Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  It would have been far less stressful to belong and oblige but Anna had never belonged. And then she had married someone who always belonged because of his confidence, his ease—then, a bunk bed at Brown; now, this palatial city home. Circles didn’t apply to him, he moved straight through them. Perhaps he didn’t even see they were there, and in rendering them invisible, denied them the power they held over others.

  * * *

  —

  Anna lifted her eyes and saw her husband was looking right at her. He had finished his speech and was mouthing the words “How did I do.” This was rhetorical, he knew how he did, and his nod at needing affirmation was for her, not for him. And as a way to indicate she understood, Anna excused herself from the table and stopped by his place to give him a kiss behind the ear, then to pull his face toward hers with one hand to say, “You got the A.”

  * * *

  —

  The powder room was wallpapered in gold leaf. White linen hand towels hung from a low glass bar by the green marbled sink. By the toilet was a little bamboo table with old Vogues and miniature black basalt sculptures. They were like the sculptures in the hotel bar in France. Here, they were leopards. There, they had been Roman gods.

  Her mind went back to the restaurant that night.

  “Do you fish?” he’d asked her, just before the cigarette flick.

  “No.”

  “That’s a shame. Do you know how to catch a fish?”

  “A rod?”

  “A rod, that’s very funny.”

  “Is this the part where I am meant to ask how one catches a fish?” Anna said.

  “Well, this is the part where I tell you.”

  “The right rod?”

  “The right bait.”

  He made a motion with his hands, casting an imaginary line.

  “Oh, fishing,” she’d then said loudly, acknowledging the imaginary line. She was also acknowledging that something was being said and something else was being left unsaid. And that was when he said her name, Anna.

  “Wait, what,” she said. How did he know her name.

  “Anna. Not for the literary echoes.”

  * * *

  —

  She returned to the table and the topic was a rumor of the opposing candidate’s failing health.

  “It’s a blood disorder,” someone said.

  “A crack in the stained-glass window,” the hostess said.

  Anna had a desire to question the debate at hand, to say what worried her about the campaign or its potential effects on her husband and her marriage. But she behaved through the last course, through espressos and freshly baked brownies, through the tour of the art in the apartment and last lectures on her husband’s infinite potential. She behaved all the way into the town car that was now always waiting for them, even on nights like this, when they were only blocks from their hotel, even as she’d protested and asked if they could walk. She behaved into bed and was about to open a book.

  “Let’s talk,” her husband said. He pulled a chair up to her side of the bed.

  “What about?”

  * * *

  —

  A second rumor had arrived that night alongside the checks and the foie gras.

  “A political campaign is a hothouse for rumor,” the hostess told Anna as they walked around the house after dessert.

  “Why is that?”

  “Rumors metastasize in the presence of power. A rumor sends a stone through the stained-glass window.”

  She was placing Anna on notice.

  A rumor was headed toward her window.

  Q.

  A.

  You’re constantly collecting information about terrorist attacks, about how they’re trying to kill you. Obviously falling in love in that context, there’s a little carpe diem that sweetens things. But love cannot thrive in the presence of constant, clear danger. Over those years in Asia I wasn’t in any condition to marry anyone. And yet you long for connection. And so the desire to couple up and share a life can be replaced by a will to couple up and save one. It happens every day. And seeing someone as like your own daughter might be an even harder emotional matrix to break free from than seeing someone like a lover. A man will always see his daughter as a little girl, even once she’s all grown up. A man will always defend and protect her, even when she makes poor choices. And even when she places a system at risk. Lovers come and go. Daughters are forever.

  Rumor.

  “Please,” Anna said, sitting up in bed. She looked at the blue curtains. She didn’t want to look at him. “Please tell me.” She pulled the shirt up over her knees and pulled her knees to her chest, like a child. “You’re scaring me. And that woman scared me. Did I do something?”

  He was staring at the ceiling, twirling ice in his gin with a straw.

  “I love you,” was what he said, and looked at her.

  “I love you, too, you idiot.”

  “What did Noel do for a living?”

  “He worked at a bank.”

  “At a bank.”

  “He moved money around, whatever, maybe he owned the bank.”

  “There’s a rumor he was a spy for the Chinese.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Anna said, and as she said the word out loud she remembered the last thing she’d called preposterous, the idea of his running for office.

  Her husband slipped the straw in his mouth and waited, giving her time and space to process what he’d said.

  “That video.”

  “It was nothing. Some case officer cleaning out his desk.”

  “Well, you might want to clean out your desk now, darling.”

  And he gave her a long and loving but firm look.

  “Let’s clean out the desk.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  And in that moment Anna didn’t see Noel in the high-backed chair she saw the boy chasing the falcon over dunes and she heard the man’s voice by her side on the rocks saying, “Rome is provincial, Paris is provincial,” and she saw the two Asian women in their blue silk dresses with the flowers. Those white buoys.

  Her husband put his glass on the bedside table. He turned to face her. He traced the lines of her face with his fingers. He never tired of her. He trusted her completely. He knew she would not place them at risk.

  “My better than wow,” he said.

  Q.

  A.

  In all your interactions with the Chinese, they arrive to meet you in pairs. If the Agency tells any overseas intelligence partner with the exception of China that we want to talk to its chief terrorism analyst, the other agency will say, Sure, of course, what time. Not China. The Chinese have what are called barbarian handlers, a select set of intelligence officers accredited to deal with CIA. The barbarian handlers are the gatekeepers, Anna. And so when CIA tells Chinese intelligence we want to talk to their chief terrorism analyst, China tells us we can speak to the handlers and they will decide. They call them barbarian handlers because we are the barbarians in their eyes.

  * * *

  —

  I served ten years in Asia and it took me ten years to understand this. After a decade I could look in the mirror and see what they saw, the barbarian. Once you truly begin to see things from their point of view you can begin to question your own. You have to move radically outside of what you know to have this experience. Noel did that. He saw the barbarian, too.

  The God Thing.

  There exists, however, a God. And the long hallway that leads to the room where you will see that God exists is lined with the people you once knew.

  * * *

  —

  What would it be like to have such certainty. Most adults Anna knew were unsure about God. Her own upbringing had been classic lapsed WASP, which is to say more eggnog and egg hunts, less birth and death of Ch
rist. God rarely came up at Princeton or at industry parties or at the Ford Foundation. Anna had lived most of her life entirely insulated from any ideas of faith that were not abstract or ceremonial. Her friends were more interested in what happened last night than in the possibility of an afterlife.

  She and her husband rarely talked about belief though they’d exchanged traditional vows in front of that fireplace, as if reciting words from a book neither of them understood or had read would solder the thing, make the marriage real. Elevate. “You are now spiritually responsible to each other,” the minister told them. “He’s exceedingly spiritually responsible,” is what the campaign manager would say later in response to being asked about the candidate’s faith. When asked if the candidate and his wife prayed together, he said, “Personal prayers are private.”

  After the rumor came a threat on the candidate’s life, speaking of elevation. It arrived in the form of a letter and it accused the candidate of being a shill for the Chinese. The letter listed his Asian business interests and detailed his late father-in-law’s extensive work in Asia as evidence of un-American leanings. Circumstances required them to take it seriously.

  “Some people want to come and ask some simple questions,” said the campaign manager, closing the door to the three Bureau agents waiting in the foyer. He said it as if he were talking about nursery school teachers, as if the questions they were going to ask her would be along the lines of favorite color or toy.

  “Some ‘people’ meaning some federal agents?” said Anna.

  “They’re just here to talk,” the campaign manager said. “We’re just crossing I’s.”

  A security detail had been hired and stood in the hall.

  “Dotting I’s?” Anna said.

  “Right, yes.” He was nervous.

  * * *

  —

  Anna increasingly had the sense she was only an actor in a film now, one in which she was given the script one page at a time. She could feel the control she’d once maintained over her life slipping away. Her husband saw it differently. He felt he was placing himself in the hands of experts as a means to an end. Strategists, researchers, details. A chief of staff, federal agents, a chef. In his view, everyone around him now was there to assist in his rise, close the polls in his favor. He believed the letter threat was a distraction and told his wife not to worry. “Every politician gets one of these,” he told her, eyes wide. He always saw the bright side. The first round of interrogations was benign; the threat was assessed as low. Still, the detail was kept at the door.

  As fall arrived, the candidate tailored his tastes, Budweiser replaced bespoke bourbon and gin, out went the Porsche. He disclosed his net worth. He listened to junior staffers’ complaints and memorized the names of high-level donors’ grandchildren. He got fierce on issues where he had once been lax or agnostic, like education reform and the minimum wage. He went to bed early and woke up before dawn to run the reservoir with policy scholars and City Council members. And he almost always handled little errors, except for one time, in the Bronx.

  “Do you believe in God?” a reporter had shouted from the back.

  “I’m not averse to Him,” said the candidate, smiling, on the assumption his charm could eclipse the emotions of others. Not this time.

  * * *

  —

  After, in the car, when Anna tried to explain why you don’t say you’re “not averse” to God, he didn’t listen. He turned away. She had the sense she was chiding not the man in front of her but rather a former self of his, one no longer available to her. That former self had left the room of their relationship. It wasn’t a lapse in their love but rather a shift in the chain of command, in the structure of the thing that had been intimate once, the thing that had included only the two of them. Now there were handlers. Now there were rules. Now, protocol. Anna could still see and feel his former self, bounding up those atrium stairs, the boy who wanted to change the world. She could still see him staring up at stars by the Statue of Liberty, feel him pulling her back into bed on hundreds of mornings, asking shyly for more, helping her to be happy. Could she catch that former self before he slipped away entirely, could she place him in her pocket until this race was over, then pull him out intact?

  That night, he went to her and pushed her hair behind her ear. “It’s getting so long,” he said. And then, “You’re right about the God thing.” He told her Edmund had called and said it was reckless not to have a view, said what kind of adult operates without clarity on faith. Not one who wants to serve in the United States Senate. “You were right, baby,” he said. “Why don’t I always listen to you?”

  He was back, for a moment. It was enough.

  He had engaged in more introspection in those months of campaigning than in the entire rest of his life, and it was changing him. And the nature of the change was unexpected. Anna was seeing the man she loved and once believed she knew do something truly radical: grow up. He was questioning his choices as deeply as she had once questioned hers. At the start of their marriage she’d wondered whether he had what it would take to grow with her. She worried now he was asking himself the same thing.

  Q.

  A.

  He didn’t care about money, Anna. You know this. Money was never his metric. He would fly first-class to Doha, but that’s not a crime. Once, when his hotel upgraded him to a suite, he went ballistic. He cared about perception, about optics and rule. He would tell me things I initially found superficial. What jacket to wear on a certain occasion. Where to get my hair cut. But he also taught me that these things link into a larger set of expectations and strategies, the fastest way to inspire trust, how to break down a difficult decision into a series of manageable choices. He believed the most important choice we make is the people we choose to love and trust. He chose me. He chose her. We were delivering intelligence but we may also have been serving a second role, protecting his legacy. Maybe we were insurance that what started in that Chinese jail would be completed. There is no real end to the life of an asset. At the end of a career like that, where do you go? There is no home. She was facing a life of nowhere to go, and he understood. He helped me break down a difficult decision into a series of manageable choices.

  Interrogation.

  When the men from the Bureau returned, they had a new line of questions. The candidate and his wife were happy to oblige, a time was set, food was ordered for the room. There were three men, and they started by asking the candidate about his childhood, about his parents and his school and the choice to leave Brown, and about the early backers of the company. They asked about the rock stars he knew and certain parties he’d attended, about the more serious drugs he assured them he had never touched. They asked about affairs, only to learn that there had been no affairs, and about social-media slips, of which there had been one or two. Have you ever stolen something? was one of the questions, to which his response was, Only Anna’s heart. He was whistle-clean. It surprised the agents, as it might have anyone, to learn that this candidate, who seemed to live fast, was actually slow, and thoughtful. He was a businessman who had done well and wanted to give back.

  “There are so many different ways to serve your country,” the candidate would say, as the party-appointed advisers had trained him to say, when people asked why he was doing this. His narrative was one of redemption. He was a man who had seen there was more to life and wanted a change.

  Change is admirable.

  Change inspires.

  And then they asked about his father-in law, about the Swiss funeral and who was there, and they asked if Anna had opened all of her condolence letters. And that was when she elected not to tell them about the video.

  When Anna sat in the same chair in the same hotel room a day later, everyone knew what the skeleton was or might be. It was weeks after the dinner where the marine had discussed suffering, almost a month after the night when her husba
nd had made and remade love to her after acknowledging the rumor, refusing to leave their one safe space exposed to its flicked lit match. He had held her so tightly that night.

  * * *

  —

  There exists, however, a God.

  * * *

  —

  Whatever came after, the man she’d met had once been the little boy in those dunes, in that snow. He had once been someone’s son. He had provided Noel with his vision of Heaven.

  * * *

  —

  “Did you meet with anyone identifying themselves as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency?”

  Anna said nothing. He had never mentioned the word “CIA.” He had never mentioned the phrase “case officer.” The word “CIA” did not appear anywhere in the video.

  “When did you meet with him?”

  They placed a photograph on the table and asked her if she recognized the man in it.

  Anna looked at her husband and he nodded, giving permission to go ahead and tell them everything. Anna knew the nod was also acknowledgment that whatever she chose to say or not say, he loved her.

  Q.