Authors: Susan Isaacs
Adam had been patient. He’d been kind. He’d stuck by me way back then. He’d not only said all the right things, he’d thought them as well. But now: enough was enough. I could see it in his lips, compressed to the point of invisibility. If he’d been one of my mother’s patients, she’d have jotted a note about him clamping shut his mouth so as not to allow himself to vent his anger.
“What are you talking about, Dix? Me not being analytical?” I started to diddle nervously with the flattened oil lamp on the table that looked like a frosted-glass version of Miss Muffet’s tuffet, but it burned the pads of my fingers. So I peered straight into my ex-brother-in-law’s dreamy eyes. “All I’ve done is analyze. I told you I’ve tried at least a million ways to track Lisa down. Not one of them led to anything.”
We were sitting in Dix’s newest hangout, a restaurant in Tribeca so exclusive that its name wasn’t posted outside. Formally it was Giorno e Notte, but those hip enough to get a reservation simply called it Reade, after its street, a fact that simultaneously nauseated me with its in-group chic and made me long to be one of those in-people maître d’s rush to kiss. Dix ran his finger around the rim of a red wine goblet large enough to be a baptismal font. No high-pitched squeal, but I shivered for a second as if there had been one.
“Katie, you and I have never been gentle with each other. Therefore”—Dix actually used therefore and nonetheless in conversation — “I feel free to tell you that tracking down somebody’s phone number is not a test of the higher cognitive functions. And don’t even think about giving me your hurt look.” He thrust out his lower lip about a quarter of an inch and cast down his eyes.
“I stick out my lip like that when I’m insulted?” I asked.
“The Keira Knightley pout, which doesn’t even look good on Keira Knightley.”
Lucky for me, my ex-bro reviewed movies, not television. He probably would have given Spy Guys a scathing review. Okay, not scathing. Neither bitchiness nor blatant cruelty had ever been Dix’s style. But with his combination of SAT vocabulary words, mastery of film history, and stealth humor you suddenly comprehended three sentences after you’d heard it—the best conclusion he could have come to about my show was It’slively-but-irremediably-trivial.
The good news was, Dix liked or loved me enough to watch every new episode of Spy Guys. In lieu of reviews, he would e-mail me sprightly congratulatory notes: Good show! Liked how His Highness’s indecision over whether to order the Iranian caviar at the restaurant reflected his doubts about renewing his contract with the Agency. It delighted me to learn I’d intended something so subtle.
Dix and I no longer shared my sister, but after their divorce we’d held on to each other, mostly out of affection, but also because of our mutual awe at Dix’s cleverness. Both of us had wound up earning our livings from TV, a circumstance we each would have laughed at (with a single, condescending New York hah!) had anyone suggested it way back then. After getting his master’s in film at NYU, Dix became one of the faceless film critics for Variety. A year of that and he’d jumped at a stint as number-three reviewer at the Times. As he was working his way up to number two on the long trek to the top spot on the paper, he’d gotten his own PBS show, Sitting in the Dark.
“I need your advice,” I told him. “So go ahead. Tell me how I can be more analytical.”
Maybe I was acting a little too wide-eyed because he snapped, “Oh, for God’s sake! What is that face? Leslie Caron innocent? You’re too big-boned for that.” I laughed, though his casual big-boned made me feel like Horton the elephant in my seersucker pants suit, which I’d realized was a mistake two seconds after I walked into the restaurant and realized every other woman there was in white silk or black gauze.
“Dixon, what’s wrong with asking for help? You just told me I wasn’t winning any awards in the higher cognitive department.”
“That’s because you’re not allowing yourself to think, Katherine.” He twisted off the tip of an elliptically shaped roll and dunked it into a dish of olive oil, then popped it into his mouth. For an instant, I feared a droplet might fall onto the front of his pale brown silk sport shirt and get sucked up by capillary action into a disgusting amoeba-shaped splotch—the sort of thing that routinely happened to me. But of course it missed the shirt entirely and wound up on the napkin he’d adroitly draped on his lap. Dix continued, “You’re getting swept off your feet by your own need for —I’m actually going to utter the word—closure. Oh, this Lisa person will give me the answer I’ve been praying for all these years! I’ll know why they fired me and it will turn out to be an idiotic keyboarding error and not a grave misjudgment on my part that led to thousands of deaths in some obscure Baltic republic. I’ll bring it to the CIA’s attention and they’ll be devastated that such an injustice occurred. Naturally, the head of the Agency, the one with the strange lips, will call a major news conference and apologize to me.”
“Don’t make a joke of it,” I snapped. “You of all people know what it’s been like for me all these years. Every damn time I say to myself, Hey, I’m over it, the next thought that instantly pops into my head is, But seriously, what the hell did I do that was so wrong it made them get rid of me like that? It hurts as much now as it did then. Kicking me out with no explanation. Even if I made some stupid error, that Comrade X in Czechoslovakia sold a few MIGs under the table to Qaddafi and then stashed thirty million in a bank account in Geneva—except it turned out to be twenty-nine million in a bank in
Bern—someone was always checking my work. A huge mistake wouldn’t have gotten by.”
Dix’s eyes widened. As they were green flecked with twinkles of gold, this was a very pretty sight. “Did something like that really happen? With Qaddafi?” he asked.
“No. It was one of my second-season Spy Guys episodes.”
“Oh. Thought it sounded familiar.”
“I didn’t do anything original in Eastern Europe Analysis either. I wrote up other people’s research and conclusions. If I needed more information, I interviewed them —and the session was always taped. That’s all I was doing in that department for the year and a half before they got rid of me.”
“Then why can’t you live with the knowledge that there’s a ninety-nine percent chance you did nothing wrong?”
Because in my heart of hearts, I didn’t think anyone else believed that. Not Dix, not my sister, not my parents. Maybe Adam, but he was a scientist from Wyoming. How worldly could he be?
The waitress came with our appetizers: baby octopus with linguine for Dixon, warm arugula salad for me. She was wearing a white butcher’s apron with the strings wrapped several times around, less out of necessity, I suspected, than because her waist was so small. The rest of her was too. She was one of those thin foodies who was either blessed with a metabolism like a smelting furnace or had a long, skinny forefinger that knew its way down her throat. She clunked down my plate so hastily that it was only chance that kept the arugula from flying into my lap. Then she placed Dixon’s revolting baby octopus before him with the devotion of a priestess offering a sacrifice to her god. Her shining eyes and glory of a smile declared not only that she knew who he was, knew of his greatness, but truly, truly, truly, it was her pleasure to serve him.
Dix had always had the ego for fame, and now, with his own PBS show, he had the urban celebrity to match. Sitting across the mosaic-tiled table, I observed him as he attended to the plate before him and pretended not to notice how the other diners were giving each other that subtle Manhattan signal: Famous Person Sighting, a quick lift of the head to point out with the chin, Look who’s over there!
Dix was not only telegenic, but he actually looked the same in person, somewhere between handsome and stunning in a dark, thick-eyebrowed way. As usual, he was dressed so you never doubted that under whatever jacket he was wearing lay genuine muscle, not shoulder pads. He reminded me of Sean Connery in Dr. No, if Sean Connery had been metrosexual enough to make people wonder if he just might prefer Bond boys to Bond girls.
Bond boys, as my sister discovered to her dismay, naturally acting as if I had caused Dix’s homosexuality. This was because I suggested during their early dating days that (maybe, possibly, perhaps) he might be comme ci, comme ça. In any case, she and Dix went through what my parents referred to as a “civilized” divorce, which meant that Maddy didn’t shriek, You lousy fairy fuck, how could you deceive me like that? As for me and Dix, my sister said she didn’t care if I stayed friends with him. (Actually, what she’d said, poetry abandoning her, was, “Why should I give a shit?”)
“What were you working on in the weeks or months before you were fired?” Dix asked. “Unless it’s still top secret.”
“Almost everything there was top secret. The rest was just plain secret. Technically there were lower levels of security too—classified and noforn, no foreign nationals. You want some CIA humor? There was a board in the cafeteria where they wrote the daily specials: someone painted ‘Top Secret’ across the bottom in big red letters. Funny.”
“Excruciating.”
“Everything I was working on was seriously secret. I mean, this was the Eastern Europe section and —surprise! —the Cold War was ending. That last day, before I could leave the personnel office and go get my things, I had to sign an agreement not to disclose what work I’d done or what discussions I may have overheard during my term of employment. I’d already signed an oath exactly like that when I started but they made me do it again … just in case it had slipped my mind. Anyway, Eastern Europe’s stuff was all top secret.”
“But can’t you talk about what’s public now?” Dix persisted, casually aligning the points of his shirt collar. He loved inside information. Film, theater, politics, but he could probably savor gossip about the Chicago Mercantile Exchange if no other inside info was coming his way.
I nodded. “I can talk about anything that’s not classified. Plus, for you, a little extra.” That wasn’t true, but I wanted him to feel I was worth an evening. “The two top people in our unit had been in shock from how fast the regime in East Germany broke down. And then came the opening of the Wall between East and West Berlin. We hadn’t exactly predicted it, at least the people in charge hadn’t. All they’d done was insert those cover-your-ass sentences in reports: ‘While it is possible that the East German bureaucracy may crumble under its own weight…’ ”
Even after everyone in the unit saw the first footage of ecstatic Germans holding up pieces of concrete—film gray from deconstruction dust and pollution brightened by a blue sweater here, a chunk of red-and-yellow-graffitied wall there, Ben Mattingly was making it clear that the NVA, the East German army, might just reanimate itself and send in tanks to quell “the uprising.” Here he was, one of the Agency’s top thinkers on the Cold War, and he couldn’t comprehend that it was over. In government as in putting on a TV series, people in charge become so enthralled by their own story that the truth —it stinks — cannot get through. They throw their arms around their story to defend it from the assaults of the truth-tellers.
“You know,” I said, “all these years I’ve been telling myself how lucky I am with the life I have, to forget all the crap with the Agency. Like the whole time after I was fired, Adam behaved like an absolute prince. He stood by me. He never acted as if he thought I was a traitor or had bad character, not one single time. And jobwise: after years of never being able to find work, I got to be a mother. And then I wrote Spy Guys.”
“Remember how you were stunned when you heard the book was going to be published?” Dix asked.
“Stunned and then crazed with joy. And double that when QTV bought the TV rights and asked me to adapt it.” Yet nothing with my novel or the TV show was as sublime as my two years with the Agency. But I couldn’t keep saying that. No one wanted to hear it anymore. Not even Dix, who had a great capacity to tolerate my kvetching. “So here I am making probably ten times what I would be making at the Agency and doing something that’s fun —at least most of the time. I have a son and a husband I love. Okay, Adam may not be a thrill a minute, but after fifteen years of marriage, name me one husband who is.” Dix didn’t even try. “I’m living in New York, which isn’t just the greatest city in the world, but the small town I grew up in. I walk up Madison or Broadway and run into half the people I went to high school with.”
“I know. But what are you getting at?”
“Why can’t I let it go? Getting fired, I mean. It’s so remote from my life now that in some ways it feels like it happened to somebody else. Why does it still have such power over me?”
“Hmm,” he said, which was Dixonese for You’ll have to draw it out of me.
“Go ahead. Say whatever you’re thinking.”
“You know how I adore your mother,” he began. “And respect her work.” Then he glommed down a baby octopus.
That meant it was my turn. “What does adoring my mother mean? Oh, you’re going to give me a psychological insight into my feelings about the CIA.”
“Katie, listen. You’re stuck in 1990, obsessing about why. I can tell you why.”
“This should be a treat.”
“Quiet. Listen to me. Ever since it happened, you’ve tried to laugh off your inability to leave it alone. Time after time, you say you know the firing must have been a mistake or that if you did anything wrong, it was inadvertent. Deep down you feel — ”
“I love the ‘deep down’ business.”
“You can’t make me lose my train of thought.” He pointed his fork at me. “It’s not that you feel guilty. It’s that you failed —in your own eyes. And nobody in your family fails. The Schottlands are successful. It’s in the DNA. Your father did some light cooking while your mother was in medical school and what happened? He turned a couple of copper pots into one of the most successful cookware chains in the country. Your mother’s only departure from being a completely balanced person is her insane lust for fashion. And what do you know, she’s now the shrink for three-quarters of the designers and garmentos in New York. Your sister was short-listed for the Pulitzer in poetry …”