by Paul Vidich
“What did he say?” she asked, finally.
It had been a short meeting. “He said they’re orderly folks. It was a strange conversation. He said things that I think he wanted me to reject.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said they stick to themselves, they don’t cause trouble. They even put nickels in the parking meters when they don’t have to because their diplomatic plates exempt them. I got the sense he was provoking me to disagree. I told him I didn’t want to press charges. It was an accident.”
Mueller paused. “He doesn’t have jurisdiction. He said drivers aren’t diplomats. They don’t have immunity. He’s already interviewed the driver. The man doesn’t speak English so another Russian translated. It irritated the sheriff. The man was on an American highway and he couldn’t read English street signs.”
“Did he say you were in the middle of the road?”
Mueller looked at Beth. “Who said that?”
“When he talked to me, he said the driver said you were in the middle of the road, and he had to swerve to avoid you.”
Mueller frowned. “I don’t remember it that way.”
She walked him to the cottage’s front door. She held her umbrella high for both of them and took his arm. He thought it was to help him walk, but he was surprised when she pulled him forward. He unlocked his door. Before he stepped inside he thanked her. She smiled. She gave him the faintest breath of a kiss on the cheek and a quick hug. She seemed to be a little embarrassed, but added in a whisper, “I’d like to see you again.”
He nodded. “Me too.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
• • •
Mueller spent the next afternoon in back of the cottage, by the bay, watching movements at the Soviet compound. He had not perfected the patience needed to wait for something to happen when there was no certainty that anything would. Time was the enemy of his restless imagination. He thought he saw something, but when he looked closer it was the same car he’d seen earlier in the day, and the routines at the compound were just that, ordinary comings and goings that had no bearing on his task. Mueller put away his binoculars when dusk arrived. He’d made his play. Now he had to wait.
He entered the cottage’s back door and threw his overcoat on a kitchen chair. When he flipped the wall switch light filled the room. That’s when he saw the front door ajar. He remembered that he’d closed it because a raccoon had gotten into the garbage he’d put in the shed. Muddy shoe prints crossed the kitchen and went into the living room. Quietly, Mueller removed his Colt service pistol from inside an old sock in his duffel bag, and undid the safety. He was alert to sounds, eyes scanning for clues, senses heightened to danger. A sound behind him, a quick movement, and suddenly he turned, gun out.
“So you are here,” Beth said, startled. She stood at the bathroom entrance. “I knocked. No one answered. I wondered where you could have gone without the bike.”
Then she saw the pistol.
He lowered the gun and placed it on the kitchen counter. “I was in the backyard. I’m not used to people walking in unannounced.”
“We agreed I’d come over and cook dinner.”
He’d forgotten.
“I found a key above the door. I bought chicken and asparagus. It’s the first of the season.” She pointed at two bags of groceries that sat by the sink. She nodded at the pistol. “What are you worried about? It’s safe here.” Then, “At least it’s safe if you’re not on a bike.”
He found a way to smile, but he didn’t offer an explanation. She began unpacking groceries and very quickly she was preparing a meal.
It was the first of several nights that she made dinner for him. She offered to come and he accepted. They established a little routine. She arrived in the late afternoon with a bag of groceries and before dinner they took a walk along the beach. They didn’t talk much, but she pointed out the large homes along the cove and described who lived in which house, offering gossip about the town. And then she would run ahead, or skip rocks across the cove’s calm surface.
On the fourth night she arrived with a bottle of wine and the morning paper, which she’d gotten into the habit of bringing when he said the only thing he missed about Washington was the Post. Winter’s gloom was already beginning to recede and the days were getting longer. He didn’t resist her efforts to brighten the drab cottage with daffodils and a plate of homemade cookies. She brought fresh ones every afternoon after he complimented her first batch. He’d given her an extra key so she didn’t have to ring the doorbell and wake him from a nap.
She had a glass of wine with the pot roast she’d prepared and he’d allowed her to pour a glass for him, but he barely touched it. They talked more easily now. She invited him to share his background, and to encourage him she talked about herself and her childhood. As was the case in most conversations then, they turned to the war.
“I was a nurse.”
“Where?”
“The war ended before I was sent overseas.” She stood and approached Mueller. “Let me see your stitches.” She parted his hair and looked at the small head wound.
He felt her fingers part his hair and massage the scalp around the injury.
“Relax,” she said. “You’re so tense.” She went back to the wound. “I think it’s healed. It wasn’t deep. I can save you a trip to the doctor. Shall I remove the stitches?”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I know that. I’m offering. It will take one minute.”
He was discomfitted by her kindness. “Okay,” he said.
He winced when she pressed alcohol soaked-cotton around the wound’s three stitches, and she patted his shoulder, soothing him, and whispered, Relax. It surprised him how the touch of her hand calmed him. It was a feeling he hadn’t had—hadn’t let himself have—for a long time. She snipped the sutures with a penknife scissors and removed three black threads with her eyebrow tweezers. She massaged his scalp when she was done and he let her go on for a while. He allowed himself to close his eyes and enjoy her touch.
He was glad neither of them was good at flirting. It was a kind of game, a deception. He preferred not to have that responsibility.
Should he sleep with her? He wasn’t someone who was easily aroused, but he found her desirable that afternoon on the beach when she burst out laughing at him. She was not someone who would turn his head on the street, but she was attractive, and she had lots of other good points. She was lively and witty, and smart, and respected his privacy. She laughed impulsively without thinking, and he found that her spontaneity made him comfortable. She was easy to be around. He didn’t know when it started, but he found himself getting fond of her. It was affection, and with it came a great need not to hurt her. But it wasn’t passion. He didn’t want that, or perhaps he did, but he was afraid of it. Or maybe he was afraid he’d ruin it—hurt her, hurt himself, make a mess of it. That’s what his wife—ex-wife—had told him. “You don’t know how to be close. You pull back. You say you want to be close, but you live inside yourself.” He’d protested that she was wrong, but divorced and alone, he’d come to believe that she was right. He had listened to her complaints, even tried to be the vulnerable man she wanted, but nothing had been enough. They had only made each other miserable. He hadn’t seen her betrayal coming. She had turned on him and taken the boy.
• • •
A car’s headlights pulled into the driveway and filled the kitchen with blinding light. It idled momentarily outside the cottage and then the engine was cut.
Beth opened the back door on the third knock and saw a tall man, with a prominent jaw and a big chest, standing in the dim glow of the kitchen’s light. He wore a wide-brim hat and a long gray overcoat.
She found Mueller in the living room where she’d left him.
“There’s a man at the door asking for you,” she said.
“I think he’s Russian.”
“Show him in,” Mueller said. “Then if you don’t mind, would you close the door behind you? I’ll see him alone.”
Mueller ushered the Russian to the far end of the enclosed porch by the wide bay window that looked onto the cove. He didn’t know this man, but he knew his type in the hierarchy of the rigid Soviet system. A trusted man, but not a senior officer made to stoop to being the messenger boy. He was glad they hadn’t sent the driver, thinking they could end this with an apology. There was no greeting, no handshake, no false cordiality. Mueller didn’t offer the man a seat or a smile. It was a brief conversation. The Soviets had come to Mueller, so they would be agreeing to his terms.
• • •
Beth couldn’t make out what was being said behind the closed door. She leafed through the newspaper she’d brought, but it quickly bored her. She found herself glancing at the closed door until she could stand it no longer. She opened a book he’d left on the counter. A photograph stuck out like a bookmark. It was a black-and-white photo of a young boy in Lederhosen by a farmhouse and on the back, in child’s handwriting, Daddy. She gazed at the boy and thought she saw a resemblance. She studied the smile on the face and the look of surprise of a uniformed man in the background waving the camera away.
She knelt at Muller’s duffel bag, anxious at the prospect of prying into his private life. She listened for a shift in their voices, or the scraping of a chair on the floor, to detect if they were wrapping up. She vigorously wiped her sweating hands on her apron and slowly undid the bag’s zipper. Her hand touched rolled cotton socks, starched shirt collars, a belt, shoes, and deep in a corner she found a tennis ball. Odd, she thought. Where is his racket? The pistol was there too, and she was careful to set it aside. A camera, a book of poetry, but nothing that would reveal his life, or compromise it. No diary. No letters. Then a small envelope inside the book and in it more photographs of the boy. There he was at a birthday cake. And there he was in Prater Park, the boy and his father standing at the Giant Ferris Wheel. The photo was a closed surface, unsatisfying, and it didn’t open up. The unguarded moments were the best. The boy waving at the camera while riding a bike with training wheels.
The door handle turned and Beth sat bolt upright. She returned the photos, stuffed everything in the bag, and zipped it shut. Back at the table, she smiled when the men entered.
She let the guest out of the house, just as she had let him in, without a word of greeting or farewell. She stood in the open door and felt the evening breeze lift her hair, and she wrapped her arms on her chest against the chill. She watched him get in his sedan, a big man with dark eyes that gave her a cold look.
• • •
Mueller was at the dinner table Beth had set. He watched her fill their bowls with noodle soup and set a basket of bread between them. Neither spoke.
“I hope you don’t mind leftovers,” she said. “I took yesterday’s chicken and added a few vegetables. How does it taste?”
“It’s good.”
They sat together without speaking. There was the sound of eating, spoons dipped, soup tasted, and a heightened sense of quiet. Mueller raised his eyes and saw her staring at him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Mueller was surprised by his vague urge to tell her where he’d grown up, who his parents were, how he’d gone off to war and seen things that no young man should have to see, but this urge passed quickly. “We don’t need a past to enjoy this moment, do we?” Then, “I’d prefer if you didn’t ask.”
She head-cocked slightly, contemplating that thought. “Then who is he?” She nodded to where the stranger had walked out. “He is in our moment.”
“He works in the Soviet embassy.” A hint, he thought.
“That’s all?”
“He was involved with the car that hit me. It will all be worked out.”
She frowned, unsatisfied by his answer. She broke a piece of bread she’d baked, placing it on his dish, and taking another for herself, which she dipped in her soup.
“You have a son, don’t you?”
Mueller raised his eyes.
“I found his photograph.” She pointed at the book on the counter. “How old is he?”
“Six.”
“Does he live with you?”
“His mother has him. It’s a long story.” Mueller wanted to say more but stopped himself. “He is growing up without me. I didn’t think it would matter. . . .” He saw her eyes grow curious and he considered how much to share, how much to hold back. Then he told a story. He spoke without emotion, as if he were speaking about someone else, and his voice became quiet, his tone guarded. He didn’t see his son often because the boy lived in Austria, outside Ratz, and his travels to Europe had been reduced since coming to Washington, so he’d seen the boy twice, and even when he did visit, his relationship with the boy’s mother was terrible. The boy spoke German, little English, so Mueller spoke German to his son, and that fact, he knew, as he thought about how their lives would diverge, made it hard to see what sort of attachment the boy would have—and who he would be to his son. And what did the mother tell the boy to turn him against Mueller?
“In my last visit I was inside the farmhouse I’d been given for the visit and he was outside by the woodshed. We were in the mountains. December. Cold had come. We needed firewood for the stove, and he was eager to help so I let him take the axe. He was at the chopping block turning little logs into kindling with one-handed hits on a log he held in position with his other hand. I watched him from the window without letting him know he was being watched. It was dangerous, of course, but he’d insisted and what could I do? I wanted him to appreciate our brief time together. ‘No’ is a difficult word for the guest parent. And I admired how he tried to imitate my style of one-handed chopping. Suddenly I jumped from the table and cried, ‘No!’
“I burst out the back door. I saw blood on his hand and fear in his eyes. ‘Let’s see,’ I said. He was crying, but he put his hand out. The finger was cut below the tip. I took him to the house, washed the wound, and applied a bandage to stop the bleeding. The cut was shallow, but he was mortified. I said the bandage would do, but I asked if he wanted to go to the clinic. He shook his head defiantly. ‘It’s only a little cut,’ he said tearfully. Of course, he didn’t believe that, but he wanted to show me that he was brave. He got in my lap and I comforted him. He asked me if I’d ever cut myself as a child when I chopped wood. I knew he was comparing himself to me. We are God to our children at his age. I could lie to him to make him feel better. The right thing to do was to lie—and sometimes a lie is required—but I had promised I would never lie to him. It was a promise I made to myself to earn his respect, so I said ‘No.’
Mueller said the last word and was suddenly quiet, almost moody. He broke a piece of bread from the torn loaf and twice dipped it in his soup, then ate. He looked up at Beth, eyes fierce. “There. That’s a story about my son. Does it tell you what you want to know?”
She looked at him for a moment. He’d slumped in his chair. Her voice was sympathetic. “You love him, don’t you?”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat to hide his emotion. “I do.”
“I’m glad that I’m here,” she said. “I’m glad that we met.”
He was surprised when her eyes reddened. She reached across the table and put her palm over his hand. Neither spoke. The moment lingered, each looking at the other, each understanding he had a world of hurt that she would never know. A part of him that was inaccessible. She withdrew her hand and wiped her eye with her knuckle. She smiled kindly.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to get emotional. I didn’t know what to expect when you collapsed on the road. I couldn’t just leave you. And here we are. I’ve enjoyed this week. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve woken up in the morning with a dread that everything good in my life will go away.
I live today’s regrets for tomorrow’s disappointments.” She looked around the little cottage that she’d brightened with flowers. “This will end. You will leave.”
“Not tomorrow.”
“Soon enough.”
He didn’t answer. Nor did he avert her eyes. He nodded.
She washed the dinner dishes, handing them to him to dry. He stacked plates in an orderly row in the drain rack. When they finished she went to the bathroom and then joined him in the bedroom.
He was under the blanket, his clothes draped over a chair. He watched her undress, first removing her sweater and then reaching behind to undo her bra. He felt her slip under the covers beside him and he felt the startling intimacy of her nakedness lightly touching his body.
“Come closer,” she said.
He considered the request. Considered how he should show her that she was a desirable woman, and that he was attracted to her. And he considered the wrongness of what they were about to do. Realized they were doing what she had said not to do, creating tomorrow’s disappointments. He turned to her. Her breath was close, warm, and he could feel the faint beating of her heart. Did every good beginning have to end in disappointment?
She reciprocated his touch, gathering his hair, bunching it, and affectionately messing his combed look. She moved her fingers to his face, finding his nose, touching one eye, then the other, and drew her fingertips across the seam of his lips. Her touch released a riot of sensation in his skin. Their arms wrapped each other and their bodies entangled in a slow unfolding of flesh. She drew her hand along the inside of his thigh moist with sweat, and reached into his boxer shorts. Her tongue moved to his mouth and she pressed her lips on his with hungry kisses that he was returning.
She slept with him again the next two nights. They spent their days walking along the beach with lunch basket and blanket, and one afternoon she got him out onto the bay in a small sailboat. They sailed on the bay to an island of scrub oaks and made love on the beach under a blanket. On the last day she inspected his leg wound and opined that he was recovered, and she removed the sutures. When they were eating dinner that night he said he had to take care of something the next day. He would be gone for a little while, he said. He’d be back. She nodded. She smiled and said, “You don’t have to lie to me. We’ve had something. It’s enough. If it’s gone, that’s okay. We had it. You can’t take that away.”
