The Cairo Affair (3 page)

But was it really a lie? Was she unhappy in Budapest?

No. She was forty-two years old, which was old enough to know good fortune when it looked her in the eye. With the help of L’Oréal, she’d held on to her looks, and a bout of high blood pressure a few years ago had been tempered by a remarkable French diet. They were not poor; they traveled extensively. While there were moments when she regretted the path her life had taken—at Harvard, she had aspired to academia or policy planning, and one winter day in Paris a French doctor had explained after her second miscarriage that children would not be part of her future—she always stepped back to scold herself. She might be sometimes bored, but adulthood, when well maintained, was supposed to be dull. Regretting a life of leisure was childishness.

Yet at nights she still lay awake in the gloom of their bedroom, wondering if anyone would notice if she hopped a plane back to Egypt and just disappeared, before remembering that her Cairo, the one she loved, no longer existed.

She and Emmett had been in Hungary five months when, in January, Egyptian activists had called for protests against poverty, unemployment, and corruption, and by the end of the month, on January 25, they’d had a “day of rage” that grew until the whole city had become one enormous demonstration with its epicenter in Tahrir Square, where Sophie would once go to drink tea.

On February 11, less than a month before their dinner at Chez Daniel, Hosni Mubarak had stepped down after thirty years in power. He wasn’t alone. A month before that, Tunisia’s autocrat had fled, and as Sophie and Emmett waited for their wine a full-scale civil war was spreading through Libya, westward from Benghazi toward Tripoli. The pundits were calling it the Arab Spring. She had health, wealth, and a measure of beauty, as well as interesting times to live in.

“Any fresh news from Libya?” she asked.

He leaned back, hands opening, for this was their perpetual subject. Emmett had spent an enormous amount of time watching CNN and shouting at the screen for the Libyan revolutionaries to advance on Tripoli, as if he were watching a football game, as if he were a much younger man who hadn’t already witnessed civil war. “Well, we’re expecting word soon from the Libyan Transitional Council—they’ll be declaring themselves Libya’s official representative. We’ve had a few days of EU sanctions against Gadhafi, but it’ll be a while before they have any effect. The rebels are doing well—they’re holding onto Zawiyah, just west of the capital.” He shrugged. “The question is, when are we going to get off our asses and drop a few bombs on Tripoli?”

“Soon,” she said hopefully. He had brought her over to the opinion that with a few bombs Muammar Gadhafi and his legions would fold within days, and that there would be no need for foreign troops to step in and, as Emmett put it,
soil their revolution.
“Is that it?” she asked.

“All we’ve heard.”

“I mean you. How was your day?”

The wine arrived, and the waiter poured a little into Emmett’s glass for approval. Sophie ordered fresh tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms, while Emmett asked for a steak, well done. Once the waiter was gone, she said, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Your day.”

“Right,” he said, as if he’d forgotten. “Not as exciting as yours. Work-wise, at least.”

“And otherwise?”

“I got a call from Cairo.”

It was a significant statement—at least, Emmett had meant it to be—but Sophie felt lost. “Someone we know?”

“Stan Bertolli.”

She heard herself inhale through her nose and wondered if he had heard it, too. “How’s Stan?”

“Not well, apparently.”

“What’s wrong?”

Emmett took his glass by the stem and regarded the wine carefully. “He tells me he’s in love.”

“Good for him.”

“Apparently not. Apparently, the woman he’s in love with is married.”

“You’re right,” she said, forcing her voice to flatline. The air seemed to go out of the room. Was this really happening? She’d imagined it before, of course, but never in a French restaurant. She said, “That’s not good.”

He took a breath, sipped his wine, then set it on the table. The whole time, his eyes remained fixed on the deep red inside the glass. Finally, quietly, he said, “Were you ever going to tell me?”

This, too, was not how she’d imagined it. She floundered for an answer, and her first thought was a lie:
Of course I was.
Before transforming the thought into speech, though, she realized that she wouldn’t have told him, not ever.

She considered going on the defensive and reminding him of how he had been in Cairo, how he had treated her as if she had been a perpetual obstacle. How he had pushed her away until, looking for something, anything, to complement her feelings of liberation she finally gave in to Stan’s approaches. Only partly true, but it might have been enough to satisfy him.

She said, “Of course I was going to tell you.”

“When?”

“When I got up the courage. When enough time had passed.”

“So we’re talking about years.”

“Probably.”

Chewing the inside of his cheek, Emmett looked past her at other tables, perhaps worried that they all knew he was a cuckold, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in thought.

What was there to think about? He’d had all day, but he still hadn’t decided, for this wasn’t only about an affair—it was about Emmett Kohl, and what kind of man he wanted to be. She knew him all too well.

One kind of man would kick her out of his life, would rage and throw his glass at her. But that wasn’t him. He would have had his “little shit” moment as soon as he hung up the telephone; his day of rage was over. He needed something that could show off his anger without forcing him to break character or descend into cliché—it was a tricky assignment.

She said, “It’s over. If that helps.”

“Not really.”

“Do you remember how you were in Cairo?”

His damp eyes were back on her, brow twitching. “You’re not going to twist this into my fault, are you?”

She looked down at her glass, which she still hadn’t touched. He knew very well how he had been in Cairo, but he wasn’t interested in drawing a connection between that and her infidelity. Were she him, she would have felt the same way.

He said, “Do you love him?”

“No.”

“Did you love him?”

“For a week I thought I might, but I was wrong.”

“Were you thinking about a divorce?”

She frowned, almost shocked by the use of a word that she had never considered. “God. No. Never. You’re…” She hesitated, then lowered her voice, pushing a hand across the table in his direction. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Emmett.”

He didn’t even acknowledge her hand. “Then …
why?
”

Anyone who’s committed adultery envisions this moment, plots it out and works up a rough draft of a speech that, she imagined, will cut through the fog with some ironclad defense of the indefensible. Sitting there, though, staring at his wounded face, she couldn’t remember any of it, and she found herself grasping for words. Yet all that came to her was hackneyed lines, as if she were reading from a script. But they were both doing that, weren’t they? “I was lonely, Emmett. Simple as that.”

“Who else knew?”

“What?”

“Who else knew about this?”

She pulled back her untouched hand. He was being petty now, as if it truly mattered whether or not someone knew of his bruised pride. But she could give him that. “No one,” she lied.

He nodded, but didn’t look relieved.

The food came, giving them time to regroup, and as she ate, cheeks hot and hand trembling, she reflected on how betrayed he had to feel. Hadn’t she known from the beginning that she would do this to him? Hadn’t she seen all this coming? Not really, for in Cairo she’d gone with the moment. In Cairo she’d been stupid.

Daniel had done an excellent job with her tagliatelle, perfectly tender, and there was a pepper sauce on Emmett’s steak that smelled divine. Emmett began to stab halfheartedly at his meat. The sight made her want to cry. She said, “What was it? In Cairo.”

He looked up—no exasperation, just simple confusion.

“You were a mess there. Me, too, I know, but you … well, you were impossible to live with. Paris was fine, and here. But in Cairo you were a different man.”

“So you
are
trying to blame me,” he said. Coldly.

“I just want to know what was on your back in Cairo.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said as he lifted a bite to his mouth. He delivered it. It was like a punctuation mark, that move.

“Cairo was bad from the start,” she went on, forcing the words out. “Not for me. No—I loved it. But you changed there, and you never told me anything.”

“So you fucked Stan.”

“Yes, I fucked Stan. But that doesn’t change the fact that you became someone else there, and once we left Cairo you returned to your old self.”

He chewed, staring through her.

“I’m not trying to start a fight, Emmett. I
like
the man you are now. I love him. I didn’t like the man you were there. So let’s get it out in the open. What was going on in Cairo?”

As he took another bite, still staring, something occurred to her.

“Were
you
having an affair?”

He sighed, disappointed by her stupidity.

“Then what was it?”

He still watched so coldly, but she could see his barriers breaking down. It was in the rhythm of his chewing, the way it slowed.

“Come on, Emmett. You can’t keep it a secret forever.”

He swallowed, his wrist on the edge of the table, his fork holding a fresh triangle of beef a few inches above his plate. He said, “Remember Novi Sad?”

There it was. Yugoslavia, twenty years ago.
I saved you, Sophie. This is how you pay me back?
She nodded.

“Zora?” he asked.

“Zora Balašević,” she said, her throat now dry.

“Zora was in Cairo.”

She knew this, of course, but said, “Cairo?”

“Working at the Serbian embassy. BIA—one of their spies. Not long after we arrived, she got in touch. Ran into me on the street.” He paused, finally putting down his fork. “I was pleased to see her. You remember—despite everything, we got along well in the end. We went to a café, reminiscing about the good stuff, careful to avoid the rest, and then it came. She wanted me to give her information.”

To breathe properly, Sophie had to leave her mouth open. This wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. Her sinuses were closing up. She said, “Well, that’s forward.”

“Isn’t it?” he said, smiling, not noticing anything. Briefly, he was in his story, looking just like her old husband. “I said no, so she put her cards on the table. She blackmailed me.”

She didn’t have to ask what Zora had blackmailed him with, and at that moment she had a flash of it: A filthy leg in a black army boot, spastic, kicking at the dirt of a basement. “The bitch,” she snapped, but she could feel herself reddening. It was so hot.

“You know what would happen if that came out. I’d never work in the diplomatic corps again. Ever. But I still said no.”

She was burning up. She grabbed the collar of her blouse and fanned it, drawing cool air down her shoulders. “Good for you,” she managed.

He shrugged, modest. “My mistake was that I didn’t report it.”

She tried to empty herself of all the heat in a long exhale. “You could have. You could’ve told Harry, or even Stan.”

“Sure, but I didn’t know that then. I’d been at the embassy less than a week. I didn’t know anything about those guys. Neither of us did. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. It would’ve looked like I’d been covering it up.”

He wanted affirmation, so she said, “I suppose you’re right.”

“Living under that cloud certainly didn’t help my mood. But that didn’t compare to later, when the whole thing came back to bite me.”

She waited.

“About a year ago, last March, Stan started asking questions. Not very subtle, your Stan.” A faint smile. “It turned out that loose information had been floating around, intel that originated in Cairo—intel I’d had access to. I was under investigation for most of last year.”

She moved back in time, remembering the fights, the moods, the drinking, the anger. It all played differently now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

That faint smile returned. “I didn’t want to burden you,” he said. “You were having such a good time. Of course, I didn’t know
why
you were so happy, but…” A shrug.

She didn’t know how he could have said that without hatred, but he had. She felt a hard knot in her chest.

He said, “It turned out that Stan already knew about Zora. His guys had been watching me when we first got there—normal vetting procedure. He’d seen me with her, and when the compromised intel came to his attention he followed up on it. So I told him what happened. I told him what she tried to do, and I told him that I refused.”

“Did you tell him about…?”

“I left the blackmail a mystery, and he finally let that go. He never asked you?”

She shook her head, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe he had.

“Anyway, I told him that Zora hadn’t tried again. I never even saw her after that. But he didn’t believe me. He sat me down for more talks, trying to trip me up on my story. Eventually, he brought Harry into it. Stan showed him his evidence, but no one ever showed it to me. I was lucky—Harry wanted to believe me. Still, he couldn’t afford to have me around anymore, so he suggested I put in for a transfer. Make me someone else’s problem, I suppose.”

“Stan never told me any of this,” she said, but it was getting harder to find air, and the last word barely made it out.

“Secrets are his game, aren’t they?”

Silence fell between them, and Emmett returned to his steak.

People talk of conflicting emotions as if they’re a daily occurrence, but at that moment Sophie felt as if it were the first time she’d experienced them. Honesty pulled from one side, while the other side, the one that was motivated by self-preservation, held a tighter grip. She stared at her pasta, knowing she wouldn’t be able to taste it anymore, maybe not even be able to keep it down, and it occurred to her that maybe her husband deserved to know. To
really
know. Exactly what kind of a woman he was married to. It would be the end, of course. The end of everything. Yet when she thought back to their honeymoon, it was obvious that he was the one person on the planet who deserved to know it all. He was probably the only person who could understand.