"No, sweetie, I'm not angry."
The voting stuff was inspired, and clearly her way of retaliating. No wonder Vietnam had won the war. My husband, who had spent many of the war years there, said the Vietnamese were both dogged and absolutely mystified as to what we were doing there, why we cared as much as we did. He spoke fluent Vietnamese, and they said things to him in their language that they wouldn't say to translators, even to reporters. Do you think we have oil? one man asked him. Is that why you're here? Will's theory was that we stayed because it was a beautiful country, because the women were beautiful and the food was French, and if you were a high-ranking military man, which he was not, you got a salary differential because it was a hardship post, and you traded money on the black market, and you ended up with enough to play the stock market on your crummy army pay, and you had a magnificent Vietnamese girlfriend and your best buddy had her sister, and your wife was far, far away. Vicki might have grown up to be one of those women, I thought. Sly, beautiful, stricken at an early age with a presentiment of loss.
"Are you going to tell my father?" she said.
The lengths to which she had gone to seize my attention bespoke more longing than I could bear to imagine existing inside her skin, and it echoed my own for her, and I wasn't sure I could speak of one to him without revealing the other, which was why I decided at that moment not to tell him, though I should have; believe me, I know I should have.
"If Toinette doesn't know you're gone, and if we can whisk you into the house as sneakily as you got out, I won't tell him. But it may be too late to promise that."
She did something then that surprised me, something else, I should say. She leaned more heavily into me and wrapped both of her arms around me and held me tight, as if she were five instead of ten. Of course I hugged her back, and I almost said something I had never said to her or the other children: I love you. I had wanted to say it a dozen times but always stopped myself, afraid it would confuse them, being loved and abandoned by so many people. I did not want to burden what went on between us with the weight of my love.
We held on to each other until the cab turned the corner that led to her house, and I slowly loosened my grip. In another minute, another twenty-five seconds, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, we'd have to say good-bye and pretend this had never happened.
3. Today, During
I DIDN'T KNOW, when I fell in love with him, that my husband was a spy. It's not like God or infertility, the sort of thing you talk about on a first date. His cover was that he was a diplomat. My cover, to use the term more loosely, was that we met as he was about to leave the Agency, that I didn't know him in the days when he was trying underhandedly to save the Free World from the Red Menace. The truth is that Will was a reluctant Cold Warrior, an ambivalent operative, someone who'd stayed at the Agency until he retired, at the age of forty-eight, because by the time he grasped how wrong our Vietnam policy was, his wife was pregnant with their son, Jesse, he had been working in Vietnam and Cambodia on and off for five years, and the skills he had acquired there didn't translate easily, or lucratively.
In those days, there was no market outside government for fluent Vietnamese speakers, and Will was neither an entrepreneur nor a man who spotted opportunities for his own advancement and seized them. He did his job, collected his government paycheck, and saw the world. By the time he told me that he was not entirely the person he had represented himself to be, I already trusted him more deeply than I had ever trusted anyone. I wouldn't say he'd tricked me into trusting him; more that he'd fooled himself all those years he'd worked for the CIA, doing things he didn't believe in. He never talked much about the details.
We had met while I was hitchhiking on Swansea, on Honeysuckle Road, the blustery north end of the island. I had my thumb out, and Will picked me up in Blueberry Parfait, the old navy blue VW Bug his kids had given that name to. I was heading back to the bed-and-breakfast in the harbor town of Cummington, where I was staying with a boyfriend, though we were a reluctant couple by then, held together by habit, inertia, and fear. Will was going in my direction, on his way to an art gallery showing the drawings he had done in art therapy in the psychiatric hospital where he'd spent a month the year before.
I knew none of this that afternoon, about the CIA or the psych ward or what led to his going there. He said only that he was a diplomat and a Sunday painter with a summer house on the island. A friend with a modest gallery on Old Settlers Road had been kind enough to hang a few drawings. I imagined seascapes, cat pictures, front porches thick with hanging plants and golden retrievers, Swansea at its cloying worst. Once we got to the gallery, I intended to hitch another ride. It's common on the island; doesn't mean you're looking for trouble. There isn't any to be had here. But there was nothing cloying about Will's drawings. They were intricate and dark and George Grosz-like, and when he offered to drive me to my destination if I could wait fifteen minutes, I said yes.
I said yes and yes and yes to him for the rest of the summer. He was gentle and loving and sad and taught me to jitterbug to Benny Goodman and Dizzy Gillespie in the living room of his charming run-down bungalow. When we danced, his aged Labrador, Binti, thumped her tail in time to the beat. We told each other stories and secrets, the way lovers do, and, the way lovers do, we did not tell each other everything. He told me that his son, Jesse, had died the year before in a car crash, in which he, Will, had been driving, and that he had come close a month later to killing himself. But he did not tell me that he'd been a spy for the last twenty years.
I told him that my first novel, which became a movie with Whoopi Goldberg, was inspired by a true story: after my father disappeared when I was nine, my mother and I crossed the country looking for him, accompanied by my mother's friend, a wise and funny black woman named Gladys but whom we called Gigi, because she yearned to go to Paris. We never found my father, but we had a lot of adventures on the journey, some comic, some poignant, several downright pathetic. In the movie version, we find dear old Dad when we have the good sense to give up looking, when we return home defeated. There he is in the living room, with his feet on the ottoman. In the movie version, he was having a midlife crisis that dissolved, like baking soda in water, when he set eyes on my mother and me again. In real life, Mr. Warren Chase disappeared without a trace. It is possible that he will turn up yet, that he will call me, or someone else will and announce that she is my sister or my father's wife. I hoped it would happen when my book about him came out, and again when the movie with Whoopi Goldberg came out. I sometimes imagine him in Arizona or California, renting a video or turning on the TV and seeing the Hollywood version of what happened to us when he vanished.
My father's having left the way he did always made me fear that my husband would leave the same way, that I would end up abandoned and in pursuit of him, the way my mother pursued my father. But I surprised Will and myself: I was the one who disappeared.
Will's life as a spy has nothing to do with the beginning of this next scene-a pivotal scene-but does play in an exchange between Daniel and me toward the end of it, and it loops in and out of much that follows.
The scene begins on a light note, with Daniel arriving in my apartment that afternoon at the stroke of four, sweat pouring down his forehead, a soaked handkerchief in his fist. "Christ, have you been out today?"