I’d been telling myself for a long time that I wanted out of the life, but it was only recently, with Delilah, that the longing had become real. For a while, she had been heading in the same direction. Her organization blamed her for losing a colleague, an assassin called Gil, in an otherwise successful terrorist takedown in Hong Kong, and was set to cut her loose. But she’d faced them down and forced her way back in, and now she was more determined than ever to stay.
I was ambivalent about her work. On the one hand, it gave me space, which I liked. On the other hand, her continued presence in the life inhibited my own efforts to leave it. Part of it was the behavioral cues-the need for a ready cover story when I was with her in case she ran into someone she knew, and her routine perimeter checks and other tactics-which continued to remind me of who I’d always been. Part of it was ongoing operational necessity, because as long as she was in the life, she was at risk, and if you’re with someone at risk, you’d better believe you’re at risk, too. And part of it was notionaclass="underline" if I was this involved with someone still in the life, how far could I have left the life behind?
I pushed her sometimes, but not too hard. I’d learned Delilah was a fighter, and if she felt she was being doubted, or second-guessed, or in any way talked down to, she had a tendency to come out swinging.
“Why not retire?” I asked her once, over café-crèmes and croissants at Le Loir dans la Théière, a restaurant on the rue des Rosiers named after the dormouse in the teacup in Alice in Wonderland. Delilah had introduced me to the place, and I loved the mismatched chairs and small wooden tables, the eclectic wall art, the wonderful smell of years of fresh ground coffee. “We could buy an apartment on the beach in Barcelona. Make love to the sounds of the waves at night, walk on the beach in the morning. Nothing but the feel of the sun and the smell of coffee and cava and no bad memories.”
She smiled and pushed back a strand of blond hair. Her blue eyes were lit by sunlight coming through the restaurant’s large front windows. “You make it sound enticing. Especially the making love part.”
“That was my favorite, too.”
She laughed. “I don’t know, John. I don’t know.”
I took a sip of coffee and watched her. I liked it when she called me John. My Rolodex is slim, and the few people in it tend not to use my first name. Midori had called me Jun, short for Junichi, my Japanese given name, and at the time I had liked that very much, too. But that was before she had betrayed me to protect our infant son, and thereby denied me a part in his life. Among the bad memories I had just mentioned, Midori held a prominent position.
“What would you do if you were doing something else?” I asked. “If you’d never gotten into the life. Do you ever think about that?”
“Sometimes,” she allowed.
“What would it be?”
“I don’t know,” she said again. “Maybe fashion photography. That’s the cover I’ve been living in Paris, and I like it. I suppose I could have done it for real.”
“Then do it now.”
She took my hand. “You know I can’t. Iran is poised to go nuclear, we have Hamas in the territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Things are going to get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. I can’t just walk away to photograph anorexic girls on catwalks.”
“Is that all you’d be walking away for?”
“You know what I mean.”
I tried again one evening as we stood pressed together on Pont Sully, taking in the glowing lights of the Ile Saint-Louis and the illuminated buttresses of Notre Dame. “Your organization is using you,” I told her. “You’ve said so yourself. Why don’t you just walk away?”
I felt her stiffen, and she took a half-step back. “I’ve told you before,” she said, looking at me. “The ‘organization’ isn’t the point. This is about my country. My people.”
I shook my head. “I don’t buy it. I think this is about you standing up to the men who blamed you for Gil getting killed in Hong Kong. Showing them you’re tougher than they are, that they can’t drive you out.”
“Why does everything have to be so one dimensional with you? Yes, I have personal reasons for staying. My dignity is involved, fine, I admit it. But why can’t you at least acknowledge there are other reasons, too?”
“Because…”
“I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’ve never been tied to anything larger than yourself. You don’t believe in anything. So you can’t imagine someone who does. She must be either deluded or lying or naive.”
I felt myself flush. “I understand your selfless reasons better than you know. I also understand the more devotion you give to the organization or the corps or the country, the more it’ll hollow you out when you realize your love was always unrequited. The more you’ll feel betrayed.”
We were quiet for a moment. She said, “It doesn’t have to be that way for everyone.”
“You know anyone whose experience has been different?”
We stared at each other. Her eyes were narrowed and her nostrils flared slightly with her breathing. That’s the way it was with us. We could go from bliss and harmony to anger and recriminations as fast and with as little warning as a tropical storm. What made it bearable, what made it good, was that the foul weather would pass with equal suddenness, usually leaving something glorious in its wake.
“Anyway,” I said, “I am tied to something larger than myself. I’m tied to you.”
Her eyes softened. Then she stepped in close and kissed me. I turned my head away, still irritated, but she reached up and turned me back. I resisted for another moment, mostly for form’s sake, and then gave in.
We stood like that for a minute or so, and the kiss grew into something more. I could feel her breasts, the heat of her skin, and suddenly I wanted badly to be alone with her someplace.
She broke the kiss and hooked her fingers through my belt. “Let’s go to your apartment,” she said. “We can fight better there.”
We did. And things were good again, until next time, when the pattern would repeat itself.
But between the periodic swings from bitter argument to sweet resolution, things were mostly good. I haven’t been deeply involved with many women, but among them, only Delilah really knew about, and accepted, what I was beginning to try to think of as my past. The surprising depth of our mutual chemistry, and the improbability of the romance it led to, was a quiet miracle for me. Delilah shared with me intimacies that I sensed came from the deepest places within her, aspects of her mind and her body that by long habit she had learned to protect ferociously and that she conceded now only slowly, cautiously, with fear-tinged hope.
I found myself opening up with her, as well. I’d meant it when I told her I was getting attached. I’d been alone so long, I’d learned to conceive of myself that way, but slowly and strangely, my conception of myself was beginning to include someone else. Sometimes the attachment scared me, and felt like a burden. Other times it seemed like a life raft, or at least like ballast. Either way, it was real, and deepening.
But one thing I didn’t share with Delilah was the onset of periodic…anxiety attacks, for want of a better description. Occasionally, I would get so lost in a book in a café that I would neglect to look up when I heard someone come in, or so lost in thought on a morning stroll that I’d suddenly realize an entire minute had elapsed and I hadn’t checked my back. At those moments, I’d be gripped by a kind of horror, the feeling you get if you accidentally run a red light at full speed and miraculously manage to breeze through the intersection unscathed. You can tell yourself no harm, no foul, but still you know you fucked up, that in another universe you were annihilated by a truck coming from your left, or you mowed down a young mother stepping off the curb, or were overtaken by some similar catastrophe. A primal part of your mind screams, How could you be so careless? Do you want to die?