Echo House

by Ward Just

  Alec watched her go, dodging raindrops.

  "Get her while you can, Alec," Wilson said. "She's one of a kind."

  "Is she going somewhere?"

  "Television; she's made for it. Those legs! That voice!"

  "A fingernail across a blackboard."

  "She's Ms. Inside-out, doesn't even need to wear a wristwatch. She'll know someone who can tell her the time. And she loves her facts, particularly the orphans, the ones with the unstable personalities."

  "Can she deliver?"

  "I think she can. What's to lose?"

  "Plenty," Alec said glumly, but that was for Wilson's benefit. There wasn't anything to lose. Virginia Spears only wanted in. She wanted a place at the table. She wanted to be part of it, faithful Boswell listening to Dr. Johnson put the fix in. Virginia Spears was avid for a peek behind the mask, thinking that she was staring into a man's soul when she was only looking at a second mask, the one that was even more untrustworthy than the first.

  She would be interested in both dance and dancer, and it would be important to keep her focused on the first, where the feet go when you're preparing a pirouette, not the spin itself, not the actual doing of it, but the preparation for it, the process. Alec decided he would try to talk Axel into giving her thirty minutes, tea in the garden room at Echo House, let's see, on that occasion so long ago the President was seated there, and Tommy and Ben on the couch, and when Eleanor called I was instructed to say they'd already left, an urgent matter at the War Department, ha-ha, when all they were doing was drinking martinis. Some danger there, that Axel would take over the story. Virginia Spears would think she was sitting with Mr. Oracle himself, and if she phrased her questions properly, equal parts charm, tact, and bluff, she'd learn who really killed Kennedy. Of course Axel wasn't the real problem. Neither was Red Lambardo nor Harold Grendall nor Lloyd Fisher nor the others the reporter would seek out, to give her yarn the usual sweet-and-sour balance, the suggestive anecdote and the quote with the sneer behind it. The real problem was Sylvia.

  That afternoon Alec called his travel agent and arranged for two seats on the Concorde to London and a third-floor suite at the Connaught, theater tickets, and a car and driver to take his mother and that bastard Willy Borowy to Sissinghurst or Blenheim or Henry James's cottage at Rye or any other place they wanted to visit in the glorious English countryside. Her birthday was in two weeks and she had been talking about a vacation in England, just she and Willy revisiting some of the old haunts. Alec told the travel agent to send the tickets and the other reservations to his mother by Federal Express. Add two dozen roses, he told the travel agent, and bill everything to the firm's account.

  Alec and Virginia met the following Tuesday for an hour and had dinner the following evening. They met for three hours on Saturday morning and spent the afternoon at Pimlico. Virginia won on a six-to-one longshot called Mr. Duck. Alec thought the interviews had gone well; any time the reporter got close to the heart of things, he pleaded lawyer-client privilege. Virginia was understanding but at one point lowered her pencil to inquire, almost plaintively, What is it exactly that you do, Alec? It isn't exactly law. It isn't exactly lobbying. Is it public relations? I think what you do is take people off the hook. There's a hook that they're on and you somehow move the hook or lift them off the hook or cause the hook to disappear or legislate it out of existence or, depending on the client, let it grow until it's the size of Alcatraz. I'm thinking that you're the neighborhood locksmith who hangs a brass key outside his shop, except with you it's a big black hook. Tell me this. Do you keep in touch with Old Man Nixon?

  The clubhouse at Pimlico was not crowded. Alec and Virginia took a table near the window, watching the horses troop from the paddock to the starting gate. The jockeys looked tiny as toys atop the thoroughbreds, whose breath was steaming in the chilly spring air. After ordering drinks the reporter cleared her throat, took out her notebook, and said she would have to ask some questions about Alec's personal life, not all the gory details but the basic information. Most of the biopers would not be used, but they had to have it, in order to fill in the blank spaces and so forth and so on. The dossier was surprisingly slender, nothing of a personal nature published in the papers. It was obvious that he enjoyed a day at the races, betting modestly, losing the same way, and obvious also from the way he was staring at the travel agent's window the other day that he liked to get away from things. From the look of his office wall he didn't care much for contemporary art. Virginia admitted that she had made inquiries and, truth to tell, Alec wasn't often seen around town. Not at the usual embassy parties nor at the usual restaurants. Was occasionally observed at the symphony, as often as not with Axel. Was seen once or twice a season in the owner's box at the Redskins games, but people think that's a business afternoon, that you don't care much for the organized violence of the National Football League. They say you don't care figs for professional sports. Virginia smiled pleasantly and allowed the silence to lengthen. So what happened with Leila Berggren? And why are you living at Echo House with your father?

  "I have two children," Alec said. "And they read the newspapers and magazines. So I'm not getting into any details about Leila and me and if you discover them yourself and publish them, I'll resent the hell out of it."

  "I don't need chapter and verse."

  "You're not getting chapter and verse."

  "Now I'm very curious," she said, laying her notebook aside and steepling her fingers as she sat back in her chair, waiting. Her manner suggested an old friend ready to listen sympathetically to any confession, no matter how mortifying. Of course the facts would be carefully groomed before they were published.

  Alec looked out the window at the track, the horses shying from the gate, high-stepping back and forth while their jockeys talked to them. There was a short form he could give the reporter. The long form was none o: her business or the business of her readers. All marriages had a code. Probably even jockeys had a code, the words they spoke to their horses at the starting gate or in the homestretch, specific words spoken in a particular tone of voice. In Washington they lived by words, each métier with its own tongue, rules of syntax and grammar. They were all romance languages and collaborated at the margins, becoming a patois of their own—the language of the law, the legislature, the military, the university, and the newsroom. He and Leila lived for work, and their work was words. Their life together was animated not by who they were but what they did and how they explained themselves. Leila spoke an esperanto. She maintained that in another life she would have been a Silesian, meaning that she would manage in German, Polish, Czech, and Russian when she had to. Also Yiddish and Romany. She had so many tongues that Alec could not keep them straight. In bed one night watching the late news she announced a discovery: the most important work in the government was being done by outsiders, people like herself, consultants fee-for-hire. That was where the power was and the money, too; but you had to come on strong. Ventriloquism, she called it. You had to throw your voice, make them hear what they wanted to hear. But to be convinced they had to know that you were a part of things permanently, and for that reason she and Hugo Borne had taken a lease on a brownstone not six blocks from the White House. The old place in Foggy Bottom had become unsuitable. But the brownstone was expensive. She named a sum. Will you give me the money? I know you've got it. It'll make all the difference for us; for the first time we'll be going first class. We're just this far from a knockout and the doughski-dough that goes with it. He gave her the money and shortly after resigned as general counsel; only a fool had a wife for a client.

  Once he ceased to be involved in her business he ceased to be involved with her and she with him. He wondered if they had both become so defined by what they did that they had no other dimension, like an agricultural economy with one cash crop. He was bored by her academic friends, weapons specialists, military strategists, economists, various geopoliticians. He himself had few friends, so they moved in her circle, and naturall
y her friends condescended to him, a lawyer uninterested in the great issues of national security, a lawyer who found it difficult to explain exactly what he did. Gradually he began to decline the small private dinners for the general or the deputy foreign minister. They might as well have been living in different cities, and in a way they were, with nothing in common except the one cash crop and their children. Their emotions were hidden inside the brick and marble of the federal city, their manner with each other a kind of amiable cynicism. Their lovemaking had all the passion of a tap on the shoulder. He did not know how this had come about and at a specific moment ceased to care. Alec would arrive home late, check the mail, read his children a story, kiss them good night, and go downstairs to see if the basement light was burning in the house next door. If it was, he called to the housekeeper to tell her he was going out for dinner. Tell Mrs. Leila not to wait up.

  A minute later he was sitting with Sandrine Huet in her kitchen. Twenty feet away were the lights of his own house. On summer nights with the windows open he could hear the telephone when it rang and the voice of Ella the housekeeper explaining that Mr. Alec was not at home or Mrs. Leila either but she would be happy to take a message. Ella was hard of hearing and unpleasant generally, so her voice was loud and exasperated. If the caller pressed for details, her voice would grow cold and superior and she would ask again who was calling and explain that no one was home but the call would be returned when it was convenient to return it. Often the caller was Leila, working late.

  He and Sandrine would close the curtains and eat in the kitchen and for many years whenever he smelled vindaloo sauce he would think of her in her jeans and pink sweatshirt pulling a bottle of wine from the fridge and asking how his day had gone, peering at the stove to check on the progress of the sauce. Tell me everything, she insisted, but rarely waited for his answer, preferring to describe for him the movie she had seen that afternoon at the embassy. Some fine things in it, she said, really very fine, the cinematography superb and the performances excellent. The sexy parts were charming. Perhaps the story was weak, lacking mettle. She had always loved the dialogue in French movies, a cyclone of words held together by centripetal force; but this conversation was aimless and without coherence. The pauses and silences were arbitrary. She rooted for the director, who was one of France's best. But at the end the thing went flat. The director didn't know how to end his story, so he left the boy and the girl on the suburban Métro, Direction Yvelines, sitting side by side holding hands, the boy looking out one window and the girl out another, waiting for Yvelines. At the end, the movie was without élan. I think we have lost our gift of narrative, Sandrine said. What has happened to us since Zola and Balzac?

  The chargé d'affaires and her friend Avril Raye loved it, she said. But the ambassador's wife agreed with me.

  The director's going to America, she said. Hollywood finally called. You drown us in Coca-Cola and then you take our movie directors.

  America is a pestilence, he said. Especially Southern California.

  Would you help me out? He's the chargé's cousin. He's only a boy. They'll eat him alive in Hollywood. He needs a lawyer.

  With the greatest pleasure, Alec said. I know the best one in Los Angeles and he owes me a favor.

  And it won't cost too much?

  Not too much, Alec said.

  Maybe he'll hate it and go back to France.

  Maybe, Alec said.

  Make him a contract with an escape hatch. Make them pay dearly.

  Count on it, Alec said. Is he really good?

  Yes, she said. He's one of our best and we don't have so very many. He has a vision. He knows what he wants to do with film, and he understands France very well. Maybe he'll understand Hollywood, too. He wants very badly to make an American film. I don't know why, unless it's the money. I suppose that's it.

  It usually is, Alec said.

  I hate it when we lose our good ones, she said.

  If he's really good it won't matter.

  She looked at him doubtfully and said, Now you can tell me about your day.

  That always made him laugh, because one day did not differ from the next. Maybe he'd lost the gift of narrative or misplaced it in a hearing room somewhere. At least a movie director could choose among scripts and select one actor over another, and on a sudden inspiration rewrite the ending, or decide to make a film in Brentwood instead of Yvelines. Of course you would have to survive the critics. But the film would always be yours, no matter what the critics said. He refilled their glasses and said that his day was routine, not worth discussing. He would rather hear about events at the embassy. So she told him about the latest intrigue, a bedroom farce involving the chef, the chef's wife, the wife's lover, and the psychiatrist who lived down the street. When Alec asked her the chef's name, she said it was Henri, why? And he explained about the chef who had inhabited Echo House so long ago.

  He loved listening to her and watching her move, as graceful as a dancer as she navigated the kitchen, all the while telling stories and holding her wine glass a few inches from her nose. Sandrine was near-sighted and excruciatingly shy. Crowds frightened her. At embassy receptions she tried to disappear behind the imposing suit of armor near the staircase; and that was where Alec found her one night at a dinner the ambassador gave for Axel. She stood with her face half-turned, concealed partly by chestnut curls that glowed in the light. She blushed when she touched her glasses with her forefinger, claiming she spoke English so imperfectly that conversation would be impossible. He moved slowly around her so that she could not avoid looking at him, but when she did, she recognized him as her neighbor, the one with the chic wife and two unruly children. He said something and she stammered a reply, looking at him sideways under her long commas of chestnut hair. When he introduced himself, she murmured a name he didn't catch. He spoke very softly, trying to forget the city he was in; he wanted to welcome her hesitant manner and evident embarrassment at being discovered. He went away and returned with two glasses of Champagne. When he asked her to tell him about the pictures in the room, she said she didn't know much about them.

  Some of them belonged to the embassy; others were from the ambassador's private collection. She was sorry to be of so little help, but art was not her métier. She didn't believe in métiers generally. Sandrine spoke haltingly in incomplete sentences laced with incomprehensible French slang. When he complimented her on her dress, she blushed. When he asked her about the charm on the thin gold necklace at her throat, she smiled and said, no. She said no to a question about the ring on her third finger, right hand, and no to a question about the small scar on her chin. He told her his name and his age. He said he had never been to France. When he asked if she had ever been to the Grand Canyon, she said maybe. He said he had always wanted to work in an embassy but that was out of the question now. She asked him what he did in Washington and he said, I live here. And I too, she said. He said something that made her smile and something else that made her laugh. She was so self-conscious. The women he knew were not shy. Perhaps they had been shy once but by the time he got to them they were as garrulous as senators, understanding that Washington did not reward hesitation or uncertainty. She still stood with her face half-turned from him but she was no longer blushing. Sandrine began to sip her Champagne, all the while inching around the suit of armor so that presently they were visible to the others in the room. She introduced him to her friend Avril Raye, who worked for the military attaché, and then the military attaché himself, a young colonel who regarded him with eyes filled with suspicion.

  They remained standing beside the suit of armor until dinner, where, by good fortune, they were seated across from each other. He learned that she worked in the commercial section of the embassy, something to do with imports. Avril Raye was seated on his left, but the table never turned. The dinner was small and conversation general. Axel was witty and provocative that night and Sandrine laughed and laughed, and even told a story of her own. Avril Raye and the milit
ary attaché wanted to talk politics, but Alec's comments were perfunctory, his attention directed at Sandrine. Alec saw the ambassador's wife look curiously at Sandrine, and then begin to smile.

  She's a great favorite of ours, the ambassador's wife said after dinner. We look on her as a daughter almost. She has not had an easy life. She is timid and perhaps does not have as much fun as she should. Washington is difficult for French people, so solemn and specific, so strenuous, so concerned with personalities. Sandrine needs someone reliable to care for her. Care about her, Alec said. That, too, the ambassador's wife agreed. Within the week Alec and Sandrine were lovers.

  They talked often of France, Sandrine admitting that she was homesick for French life, the long Sunday lunches in Montparnasse or at her parents' farm in Normandy. She missed her parents and her brother. She was homesick for Parisian conversation, the mortal combat of the intellectuals, and afternoons shopping with a friend in the boutiques in the Place de la Victoire or in St.-Germain-des-Prés. She missed Mass at St. Sulpice. She still kept her little blue Renault at the farm near St. Aubin and one day would return to reclaim it. But meanwhile she had to earn a living and the embassy paid well. The routine suited her and she was very fond of the ambassador and his wife and Avril Raye, who was a true friend and had proved it time and again. She did not feel it was time to leave Washington, dull and stupid as it had become. She and her former boyfriend had had happy times in America, and then he went to Vietnam on temporary assignment. If you were a French journalist, that was where you went in 1970. He had been droll about the assignment, saying that he intended to meticulously inventory the American errors as the Americans had inventoried the French; and they were the same errors. She had not truly recovered from the shock of the telephone call informing her that he had found an Amencan girl, also a journalist, and that they would be married in Saigon. It was natural that he would find an affinity with another of the same métier. That's usual, isn't it? There's so much to share.