The Unwitting (35 page)

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I shook my head. The picture shattered like a mirror breaking, but the anger lingered. I told her I was late because I’d just gotten off the phone with someone at the NAACP. “A fellow named Woody Jordan. You remember, the lawyer who was on the trip to Russia with you.”

Her face went still as a mask. If I’d had any doubts, her reaction dispelled them. The image of the two of them in bed returned. I shook my head again to smash it. Then I told her about the letter written in the Birmingham jail.

“Elliot’s going to give you hell,” she said.

“Elliot’s not the publisher, I am.” Oh, the bravado of a cuckold.

I will always wonder at what she did next. Was it a confession or a gesture of love, or were they not mutually exclusive? They wouldn’t be for me. She got up, came around the desk, and crossed the room to me. When she was inches away, she opened my trench coat and slipped inside it, and there in the overheated office, with rain pelting the windows and the staff wandering past the door, we stood holding each other as we had years ago, when we had been drunk on the newness of us and the limitlessness of a future that had become the soiled, written-in-stone past. That was when I knew that I would go to my grave debating the ethics of what I had done, but I would never forget her lie to me, and I would never forgive myself for lying to her.

Twenty-Five

I
SAT STARING AT
the last page. He had known, and he had never said anything. I wished now he had. I tried to imagine our life if we had dragged all the secrets out into the open. Would we have absolved each other? Or would we merely have pretended to forgive and carried festering grudges? I’d never know.

I got out the stepladder, carried it and the journal to the big walkin closet, and climbed to the top. The space was a clutter of boxes of old hats and shoes I would never wear but could not bring myself to throw out. I put the journal behind them. I wasn’t sure if I was hiding it from Abby or from myself.

A week later, I got out the ladder again, climbed to the top shelf, took the journal down, and put it in my night table drawer. Some nights I managed not to look at it; more often I found myself opening the drawer, taking it out, and reading through it. After a while I knew the words almost by heart, but the meaning was more elusive. It shifted with each reading. Some nights I raged against him, others against myself. Once, Abby wandered in, and I slipped it beneath the covers. After that, I took to putting it inside another book, as if it were the pornography of my marriage.

Meanwhile, Charlie and I debated. Occasionally, I lost my temper. Even in my head, Charlie was still Charlie. He never raised his voice. When I realized the way I was staging the encounters, I had to laugh. Then I started to cry.

My emotions were on a hair trigger. I blamed myself for the night in Leningrad. I blamed Charlie for the state of the world. Several months earlier, I had sat in my bedroom staring at the television in stunned disbelief as a South Vietnamese police chief raised a revolver to the temple of a Viet Cong prisoner and the prisoner crumpled to the ground. A small shocked
oh
, like the pop of a toy gun, escaped my mouth. A hallucination of Charlie going down went off in my brain like a flashbulb.

One morning I opened the paper and read, in an article seemingly so unimportant that it was beneath the fold, of a Lieutenant Calley, who was charged with the murder of an unspecified number of Vietnamese civilians. When I turned to the inside page where the article continued, I discovered the unspecified number might add up to 109.

This is what you brought on, I told Charlie’s empty chair across the table. I did not raise my voice. The horror screamed for itself.

This was in the future, he argued. I didn’t see it coming. No one did.

That’s the point, I countered. First it’s a harmless little fib about funding. Next we’re overthrowing duly elected governments, assassinating uncooperative heads of state, and murdering civilians in corners of the world where we have no business being. It’s a variation on the domino theory your friends are always talking about. Subvert one safeguard, and the rule of law comes tumbling down.

He was quiet. I had finally beaten him. Pyrrhic victory, once over lightly for breakfast.

But one battle does not determine a war. On autumn evenings when I looked out the window and saw darkness rising from the trees in the park and on soft spring nights when the air ached with a promise that would never be kept, I came face-to-face with my own dishonesty, and not only about Leningrad. I raged at Charlie for the Viet Cong prisoner who slumped to the ground like a rag doll and the 109 civilians, give or take a few women and children, but, and I
am not proud of this, his betrayal of me was the pain that would not let up.

You cannot run a magazine devoted to the pursuit of truth, I told him, while you’re lying to everyone connected with it, including me. Me, me, me.

What about you? he asked, and a cruel smile played around his thin mouth. What about the lie of Leningrad?

My mistake—I started.

Mistake
, he taunted.

My betrayal was a single incident, committed under duress. I don’t absolve myself, but it didn’t give the lie to our entire marriage.

One withheld fact does not give the lie to an entire marriage, he countered.

Withheld fact, I taunted in return. How about the betrayal of everything we believed in?

Again and again, it came back to that. How had we loved each other so much and understood each other so little?

Twenty-Six

M
ORE THAN A
year after I finally put the journal aside, not in the top of my closet as if I were trying to hide it, but in the drawer in Charlie’s dresser where years ago I had found widowed cuff links, old medals from the war, and letters I’d written him, I called Frank Tucker and asked if he was still interested in the piece he had wanted me to write.

“You mean the one about how Charlie snookered you and screwed the country?”

“That’s not the way I’ll phrase it, but yes, that one.”

“So you’ve finally realized the truth is more important than your girlish heart.”

“Are you interested or not?”

“Sure. The topic’s still hot. Every day someone spills more beans. There’s bound to be a government investigation. More than one probably.”

The research for the article was difficult. Few people who had been involved were willing to talk. But I did make one discovery, or at least draw one conclusion, and it gave me such joy that, sitting at my typewriter, I let out a yelp of pleasure. The CIA had not gotten its money’s worth.
All you’ll be doing is helping people say what they would have said anyway
, Elliot had told Charlie at the first lunch. It was a recruiter’s ploy, but Elliot’s lie had turned into truth.
The Agency had showered money on magazines and books and art shows and foreign travel, and all they’d gotten in return was a bunch of unwieldy artists and intellectuals going their own way and having a damn good time of it. The recipients shaded issues here and there, but they didn’t deliver anywhere near the millions of dollars’ worth of propaganda the Agency was paying for. The CIA had been snookered, just as I had.

The second part of that sentence was the painful part. Writing about my marriage was like slicing myself open. I made an effort to explain Charlie’s reasoning and motivation, but I didn’t try to whitewash him. Any more than in the privacy of my own conscience I tried to whitewash myself. I was past the point in life when I believed people were of a piece. I had learned to live with ambiguity. If you can’t, you have no business falling in love.

The response to the article was mixed. Some letters to the editor suggested that Charlie had acted for the good of the country and I’d better grow up. Others railed against him for undermining the American system and warned that the road to tyranny was paved with means justified by ends. One woman wrote that Charlie was a swine, and she wasn’t saying that only because she, too, was a wronged wife. The editor said he printed that one for comic relief. I smiled, though I didn’t find it amusing.

The responses from people I knew were more surprising. Charlie’s parents had never mentioned the television news special, though I was sure they knew about it. Now they said they were glad I had made people understand Charlie’s feeling for the country that had saved them. Then his mother mentioned that just the other day she had seen the ghost of her sister in Prospect Park again.

My mother had no interest in the political or moral issues, but she found vicarious shame in the personal implications. In her mind, my having been duped by a man reflected on her. She was also worried about my sullying Abby’s view of her father. I told her to look
on the bright side. Now Abby wouldn’t measure every man she met against an unrealistic image. I didn’t add that I was the one who had fashioned that false hero. I had asked too much of Charlie.

A MONTH OR
so after the article came out, on a blindingly bright winter Wednesday, I ran into Elliot on Fifth Avenue. I was walking north and he was coming south, and we almost collided. I started to turn away, but he put his hand on my arm to stop me.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, and I realized it was. Though I hadn’t forgiven him, suddenly face-to-face with him, I was having a hard time hating him. Charlie always said I was an expert at outrage but no good at carrying a grudge, except against my mother.

He asked how I was and wanted to know what Abby was up to. I said we were both fine.

He took off his dark glasses and squinted at me through the glare. “I miss her. I miss you both.”

The comment caught me off guard. That was why, standing in the middle of the sidewalk while the midday crowd hurried back to offices, streamed into Saks, and came out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral with soot-smeared foreheads—it was Ash Wednesday—I took off my own dark glasses and gave myself away.

“I just want to know one thing. It was bad enough that you corrupted Charlie. Why did you have to come after me too?”

He tilted his head to one side and smiled, not the cool blue-eyed smile that he used to keep people at bay, but an unguarded grin that came and went so quickly I almost missed it.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we only fell for the right people?”

The words were as close to a personal confession as I’d ever heard him make, and suddenly it occurred to me that whatever had been between us was as unfathomable as the love Charlie and I had known. Not as devastating or fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants fizzy, but inexplicable just the same. I suppose any attachment worth its salt is.

And I knew something else as well. I would always have come
second with Elliot, just as he would have with me. His real love was the secret. I suspect that many in his line of work share the passion. They talk about God and country, but what they mean is I-know-something-you-don’t. Charlie had not been one of them. The secret had tortured him. It intoxicated Elliot. As we stood in the merciless light, bound by our long tangled history, separated by what I now knew about it, I finally saw him clearly. And I knew suddenly that he was capable of a lot, but not of Charlie’s murder.