Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  The next morning, Stan invited me to spend the weekend at his apartment, and I accepted. We drove toward Washington together, chattering all the way about American history and our favorite presidents. He told me how to make a soufflé that never collapsed. For about fifty miles, we sang Elvis songs together—he was surprisingly musical, and of course he remembered the lyrics to every song he’d ever heard. Finally we pulled up to a high-rise building in a working-class suburb. Stan showed me to the elevator, which we took to the seventh floor; it opened onto a dingy hall with shoe-scuffed green carpeting. He unlocked his door, picking up the advertising brochures for pizza delivery that had accumulated over the week, and I crossed the threshold.

  I set down my bags and looked at Stan’s apartment, a small, boxy studio with low ceilings that overlooked the Beltway. The room was furnished in heavy oak. I complimented him on the tall, patrician dresser. It had graceful curves, with rolled top drawers and precisely carved trim; it was polished to a high luster and smelled of Lemon Pledge. “It was a gift from my parents,” he said. “Actually, all the furniture here, they gave it all to me—they usually give me furniture on my birthday, or when I tell them I’ve been promoted. My mother likes to give me things I’ll be able to use for a lifetime. The dresser was a promotion gift.”

  Stan told his mother and stepfather that he had been promoted at what he thought were plausible intervals. His parents didn’t know about the real promotions; they thought he was still a lawyer. He felt he had no choice but to lie. “My mother wouldn’t sleep at night if she knew. My father wouldn’t remember not to talk about it on the phone.” I asked him how his parents would feel if they found out, especially if they discovered in the most terrible way possible, with a knock on the door from a dark-suited Agency envoy, a visit from the grief counselors. “They would forgive me. They’re patriots too,” he said, a rare note of hesitancy in his voice.

  I sat down on the dark brown leather sofa, crowned with four identical square pillows, exactly equidistant, made of light brown silk. In front of the sofa, a crystal ashtray and an illustrated book about the flora and fauna of New England lay on a glass-and-chrome coffee table. There was a framed poster from a Broadway show on the wall, along with pictures of Stan posed among various Republican luminaries. The words To Stan, with thanks for all your help were handwritten on one portrait-size photograph that displayed Stan on the steps of the Capitol, his arm around the shoulders of his state’s senior senator. Both men wore dark suits. The senator was some thirty years older and thirty pounds heavier than Stan. Both appeared immense, important.

  A dark Oriental tapestry hung on the opposite wall above a collection of antique books arranged neatly in a small mahogany bookcase. Crossed fencing swords were mounted above a masculine affair of a bed with navy sheets and a solid bedspread. Another bookcase held debating trophies. A solitary rubber-tree plant gasped for light in the corner. I went to open the curtains, but Stan stopped me: “It’s nicer when they’re drawn,” he said. “More private.”

  I opened the walk-in closet to hang up my coat. There was a collection of videos on the shelf—half action movies and science fiction, half pornography: Lesbian Dildo Sluts, All-Orifice Action. He had made no attempt to hide them. He hadn’t been expecting my visit, obviously. I pretended I hadn’t seen them; so did he.

  That night, Stan caressed every feature of my body, touching me in that gentle way, talking to me softly, then thrillingly, telling me what he planned to do to me next. He seemed to know what I wanted without being told. I told him not to stop, and he didn’t. When I told him he was the best lover I had ever had, I meant it—as I always do.

  Afterward, he soaped my back in the tub, and an innocence stole over him; he jiggled my breasts delightedly, he watched them bounce, squished them into funny shapes, drew mouse whiskers on them with a bar of soap. He was as joyful as a six-year-old with a new skateboard. “I can’t believe you’re finally letting me do this,” he said. “God, I’ve wanted to do this for the longest time. Look, they float!” He called me his little lizard, his little otter, his kitten. When I stood up, he took a towel and patted me dry, and when he reached my belly, he drew his finger carefully along the raw red scar.

  “You’re the only man who’s ever seen that,” I said. “It’s kind of ugly.”

  “No,” he said, looking at me with an odd intensity. “If I’m the only man who’s ever seen it, it’s the most beautiful thing about you.”

  He stroked my hair as I fell asleep. Every time I woke up, his arms were still around me. He watched me as I dried my hair the next morning, his eyes bright and shiny: “You’re so beautiful. So beautiful. You’re the most beautiful woman I know. Everywhere you go, the men stare and the women get jealous. How did a fat guy like me get so lucky?”

  He went out to get the paper and came back with pink roses, tipped with silver and beaded with dew. He cooked breakfast for me and brought it to me in bed—cream of wheat, butter and honey in clay pots, green figs, yogurt. We didn’t want to go back to the Farm. We didn’t have the whole weekend off; we never did; we’d finished late on Friday and were expected back by Sunday afternoon. We wished we could take a vacation.

  On the drive back, I took his hand and asked, “Stan, why are you so kind to me?”

  “Because I’m in love with you.”

  He had been bursting to say that. In a way, I’d hoped he wouldn’t, because I didn’t know what I would say. But when he said it, I was touched. And proud. Stan’s love felt like an imprimatur. Stan was not a mercurial or an impulsive man. He was serious, the kind of man who planned to lead the free world. When he made a decision, he made it for excellent reasons. His love was the judgment of a man who took good judgment seriously. I didn’t say anything, but I smiled at him and stroked his cheek, and that seemed to be good enough.

  From then on, he had surprises waiting for me in his room at the end of those long days—rum-filled chocolate truffles wrapped in golden ribbon (he didn’t touch them; he was still dieting), crimson tulips, an exotic sticky liqueur served in a crystal shot glass. Our lives became completely intertwined. Every evening he asked if I would stay the night, and when I said yes, he looked as happy as he had the first time he touched me. He held me in the mornings before class, and watched me as I showered. “It thrills me to see you naked,” he whispered as I soaped up. “I know that sounds silly, but it just thrills me. Your body is so beautiful. Wait … wait, don’t get dressed just yet. You know, right now your nipples look like number-two-pencil erasers when they’re fresh out of the box … let me touch … do you think I’m silly to get so much pleasure just from touching you?” He passed notes to me in class. Once he passed me a sketch of my face he had drawn during the lecture. In his portrait I had no flaws: I had no scar above my eyebrow; my hair cascaded in Pre-Raphaelite ringlets down my back—an effect it achieved in reality only twice a year, in weather conditions more specific than those required to launch the space shuttle. My eyes were innocent, enormous, sable-fringed; my bone structure perfected to the proportions of a Roman statue. It was the way I liked to think I looked, but deep down I knew better.

  We ate lunch and dinner together every day, ignoring everyone else in the class, and talked about our exercises. He helped me plan my recruitment pitches and my surveillance detection routes. With his help, my driving improved, and I became capable. Every weekend, I drove us back to his apartment in Alexandria, and we would spend our only free day in each other’s arms.

  My birthday arrived in March. A year before, I’d dropped hints about the date to Paul, but he forgot it, or ignored it, and I spent the evening alone in my apartment surfing the Internet. When I woke up this time, though, Stan was already awake; he brought me coffee and a tiny cake with candles in bed and placed something small in my hand. I unwrapped the silver paper and found a velvet box. I lifted the lid. Inside was a diamond necklace, the glittering stone set amid tiny sapphires on a golden teardrop, the setting filigreed like lace, the pendant han
ging from a slender chain, the whole thing shimmering like dew. “It’s an exact copy of a piece that belonged to Empress Maria Theresa,” he said.

  He fastened the clasp around my neck. I felt the stones smolder in the hollow of my collarbones, and for a moment, I don’t know why, I felt unbearably sad.

  One weekend we arrived at his apartment compound to find that the management had pasted a bright yellow sticker across the windshield of his rusted Chevy convertible, warning that his tags had expired and the building management would have his car towed if the situation was not rectified within forty-eight hours.

  “What fucking business is it of theirs?” Stan swore, and kicked the tires. “This is between me and the state of Virginia, not the goddamned building manager!” After scraping off the sticker with a razor blade, which took nearly an hour, Stan called the property manager at home, interrupting his dinner, explaining that the building management was not only in violation of city, county, and state laws against vandalism—and that Stan would report this to the police—but that Stan was prepared to organize a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all the tenants similarly inconvenienced and to sue the building not only for damage to the vehicles but for the time he would spend preparing the lawsuit, which, he informed the stunned property manager, he would be billing at his standard rate, six hundred dollars an hour. “Your company will spend more than thirty thousand dollars paying for the costs of the discovery motions alone,” he said.

  After slamming down the phone, he switched on the news. The headline story was a World Health Organization initiative to fund HIV treatment in Africa. Stan glared at the screen. “Why should a penny of my tax money go to that? You know, they’ve known how HIV is spread for years and yet they keep fucking around without taking precautions. They just keep screwing like rabbits. Why is it my responsibility to bail them out now?”

  I’d never seen him lose his temper. He looked at my face and saw my dismay. He softened. “I’m sorry. I’m overreacting. I wait all week to get these few hours alone with you, and the weeks are so long, and I come back and find the building management committing extortion and I waste a precious hour scraping crap off my car—I’m just frustrated.”

  I took him in my arms, cautiously. “We could both use a vacation,” I said.

  We ordered a pizza that evening and sat in front of the television, watching reruns of L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues. The next day, he received a letter of apology from the management, a bottle of wine, and a promise to change the building’s policy on the use of the yellow stickers.

  Stan had lost twenty pounds. People were beginning to notice, and his pants were loose. I told him he looked great, and I complimented him on his willpower. He looked at the cigarette I was smoking. “Have you ever thought about quitting?”

  “Et tu, Stan? I thought you were the only one here who wouldn’t give me grief about it.”

  “I wasn’t a smoker before I met you. I’d have a cigarette with a drink every now and again, but I only really started smoking when I met you. You smoked, and it was the obvious way to spend time with you.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” I looked at him closely. He hadn’t been smoking much lately, it was true. He’d been saying he didn’t feel like it.

  “I had such a crush on you. I’d had such a crush on you since the first time I saw you. You smoked, so I smoked. But I’m worried about your health. You should cut back.”

  I had no idea how to react. “Well, maybe when we’re finished with training I’ll think about it,” I said at last.

  “Think about it,” he said. “If I can lose weight, you can quit smoking.”

  When I thought about it, I realized that smoking had never seemed natural on him. He had strong views on substance abuse. Once, I’d mentioned that I used to smoke dope. He became rigid. “I sure hope you’re over that phase, because I can’t be with a woman who does that.”

  He had his political career to think of, I supposed.

  We expected that when training was over we would be sent back to Headquarters for a year of language study, although we didn’t know for sure; we wouldn’t receive our assignments until it was all done. “Have you thought about where you’re going to live after we finish?” he asked me. I was sitting on his bed with his head in my lap; he was looking up at me. His tone was casual, but his face wasn’t.

  “I haven’t been looking much beyond getting through this, really.”

  “You know, kiddo, we spend every night together now—and it’s been wonderful. I don’t want that to stop. Would you consider moving in with me?” He paused and said, “I know we’re not married—”

  “That’s not the issue—”

  “We’ll get a bigger apartment. Someplace just for us. Someplace with a terrace—we can plant a garden. We can get parakeets. Think about it—it makes sense. What’s the point of us both spending money on rent for two apartments that wouldn’t be as nice as one we could afford together?” Stan and I had seen a pair of cheerful parakeets in a pet store once; I had admired them. We imagined naming them after our pseudonyms: Caesaria and Lou.

  He saw my hesitation. “I don’t want to pressure you,” he said. “I don’t want to rush you into something you aren’t comfortable with. But think of the money we’d save. And, God, it would make me happy if you said yes.”

  I looked at his longing, loving eyes. I remembered Paul saying, “Selena, don’t fall in love with me.” I remembered going to the hospital alone. And, God help me, I said yes.

  He took me into his arms. “Selena,” he said. “I want you to know how much I love you. I would take a bullet for you, I love you that much.”

  I told him that I loved him too.

  Stan had recruited me.

  CHAPTER 6

  As spring neared, the most serious problem we faced was the People’s Front for the Liberation of Turkrapistan. We suspected that the terrorist cell was producing sarin gas. Using overhead imagery, we’d identified the PFLT training camp in the inhospitable foothills of the Greater Turkrap mountain range. We were running a penetration of the camp, and one of our assets, GONZO, claimed to have seen Libyan chemical engineers in the compound’s laboratory.

  About a month before, the PFLT had bombed the hotel where the Turkrapistani government was holding its annual leadership conference, killing the deputy prime minister and more than thirty civilians, some of them children. The defense minister threatened to impose martial law. The Turkrap Broadcast Company brought us the news in a special bulletin, and when the TBC showed footage of the hysterical mothers, keening in agony by the bodies of their mutilated children, Iris sucked in her breath sharply and said, “What animals would do something like that?”

  Iris wasn’t the only one who was losing her grip on the distinction between Turkrapistan and reality. Instructors who had been there long enough behaved as if Turkrapistan were as real as any member of the United Nations. In the bar, they could be overheard arguing late into the night about local politics. Look, Jim, even China’s got MFN these days! Well, Bob, I say Turkrapistan gets MFN when they play by the rules. Not before. That’s why they say “most favored nation,” not “any old rat-ass piece of shit excuse for a country.” Yeah, Jim, but you’re biting off your nose to spite your face. Without Turkrapistani oil we’ll be at three dollars a gallon by summer.

  At lunch one day, our classmate Kevin asked the assembled table whether we would blow GONZO if it was the only way to save lives. “Let’s say he tells you that the PFLT is planning to put a bomb on a plane.”

  “How many people know?” asked Mark, who had been a stockbroker before joining the CIA.

  “Only four—and the other people who know are all inner circle.”

  “How does GONZO know?” asked Mark.

  “They’re making him build the bomb,” said Kevin. GONZO was an explosives technician.

  “So if you do anything to prevent it, they know he sang.”

  “Right. GONZO ends up in an unmarked grave with his ba
lls stuffed in his mouth.”

  Mark said: “Well, he’s the only source we have reporting on the PFLT. We can’t take the chance he’ll be whacked.”

  Joe looked up from his plate abruptly: “Are you out of your mind? You’d let the people on the plane be killed? What if there were Americans on board?”

  “Not if there were Americans,” said Mark. “Of course not. Then GONZO’s dead meat.”

  Sitting at the end of the table, Iris listened to this exchange in silence. The cafeteria smelled of long-forgotten grade-school specialties—Salisbury steak with gravy and sloppy joes with Tater Tots. We finished our lunches and took our trays to the revolving carousel that whisked the plates off for scrubbing and scalding. Iris asked me if I wanted to take a cup of coffee with her on the lawn, since we still had ten minutes before class began. We took our Styrofoam cups outside, under a shady elm tree. The lawn smelled newly mown. Iris fussed a bit, arranging herself, her handbag, her coffee, and her Chanel sunglasses. “I’m beginning to really hate those people,” she said, nodding toward the cafeteria.

  “Why more than usual?”

  “Did it just occur to you in there that if you’d had the misfortune to be born without an American passport, those guys would have let the PFLT blow up your fucking plane?”

  I thought about that for a moment and then turned my palms up in the air. “Let’s not pretend you joined the CIA because you were expecting to meet Nelson Mandela. I mean, be reasonable.”

  We had passed the halfway point of the class. I was melancholy because Lilia had just given birth and I didn’t have time to go to New York to see her new daughter. When my nephew was born, I’d flown back from India. Lilia and I had pushed his carriage through Central Park together every day that winter. I woke up at night to keep her company; I warmed a saucepan of hot cocoa, the Mexican kind, with cinnamon and vanilla bean, and as he nursed and gurgled and then fell back to sleep, we talked, drinking our cocoa with afghan blankets over our shoulders. We spent long, lazy afternoons playing with the baby’s fingers and toes. We had no secrets from each other.