Julia was adamant their affair remain casual, not disrupting — let alone destroying — either of their marriages, and she asked about Katherine constantly. They’d never met, but Julia seemed genuinely interested in her. Not out of jealousy — more like Julia was so concerned about her potential threat to Alexi’s relationship that she wanted to protect his wife in some way. She was forever inquiring about Katherine’s background, her job, always taking her side when hearing about some minor tiff, even when Alexi didn’t think he was asking her to choose sides, and he could never tell if it was his wife in particular or some sort of intrinsic loyalty to other women (even if she was, in fact, the other woman).
But Alexi always obliged and answered her questions, sometimes talking about Katherine for so long that he could almost see her in Julia’s house with them. His pretty, wavy-haired wife, complimenting Julia on her spacious Neutra, on her yard, on the wooden deck that stretched out to a garden filled with juniper and jacaranda trees. He could see the three of them sitting around Julia’s bright red patio table, Katherine shielding her eyes from the sun, fielding Julia’s queries about Benny, about the design world, Julia doling out advice on how to nudge her boss into giving her more challenging projects, Katherine shooting Alexi a look that this woman was pushy. Then Katherine would flip the conversation back to Julia — she seemed to believe sharing anything about her accomplishments was inherently shameful and immodest — and as soon as talk of the movie came up, Julia and Alexi would immediately launch into some mistake they’d made at work and lean in together, trying to untangle whatever knot they’d created. And Katherine would sit back, stare up at the trees and tell them both in the calm, no-nonsense voice she’d perfected even before motherhood, to stop their useless analyzing: no one else on the film was possibly obsessing over whatever slight they feared they’d made, and why couldn’t they just enjoy the lovely afternoon?
What Alexi never got to tell Julia, before she’d named names and severed all contact with him, was that she shouldn’t have felt so guilty, that a twisted and terrible part of him wondered if the affair had actually made him a better husband. Somehow spending all that time with Julia, talking about Katherine, only reinforced his love for his wife. Plus getting to obsess over everything work-related with Julia meant he didn’t need to burden Katherine with any of it, letting him throw all his energy into his family. And Katherine was spared his boring industry stories when he knew, strutting around the set in his military boots with a war-torn, gutted-out backdrop behind him, that Julia was waiting on the sidelines, ready to go out for drinks and pick apart everything that had happened on the movie that day, looking, if not for her pantsuit and heavy script under an arm, like one of her own characters, a dark-haired Soviet beauty pining for Lev back in the village.
He’d always felt so rejuvenated, coasting down Culver from the studio, back home to his wife and son. It was as if he were finally fulfilled. Katherine satisfied him maybe ninety percent but Julia was perfect for that niggling ten. Very little made him happier than pulling into his driveway and seeing, through the window, his family moving around inside, a diorama of his life he could so effortlessly step back into. Katherine’s boss had finally agreed to let her take a stab at designing — sometimes at dinner they’d clink glasses to their good fortune — and Alexi used to feel so blessed walking in and finding her on the living room floor, going over sketches, surrounded by fabric swatches and charcoal pencils. He loved listening to her talk about flax and bark cloth, comparing Prouvé to Ponti, words as foreign and beautiful to Alexi as Italian or Portuguese.
Katherine never got a chance to finish the project. When Alexi was called in to testify, her boss, a man they’d had for dinner half a dozen times, whose son used to play with Benny, said he just didn’t want to “get caught up in all that business” and fired her as quickly as he’d hired her. Now she was working at a dress shop she’d once frequented in Century City and waiting on, Alexi was certain, the same women she used to shop and lunch with. Women Alexi doubted were calling anymore, let alone inviting her to parties and outings with their children, no one wanting to get their hands dirty, no one believing for a second that the wife of Alexi Liebman hadn’t been involved in anti-American activities as well.
“SO THINGS haven’t been easy,” Alexi said now, turning to his son. Benny was sprawled on the narrow motel bed, clutching his root beer with both hands. “Is she — talking to you about this?”
“She said she saw those FBI guys everywhere. So Aunt Ellen told her to see a psychiatrist.”
“Benny.” Alexi set down his drink. “Have you been eavesdropping on your mother?”
He shook his head. “She tells me. But she doesn’t see Dr. Bittman anymore.”
“He fixed her?”
“No,” Benny said. “Stella, from the movie? She came over a couple months ago. She said she felt bad doing this — and she really seemed to — but that Mom had to stop going to Dr. Bittman. That what she told him could put a lot of people in trouble. Stella gave her the name of a good one in the Party.”
Alexi looked around the room, at the frayed carpet and the yellow bedspreads and his son beside him, his tongue licorice-black. So Katherine was being watched from both sides. “And she went to this new psychiatrist?”
“She was pretty upset after Stella’s visit. So she isn’t seeing anyone.” Benny shrugged, but the gesture looked false and exaggerated. This was not the way, Alexi thought, that a nine-year-old was supposed to talk. “During the day she’s okay,” Benny continued, “but at night sometimes she thinks they’re at the window, and it’s just a branch. Or she makes me check inside closets and behind doors. But lately she sleeps with me, and that makes it better.”
“And those FBI men—were they following her?”
“Mostly they’d just park across the street and watch us. Once I went out to the side yard and saw them going through our trash, and another time they threw their sandwich crusts on our lawn, but other than that they were alright,” Benny said, as if the whole thing were perfectly normal, as if he were simply describing nuisancy neighbors, and Alexi felt his throat constrict. He stood up. He scooped all the wrappers off the bed and tossed them in the garbage. “Let’s get you to sleep.”
Benny pulled out a little leather toiletry kit — Alexi could see everything in there, so neatly packed, even a bag of tissues, and a tiny spool of floss Katherine must have measured out just for this trip. His son was a good brusher, working even his back teeth and gums, and Alexi found that he was keeping his own toothbrush in his mouth much longer than he would have were he alone.