkest sapphire) that pulled down slightly at the outer corners. Fie took me for lunch in the employees’ cafeteria and I could all but hear my mother and my friends singing Don’t let this one get away, though my mother would be unable to exert enough self-mastery to resist a contrapuntal Not Jewish. She wouldn’t sing it for long. Adam was smart, good-hearted, polite, and not so much of a workaholic and sports nut that he didn’t read actual books.

Objectively, my husband was blessed with almost-handsome genes. Adam never looked dorky, though no one would ever think him a trendy guy. His hair was dark red-brown, straight, and a little mussed, and somehow you just knew he was two styles behind, not one ahead. He was sufficiently tall and lean that not even the most mean-spirited human being in Manhattan (i.e., my sister, Maddy, poet and sufferer of weltschmerz, a word that she actually used in everyday speech) ever held his lack of being cool against him.

Adam was a looker and had serious academic credentials but still he was a guy who had chosen to cut up dead animals for a living. Early on, the first few times we’d slept together, I’d done a lot of sniffing: attractive (or handsome, if your vision was 20/40), to say nothing of being Mr. Sizzling Sexuality Beneath Cool WASP Facade, but I had to make sure there was no subliminal smell of formaldehyde or, God forbid, something like a five-days-dead pit viper. Anyhow, then and through the years, Adam always smelled reassuringly of Adam, hay with a splash of sandalwood. Maybe it wasn’t hay, but since he came from Wyoming and knew how to ride a horse, that’s how I thought of it.

“I’m so glad you’re not one of those science guys who wears Tshirts from a 1985 Dire Straits concert,” I was telling him over breakfast, trying to sound lighthearted. I think I even attempted to toss my hair girlishly, forgetting I’d gone from shoulder length to chin length a year before.

“What would you do if I was one of those science guys?” he asked, clearly understanding I was in playful mode but not looking at me. He was concentrating on slicing his toast twice so it formed four nearly equilateral triangles, something I’d watched him do since the first morning we’d had breakfast together. “Leave town?”

“Probably leave the country. Do you want to know another thing I’m glad about?”

He glanced up from his plate and smiled. “Do you actually want a yes or no?”

“Of course not. I’m glad that you don’t wear those stiff, baggy science-guy jeans that look like they were put in a charity bin and sent to some third world country where they said, ‘Ugh!’ and sent them right back.”

As our dialogue indicated, Adam was closer to being a word minimalist and I was pretty much a maximalist. Still, when it came to thinking, I didn’t know whether long and complex thoughts whizzed through his brain or if he was particularly gifted in the hunch department. But he did sense I was still upset about Lisa because he asked, “Did that woman you knew from the CIA get back to you?”

“No.”

“She sounds like a pain in the butt.”

“She was.”

“Sounds like she still is. Well, she probably realized you couldn’t do anything about… what was it? A matter of national importance.” This remark was so you-doing-something-nationally-important-ha-ha! it brought to mind that breakfast table scene from The Public Enemy in which James Cagney smushes a grapefruit into his mistress’s face. Not that I could imagine doing something like that to Adam, plus the only citrus fruit I had on hand was a lemon, which was in the refrigerator and I would have to cut it in half. Besides, even during our worst moments, my attacks on him tended more toward the oblique: Your mother is a closet anti-Semite and don’t deny it because every time we visit, her first dinner is always that greasy roast pork with bacon and chard, though during one fight I threw his shaving mug across the bathroom. Actual belligerence was rare.

Most of the time, actually, we were more like the two demoiselle cranes that lived in the pond right next to the Bronx Zoo’s hospital, where Adam worked. They were gray birds, a little smaller than regular cranes, with black on the front of their necks that extended down over their chests like chic, oblong black scarves. Not only did they mate for life, but they always seemed to do things together.

Each time I visited Adam at work, he’d point them out. “When one crane drinks,” he’d tell me, “the other one always seems to be drinking too!” His hands would be on my shoulders so he could position me for a perfect crane panorama. Then, for the fifth or twenty-fifth time, he’d go on about their monogamous nature (human marriage, alas, being an institution in which you listen to the same observations limitless times, which would reduce mere cranes to insane philandering). “Amazing!”

Actually, Adam did not speak with exclamation points, being your standard low-key Western guy, but I was pretty good at discovering the occasional maraschino cherry of emotion in his vanilla delivery. In any case, my husband was a one-woman man, and since the day he’d picked me up inside the Small Mammal House at the National Zoo in Washington, where he claimed I was smiling at a red-ruffed lemur, I’d been his woman.

And I stood by my man, albeit not while he was doing a necropsy — that’s what an autopsy for animals is called—on, say, a deer he suspected might have succumbed to meningitis. Still, I was a traditional wife, delighted to sit beside him on the couch watching 24, or to go along for an hour-long evening trot with our dogs, even listen to the old country music records he’d inherited from his grandfather—scratchy, mournful songs sung by a hoarse cowpoke who sounded as if he should get a chest X-ray.