Andersen, Kurt (19 page)

He stops, leans back, smiles. “Sorry about the rant. You know me.”

“I do indeed.” In fact, he’s weirdly consistent: a radical who passionately despises liberals and other misguided Americans in 1968, a conservative who passionately despises liberals and other misguided Americans in 2014.

I’ve been here almost half an hour. Because I’ve kept it friendly, let him rattle on without getting into a real debate, he’s relaxed. That was my plan. I’m playing the good cop, and he doesn’t even know I’m playing a cop. Finally, he pops the big Washington question.

“Any regrets,” he asks, “about taking yourself out of the running for the Supreme Court? Because you’d’ve been a hell of a lot better Democrat choice than the weasel they picked.”

I give an abridged version of my standard answer. “Never served on the federal bench? And sixty-two years old at the time? Wasn’t going to happen.”

“But you practiced in the real world, private-sector law for profit-making enterprises! And in any case, why short-circuit the process? Frankly? I think you did yourself a disservice.” He sips his coffee. “Reputationally.”

Can he be serious?
You have no idea the disservice I’m about to do myself. And you. Reputationally.
“Buzzy, I think you can figure out why I couldn’t go through with it. The vetting, the White House lawyers’ questions. ‘Is there anything in your personal history that could be controversial or embarrassing?’ We committed
felonies
in 1968. Big felonies, Federal Class C for sure, arguably Class A.” The prosecutorial jargon gets people’s attention. “People died, Buzzy.”

He blanches. He puts down his coffee. He frowns. He sighs.

What if he responds the way Alex did?
I have no idea what you’re talking about, Karen, none, not a clue, you’re mixing up the real and the make-believe.
Then it’d be two against one. From which I would conclude what? That each of them, independently and spontaneously, when asked to acknowledge the truth after so many years of silence, has chosen to stonewall a person who knows the truth? Seems unlikely. Or that the two of them have hatched some kind of conspiracy against me? Given their mutual loathing, that seems even less likely. Or that I’m the one who’s nuts? “Right,” Buzzy says. “Yes.” His body loosens. He sighs again. “I understand. Of course.”

I must not smile. I have never so completely suppressed joy. I’ve spent several decades disliking Buzzy Freeman from afar, suspecting him of dirty tricks and double agentry in the 1960s and galled by his hard-core apostate politics since. But now I feel a surge of gratitude,.

His eyes are watering. “Kilo Hotel—Bravo Foxtrot, over,” he says. Those were our code names in 1968..

“This is the first time I’ve really discussed it with anybody except my lawyer,” I say.

“Me, neither—I mean, me, too. I’ve never told
anyone.
I once went to a doctor who wanted to hypnotize me to make me quit smoking, but I was afraid of what I might say when I was under. So I quit smoking to avoid being hypnotized.”

“I know, I know.”

“I’ll go for weeks without ever thinking of it specifically,” he says. “I have these dreams where I’ve done something terrible, it’s never clear exactly what it is, but I’m terrified of being caught. And then in the mornings I wake up and, well … You know. The bad feeling and fear never quite go away. Like an ache.”

“I know.”

“My ex-wife, when she decided to leave, told me she couldn’t get over this nagging sense that I was keeping secrets from her. I offered to take a polygraph test to prove that I’d been absolutely faithful, that I wasn’t a bigamist, wasn’t gay, wasn’t a spy, wasn’t any of the things she suspected me of.”

He’s given me the perfect opening. “Were you a spy, Buzzy? Back then? An agent from Army Intelligence or part of COINTELPRO or one of those programs?”

“
What?
No!
I
was the one who was always
warning
about that, and you all called me paranoid! I was the one who dosed Chuck with LSD to test his loyalty!”

“I remember. If you’d been an undercover agent, that would’ve been a clever way to convince us to trust you. And you had been in the military.”

“No.
No.
I
believed.
Like you say, I’m a true believer now, and I was a true believer then. For better or worse. Believe me.”

I do, I think. “After they got Chuck, why were the rest of us allowed to get away with it, walk away? Why did they never arrest us? Or blackmail us? Did anyone ever try to blackmail you?”

He shakes his head.

“If they knew who we were,” I say, “and they obviously had to, why did it never come out? We all have people who don’t like us.”
Especially you, Buzzy.

“Yeah. That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Maybe because the government had much bigger fish to fry at the time. Or maybe they watched us for a while and then just gave up and sealed the files. I agree, it’s mysterious. Luck, I guess. Dumb luck.”

For another twenty minutes, Buzzy and I keep talking a mile a minute. It feels so good—so liberating—to speak truthfully. Although I’m lying by omission. I don’t mention that I’ve talked to Alex, and I let Buzzy think I’ve come to his house for purely private, personal reasons, seeking only (his word) “closure.”

If I reveal to Buzzy that I’m publishing our story, he might go wild. He is tort-crazy—he sued an MSNBC commentator and a website for libel; he sponsored some kind of class-action defamation suit on behalf of West Bank settlers; and he won a settlement from Unilever after he scratched his inner ear with a Q-tip that had insufficient cotton. But suing me or the publisher to try to prevent publication won’t stop the truth from coming out. He’s not stupid.

I can’t lie.

“I’m writing about it,” I tell him. “In my book, my memoir. All of it.”

He stares at me for a long, long time, nods, then gets up and takes away the coffee tray when he hears his wife coming in.

Have I just made a terrible mistake? Buzzy is still a guy for whom the ends justify all kinds of unsavory means.

When my taxi arrives, just as his wife is getting home, he embraces me with such fervor and for such a long time that Harleen starts to look a little embarrassed. I make myself smile when I think,
Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.

14

We never officially suspended the Bond missions, never said out loud that it was time to grow up and move on. However, as soon as we were in high school—not just high school but
New Trier
and its inescapable throb of self-importance—our spy toys and funny accents became childish things to put away, like painted wings and giants’ rings.

I’ve tried hard to recall any specific, telling reactions I had to President Kennedy’s assassination. When I heard the news—geometry class, the principal over the PA—I remember thinking how strange it was that Chuck had given a world history presentation that morning about the assassinations of Prime Minister Lumumba in the Congo and President Diem in South Vietnam. I remember thinking:
Lyndon Johnson is the fourth president in my lifetime.
I remember worrying about my brother, Peter, who was in third grade and had an autographed photo of Kennedy tacked to his bedroom wall. I remember my mother fiddling with her rosary and sniffling all weekend.

Two days after the assassination
,
my dad and I were alone together in the TV room, the way we’d started spending every Sunday morning. He was reading the
Tribune,
and I was reading
Life
—that is, examining a picture of Yvette Mimieux in an orange bikini standing next to a giant orange surfboard, thinking of Chuck Levy and wondering to what extent I could remake myself as a surfer girl. This weekly time alone with Dad, faintly subversive, had been an unanticipated benefit of my refusal to attend Mass. We usually turned off the TV after
Meet the Press,
but today the set was on because of the assassination coverage. The president’s casket was being carried from the White House and loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon.

I asked Dad if anything like this had happened when he was a kid. He told me yes, the Austrian chancellor and the king of Yugoslavia were both shot dead when he was just about my age.

“Who killed them?”

“Nazis killed the Austrian, even though he was a fascist, too. And the king by some kind of revolutionary. There was also an assassination in the States around the same time—the socialist hillbilly running for president from Louisiana, killed by the young doctor … Huey Long.”

On TV, the funereal hush was replaced by bustle, with a correspondent speaking quickly and urgently. We both looked over at the screen. It was Dallas, a police station, the assassin being paraded in front of reporters.

Dad snorted and shook his head. It was his what-a-crazy-country reaction without any of the humor.

“Did you kill the president?” someone shouted.

“No,” Oswald said.

The man accused of killing the president, the actual guy, with a black eye and a cut on his forehead, giving an impromptu press conference, on TV, live,
so
live. I was transfixed.

“I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question.”

I was astonished. He sounded so reasonable. He looked so regular. He was wearing a crew-neck sweater.

“Mr. Oswald, how did you hurt your eye?”

“A policeman hit me.”

I started to form a question about whether the police would get in trouble for hitting him, but then someone lunged into the scene, the camera jiggled, and Oswald fell.

“He’s been shot! He’s been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot!” a man said. And then another man’s incredulous voice came out of the TV: “This is unbelievable.”

It was as if the TV broadcast had tuned in to a dream.

I started crying, which upset me more, since I hadn’t cried during the previous forty-eight hours. My father the psychologist came over and squatted and hugged me and said that it was probably my grief for the president finally spilling out.

Mom and the little kids got home from St. Joseph’s, and we all kept watching. When someone on TV identified Oswald’s killer as “a nightclub owner named Jacob Leon Rubenstein,” my father sighed and muttered something in Danish and shook his head.

I think my mother never entirely recovered from the shock of Kennedy’s murder, especially coming so soon after Pope John’s death. The instability and extremism she’d always dreaded, what she called “the cuckoo foreign stuff,” had at last infected her America. I was confused by how the death of someone she didn’t love, had never met, this remote and essentially unreal figure, could be such a personal blow to her.

I don’t recall the days after the assassination being sad so much as weird, weird first because all regular TV programming stopped from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, and then weird again when life snapped completely back to normal on Tuesday. No one had lost their jobs, no one’s houses had burned or flooded or collapsed, no war had begun. My favorite new TV shows (
Hootenanny, Patty Duke, East Side/West Side, The Fugitive
) were all on the air as usual the following week, the New Trier Indians played and lost the big annual game against the Evanston Wildkits, we held our first Esperanto Club meeting, I took quizzes and wrote papers and got A’s. In other words, the assassination was this strange new kind of event that was both heavy and weightless, commanding everyone’s attention but having no immediate, discernible impact on their lives.

Chuck was joining us late for lunch in the cafeteria. “Hey, Levy,” Alex said, “Hollaender agrees that Dylan is better than your goofball English combo.”

“That’s not what I said. I said I can’t imagine the Beatles ever singing a song like ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ and that I wish Bob Dylan would go on
Hootenanny.
”

“I saw them on TV the other morning, the Beatles,” Alex said, “on the
CBS News.
My dad thinks they look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Chuck said as he set his tray down, “and I don’t much care.”

Back in the spring Chuck had heard the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” on WLS and became an instant fan. One afternoon around Halloween he’d played his new 45 of “She Loves You” for me, just me, picking out George’s chords on his unplugged guitar. When his record player automatically started playing it again, Chuck put down the guitar and mouthed the words, smiling.

There we were, alone in his bedroom, sitting on his bed.

Listening to lyrics exhorting a boy to requite a poor misunderstood girl’s love. It was him I was thinking of—I loved him, and I thought he should be glad.

I thought the moment had finally come. I hoped my face wasn’t as red-hot as it felt. I thought he was going to lean over and kiss me.

Instead, as he stood up and turned over the record to play the B side, he asked me, “Do you think I should ask Wendy Reichman to homecoming?”

That was the day I decided to end my five-month crush on Chuck Levy. And it’s why, I think, my fondness for the Beatles was, forever after, a bit grudging.

“I don’t know. I hear she likes some sophomore.”

As I struggled to keep my anger from precipitating tears, we’d listened to John and Paul sing about thinking of a girl night and day and swearing they’d get her in the end.

Now, in the cafeteria, Chuck said. “My mom showed me this article about Oswald, about his living in New Orleans over the summer. Guess what he was reading? What he checked out from the library there?
Moonraker, Goldfinger,
Thunderball …
”

“Wow,” I said, “really?”

“Yeah, and
From Russia with Love.
” He didn’t need to remind us that was JFK’s favorite.

“Wow,” Alex said.

We sat in silence for a good fifteen seconds, picking at lasagna, sucking milk from two-cent half-pint cartons.