Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  RAINBOW looked long and hard at C/O ROSENBLATT. “Screw you,” he spat, and walked out the door.

  I went to my supervisor’s office. “Well, what do we do now?” I asked.

  He took a sip of his chamomile tea. He said, “I just love Mondays. Gonna be a big brouhaha with Agriculture over this.” The negotiator’s carelessness with the secrets we’d given him was incandescently stupid, but typical: Some of the Agency’s senior hands sincerely believed that intelligence should never be shared with the customers, since they just couldn’t handle it responsibly.

  “There’s not much we can do,” he said. “ROSENBLATT handled it just right. He gave the guy a fig leaf if he wants to come back. Wasn’t he about to go back to that little village he comes from? Let him have a good long think.” The negotiations were scheduled to go into recess for a week; RAINBOW had planned to go back to Finn Slough to surprise his brothers by telling them that the Mikko Hinhalla would be safe.

  “Sometimes people think it through and decide they don’t want to know the truth. All we can do is sit tight and hope for the best. Send ROSENBLATT a nice cable. He’s probably feeling a little down.”

  Iris called me on Sunday night in tears. Things hadn’t gone well with Max, the man who had phoned her while we were having tea. He had taken her to dinner the week before at Sequoia, a waterfront restaurant in Georgetown that was popular with journalists and junior congressional staffers. They sat on the terrace overlooking the Potomac. He made her laugh, and after dinner, as they walked together on the Mall, he told her delicious gossip about the senator he worked for. The evening was warm and sultry. They lay on the grass, staring at the lights twinkling from the Washington monument, and Iris allowed herself to be kissed. He invited her back to his apartment, and when she left the next morning, he promised he would call her soon.

  He didn’t, of course.

  “Oh, honey,” I said to her from time to time as she told me her story.

  She snuffled and asked why she did this to herself. She missed Max, she said. She missed Brad.

  “You poor thing,” I said.

  Would it be wrong, she asked, to just call Brad? She wanted to hear the voice of a man who loved her.

  No, I said. I thought that would be just fine.

  Monday afternoon, I stopped by Brad’s office. I poked my head in the door.

  “Brad! I brought you something.”

  He looked up from his desk.

  I had stopped by Barnes & Noble the day before and picked up a copy of Fleeing from Love: Why Women Sabotage Their Relationships with Mr. Right. The cover depicted a heart cleaved in two by a thunderbolt. To make it look used, I’d battered it up a bit and written things like Wow … powerful insight in the margins.

  “This really helped me,” I said. “I think it’ll help you understand Iris better.”

  Brad accepted the book and nodded solemnly at the title. “I’ll look at this right away. I appreciate you thinking of me.” He paused, and thumbed the pages. “She left me a message last night,” he added reflectively.

  I settled myself in one of the plastic chairs and arranged my features sympathetically.

  “And?” I asked.

  “And nothing. I was at my cousin’s place, and I got back late. I didn’t want to wake her up. I’ll call her tonight.”

  I shook my head. “I cannot believe she did that. I spoke to her yesterday. She was all sad about something silly, and she asked me if it was okay to call. I told her, ‘No. It is not okay. Men have feelings just like you do. You can’t just call every time you need a boost. That’s not fair. If you’re not willing to be there for him when he needs you, why do you have the right to lean on him when you’re low?’ ”

  “I don’t think Iris—”

  “God knows I love that Iris, but sometimes she’s so blind.”

  “I think she just—”

  “Brad, you don’t need to defend Iris. I love her too. But sometimes she’s just spoiled. Don’t call her back today. You’ll see. Your phone will start ringing all hours of the day. And you know what? It’ll do her good. She needs to see how afraid she is of someone who’s good to her.”

  That week, Brad and I met for coffee every day. At three o’clock or so, he’d send me a message on the interoffice mail system, asking, “Wanna take ten?” I’d reply, “You bet!” We’d meet in the cafeteria, which by late afternoon was more or less empty but for the cleaning crews. Brad would carry our coffee to the table and settle into one of the chrome-and-plastic chairs. He swiftly understood that I was willing to listen to him talk about Iris, and was so grateful that he didn’t ask why. I nodded thoughtfully while he spoke. At regular intervals I interjected comments along the lines of “That sounds really painful for you” (meaningful silence) or “I hope you’re allowing yourself to cry over that” (meaningful silence). If I thought it appropriate, I would add something cryptic but sensitive, such as “Respect what your feelings are trying to say to you.”

  He told me about the first time he had laid eyes on Iris. “I know most men look at her and just notice how gorgeous she is. And, I mean, of course I noticed that, but that wasn’t it. It was never just about her looks, it was that she was so natural, no airs, just laughing and—”

  “Comfortable with herself?”

  “Exactly.”

  Brad told me the story of their first date. He had taken her to the Pines of Italy, a family-style restaurant in Arlington with checkered tablecloths and red candles that melted sloppily over empty wine bottles. After dinner, the padrone came over to chat. He surveyed Iris and her legs, bunched his fingers to his lips, and kissed them explosively to indicate the wonder of the vision before him. Iris scanned the man’s stained apron and his paunch, squeezed her own fingers to her own lips, and returned the gesture.

  Brad shook his head. “That’s when I knew I could love this woman.”

  Iris had been charmed by the Pines of Italy: She’d told me all about it—in the same cafeteria, in fact, over the same coffee. She liked the way Brad had opened the door of the car for her, waited until she tucked herself in, and then shut the door behind her. She liked the way he’d noticed that she was shivering and turned up the heat. She liked that he knew how the Agency worked. But she had made Brad take her back to the Pines of Italy three more times before she let him kiss her. It was a full two months before she stopped saying, “I want to wait, baby.” The first time she woke up in his small condominium, she turned over and looked at him. His enormous body was sprawled across the bed like a felled redwood; he was slightly sweaty. She got up and brushed her teeth, then padded into the living room. She took in the sepia-toned Factory Outlet sofa and the matching recliner, the ash-veneer entertainment center. She opened the blinds and saw a parking lot. She wasn’t sure what she felt, but it wasn’t thrilled.

  But Brad was nice—so unbelievably nice. No one had ever been nicer to her. She had the feeling she could ask him to do outrageous favors for her—Would you mind taking my cat to the vet for me? She coughed up a weird-looking hairball this morning, but I have a manicure appointment this afternoon so I don’t have time—and he would oblige, saying that he was always glad to help and that’s what friends were for. Iris had been with men who weren’t so nice; men who didn’t call when they said they would; men who borrowed money from her and never paid it back, then tried to sleep with her sister. And you wouldn’t know it from talking to him, she said, but Brad was a monster in bed.

  Brad never asked why I found his relationship with Iris so fascinating. He told me that after they had been dating a few months, he woke up in the middle of the night to find Iris in the living room, settled in front of the computer, surfing the Internet, reading from a page of children’s jokes—riddles and puns. Her innocence moved him, he said. He loved the way Iris would tire at the end of a long night and fall asleep in the car as they drove to his apartment, her hand resting in his. Once, Brad had picked her up from the bucket seat of his car, hoisted her easily in his arms, a
nd carried her into bed without waking her.

  I listened to these stories quietly, and when he was done, I nodded with infinite compassion, trying to hide my infinite boredom. I told him that he would feel empowered if he didn’t call her and that he should grow a goatee.

  “A goatee?” he said doubtfully, stroking his chin.

  “I think it would suit you.”

  On Wednesday, Brad told me she had called him again the night before, leaving a long, rambling message. He hadn’t called her back.

  Brad was discovering how good it felt to make Iris see how afraid she was of someone who treated her right.

  · · ·

  On Thursday night, Iris called me. She told me about a sale at Filene’s Basement and a fight she’d had with her mom and a new secretary at the office who had lost a month’s worth of expense-account receipts. She asked me about her wisdom teeth: She needed to have them out and did that hurt? I was finding it difficult to pay attention: Stan had challenged Peter Jennings to a rather noisy debate. I motioned for him to quiet down, but he ignored me. I asked Iris if maybe we could talk later.

  “Honey, let me just ask you one thing—have you seen Brad around? He’s dropped off the face of the earth. I’m kind of worried about him.”

  “Worry not,” I said. “Saw him just today—he looked just fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he looked terrific. Don’t think you need to worry for a second.”

  “Wow. That’s a relief.” Long pause. “Why, what’s up with him?”

  I let the line go silent for a moment, then said, “Will you be mad if I tell you what I really think?”

  “Go on,” she said reluctantly.

  “Iris, I don’t think you should even be asking those questions. I think you should just let the man get on with his life.”

  On Friday, I told Brad that there had been a time in my life when I had acted like Iris, afraid of a man who truly loved and respected me. I’d been a smart woman who made foolish choices. But I had done a lot of work on myself, like Iris was doing now, and I’d come to see that I deserved to be treated well. I told him how Stan and I liked to sing Elvis songs together as we drove back and forth from the Farm, and how he cooked for me, and how I trusted him.

  But I added that things with Stan weren’t perfect. I told Brad about Stan’s anger and his jealousy. I said that sometimes Stan’s temper frightened me. “Let’s face it,” I said. “Perfect relationships only exist in our fantasies. Stan and I have our challenges. But we’re working through them.”

  He nodded sympathetically, told me that I should respect what my feelings were telling me, and went back to talking about Iris.

  Had I been asked to place a bet, I would have said that RAINBOW was more likely to poison the Fraser River with cyanide than speak to ROSENBLATT again. I guess I still had something to learn about folks.

  On Monday morning, a cable from ROSENBLATT was waiting. After returning from Finn Slough, RAINBOW had called him on his phony business line. His voice shook. They met at a Toronto steakhouse, where C/O ROSENBLATT ordered shrimp cocktails and filet mignon for them both. RAINBOW, in his shabby parka, was underdressed. There were dark circles under his eyes. “You look a little tired,” said C/O ROSENBLATT with fatherly concern.

  RAINBOW was not in a talkative mood. He stayed quiet through the appetizers. “I’ll keep working for you,” he said finally. “But I swear to God, if that stuff leaks to the wrong people again, I’ll stop.” He said little else. The men arranged a time and place to swap his next report for his salary. C/O ROSENBLATT asked RAINBOW to prepare a dossier showing all of the Canadian Ministry of Fisheries’ confidential estimates of salmon yields for the next seven years. RAINBOW left most of his steak untouched. “I’m doing this for my family,” he said before he left. He wanted ROSENBLATT to know.

  “Of course you are,” said C/O ROSENBLATT. “That’s why we all do this.”

  C/O ROSENBLATT asked the waiter if he could take the meal home in a doggy bag.

  I closed the cable and imagined RAINBOW’s trip back to the Fraser River. I saw him standing at the water’s edge, his hands in his pockets, then reaching down to scoop up a stone, skipping the stone across the water. I imagined a lowering sky shading into the gray rapids, the flash of a jumping salmon’s sapphire fins, the rattling call of a kingfisher. I imagined RAINBOW running his fingers pensively over the bow of the Mikko Hinhalla, then watching his sister-in-law separate the bills into piles: creditors who could be stalled and creditors who couldn’t. I imagined his gork of a nephew with his arm in a brace, watching the other kids play. I imagined RAINBOW standing silently amid the cheatgrass and the blueweed at the banks of the Fraser River, contemplating the current and deciding that he had no choice.

  I couldn’t talk to Stan about the case. I wanted to know what he would think of it, but of course he didn’t need to know. On the drive home that day, he asked what was on my mind. I said that I couldn’t see why we needed to spy on Canada. “They’re our friends,” I said.

  “We don’t have friends.”

  “The Canadians? Come on.”

  “They’re all enemies. Or potential enemies. They’re not Americans. They’re all pursuing their own interests, not ours. It would be great if we could all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ but it just ain’t like that.”

  “They’re Canadians!”

  “They’re a bunch of self-righteous hockey players who wear stupid caps with tassels and kill baby seals. They coddle our draft dodgers and they fish in our water. Screw ’em.”

  “The Norwegians kill seals. And the Japanese. Not the Canadians,” I said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake—it was a joke!”

  “Espionage is a hostile act—it’s something you do because you absolutely have to. You do it when you’re confronting the Nazis, or the Soviet Union, or Iraq—not Canada.”

  “You do it when the legally appointed officials of your democratically elected government tell you to. The decisions are made in accordance with the law. They’re made in the context of the Constitution and a system of checks and balances. Why do you think you should decide what’s in the national interest? Who elected you? I have faith in our system. You live in the freest, most prosperous, most creative society in the world thanks to that system. If someone tells me we need to know what the Canadians are up to, why should I question it?”

  “Because it’s nuts! Why would we bother?”

  “They may have reasons for needing to know that I don’t have to understand. Isn’t it rather arrogant to suggest that you, with your doctorate in Sanskrit, know better than the top officials of a government freely elected by the people of the United States?”

  Maybe he was right. I didn’t know anymore. The Canadians probably were capable of fucking us up.

  Throughout that week, I choreographed the Mating Dance of Brad and Iris with the care of a zookeeper breeding pandas in captivity. I am quite certain that no one—but no one—had ever listened to Brad with the interest and rapt attention I displayed and that no one would again, unless he paid upward of $160 an hour. I gave him the best romantic advice a man has ever received from a woman, and damned if it wasn’t working even better than I’d expected. He had stopped calling Iris, and Iris had started calling him. On Tuesday, Iris forwarded him a joke that was circulating on the Internet via e-mail; he didn’t reply. That clearly chapped her hide: The next day she sent him an animated e-card, with a syrupy soundtrack, that told him how special he was to her and how special he would always be. When he told me about this—and told me that he still hadn’t answered—I noted a distinct glint of sadistic pleasure in his eyes.

  He asked me what I thought he should say to her if she called. He now permitted me simply to dictate his lines. I told him to get off the phone as quickly as humanly possible. I said that sooner or later she would show up on his doorstep, guaranteed. Then he could give her just a little crumb of hope. He could tell her that she looked nice. “Say that may
be you can go out again sometime for dinner again, but you don’t want to make any big romantic promises. Tell her you feel a little sour on romance these days. Tell her you’ll have to take it really, really slow. Get to know one another all over again. And do not tell her you love her, even if she says it first. You can say, ‘You’re very special to me, Iris, but I don’t know what I feel anymore.’ And then you send her away because you’re about to go out. Got it?”

  Brad nodded. The goatee was growing in quickly, and I thought it suited his new attitude. I suspected he did, too.

  When Iris called and told me she had stopped by Brad’s place to pick up her CDs and that he had seemed in a hurry to go somewhere else, I told her I thought she ought to move on and date other people. “You can’t live in the past, Iris.”

  I told myself I was doing this for Iris’s own good. If she returned to Brad, she would be returning to a man who loved her more than any woman could ever ask. The Maxes of this world, Iris clearly did not need. If I could help her to overcome her fear of being loved, was I not doing everyone a great favor?

  After a while, case officers get good at this kind of logic. It’s something of a job requirement.

  On Thursday, I told Brad that I needed his advice desperately and that it was an absolutely confidential matter. He said he felt honored that I would choose to confide in him and would do his best to listen with compassion and respect.

  I told him that his advice would be especially valuable to me because he understood how the Office of Security worked. I explained that I had sent a few indiscreet e-mails to my family “when I first got here and knew nothing about security” and that somehow the Special Investigations Branch had found out. “I don’t know what this means,” I said, “and I don’t know what to expect, and I don’t know why it’s taking so long for them to answer my calls, and frankly, I’m worried.”

  He looked extremely concerned. “It sounds like you made an honest mistake and owned up to it,” he said.