The Secret Lovers (20 page)

“Pretty soon,” he said, “you and I are going to have to tell someone else about all this.”

Christopher rose to leave. He coughed on Wilson’s cigarette smoke.

“When you run the name check on Rodegas,” he said, “you’ll find that he’s my wife’s godfather.”

“You know him?”

“Cathy will introduce us,” Christopher said.

1

On the flight from Paris to Rome, Christopher was alone in the first-class compartment; the stewardess gave him a drink and a foil package of nuts and retreated to the lounge
behind the cockpit. He left the whisky and slept a little. Dreams woke him, as they always did at the end of an operation, again and again.

Cathy was waiting, unsmiling, beyond the customs barrier. She wore a raincoat, with pearls showing at the open neck and sandals on her bare feet. When Christopher came closer he saw that she had
painted her eyelids. He had never seen makeup on her face. She didn’t move toward him or speak, but waited passively for him to kiss her. As they left the terminal, Cathy walked a little
ahead of him, as she had done on the night she had led him through Trastevere and into Saint Peter’s Square. In the parking lot she handed him the keys to the car. It had been raining and the
top was up; Cathy put it down at the exit while Christopher paid the parking fee. When they entered the highway, she put her foot on top of Christopher’s on the gas pedal. “Go
fast,” she said. She increased the pressure until the speedometer needle passed 150 kmh. The wind took her hair. She moved back to her side of the car and lay back, knees parted, her painted
eyes turned toward Christopher. The road was empty, and he kept the speed she wanted. “Slow down now,” Cathy said. They were passing the ruins of Ostia Antica, and inside the low walls
they could see the broken columns and the fallen brick.

“From here you have to do everything I ask,” Cathy said, “or you’ll spoil what I want to do.”

Christopher took his foot off the accelerator and the compression of the engine slowed the car.

“Park,” Cathy said. “I want to go inside.”

Christopher parked the car close to the wall, in a dark patch of ground between two trees.

“You go over first,” Cathy said. “We can just climb up from the car.”

Christopher went over the wall. Standing on the grass inside, he watched Cathy climb after him, balancing and swinging one leg up and then the other, like a rider mounting a horse. She stood
erect on top of the wall and removed her raincoat. He had already seen that she wore nothing else. She rolled up the coat and threw it down into the seat of the car. She leaped, naked except for
the pearls around her throat, onto the grass. She moved close to Christopher. When he reached for her she leaped back, turned and ran. He waited for a moment, then followed her into the ruins. She
waited for him by a wall, then hid again. She appeared, disappeared, reappeared. At last she came up behind him, he heard her breath and the fall of her bare feet. She seized him and pulled him to
the damp earth. It had begun to rain again, the warm rain of June in Italy. Their hair was soaked, Cathy’s bare legs were splashed with mud. She lay unresponsive through the act, the rain
washing the eye shadow over her cheeks like dark tears. But she would not let him stop and finally she was turned back into herself again, clasping Christopher and crying out to him.

In the car, wearing her raincoat again, she put her head in his lap. He thought she was asleep. Then she stirred and said to him, in a steady clear voice, “I’ll learn not to cry out,
Paul. You’re still the only one I can’t help it with.”

2

The next day was bright and warm. “The sun has come out to apologize for the rain,” said Cathy. She wanted to eat at midday at Da Necci, a restaurant they liked in
the Piazza Oratorio. One entered this tiny square through a passageway whose high walls were covered with faded frescoes; the Trevi Fountain was a few steps away, but owing to some trick of
acoustics the rush of its waters could only be heard halfway into the frescoed passage; Cathy liked to step back and forth across an imaginary line, listening to the fountain on one side of it,
hearing nothing on the other.

Cathy spoke, with her musical Southern good humor, to the owners of the restaurant, and to the boy who brought them coffee at the end of the meal from the bar next door. But she and Christopher
said nothing to one another. When they had finished she turned her face, masked by sunglasses, toward his.

“I’ve got something to show you,” she said.

Cathy led Christopher across the piazza and into a building. He followed her up the narrow unlighted stairway to the second floor. She took a key from her purse and opened the only door on that
floor.

They were in a small flat. Cathy stood in the center of the sitting room, holding the ends of the silk scarf that she had draped around her neck. She lifted a hand in invitation. Christopher
opened a door and saw a bedroom and a bath beyond. The walls were covered with enormous photographs of Cathy’s face. The pictures were new; they were like publicity stills for a film star.
She opened a closet; it was filled with clothes, plainly Cathy’s from the color and style, that he hadn’t seen before. The flat was shuttered, chilly and damp like a summer place rented
from strangers. Christopher caught the afterscent of marijuana.

Cathy went to the door, waiting for him to open it for her. Then, before Christopher could move, she flung it open herself and walked into the hall.

“You’ve seen it,” she said, beckoning him to follow. “I don’t want to talk to you about it inside it.”

They walked the few steps to the Galleria Colonna and ordered more coffee. The orchestra was playing, so they could not speak above its noise; Cathy listened to the waltzes in the echoing stone
gallery for a moment, then covered her ears and, making a sign that she would be back, walked away into the crowd.

When she returned, the orchestra had gone. She opened her hand; in her palm was a gold wedding ring. “I know you don’t like rings and wouldn’t have one when we were
married,” she said, “but I bought you this just now. I think it will fit.” She slid it onto Christopher’s finger. He took his hand away, and she did not resist; a month
before she would have struggled with him.

“I said in my letter that I was done with talking about love,” Cathy said, “but there’s quite a lot I have to say to you. I want to explain what’s happening, or
what I’m trying to make happen, so that there’ll be as little confusion between us as possible. So will you let me talk this one last time about you and me before I let it alone
forever?”

Christopher nodded. “Start with the place we just saw,” he said.

“All right. I was going to, anyway. You remember, when I came down here to tell you I loved you and we went to Cannes, what it was you did, directly after we’d been to
bed?”

Christopher was not likely to have forgotten. In Cannes he told her what he had not told his mother or his brother, or any person outside the Agency—that he was a spy, a secret agent. The
words, spoken aloud, sounded ridiculous. They were seated at the breakfast table. Cathy had pushed the table onto the tiny balcony because the sun was shining, but it was cold and they wore their
winter coats over their naked bodies. Cathy, a mink collar turned up around her face, greeted the news with a laugh of delight, then turned serious as he told her more. Even now she could not
understand what a proof of love Christopher’s confession had been; even loving her, it had made him ill, caused him to tremble and sweat, to speak the inmost truth about himself to an
outsider.

“I had no idea what you were saying to me,” Cathy said now. “I was so dazed with love and desire. You said you’d never told anyone else, but you told me, and later you
told me more. ‘That’s where I live,’ you said to me.”

Cathy had removed her sunglasses. Her glance was inward as she spoke; she might have been reading off a page. Her slim body was as straight as that of a young girl at a recital; she sat on the
café chair as if it were a piano bench.

“You just showed me the rooms, though, not what was hidden in them,” Cathy said. “That’s what I thought at the time, and have thought ever since—your life, this
secret existence you lead when you’re not with me—is like a darkened house. I’d say a haunted house, but you’d make one of your faces, Paul. You do so hate for me to
dramatize.”

Cathy, as she spoke, turned her own wedding ring round and round on her finger. She wore no other jewelry.

“My life with you is like living on some planet that has a year of night for every hour of daylight, Paul. When you’re gone, I’m in the dark. I try to go with you in my mind,
but I can’t make the journey because you can’t tell me where you are or what you’re doing. You just vanish, and sometimes you have dreams about where you’ve been after you
come back, but you won’t tell me what they are, so I know they must be true memories of what’s happened to you. You shut the doors on me. For all I know, you kill and torture; I
don’t believe you do, but I don’t know. If I asked you now those two simple questions: do you kill, do you torture, would you answer?”

“Yes, I’d answer. I don’t do either of those things.”

“But
would
you, if there was no other way to do what you do?”

A man they knew went by; he waved and called out a greeting in Italian.

“Yes,” Christopher said.

“I thought so. There must be a reason. You’re such a sweet and gentle lover, Paul, I’ve never known a man who wants so much not to
hurt
. You’ve never hurt me
with your body. Never.”

Cathy uttered a long sigh, caught up Christopher’s hand, fondled the ring she had just given him between her thumb and forefinger. She lifted his hand to kiss it, then stopped herself.
Before she spoke again, she let go of him.

“I’ve decided to take the rights you say I can have, Paul,” she said. “I’ve rented that place you just saw for myself. To use for my own purposes, to vanish, to go
black—isn’t that the word you use when you become someone else?”

She took his hand again and leaned across the table. Christopher saw the shape of his own face, his movement of surprise, on the glistening surface of her eyes.

“You can never come back to my place,” Cathy said; she touched his face, smiled. “It has nothing to do with you and me. What I do there is secret. You can’t touch it, see
it, know about it. I have different clothes I wear there. I’ll speak a different language. I’ll bring nothing from one life to another. Like you, I’ll never lie in our part of
life. In the other part I’ll do what I want, according to rules others and I will make. You can’t know the rules.”

Christopher’s life had taught him that it was no use to ask questions. There was nothing to ask Cathy; he understood what she wanted. It was what she had always wanted—to make it
impossible for him to banish her from his mind even for an instant.

“You’ll dream of me now the way I’ve dreamt of you,” Cathy said. “If you feared anything, Paul, if you were capable of it, you’d be afraid. I’ve had my
share of being terrified for your sake.”

“Will what you’re doing cure you of that?”

“So far it hasn’t even made me forget, not for an instant. No matter what’s happening to me.”

Cathy’s dry hand, a musician’s hand, long-boned and muscular, lay in Christopher’s open palm. He imagined it, a frozen detail like the focus of a painting, stroking another
man’s body. Emotion kindled within him for an instant that lasted no longer than the glimpse of Cathy’s flesh, and then his mind extinguished his feelings.

“You’re doing something dangerous,” Christopher said.

“Then save me from it.”

“You’ll do what you want to do.”

“You say that about everyone, Paul. It’s one of your sayings.”

“It’s true of everyone.”

“People do what they have to do,” Cathy said. “There’s a difference.”

Cathy’s face was shaped, for a moment, by an expression of wisdom. Everything that she felt registered on her flesh; it was as much a screen as Christopher’s mind. The changeful face
and voice, the body that danced or collapsed as her moods changed, were the things that he loved in Cathy and remembered in her absence. He felt sexual desire for her only when he was with her, and
all the time he was with her. He had never had a sexual dream about her.

“Paul, you won’t ask me why I’m doing this to us, will you?”

Christopher took his hand away and called for the bill.

“Because I thought that the love I felt for you was a force that would bring you to me, make you choose me, over anything,” Cathy said. “I told you from the start—I
thought I could make you become me.”

The waiter was at the table. His eyes were on Cathy, and she spoke quickly while her voice was still in control.

“I’m doing what I’m doing, Paul, to see if I can become you. If I can, surely you’ll understand love and I’ll understand you.”

When they rose from the table, Cathy took a step toward Christopher, halted, then put her arms around his waist. He held her against his body, increasing the strength of his embrace as she
tightened her arms. Her face was crushed against his chest.

“
Bella!
” cried a stranger, passing by.

3

Cathy wanted to leave Rome for a while. She and Christopher, having a drink on the sidewalk at Doney’s, a day after his return, had met Franco Moroni. The Italian,
tailored and barbered, sat down with them and spoke about his new movie; he was going to film it in Spain, with Spaniards playing a band of terrorists who kidnap an American President’s
daughter. “Cathy would be perfect for the girl, she’d only have to be herself with that glorious American face that has no memory of passion and no idea of pain,” Moroni said.
“But she won’t agree to take the part.” Cathy watched Moroni with mocking eyes. “What happens to the girl in the end?” Christopher asked. “She’s killed by
the CIA; my films are true to life,” Moroni answered. He called the waiter over and paid the bill before he left, and while he spoke to Cathy, asking her again to be in his movie, he gripped
the back of Christopher’s neck with warm damp fingers, as though touching her flesh at second hand.