The Unwitting (30 page)

I was looking at my watch and calculating how much longer I had to stand there grinning stupidly and pretending not to look at the only person in the room who interested me when Lauren’s father joined me behind the table. Bill Dreyfus was a handsome man with chiseled features who looked every inch the white-shoe lawyer he was, but something about him gave off a whiff of those hot-air balloons. Maybe it was the intensity of his gaze. It pinned you in place with a wild glitter, as if he were a mad scientist and you were a specimen on a dissecting board.

“I’d sell my firstborn for a good stiff scotch,” he said as he leaned into my face.

I took a step back. “I have only a first, but I’d probably trade her in for the same.”

We stood side by side then, watching kids shuffle around the room, skulk in corners, and, in two or three cases, cling together precociously. Another parent moved in to break up the clingers. Bill Dreyfus leaned toward me again, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet but urgent.

“Charlie should have gotten a medal.”

My head swiveled to him. “What?”

“The guys who gave their lives in the shooting war got recognition.”

Maybe it was the amateur band’s lugubrious rendition of “A Hard Day’s Night,” or the heat from the jumping, dancing, hormone-pulsing bodies, but I didn’t understand what he was saying, and the confusion must have shown on my face.

“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said anything, but I just think it’s a damn shame. Instead of pillorying him on television, they should give him a medal for service to his country.”

I went on staring at him. He thought Charlie deserved a medal for turning a reputable magazine into a CIA front? Charlie had always said he was a bit of an ass.

Twenty-Two

I
COULD NOT STOP
reliving my life backward. Not backward in time, but backward in perceptions and emotions. Everything was the opposite of what I’d thought it was.

Charlie sits across the table from me in the flickering candlelight of La Cave Henri IV, brimming with promise, effervescing with hope as he tells me about his lunch with Elliot, and I want to cry because of what he isn’t telling me. Or am I missing something? Is he aching inside with the secret? But I will not flatter myself. A man does not ache for more than a decade. He gets used to the pain. Perhaps it even begins to feel like pleasure. If knowledge is power, secrets are dirty tricks, and this one was on me.

We lie in bed later that night, sweat-slicked body to sweat-slicked body, then he rolls away, raises a long arm toward the glass ceiling, and points out Orion, Leo, and Virgo. His ability to spot constellations always dazzled me. Either I couldn’t see them at all or I found them everywhere I looked. One night when he was trying to teach me, I found three Big Dippers.

“If it’s a boy,” he whispers on this night, “we’ll name him Leo.”

I ask him what he’s talking about, and he tells me, with absolute conviction, that we just made a baby.

“Didn’t you feel it?” he asks.

And I believe him. Who knows, maybe he was even right. But
now I know what he didn’t tell me that night, and I think about how Abby was conceived in duplicity.

My memory prowled, distraught and dangerous, and I’m back in the big shadowy room with reflected light from the canals lapping at the painted ceiling. He closes the door behind us, and without a word we begin shedding clothing, peeling down to ourselves, in perfect accord. We do not even have to speak, I think. Now I knew how much he was not allowed to say.

I saw the rest of it too, though the scene looked different when not viewed through the rosy haze of Venetian glass. He is sprawled on the bed, his dark lashes lying like fringes on his sunburned cheeks, his breathing peaceful as a crypt, and I shake him awake to ask a question. He doesn’t even need time to think. The lie comes as quick and easy as a reflex. The lie is who he has become. What does that make me?

The tension between the life I thought I had lived and the revised history of it threw me off-balance. Maybe that was why it took me so long to realize that I was an accomplice, or at least a beneficiary.

The recognition came one morning at the end of May, when a Wedgwood blue sky hung outside my study window. I was sitting at my desk, writing a check for the rent. I could not believe I hadn’t thought of it before. The money Abby and I were living on came from the life insurance policy the CIA had bought for Charlie. I was worse than Charlie and Elliot and all of them. They had taken money for an idealistic, if wrongheaded, end. I was using it to live well.

The solution, no, the retribution was obvious. I should have thought of it sooner. I would give away the money. There were hundreds of good causes, but I did not need more than a minute to think of the best under the circumstances. I would give the money from the insurance policy to the antiwar movement. Abby and I did not need an eat-in kitchen, study, and formal dining room in a prewar
building with a view of the park. We would get along just fine in a small two-bedroom with a galley kitchen in one of those ugly new white-brick buildings. We would be more comfortable morally if not physically. And she’d be better off in public school, learning about other kinds of people as well as literature and math and science.

I went down the hall to the kitchen, found the morning paper, and carried it back to my desk. The timing was perfect. The lease on the apartment had to be renewed in two months. I turned to the real estate pages. Reality struck. I had not looked at the listings in years. People who lived in rent-controlled apartments rarely did, unless they wanted to gloat. The only way we could save money was by moving into a studio apartment. I pictured myself closing the Murphy bed Abby and I shared into the wall. Where would I work? She could never have a friend sleep over. Even my mother had made a better home for me than that, until Mr. Richardson began to notice me and she decided I should leave it to join the Army.

I dropped the real estate listings into the wastebasket, pulled my Rolodex toward me, and began flipping through it. If I couldn’t cut back on expenses, I’d increase income. I spent the rest of the morning calling editors. I didn’t bother with the little magazines. They already knew me. And they paid nothing. I called editors at fashion, women’s service, and interior design magazines, at general-interest periodicals and glossies. By the time I got up to make myself a sandwich, I had two assignments. I carried my lunch back to my desk and sat down to work again. That was when I remembered that on several occasions
Holiday
had asked me to write travel articles on the cities where I’d attended conferences. I’d always refused. I rarely read travel writing. I could not imagine I’d be any good at writing it. But now I thought of the hefty fees the magazine paid and dialed an editor I knew there. He said he had the perfect assignment for me. How soon could I be ready to leave? For the second time that day, reality threw cold water on my plans. I could not fly off to exotic places at the snap of a suitcase lock. I could not fly off at all. What would I do
with Abby? I thanked the editor and got off the phone. The idea didn’t come to me until I’d carried the plate from my sandwich and my tea mug back to the kitchen. School was about to let out for the summer. I called the editor back. He asked if I wanted to go to Buenos Aires. I told him I could be ready to leave in two weeks.

Abby turned out to be a game traveler, gobbling up sights and impressions, trying exotic foods, and striking up conversations with total strangers. At a tango performance in a square one afternoon, when the dancers fanned out to take partners from the crowd, one of the men reached for her hand to lead her into the plaza. I expected her to shrink back. She accepted his hand and sailed out among the dancers. My daughter turned out to be a born tango dancer and a shameless ham. I stood watching and thinking how proud Charlie would have been. It was, I realized with a start, the first time since the night of the television broadcast that I’d thought of him without bitterness.

I opened a second bank account. The manager of my local branch disapproved. I don’t know why I was surprised. After Charlie died, I’d had to fight to get our Diners Club card transferred to my name. Now, the manager couldn’t imagine why a respectable widow would want a second checking account. I thought of explaining that one account was for the funds I earned writing, the other for blood money, but didn’t.

I continued to write for the serious journals as well as the more popular magazines. That was why one morning in early September I got a call from Frank Tucker. It was Abby’s first day of ninth grade—she was still in private school, thanks to a partial scholarship and my new willingness to write just about anything that paid well—and I had been wandering the apartment in an elegiac mood. In four years she would be going off to college. Four years was a lifetime to her. From where I stood in the empty echoing apartment that morning, it was the blink of an eye.

“I have a proposition for you,” Frank said.

“You usually do.”

“No, I mean a professional proposition. Can we have lunch one day this week?”

“Couldn’t you just tell me over the phone?”

“I mean it, Nell. This is pure business. But if you don’t trust me, bring Sonia along.”

“And have you ogling her all through lunch?”

“I detect a note of sex envy. It’s a good assignment, I promise.”

“For whom?”

He mentioned a new left-wing journal. I asked him why the editor didn’t call me directly.

“Because he knows we’re friends.”

That was how upside down my world had turned. Frank Tucker, who had teased and taunted and tried to put his penis in my mouth, was my friend. And Charlie, whom I had trusted with my life, was my nemesis.

We lunched in the garden of a small Italian restaurant in the Village. A lemon sun filtered through the trees, warming the air that had started the day crisp as a just-picked apple. Every now and then a breeze rattled the leaves like rain, though the sky was cloudless. I wished I were there with someone else, though I couldn’t imagine whom, except the old Charlie, the one who had never existed.

Frank started talking about the piece as soon as I sat down. The idea was his, he said, but Phil Winters, the editor of
Barricades
, was high on it.

“I can’t do it,” I said when he finished describing what he had in mind.

He put down his glass of wine and looked at me across the table. This was the sincere moment.

“Look, Nell, I know I haven’t always been easy on you. I mean, hell, how could I resist? You always rose to the bait. But take it from me, you’re the only one who can do it.”

I shook my head. “It’s too personal.”

“That’s the point. The piece will be a prism. You write about how Charlie snookered you, and we see how the CIA screwed the country. Like you gals say, the personal is political.”

Even when he was trying to be persuasive, he couldn’t help being insulting.

“That isn’t what the statement means. And this personal is a little too close to the bone.”

“I thought you were a writer.”

“That’s not the song you usually sing.”

“I’m serious. Either you believe that words can pick this rotten world up by the scruff of its neck and shake some sense into it, or you think they’re just pretty beads you string together for effect. Which is it?” He sat waiting for the answer.

“I think words can shake the world, but I still can’t write about this.”

“I’m not asking you to do a piece about having been dumped or cheated on like those sob sisters.”

“Sensitivity always was your long suit.”

He shook his head. “I mean it, Nell. This is important. Will you at least think about it?”

I told him I would, though I knew I wouldn’t.

He didn’t mention the article again during lunch, but as we stood in front of the restaurant saying goodbye, he came back to the subject.

“If nothing else, it would be a vindication of Charlie’s death.”

“How does my writing about Charlie’s duplicity”—I had never spoken the word aloud, and it sent a chill down my back despite sunlight spilling over us—“vindicate him?”

He stood looking down at me, and for a moment the fleshy face turned almost kind. “It doesn’t. Forget I said anything. Just think about the piece.”

I did not think about the piece. I knew I couldn’t write it, if for no other reason, and there were others, than Abby. I did not want her
to know that her parents’ marriage had been a fraud. I did not want her to go through life thinking that, as Frank had put it, her father had snookered me and screwed the country.

A FEW WEEKS
after I had lunch with Frank Tucker, Abby got a school assignment to write an essay about a modern hero.

“Define
hero
.” I had been late getting home from a literary awards reception and was trying to warm up the previous night’s meat loaf and bake a potato, two processes that can’t be rushed, but I was as adamant about not living on delivery pizza and Chinese take-out food as I was about sitting across the table from each other and carrying on a conversation over dinner. I tried to limit my evenings out, but the recipient of the award was a translator I’d known since my first job in book publishing, and I’d had to show my face.