“Well, you’ve succeeded,” Rita Macklin said. “Did you have fun getting away from me?”
She wanted to hurt him.
“What about women, Dev? You’re good-looking. You can have women and you want them. You could seduce them the way you seduced me the first time we met in Florida. You just crept into my mind and sat there until I had to spread my legs for you. I didn’t go to bed with men then the way women go to bed with men now. I didn’t sleep with men because I felt like it or I had an itch that day or because I was bored or because it seemed a good way to end the evening. I was a good girl, Dev, by the standards of the times. Did you screw me because I was a good girl and that counted for more, to get a good girl?”
He wouldn’t answer her; or maybe the silence was answer. She leaned forward.
“You had women when you left me, when you wouldn’t call me. I called you and called you and I wanted you. But you were away, screwing women.”
“I slept with other women,” he said. “That’s what you want me to say.”
Yes. Exactly what she wanted.
“I slept with other men,” she said. “I didn’t miss you at all. There was a war correspondent, a wonderful man, we made love and I fell in love with him. Barry. I really loved him.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed in Nicaragua. Terrorists. Or the government. It didn’t matter because he was dead in any case.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I never missed you. I thought you were dead. I thought they pretended to relay my telephone calls to you because they didn’t want anyone to know that an agent had died. They’re bastards, spooks. They could do that. They think they can do anything.”
“I missed you every day and every night.”
“You’re a liar. You tell that to all the girls. Girls are made to be lied to.”
“I’m not lying to you, Rita.”
“You said words lie. I remember that. So if words lie, why are you telling me things? You tell me you’ll never leave me but you’re going to leave me to find Henry McGee.”
“Don’t you want me to leave? Then I’ll stay. I won’t go after Henry McGee. To hell with Section.”
They were silent for a long time in the looming darkness of the room. The darkness was palpable because of the edge of light from the moonlit windows. Every object was soft and warm because of the darkness. The room painted their eyes. She saw his eyes, saw the gray so honest that it pained both of them.
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes. I’ll quit Section. I don’t owe them anymore. And I can leave now because the cold war is over and all the soldiers can go home.”
“Will they let you?”
“They’ll have to.”
“And you’ll stay with me.”
“Until you’re old and gray and don’t even want to make love anymore.”
My God.
She reached across the darkness and he held her and felt her body beneath the thin satin dress and felt the bones of illness and smelled her sweet breath and the sweet flower odor of her unperfumed skin. She buried her face in his neck and kissed him and felt the wince of pain across his shoulders and let him go.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.
He reached for her again. He kissed her with the gentleness of yearning. “I love you.”
“Don’t the words lie anymore?”
“No. Deceit has retired,” he said. He held her tightly.
“Oh, Dev. I wanted you all the time. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was running away from you. I thought it was better to hurt you once and for all than to hurt you in little doses all your life. I thought you’d just get fed up and turn your back and forget me.”
“I wanted to. I really wanted to. I hated you. You walked out on me and that really hurt. You hurt my pride. I thought my love was worth a lot more. I thought if I loved someone, anyone, they’d have to see they didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t walk out on me because I loved them.”
And for the first time, she saw the change.
My God, she thought, there are no lies at all.
Because he was crying and he had never done that before.
28
They did not make love. They lay together in darkness, in her bedroom in the still of midnight in the town house. They were naked next to each other and they saw the wounds on each other. He said he loved her again and she believed him, just as she believed him when he said he would never leave her. She had won him by dying; he had recovered his life by dying. They had both died and awakened in spring. They had no winter left to them. He was no longer November, frozen in time and space across the years in the position of a winter soldier, an agent of violence and silence.
She had wept many times.
Now she was not weeping. They lay in silence, exhausted by all their words to each other.
“Henry McGee,” she said.
He turned to her and could see her profile in the lamp of moonlight that filtered through the curtained window. She was more beautiful than he had ever remembered her, even the first time he had met her on that beach in Florida, even the first time he had tasted of her sweet breath and made love to her body.
“I love you, Dev. You were the only love in my life. Even if I thought I loved another man. Even Barry, who was sweet and gentle and brave.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry he died.”
“Henry McGee,” she said. “I should thank him for shooting me. He brought you back to me.”
He saw how bitter it was with her and he couldn’t say anything.
She looked at him. “You do love me.”
“I always did. I couldn’t move, I was frozen away from you.”
“The world. It was the world you lived in. You don’t have to live in it anymore. It was agents and death and deceit and lies and spies and all of that and you couldn’t tell me and you couldn’t let me in it.”
“No.”
“Were you going to arrest Henry McGee? If I let you go?”
“No.”
“Were you going to thank him for bringing you to your senses and back to me?”
He didn’t know what to say.
“You see, Dev? How I’ve changed, too?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Rita.”
“I know you are. But the hurts are still there.”
“Yes.”
“If I told you to get out of my sight and leave me alone, would you do that?”
“I told you: I’ll never leave you.”
“Then you’re going to impose yourself again. Like kidnapping me from the sanitarium. I’m not afraid of you. I could put you in jail for a long time. I’ve got my own life. Or I could let you hang around and just hurt you all the time. Do you know how a woman can do that? There are thousands of ways. You see men being hurt all the time. I could do that to you.”
He waited in the darkness.
“It’s a bad world, full of bad people,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you bad or good, Dev? I just want to know.”
“I don’t know what I am.”
“You saved that little boy’s life on the island that time. You didn’t have to do that. Our little black son, Philippe, back home again and working to save his people from themselves.”
Devereaux waited.
“That was good,” she said in her soft, absent voice. Her voice had changed as well. “Then there’s murder. That’s always bad, Dev. I told you to kill a man once and you didn’t do it at first, not when I told you to kill him. I would have killed him myself. Instead you waited and he hurt me and hurt me and then you finally killed him. Is that it? Did you get some pleasure out of his hurting me that made it more pleasurable to kill him finally?”