American Romantic (31 page)

The most difficult task he put off until the last week. That was sorting May's clothes and arranging for them to be sent to one of the local charities. An especially pretty silk blouse and a black Gucci bag he would give to Christina Noiret. May's smell clung to the blouse. In the recesses of her bedroom closet he found a dozen albums of her photographs and the unfinished typescript of her life of Goya, another of her projects, this one begun in Washington; he couldn't remember the year, but it was post-Africa. May confided that she had run out of material and, well, she needed access to the Prado or wherever Goya's papers were kept, if there were any papers. As things stood she could not see Goya whole or even partway but wasn't that the usual thing with artists? What you had to go on was the work and not much else. Also, they tended to be liars, as smooth as a snake-oil salesman. And the Apocalypse was always near. An exception would be Van Gogh in his letters to brother Theo, always candid even when asking for money. Probably there were exceptions to the general rule. Honestly, she didn't know much about it, the sincerity issue. She loved Goya's work and when you came down to it the artist was secondary to the work. For her fortieth birthday Harry bought her a print from the “Capricios” series, the one of the blushing bride-to-be crowded by her elderly and leering suitor and her devastated family, save for her cynical papa. The dowry this time would go the other way. Goya called the piece
Qué Sacrificio!
What a sacrifice! May loved the print and hung it in their bedroom next to a photograph of her and Harry on their wedding day, at a restaurant in Montparnasse, before them a giant platter of oysters and a bottle of Perrier-Jouët in a silver bucket. May had never eaten an oyster and had to be shown the technique and the uses of the lemon and mignonette. Forget the fork and slip the oyster from the shell to your tongue and wait a moment. May was laughing and never looked lovelier.

Harry had never been in her closet. Most everything had been given away. The closet looked forlorn, with a well-worn blue robe and slippers tucked into a corner ready for the garbage bin. The closet was dusty and dark and he almost missed the two remaining items, a heavy manila envelope and her diaries. He had not known she kept a diary. He looked at them a long minute, wondering about the contents. He picked up the diaries and weighed them in his hands like a goldsmith assaying value. There were four diaries with entries written in a close-hauled script. Here and there were sentences written in a five-number code. He remembered a dinner in Africa with the station chief years ago when she asked about codes, how you went about making them and deciphering them in a way that was simple and easy to remember. The station chief was a connoisseur of codes and cryptology and went on and on about letter codes and number codes, the Vigenère Square with its keyboard, and much else besides. A classic five-number code was efficient and he explained how that was constructed. May was fascinated. She couldn't hear enough about codes. Harry riffled the pages of the diaries but did not read them. Diaries were notoriously unreliable, a furtive means of settling scores. That which the diarist did not dare to speak aloud she committed to paper, and hid the paper. These diaries were the size and weight of a short hardcover book, leather-bound, the pages ruled. Harry thought they had a sinister aspect, something forbidden. The black leather binding, the ruled pages, the five-number codes here and there, all of it composed in a dense hand.

You fox, he said aloud.

But what he saw was a hand reaching from an open grave.

Harry looked around their bedroom, the bureaus and their big bed with the red pillows and heavy duvet. Photographs on the bureaus, even one of her family sitting on the steps of their house in Slother. Their room, her arrangements. The air was close, as if he were underground. Harry scooped up the diaries and the manila envelope and moved downstairs to his office and set the diaries one by one on his desk. The manila envelope he put to one side.

The late-afternoon sun cast a dull milky glow on the figured carpet. He remembered buying the carpet in Tunisia. The rug was May's choice. She was having the time of her life bargaining with the rug man, a fat bastard with a neatly trimmed beard and merry little eyes. Harry picked up the diaries and thought about the rug man in Sfax. The hotel in Sfax was mediocre. Mediocre suite, mediocre food, and in the dining room three tables of Germans with parade-ground voices. He was ambassador in Oslo then, and he and May had taken a week in Tunisia because of the appalling Norwegian February. When the carpet arrived a month later May insisted he lay it in his office to give the room a dash of color. He scarcely remembered a thing about Tunisia except the fat bastard, the hotel, the Germans, and his aching feet. He thought about the heat and the hotel and the Germans and his feet and the rest of it, knowing that he had willed himself to stray ever so slightly off the point, holding in his hands a poison pill, diaries that would give clues to secrets held—better yet, the secrets themselves, innermost secrets, secrets that went unspoken, secrets private enough that some of them were written in code. He had never kept a confessional diary and never read one. He did not as a matter of principle read other people's mail—and then he laughed out loud because he read other people's mail all the time. The station chief walked in with a sheaf of papers, handing them over with a thin smile. Wait'll you read this, Harry! Unbelievable! They were transcripts of conversations in the presidential palace or the defense ministry, a café on the wrong side of town or a hotel room, and Harry would dig in as at a four-course meal. Not Oslo. No need to bug the friendly Norwegians. But at every other posting he had had there was a lively traffic in intercepted conversations. So principle had nothing whatever to do with a decision to read or not to read his wife's diaries except to satisfy his own curiosity, with no doubt a disturbing surprise somewhere along the line, a bitter payback from someone loved at once and forever, loved from the moment of hello and the breathless hesitation after hello, the crowded bar, Sure, I'd like to join you and your friends; and within an hour or so the friends disappeared, leaving you both in a companionable climate of silence before the conversation began and could be said to have continued until this very moment. No need to strip someone clean in order to satisfy the itch of curiosity. Something narrow-minded about it. Vulgar. Fear was in there somewhere, too, an apprehension. No good could come of this. Now was not the time. At last Harry shook his head decisively and threw the diaries into the burn bag. If he did not read them now he would never read them, so what was the point of keeping them? He had an illusion and he would remain with the illusion, the unopened door. Often enough the more you knew the less you understood. As for the diarist—the diarist had a right of privacy, even the dead, and perhaps the dead most of all.

That left the manila envelope, a government-issue envelope of heavy paper, the flap fastened by a string wound around a dime-sized cardboard wheel. In black type at the upper left were the words “United States Department of State.” It looked to be years old, the paper creased and curled with handling. He placed the envelope on his desk and stepped to the sideboard and poured a glass of whiskey, adding ice and a twist of lemon. The time was six p.m.; the pale afternoon sunlight had vanished as darkness gathered. The French residence next door was ablaze with light, another reception. In the driveway the chauffeurs were gathered around an idling Mercedes smoking cigarettes. Harry watched them a moment, then switched on the desk lamp and opened the envelope. Inside were letters, dozens of them, addressed to May Huerwood, poste restante. He looked at the postmarks and discovered that the most recent date was the summer of the year before. The correspondence stopped there. Harry was in no hurry and glanced now at the stamps, Thailand and India, South Africa and Senegal, Holland and Austria, three from Canada and two from the United States, four from Russia. The smaller the country, the gaudier the stamp. There were no return addresses, unless the five-figure blocks carefully written on the back flaps were a kind of address. Harry took a few of the letters in his hand and fanned them as he would a deck of cards. The ink was blue, the writer's script a professional-quality cursive. It had a feminine look, script from a girls' boarding school of his youth, Emma Willard or Foxcroft, all loops and flourishes, loosely composed. Harry sat at his desk and looked at the contraband, settling himself before starting to read. The second thoughts he had about May's diary did not apply here. He chose a letter at random, noticing at once that some of the spellings were British. But that was consistent with the Anglophilia of American boarding schools.
I heard a rumour the other day that you and Himself are bound for Oslo. Be sure to bring your woolies . . .
Harry looked at the ceiling, pensive, and took a slow swallow of his drink, the scotch going down so smoothly he barely tasted it. But the jolt came quickly. The letter was signed “With love” and carried a signature he did not recognize. The scrawl was hard to decipher, the loops and flourishes collapsing into a long horizontal line. Harry knew right away that May's correspondent was no schoolgirl, sentences rolling on about Oslo and its phlegmatic inhabitants, not forgetting the savage winters and interminable summers, the sun setting sometime around midnight and rising thirty minutes later, an Ibsen world of nagging anxiety and gloom, nothing at all like cheerful raucous sensual sentimental ruined Africa.
Would you like to join me in Luanda?
Something about the forced cadence reminded him of a young attaché in Africa who looked after things for the Belgians. May saw him at parties. May liked him. He was young—well, they were all young, but this one was in his twenties, elfin, a good-looking boy who drove a green Karmann Ghia. He had come to the residence a few times, once at the annual Fourth of July reception where he wore a goofy red-white-and-blue hat that fell around his ears. He carried a title. Count? Baron? One of the two. Very popular with women was Andres, a dilettante diplomat, here today, gone tomorrow. He was unattached, amusing, a bon vivant. Andres was usually turned out in bespoke summer suits and bench-made shoes, a Borsalino hat and a little yellow hankie in the top pocket of his jacket. Harry had taken an instant dislike to him.

May said, Oh, come on, give Andres a break.

Harry said, He's a
poseur.
Not a serious man.

Well, she said with a laugh, that's true enough.

Playboy, Harry said.

He doesn't have much to do here, May said. So he fools around.

I think he dyes his hair, Harry said.

He does not, May said.

Gotcha, Harry said, but he did notice May's quick response and the answer that followed.

Anyway, May said, he's leaving soon.

Where to?

France, May said. He's going to work for a bank, one of the French ones. The idea is, the bank wants to set up facilities in underdeveloped countries. Andres assesses the political climate, how stable it is, how reliable, and how corrupt. He calls himself a security consultant. Risk, reward. Can we give him a going-away party?

Why not, Harry said, thinking as he said it that the Belgian was on to something.

So she had another life, a long-distance life from the look of the postmarks. Harry had not suspected anything, least of all with the Belgian twit. He looked at his glass, empty, and moved to the sideboard to fill it, taking his time. There was no rush. He looked again at the letters, rereading bits and pieces of them. For the most part they were travelogues, accounts of journeys to Asia and Central America, the Middle East and Africa. Evidently he loved travel for its own sake, the hotels and airplanes, meetings with businessmen and foreign correspondents, those in the know. Andres did not have a high opinion of those in the know and on the make. He had a lavish expense account. The hotels were all of the five-star variety, and when he arrived somewhere he was always met by a driver with a limousine.

Somewhere along the line he switched jobs. Now he was working for an insurance company, assessing threats, attempting to read the future. Here and there were the five-figure codes, usually at the end of the letter. It took Harry a moment to get beyond the schoolgirl script, incongruous in the circumstances. Letters home to Mom. We just beat the pants off Foxcroft in lacrosse. Harry stacked the letters on the desk where he sat glumly in his chair drinking scotch. How could he have no idea? He blamed his incuriosity, though he had not always been incurious. That was a latter-day phenomenon that commenced roughly around the time of his sixtieth birthday, though he had never counted suspicion as a virtue. This business appeared to date from Africa after they had lost their little girl. They were both distraught, not themselves. They were careful with each other. Harry was often away but never more than a night or two, and it was one of those nights when Zoe came to his bed and remained there until dawn. When he woke up she was gone, and a week later he learned she had been transferred to the coast, Dar es Salaam. He forgot about her, but a few years later when he and May were living in Washington, Zoe called him at home. What's up? How are you doing? Can we meet sometime? Without a word he hung up the telephone, waiting a minute to see if she would call back. But she didn't, as he was certain she wouldn't. Who was that? May called from the kitchen. He said, Wrong number. And that was that, except the memory of her was with him once again. Zoe was a product of disobedient high-stress environments where the rules were made up as you went along. She was a free spirit, her good cheer infectious. Also, she was fearless, traveling without escort to the most dangerous parts of Africa. She loved her work and she loved what could come after work. She lived by the statute of no entangling alliances. She slipped out of his bed as easily as she had slipped into it. Wasn't that fun! Much later she married Axel Brown, Harry's solid and dependable aid administrator. Axel called her the Sally Bowles of the Bush. Their night together those many years before seemed to Harry a moment of no consequence, a kind of reward for them both at the end of a discouraging day, all too common in the work they were called upon to do and the place they were called upon to do it in. Still, something lingered, because when she called that night he did not say, Good to hear from you, Zoe. What's up? How are you doing? Not at all. He dropped the telephone as if it were radioactive. May knew it, too, looking at him strangely as he returned to the kitchen to toss the salad.