Past Perfect (7 page)

Simultaneously, we broke into grins at the memory of Maddy’s not winning the Pulitzer. Dix and I did tend toward heartlessness when it came to Maddv. We were also the only two people in the world who didn’t worry that my sister—“sooo fragile” —would one day put her head in the oven. Well, not that, because Sylvia Plath had beaten her to it. But neither of us feared she would do away with herself.

Dix’s opinion was that Maddy was far stronger than she behaved. That’s why he’d finally been able to leave her, because he knew that after all her swooning and staring out of windows for days on end and suffering poet’s block, she would inevitably recover. Dixon believed that Maddy would live because her need to create art was far stronger than her will to die.

My response to that was always the same: Bullshit. What kept my sister alive was the fear she could not make it as a postmortem literary saint. The Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Other Great Artists Who Offed Themselves Pantheon wouldn’t accept her. “The Personal and Poetic Pain of Madeline Schottland” might not make it as the subject of a doctoral candidate’s dissertation.

Dix could never accept that despite Maddy’s shaky voice (especially tremulous when she gave readings —her too-many-people-I’m-so-frightened number), my sister was physically and emotionally strong enough to kick the shit out of Wonder Woman. She’d made herself a Poet of Note more by will than by genius.

Was this uncharitable? Yes. Cruelly competitive? Yes. But my sister was twice as competitive and uncharitable about me as I was about her. Three or four times.

Dix was about to begin his analysis of me again, so I kept going. “I’m not saying you’re completely wrong about my shrinking from failure. My parents and sister are relentless achievers. But I set reasonably high standards for myself too, and getting canned was a shock. A double shock, really, because I thought I was doing terrifically well. It’s a lot more than wounded ego, though. You know what’s always hurt so much more than my failing? The injustice of it. I can’t believe the unfairness. I didn’t deserve to fail!”

“Then stop walking around the same block you’ve been walking around since 1990. ‘It hurt. It was unjust. I was so surprised.’ Where has that gotten you? Either use the brains you have or—”

“Or stop being a bore?” I inquired.

“Not just to other people, Katie. To yourself.” It was hard to manage an amused little smile when I felt flushed with shame. Maybe rage. But Dix was right. It was time to tackle my problem with intelligence or drop it—for good.

IN THE CAB going home, I had a quick fantasy about sticking my key into the lock and Adam pulling open the apartment door. Definitely hot: his shirt would be open a couple of buttons, his hair mussed from running his hands through it as he anguished over having been so tough on me in the morning. That reverie evaporated within ten seconds of opening the door.

I was hit with the familiar aroma of microwaved popcorn. In the hallway, the dogs, who’d formed themselves into their usual inverted V, were snoring outside our bedroom door. Inside, Adam was asleep, though blessedly silent. Not only did he not snore, he barely moved. Despite his size, our summer comforter was undisturbed, still tightly tucked into the mattress. As always, he lay on his back looking swaddled. Every once in a while he turned onto his side, but his night moves were mostly smiles playing over his lips and the sleep-time erections pushing against the tight covers.

I went into the bathroom for my nightly business: toilet, hand wash, contact lens removal, de-makeup/tone/moisturize, floss/brush. How odd, I decided as I did an anti-garlic tongue brush with my Sonicare and almost choked as it slipped and hit my uvula, that someone like me, the anxiety queen, a woman given to imagining her own death from a freak accident on even the jolliest occasion (like catching fire while leaning over to blow out the candles on a birthday cake), would marry a man who appeared to be without a nervous system.

All right, that wasn’t fair. My husband was capable of emotion: he loved Nicky, me, the dogs, his family, my parents, probably in that order, although there were times I sensed I’d moved temporarily to number one and Nicky had dropped down to two. But Adam definitely wasn’t given to huge hugs and shouts of I love you! His waking hours were an extension of his sleeping hours: small smiles and, for me alone, erections.

Well, I assumed they were for me alone. Of course, I’d heard the usual marriage horror stories: They always had fabulous sex—not just once a week—and then, out of the clear blue sky, he announced he’d been having an affair with one of the assistants at the Gymboree on West Seventy-third and wanted to marry her! But I believed in my husband. From high school on, Adam had had only one relationship at a time. Whatever wild oats he possessed, he didn’t sow them around.

Adam-wise, it was bad timing that the Lisa Golding call came on the very day Nicky was leaving for camp. Up to that point, I’d been viewing the summer as a chance to rekindle my marriage flame. Not so much our sex life. That had actually been good all along, both of us needing more than the national average Also, for a guy from Wyoming, a state I’d never viewed as a hotbed of erotic creativity, Adam was extremely inventive, to say nothing of uninhibited. Maybe it was his nature, or perhaps during his years in veterinary school he’d picked up everything there was to know about mammalian anatomy and physiology, and to that he’d added the tricks he learned watching humping wildebeests.

What needed rekindling was our life together. When Nicky was away on a school trip or at a friend’s, our dinner talk was less conversation than alternating monologues. Adam would tell me about his day. Knowing him to be a man of few words, I’d pepper him with questions, just to keep him going. When there was nothing more to say about zoo matters, it would be my turn. I had a lot more to tell, since I was a storyteller by trade and blabby by nature. From Oliver’s rages over letters from Bible Belters complaining of clinging clothes that outlined both cheeks of Dani Barber’s butt to what was going on with the makeup lady’s love life, Adam heard it all. Any leftover moments got filled with politics, family news, or great issues like, should we go see Doubt with the Cassidys, who always want to sit in the cheapest seats?

Maybe this is what happened to all couples after fifteen years together. Could we have been like this right from the start? Were we both so taken with the novelty of each other and the New York-Wyoming contrasts that we mistook novelty for sparkle? For depth?

Oh, about depth: it was a quality my sister was credited with. Never me, not even once. Admittedly, depth was not a word applicable to Spy Guys. The novel wasn’t even a millimeter deep, although it had got a great review from Cosmopolitan: “High-style CIA hijinks, told with wit and a wink.”

Writing the book had had more to do with a homage to spy fiction than with any personal obsession, my not being able to stop thinking about the CIA. I was pretty sure of that. Sort of sure. I needed to have fun, to do something I could call my own after years of involuntary unemployment followed by Manhattan mommydom, with its incessant conversations about getting little Tyler and baby Zoë into whatever was that year’s Harvard of nursery schools.

When I began the book, I was lonely. In fact, I hated working alone. Often I longed for the other mommies. Yet writing a novel did have its compensations. Instead of lunches with them and getting regaled with tales of toddlers choking to death on their daddy’s carelessly dropped Turnbull & Asser cuff link, I could spend time in a universe in which a soigné deposed prince and an ex-New York cop with a badass past protected the free world by chasing down scummy Eastern Europeans peddling old Soviet nuclear warheads.

Right after my book came out, we’d gone to my parents’ for brunch. Being the daughter of a shrink, I of course comprehended what it meant when I searched my handbag and found I’d left the Cosmopolitan review at home. Look, there were certain periodicals you didn’t wave in front of a family that embraced serious poetry, serious psychiatric literature, and serious money. Adam, whose usual behavior chez Schottland was to smile, nod, and avoid lox, was staring across the table at Maddy’s sour expression and flared nostrils. My sister didn’t like all the bright chatter about my just-published Spy Guys. No one had yet said a word about her two-year-old collection, Soft Fruit and Other Poems. Her upper lip lifted into an expression between a sneer and outright repugnance as my father was telling me, “The manager of our Galleria store in Dallas said he loved the part where Jamie pretends to be an oversexed flight attendant.” My mother looked like she was holding herself back from telling my sister, The manager loved your book too, Maddy. Maddy’s nose twitched as if she were sniffing the stink of American literature decomposing after my having ax-murdered it.

Suddenly, Adam had a voice. He quoted the Cosmo review verbatim to my mother. He informed my father of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar advance my publisher had offered for a sequel. As my mother raced around the table to kiss me (“Katie, sweetie, what a lovely quote!”) and my father reached across Nicky to squeeze my hand (“If you don’t watch out, Katherine Jane, I’m going to hit you up for a loan!”), I saw the look on my husband’s face. Pleased. He had gotten me my due. Then he tuned out my family by carefully applying cream cheese and plum preserves on a bagel in a clockwise swirl.

My mind was like a cyclone, spiraling darkly, lurching crazily, trying to come up with a way to locate Lisa that would not only prove to myself that I actually had a higher cognitive function or two, but would also get me from where I was —no place—to someplace. Also, I was feeling the pressure of “what if?” What if, as she’d said, the matter was huge, vital? What if she was in danger? The sooner I could act, the better. Naturally, I came up with nothing. It took me two and a half days after my dinner with Dix to find a way of moving forward, and that happened only because the show’s CIA expert technical adviser made his annual, unannounced drop-in to the set.

Years earlier, a couple of weeks before we shot the first episode of Spy Guys, our producer, Oliver, contacted some association of former Agency ops and came up with Harry “Huff” Van Damme as an expert adviser. Hiring an ex-spy had been my suggestion. Since I’d never stepped outside headquarters in Langley on any business, I felt we needed somebody who had been Out There. Huff had been all over the world —according to him —risking his neck and his soul for his country. He actually had a scar on his cheek, though it ran unromantically in a horizontal line from under his nose to his ear, so it appeared he’d wiped something thick and pink across his face with the back of his hand. He claimed to have gotten knifed while taking over a boat on the Rio Grande de Buba in Guinea-Bissau, though for all anyone knew he could have walked through a glass patio door in Kansas City.

I’d always gotten on dandily with Huff because, right from the start, I’d chosen to accept whatever he said. This wasn’t because he seemed like a born truth-teller, but simply because I wanted somebody to be able to give me an authoritative “His Highness could be wearing an ankle holster,” so I wouldn’t have to spend hours fighting with Oliver and a costume designer over a line in the script like HH pulls snub-nosed revolver from ankle holster. Within a week of our first meeting, I recognized Oliver would be the type who’d be bellowing, “Only dykes wear ankle holsters!” and I would find myself screaming back, “It’s make-believe, for God’s sake! What does it matter?”

While the cameras rolled, Huff spent about half an hour on the set, sitting on a dirty wing chair abandoned by some other production company. Resting his head against soiled yellow damask, he stretched out his long legs and half closed his eyes to show how unthrilled he was. Once the director called, “Cut,” Huff moved excessively close to Dani and told her breasts (as the rest of the cast and crew gathered close to listen to him) about machete fights with rebel commandos in the Philippines and outwitting the KGB in Romania. Having listened to Huff’s guts/gore/glory oeuvre many times, I told him I’d meet him in my office.

“Hey, K,” Huff said to me an hour later. “Que está acontecendo?”

“What?”

“It means ‘What’s happening?’ in Portuguese.”

“Nada,” I answered tentatively.

“Your other half still cutting up elephants at the Bronx Zoo?”

“Whenever he can.”

“He must have a strong stomach!”

I decided not to take that personally. “Besides what we talked about on the phone, Huff, about how someone Dani’s size could take out a man built like a defensive lineman, say around six-feet-five, three hundred pounds: I need something else.”

“What?”

“I’d like you to track down an Agency alum for me.”

“From your era or my era?” Chutzpah, though technically not a dig. Huff was at least ten years older than I was. But he had retired from the CIA only five years ago. I hadn’t been there since 1990. My time there now seemed so over that my colleagues could have been flying reptiles.

“She’s definitely from my era,” I told him. “For all I know, she could still be there. Her name is Lisa Golding. She was involved with training foreign nationals whom the ICD unit brought over here to live.” His forehead looked about to crease at the acronym, so I added: “International Cooperation Detail.” He still looked puzzled. “The unit that placed people who did us huge favors. The people we promised to bring here if things got hairy for them.” Little doubt we’d promised many, many more, but the ICD was responsible only for those promises higher-ups determined were worth keeping.

“Oh, I know what you’re talking about. It’s called the JLC now. I’ll have to check what it stands for.”

“You don’t have to — ”

Huff didn’t let me finish. “This is for the show?” Was he annoyed at having to do a little extra work for his flat fee? I wondered. He was eyeing my toile wallpaper with a pissed-off expression.

Okay, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the sudden withdrawal of pleasantness, but I was. And I had no idea how to respond —a perfect example of why I was so much more comfortable with fiction than with life. In books and on TV, it’s always easy: that next line of dialogue comes right away. What if it takes three weeks to think up? No one knows how long it took to create the next sentence, the next page. You never wake three nights later at 4 A.M. with the perfect rejoinder. So I blurted out, “Of course it’s for the show.”