Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  “I just want it to end,” she said.

  The next week she stopped working. She started acupuncture. She forgot, for a while, about the swim and the video and even, at times and in flashes, she forgot about her father, or perhaps she was simply getting better at willing away the facts.

  That period in their lives was bookended by two parties, the firehouse on Halloween after the first miscarriage, and a restaurant downtown in early March, after the second. The restaurant had high ceilings, and though there was still snow on the streets, the owners had opened their doors to let tables spill onto the sidewalk. Anna and her husband sat at a banquette underneath a Peter Beard photograph of some supermodels and an elephant.

  At the bar a group of schoolgirls drank vodka shots. Anna looked at them and thought about that age, before we make the choices that define us.

  Her husband had insisted Anna sit next to him. They were right at the center of the banquette.

  “What if I need to escape,” she said.

  “Just slip under the table. Let’s slip under now, just for practice.” He was holding her hand, and he wouldn’t let it go all night, not even to eat. Anna didn’t know what to talk about at dinner parties now that she wasn’t working and couldn’t yet talk about children’s schools. As the volume of the table rose, she was quietly gauging how hard slipping under the table might be. Someone was talking about digital music meaning new markets.

  “Once we launch in China I can pivot,” her husband said. Which caught her attention.

  “Pivot what,” she said, eyeing the girls at the bar.

  “Pivot to something new,” he said. “A quiet life. Gardens.”

  Anna closed her eyes. He was teasing, of course, his life would never be quiet. He had one speed, and it was increasing. Could she keep up? What if she simply didn’t want it all anymore. Does not wanting what you have qualify as a secret? If it does, would this one also vanish before she could share?

  two

  Q.

  A.

  The night before I left for Beijing my parents gave me a ship’s nautical compass with a tiger’s-eye stone set in the center. “So you can always find your way home,” my mother said. She wasn’t referring to Asia; of course I could find my way home from there, and my mother wasn’t so silly as to see Asia as exotic. She was referring to something else. What she meant was that the compass would remind me that sometimes we lose ourselves. Sometimes we need a way to return to who we are, if the center slips. The center is what can get lost.

  * * *

  —

  As I spent hours on that boring visa work, I was newly living in a state of constant heightened awareness. Before deploying, there were no worries about hostile control, no worries about safety, about whether my accent was passable, about whether I could recall on demand where I had been at this hour on that day and with whom, what I had paid at that bar or what color lipstick the waitress was wearing. I had entered a new phase, the one where you can’t forget anymore. You can’t misplace. Life is no longer casual.

  One day I was on my hands and knees in my office looking for a button that had popped off my blazer. Your father walked in without knocking. He was wearing a traditional Chinese jacket with an American shirt and tie on underneath. I would soon start seeing him regularly, even as he wasn’t “in” anymore. He knew my chief, who had been his protégé. He knew his way around the station. He looked at my desk and saw the gift. “A moral compass!” he said, like a child spying candy. “Exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

  Pills.

  A marriage can last a long time in a state of gray. A state of emotional limbo. Anna knew her parents had lived that limbo, that her father had been increasingly absent in the early years of the union. And whenever she forgot this fact, her mother would remind her until over time she no longer wanted to argue with Lulu over the definition of absent, over who had been more or less present. Everyone had seemed to admire her parents’ bond until the bond was broken. In that generation people talked about what happened when a marriage split up but in private, the topic still retained the gloss of taboo. Anna was never sent to specialists to deconstruct her response. The response of a child was beside the point.

  A marriage is a walled fortress, rarely accessible to even the most sophisticated external observers. That fortress is one of marriage’s gifts, and Anna experienced this gift acutely in that year of chaos, the one her husband would later refer to as their annus weird-abilis. When this or that friend inquired about how she was she would think, Just try and cross my moat. In a marriage you can close the doors and hide. It’s usually not the vows we say at the start that solder us; it’s what happens behind those closed doors over time.

  * * *

  —

  Noel had felt Anna’s husband was a fine enough choice though he worried his daughter was marrying a boy more than a man. Girls will do that when their father is very strong, ironically, cede the central role to Daddy to protect his pride, or perhaps to protect his sense of place in his daughter’s life. And they do it subconsciously. Human nature conditions us against understanding choices as we make them; emotion usually enters the equation long before intellect can have its say.

  The morning after her wedding Anna woke up wondering if she’d made a mistake. She was standing by the stove in the chalet, boiling water for tea. A family friend came up and put his hand on her shoulder. He lived in Geneva and worked in finance. He’d driven up late the night before on hearing the news. He drove a blue Fiat Panda, a car Noel often teased him about, saying things like Who do you think you are, Gianni Agnelli? Though it was Noel who’d studied the Italian industrialist for style. Noel wore his Patek on the outside of his cuff.

  “Would you like some help, dear?” the friend said.

  “I can boil a pot of water, thank you.” Though she wasn’t even sure that was true, then. She knew only what was right in front of her, and as the peace that comes with close focus was the only peace at hand, she took it, who wouldn’t. In those days, she could see a knife and know it was a knife. She could hold a knife in her hand. What action she might take if left alone with a knife was anyone’s guess, though suddenly Anna wasn’t sure she desired anything anymore.

  “I meant this,” the friend said, and held out his hand. “Help.” There were two tiny blue pills on his palm. Anna took and swallowed them.

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?” he said, shocked.

  “Not really.” And then she said, “I can boil a pot of bloody water,” and wiped her eyes.

  The drawbridge was up. The moat was full.

  Q.

  A.

  A colleague of mine had his offer of employment rescinded due to security concerns. It was rescinded two days after he received it. He tried to understand what had happened, what those concerns could possibly be. He considered appealing the ruling, challenging this sentence he felt had come down on him unfairly. When he inquired about avenues of appeal he was given a lecture that came down to No más. That same week a young woman was in my office, she had also received an offer followed immediately by a letter rescinding it. In both cases the rescind notes arrived before the polygraphs but after the test that asks things like, Have you ever blacked out when you’ve been drinking? As if I would remember. And things like, Are you angry at dirt?

  Many people fail and go on to get jobs at other places, FBI, DIA. If you apply to those places, you of course admit you’ve had clearance denied by the Agency. And then those other places call CIA and say, Hey, we’re considering hiring this girl. Can you tell us about her? And CIA says, Um, no.

  It would be in the Agency’s interest to start trusting its own. Put me through bells and whistles. Throw me from a plane. Train me to lie and deceive. But then let me in the trust tree.

  Trust inspires confidence. You want it if you’re teaching tenth grade but you require it if you’re p
lacing your life on the line. Which might lead one to another question: What kind of temperament is drawn to the absence of trust in the presence of danger?

  Beirut.

  Her parents had ended their honeymoon in Lebanon, 1972. The trip came to symbolize some last happy thing between them. They’d first flown into Munich for a weekend with friends and then taken a flight to Hvar for a sail down the Dalmatian coast. From Dubrovnik they flew to Beirut. Those were the days of honeymoons like that, at once grand and bohemian, exotic. The absence of airport scanners. Her father knew how to sail though he didn’t need to for this occasion; a friend had lent them the boat, a sixty-foot Swiss yawl, as a wedding gift.

  After Beirut, they’d rented a car and driven to Tripoli. When Anna would say things like, “Tripoli sounds like an odd place to honeymoon,” her father would tell her, “There’s an absolutely spectacular beach,” and Lulu would say, “It was work.” The word “sailboat” didn’t seem to match up with the word “work,” though. What work could be done at sea, or on a beach? After her mother left, Noel would talk about that trip as a way of saying he didn’t regret the marriage. How can you regret something that had once contained such joy. Anna wanted to understand if that trip was the end of something, or the beginning. She wanted to understand where the problems started. Children care about precision. Children care about the facts.

  It was only later that Anna understood that facts are relative and subjective and that the order in which we receive facts matters. The order in which a story unfolds. Who is telling the story matters, too. If she’d asked Lulu about the honeymoon Lulu would have had a different view.

  * * *

  —

  Munich, Beirut. Her parents were in these places only a year before the Israeli raid on Lebanon, when IDF forces landed missile-equipped Zodiacs on the beach. They were there only weeks before the Olympics and the Black September massacre of Israeli athletes. The raid was interpreted as retaliation for the massacre. If you look at the order of things, that interpretation makes sense.

  Her father would often say that everything is coincidence and luck, that timing is incidental. Telling the story of the honeymoon was an opportunity for Noel to tell a story about history. Before she was ten Anna knew about the Mossad and the Baader-Meinhof gang, about Ehud Barak and Golda Meir and the iconic image of the black-masked kidnapper on the balcony inside the Olympic village, anonymity enhancing his menace. When Anna pointed to the picture once and said, “Daddy, does the man have a gun?” her father said, “He’s not a man. He’s a terrorist.”

  * * *

  —

  The trip was Anna’s origin story, the days during which Noel and Lulu decided to have a baby, and the trip when they started talking about the lives they wanted to live, maybe the trip where Lulu told Noel she didn’t want him traveling so much anymore, the trip where he realized that sooner or later cracks would appear in the glass. Anna always wanted to hear more about the yawl and the ports. She wanted to know about the crew and what they ate, and whether yawls have kitchens. She wanted to know what her mother wore at night and what one packs for a holiday that moves from the coast to the city. And why Beirut? “It’s the most beautiful place in the world,” her father told her. Though he would say that about many places over time.

  Noel told her about the central square of Split and about the old stone walls of Dubrovnik. He told her about Lebanon and Israel and what had happened in the lead-up to that summer and why certain people wanted one thing and other people wanted another. He tried to help her understand that the reasons bad things happen aren’t always evident, that diplomacy isn’t algebra. He always encouraged his daughter toward empathy and away from judgment. He always tried to help her see a thing a different way. He wanted her to understand how everything in the world had changed that summer. The telling and retelling of the story became a thing between them and, like Heaven’s rooms, it was a default for them in times of stress or times when they didn’t want to talk about other things. Every family has these topics. Lovers have them, too. Your safe places.

  “And why did you have the fight about when to leave?” Anna would ask her father.

  “Your mother wanted to stay and see the Olympics.”

  “And you won the argument.”

  “She came around to seeing it my way.”

  * * *

  —

  Noel told her that the night of the massacre one of the Israeli athletes had sent his thirteen-year-old son to stay with his mother. In doing so, he had saved his life. The men who carried out the attack were refugees. “They came from camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan,” he told her. And then he would show her on a map where those places were. He would explain that fear, and a sense of injustice, often inspires bad actions. He would explain why the president of the United States had elected not to attend the athletes’ funerals.

  As she got older Anna would increasingly wonder about her mother’s experience of that week. As those places took on new prominence in the world, she would think about the coincidence of her parents having been there when it all started.

  “Who honeymoons in Tripoli,” she asked Lulu when she was older.

  “Your father.”

  “You liked different things,” Anna said, delivering her conclusion.

  “Well, if commitment counts as a thing, yes,” Lulu said, delivering hers. After a certain age Anna didn’t ask about Tripoli anymore. She didn’t ask about the past.

  Anna didn’t know how often Noel and Lulu spoke after Lulu left but she had the sense they stayed in touch. Sometimes she wondered whether Noel begged her mother to come home. Maybe the separation worked for them though it had broken their little girl’s heart. Until she was older, she couldn’t understand. We don’t think about our parents experiencing certain things until we experience them ourselves. Then we empathize, and forgive. Anna had developed a new interest in the details of her parents’ marriage as the day of her own wedding approached. Had Noel gotten down on one knee? Had Lulu been afraid before she said yes.

  Children care about precision. Children believe in facts.

  Even when you’re all grown up you’re still someone’s child.

  What coincidence.

  What luck.

  Q.

  A.

  A polygraph is not a deposition. If you keep to yes and no on the poly, if you say only what’s essential, you look like you are hiding something. Having something to hide makes people anxious, Anna, even a professional.

  * * *

  —

  You have to remember that what happens before you’re hooked up to the machine is also part of the performance. From the moment you enter the room, they are observing you, looking for slips. Once they turn on the machine it lasts only a few minutes. So you see everything leading up to turning on the machine is essential. What happens before you begin often sets the tone, even the outcome, of the thing.

  * * *

  —

  The last poly I observed took place in a spectacular spot. I walked into a room in a hotel to realize it was the honeymoon suite, which amused me. There was Cristal, and a pound tin of caviar, on ice. There were flowers everywhere. The bed was on a raised platform. And yet it was elegant, not tacky. It was breathtaking. It overlooked the ocean.

  Through the window I could see people diving off yachts and racing on Jet Skis. In a honeymoon suite you tend to think about honeymoons, so I was thinking about how if I ever fell in love, this was exactly the place I’d like to come, though I could never afford it. I was thinking about the irony of how this would be my only time in a suite like this, and I was there not to love someone but rather to destroy someone, to question her allegiance to me, which would be to desecrate the trust. Once you question, things shift, and they did with us. But this was part of my preparation for letting her go and part of her preparation for leaving. It was understood.


  I was there to oversee the polygraphing of my shiny thing, as some suspicion had arisen around her. I had been told not to tell her about the poly. I had been told to tell her only that we were coming to this place for a break, that she would be afforded complete cover to wander the beaches and read books, that no one would know where she was and that not even I would bother her, that this was a trip for her to have some peace away from what had become an increasingly stressful situation.

  * * *

  —

  We had lunch. And then I told her I had to take her to a meeting, and when we arrived at the door to the suite I told her I was sorry but that we were going to have to polygraph her. She responded with absolute calm and professionalism. Though she likely had known the whole thing about rest and books and beaches wasn’t real. She wasn’t into rest anyway. A holiday for her was work and accomplishment. She was defined by her invisibility but also by her preternatural drive. That drive came from a rage she held against her family, against her father in particular, and I could guess at its origins though they were never disclosed.

  The technician had flown in only an hour earlier. He shook her hand and then said, as he was organizing things, as if he were asking her the time of day or the temperature, as if it were beyond benign, he said, “I plan to ask you if you’re committing espionage against the United States, if you are a double agent.” He was drinking a freshly pressed orange juice from room service. It left a line of pulp on his lip.

  “Understood,” was all she said.

  * * *