Past Perfect

PAST PERFECT

Susan Isaacs

To Mary Rooney.

In 1977, when I had doubts, she said,

“Of course you can write a novel.”

This book is for her, with love and thanks.

CONTENTS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

OH GOD, I WISH I had a weapon! Naturally, I don’t. Of course, if life in any way resembled Spy Guys, the espionage TV show I write, I’d pull off the top of my pen and with one stab inflict a fatal wound, and save my life. Except no pen: just two pieces of chewed Dentyne Ice spearmint wrapped in a receipt for sunscreen and panty liners.

When I began making notes on what I naively thought of as Katie’s Big Adventure, I hadn’t a clue that my life would be on the line. How could I? This would be my story, and every ending I’d ever written had been upbeat. But in the past few weeks I’ve learned that “happily ever after” is simply proof of my lifelong preference for fantasy over reality.

Unfortunately, fantasy will not get me out of this mess. So what am I supposed to do now? First, calm down. Hard to do when I’m crouched behind a toolshed, up to my waist in insanely lush flora that’s no doubt crawling with fauna.

It’s so dark. No moon, no stars: the earth could be the only celestial object in a black universe. And it’s hot. Even at this late hour, there is no relief from the heat. My shirt is sweat-drenched and so sucked against my skin it’s a yellow-and-white-striped epidermis.

I cannot let myself dwell on the fact that my danger is doubled because I’m so out of my element. Me, Total Manhattan Sushi Woman, cowering behind a toolshed in fried pork rinds country with unspeakable creatures from the insect and worm worlds who think my sandaled feet are some new interstate.

Adam, my husband, would probably be able to identify the nocturnal bird in a nearby tree that refuses to shut up, the one whose hoarse squawks sound like “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Adam is a vet. A veterinary pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, to be precise. Were something that feels like a rat’s tail to brush his toes in the dark, he wouldn’t want to shriek in horror and vomit simultaneously, like I do. He’d just say, Hmm, a Norway rat. Adam is close to fearless.

I, of course, am not. If I concentrate on what’s happening here in the blackness, the slide of something furry against my anklebone, the sponginess of the ground beneath the thin, soaked soles of my sandals, a sudden Bump! against my cheek, then something, whatever it is (bat? blood-swollen insect?) ricocheting off, I will literally go mad, and trust me, I know the difference between literally and figuratively. I’ll howl like a lunatic until brought back to sanity by the terrible realization that I’ve given away my precise location to that nut job who is out there, maybe only a hundred feet away, stalking me.

Feh! Something just landed on the inner part of my thigh. As I brush it off, its gross little feet try to grip me.

Don’t scream! Calm down. Taoist breathing method: Listen to your breathing. Easy. Don’t force it. Just concentrate. Listen. All right: three reasonably calm breaths. What am I going to do? How am I going to survive? Will I ever see Adam again? And our son, Nicky?

What used to be my real life back in New York seems as far away as some Blondie concert I went to when I was fifteen. All right, what the hell was I originally thinking I had to do here behind the toolshed? Oh, try to remember what I wrote in the journal I began a day or two after that first disturbing phone call. Maybe something I’d unthinkingly jotted down could help me now, or could at least allow me to delude myself that this episode will be yet another of my … and they lived happily ever after.

AS THE VOICE-OVER intro to spy guys observes every three or four episodes when some new hell breaks loose: It all started so simply. And only four weeks ago. It was around two in the afternoon. I was home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan packing a few of my things into a small duffel, preparing to take Nicky, my ten-year-old, to a weight-loss camp in Maine. His trunk was already up there, filled with large-bellied shorts and new athletic gear. Camp Lionheart required a parent to remain nearby for the first twenty-four hours of a camper’s stay, probably to soothe any kid unhinged by half a day of sugar deprivation.

That kid would not be Nicky. Mere empty carbs were not his downfall. Food was. Naturally there was Ben & Jerry’s. But there was also grapefruit. Calf’s liver with sautéed onions. Giant Caesar salads with bony anchovies no one else under twenty-one would eat. He loved each block of the food pyramid equally. Nicky was a kid of huge enthusiasms. Yankees, Knicks, Giants, Rangers. Megalosaurus, triceratops, pteranodons. Yet, even as the Megalosauruses gave way to Game Boys and Game Boys were eclipsed by His Dark Materials, there was always that one overarching passion, food. Walking him to school when he was little, I had to allow an extra twenty minutes for him to stop and read (aloud and lovingly) every menu posted in the windows of the local restaurants, lifting him so he could read the appetizers. “Gambas al Ajillo,” he’d sound out. “What’s that, Mommy?”

Sitting on the edge of the bed beside my duffel bag, I glanced inside. I’d folded the sleeves of my pink and aqua tattersall shirt across the front. They looked like hands pressing against a heart. The shirt was crying out to me: What kind of mother are you? How could you do this to your child? Not that Nicky would be one of the weepers, no Mommy, Mommy, don’t leave me here!! Not one of the whiners either. While his father was a Wyoming strong, silent type, Nicky was a blabby New York kid. Still, he had inherited Adam’s tough-it-out gene.

So there I was, beating up on myself, trying to figure what deranged thought process had led me to convince myself and then argue with Adam that a fat-boy camp was a stellar idea. I was packing off my only kid, giving him an entire summer to reflect on the fact that his mother couldn’t accept him as he was. And his father too, since Adam and I were Present a United Front parents, a concept we’d both gotten from our own families, the eastern Schottlands and the western Graingers. Not that we’d ever consciously decided on such a strategy. Like so much in marriage, we did as our parents did, not necessarily because they were right, but because what they did was what we knew. Since we two were speaking as one, Adam could not blare out the truth: I can’t believe your mother is so shallow and easily gulled by those hysterical “Danger: Childhood Obesity!” reports in the Times and on CNN. My eyes filled, though I can’t remember whether it was at the unfairness of Adam’s unspoken criticism or because it was so close to the mark.

I actually started crying genuine stream-down-the-cheeks tears when I remembered that Adam wouldn’t be driving up to camp with us. It felt like desertion. It wasn’t. He had to deal with an outbreak of duck plague. Five Muscovy ducks had dropped dead, admittedly not a big deal, unless you’re one of those “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” types, which obviously they were in the zoo’s pathology department. Truthfully, my tears weren’t flowing because I couldn’t bear to be without my husband’s company. After fifteen years of marriage, most people can tolerate forty-eight spouse-free hours. But I wanted Adam along to witness for himself, once again, my devotion to Nicky, to observe what a splendid mother I was, and how leaving our son in a weight-loss camp was not the act of a neurotic New Yorker who had a block of ice for a heart.

At that instant, my phone rang. I picked it up and uttered a tremulous “Hello.”

“Hey, Katie Schottland,” said a squeaky, cartoon voice, as if the speaker had come from some primary-colored, two-dimensional universe whose inhabitants did not have genitalia. “Do you know who this is?”

I sniffled back about a quart of as-yet unshed tears, then wiped my eyes with the three-quarter sleeve of my new, cantaloupe-colored stretch T-shirt that gave my skin the golden glow of liver disease. Shaken as much by my weepiness as by the intrusion of the call, I stood, marched to the dresser, and, holding the portable phone between ear and shoulder, yanked open a drawer. I wished I were one of those tough dames who could bellow, I don’t have time for this shit! What I actually said was: “If you don’t tell me who this is, I’m hanging up.”

It’s not in my nature to be that snippy, but I’d gotten home late from the studio in Queens where we taped Spy Guys for QTV, a network that called itself “The People’s Choice for Quality Cable.” (Its detractors called it Quantity Cable.) Besides being rushed and sick with guilt about what I was doing to Nicky, I was again trying to dig up the old dark blue bandanna I’d been searching for obsessively, as though it were a talisman that would protect both me and my son from my folly. Why couldn’t I find it? I pictured myself wearing it knotted casually around my neck, the implication being that I’d be using it as a sweatband, or, in a pinch, as a tourniquet as I gave first aid to a fellow hiker who’d suffered a hundred-foot fall from a precipice. Not that I was actually considering the Parent-Child Hike option scheduled for Camp Lionheart’s opening day, but for my son’s sake, I needed to look like a gung-ho mother who delights in vigorous exercise.

Meanwhile, the person on the phone shrilled, “Come on, Katie. Lighten up.” Now I could hear: definitely a woman’s voice. Not unfamiliar. Her identity was right on the tip of some neuron, although she was not sister, close friend, mother, or anyone connected with the show. Still, I couldn’t access the name.

“Fine,” I said, “I’m lightened up. Now please tell me.”

“Actually, this is serious. Terribly, terribly serious.”

“Lisa!” I exclaimed.

For all the time I’d known Lisa Golding, since our sunny days more than fifteen years ago in the CIA, she’d had a habit of repeating adjectives: “The German translator has a gigantic, gigantic pimple on his chin.” “Ben Mattingly’s wife is so filthy, filthy rich that he actually doesn’t find her embarrassing.”

Anyway, back on that afternoon four weeks ago, Lisa Golding declared, “Katie, I’ve got to talk with you. This is a matter of national importance!”

National importance? Years earlier, when we were both in our twenties, Lisa’s job at the CIA had been an extension of her brief career as an assistant set designer at a regional theater in exurban Atlanta. She set up houses and wardrobes, and coached foreign nationals in American lifestyles. She worked for the International Cooperation Detail, the CIA’s equivalent of a witness protection program. The ICD brought people whom our government owed big-time to the United States to live.

“Do you know why I’m calling you?” she demanded.

“You just said something about a matter of national importance,” I muttered, at last finding the blue bandanna. I crumpled and twisted it until it looked wrinkled enough to pass for hiking gear. I know I should have been paying more attention. Yet even though I hadn’t heard from Lisa in years, I couldn’t imagine her saying anything compelling enough to make me slow down my packing. I just assumed her call had to do with my writing Spy Guys: She was coming to New York and could she visit the set; or a friend had written a screenplay and did I know an agent.

Perhaps at this point I ought to put my conversation with Lisa Golding on hold and explain the spying business. First and foremost, I was never a spy.

My career path actually began years before I even heard of the CIA, when my big sister, Madeline, copped both the Deering School’s fifth grade’s Vance Poetry Prize and the Kaplan-Klein Essay Award. Uh-oh. At that moment I thought, Okay, I’ll be a theoretical physicist—probably because “mathematician” sounded too pedestrian. That vocabulary does sound a bit much for an eight-year-old, but consider the extenuating circumstances.

Maddy and I were privileged mini-Manhattanites who lived in a co-op on the Upper East Side with gifted, solvent, and articulate parents. Our father was the founder and CEO of Total Kitchen, a small but quite profitable chain of kitchenware stores for people eager to spend nine hundred dollars on an espresso machine. His hobbies were listening to jazz, mostly that stuff that repeats the same phrase fourteen times — until you can’t bear it anymore — and collecting colonial American cooking equipment. Our kitchen was decorated with shelves and shelves of ugly black iron shit with wood handles.

Our mother was a psychiatrist whose patients —chichi bulimics and natty manic-depressives —worked mostly in the garment business. She herself had such a brilliant sense of style that more than a few patients confessed they couldn’t bear to quit treatment because they would miss seeing how she got herself up each week. My parents’ friends were an urbane crew, journalists, theatrical producers, an academic here, a lawyer there, as well as their fellow minor moguls and shrinks. Thus, Maddy and I were not at all fazed by words like soigné and Turk’s head mold and astrophysicist. While we were allowed only one hour a day of TV time, our reading was never censored or limited. My vocabulary grew. I read every book that caught my attention, from Harriet the Spy to Wild, Reckless Love to The Big Bang: A Report from the Cosmos.