Past Perfect (18 page)

Her last comment underscored one of the many differences between us. “I’ll have nothing,” she repeated when I got to her loft. Three words, poetic parsimony. I, on the other hand, would have emoted: I have nothing. Nothing at all! Nada. Rien du tout. Gornischt — and that would have been just the preamble to my description of writer’s block. If I got it. Which I didn’t. Poets got existential despair. TV writers got a dental plan.

As for her emotional life, since she and Dix had been divorced she’d had a series of men. Maddy hated the word relationship so she referred to whatever she had going with them as liaisons. Liaisons sounds French, sophisticated, hookups with married men in nipped-waist suits who carry sex toys in Vuitton attaché cases. But her guys were mostly heterosexual variations on Dix: intelligent, better-looking than average, tending toward tight-crotched pants and trendy eyeglasses. What all the ones I’d met lacked, that Dix had, was humor.

Not only did these guys not do a thing for me, I couldn’t see how they did anything for Maddy. She and Dix had had great repartee, and while he couldn’t zap her congenital inertia and hypochondria, he’d lifted her spirits more than any of the antidepressants she’d taken. The good news about her post-Dix men was she never married any of them. The bad news, or sad news, was that afj age forty-three, she lived alone. Not even a cat. If she derived some delight or contentment from having no entangling alliances, like glorying in the freedom to turn on all the lights in her apartment at three in the morning and blast recordings of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry with no one to yell, What the fuck are you doing at this hour? it would have been fine. But pleasure was the one word not in my sister’s vast vocabulary.

“You’ve never gotten blocked?” Maddy asked.

“Well …” I began.

“You haven’t, have you?”

“Could I please finish?”

“Go ahead.” My sister sighed. If I’d been feeling as lousy as she probably was, I would have slumped into a huge, comforting chair. Instead, I was in the chair with the big rolled arms while she sat in a straight-backed chair that looked as though she’d grabbed it from some flamboyant person’s dining room. Her own living room was beige or white, 1990s good taste with lots of linen fabric. Most of her furniture looked as if it needed ironing. But the chair she was in was lacquered dark red, Chinese style, I guess, with a yellow silk seat. She moved her back around, then shifted her weight from one cheek of her butt to the other.

“Maybe I’ve never been truly blocked,” I said. “But there are days when I call in and say I’m working at home. Then I drive to some outlet and buy stuff I don’t need: plaid umbrellas one time, four of them. Or I go to the bookstore when it opens and buy a load of books and come home to read. I can’t write those days. I don’t even try.”

“But that’s never happened to you for months at a time,” Maddy replied. The sentence may have started as a sigh, but there was so much feeling behind it that it sounded like a whimper from a baby.

“No. But most of the time I’ve been writing, there’s been a deadline hanging over my head. Back at the CIA, when I was doing reports: there was nothing creative there. I put a lot of people’s work into an order and … did some clarifying. Many of them were academics and I had to make their language more accessible. And now, in TV, I’m always under the gun. The only time I didn’t have a deadline was when I was writing the novel.”

“Did you get blocked then?” Maddy asked.

“No. I was so desperate for employment—in the sense of being used for something. I was afraid that if I slacked off …” She was crossing her legs, right over left, left over right, then back again. “Why are you” —I imitated her leg switches —“like that? Do you want to change chairs with me?”

“No.” She flipped her hand toward the rest of the living room. “I have lots of chairs.”

“You look uncomfortable,” I said.

I thought she was going to say something like Life is uncomfortable, but she said, “I’m not.”

“Fine.”

There was a moment of silence that grew more awkward because each of us was waiting for the other to break it. We were both nervous about talking at the same moment, then simultaneously saying, Oh, excuse me, then realizing neither of us had anything to say. I got out the first word only because I’d always had the faster reflexes. All Maddy managed was a sound like the i in if, and then she stopped because I had won.

“Do you think there might be a positive aspect to being blocked?” I asked. “Look, I always say that my subconscious is my best collaborator. When we map out a new season, I sit down beforehand and make an outline of what I want to present. After months of not working or even thinking about work, I’m amazed at what comes out. I mean, it all didn’t crystallize in that split second. Some part of my mind had been sitting in front of its own little computer and plotting out what ought to happen in the upcoming episodes.”

“Writing poetry is different.” It sure was. Maddy’s most well-known poem was “Soft Fruit,” about starting to eat a peach and having her teeth bite into a small, rotten spot and before she can pull back, there’s putrefied peach all over her tongue —though she wouldn’t use such an obvious alliteration as putrefied peach. But most of her other poems had the same idea: finding something terrible in the middle of a pleasant experience.

“Why is poetry different? Because there’s not necessarily a storv involved?”

“It’s not just a question of narrative,” Maddy said. Trust my sister to say “narrative” after I’ve said “story.”

“What’s it a question of, then?”

“I don’t know.” My coloring was more red and Maddy’s more yellow, yet if we stood side by side, there wouldn’t be a great difference between us. Normally. But now I noticed she had gone from slightly sallow to waxy. That happened when she was really low. Though I didn’t think she’d gained weight, she was looking more blockish. Like my father, except while his cubelike physique came from sturdy forebears and playing tennis, hers suggested a loss of muscle tone. What curves there were to her body had become squared off by flesh.

“Is your mind a total blank when you try to write?” I asked.

“It’s blank and in turmoil at the same time. I can’t explain it. I get up every morning thinking, This is it. Today I’ll take my notebook and put a new ink cartridge into my pen and I’ll begin with the first word that comes to mind. At the end of the day, it’s just the end of the day. The sun sets. Nothing’s happened.”

“You’re depressed?”

“Katie, when have I not been?”

Before I was born, when there was only you. Naturally I didn’t say that. “I know. But maybe this time is a little worse.”

“No. I’m actually in a good mood —for me. It would probably be your major depressive disorder. For me I’m all right.” I must have looked dubious because she added, “I am. And for God’s sake don’t go running to Mom and Dad.”

“I’m not—”

“I’m okay. I’ve gone through the usual dry spells before and I’ll go through them again.”

“Maddy, are you feeling suicidal?”

“No! Can’t I talk to you? Can’t I say I feel down because I’m not writing without you thinking—”

“Swear you won’t pull a Sylvia Plath?” I’d always been so sure she wouldn’t. But what if I was wrong?

“I swear,” she said in a louder voice than she’d used since I’d got there. “I swear! Don’t give me your skeptical face. I told you I won’t do anything and I won’t. I’ve been a lot worse than this.”

“How about calling me every morning just to let me know—”

“‘Good morning, sis! No carbon monoxide for me today!’”

“Something like that,” I said. Great, Laughing Girl seven days a week as my first call in the morning. “It couldn’t kill you to make a thirty-second call every day.”

“Stop it!” Maddy snapped. “If I do start feeling … not right, I swear to God I’ll call you.”

“You’re an atheist.”

“I swear I’ll call you. Now shut up about me. What’s new with you?”

Of course I wasn’t going to tell her. Yet somewhere in every younger sister’s head is the notion that it is the older sister’s duty, if not natural inclination, to take care of her. So what came out was, “Well, actually, a lot is new.”

For an instant, Maddy stopped wriggling. “Tell me.”

“It’s a lot of narrative,” I said.

“I can take it.”

So I told her what had been happening since Lisa’s call, except I left out dinner with Dix, less out of protectiveness than selfishness, because I wanted her to concentrate on me. She only clapped her hand over her mouth once, when I told her how I faked my way into Dick Schroeder’s house. “Are you crazy? What if they’d had a guard dog?”

“I thought of that, but I was more worried about getting shot.”

“By him?”

“It’s too embarrassing. Okay, I’ll say it. I kind of pictured an Agency security detail pulling out Berettas and drilling me.”

“That makes no sense,” Maddy said. “Why would the CIA give him a security detail from 1990 until now?”

“It makes as much sense as slavering Dobermans ripping off my flesh.”

“Why are you doing this, Katie? What can you hope to get?”

“Justice.”

“Justice?” The sound she made would be noted in scripts as “[HUMORLESS LAUGH].” Then she added, “From the Central Intelligence Agency?” I could have written that response before she gave it. Maddy was so damn predictable.

But I chose not to make a cutting remark in case she decided to do a Sylvia Plath and needed one final hurt. Anyway, at that moment, my lunch of yogurt and plum stopped working. I was hungry. My sister, however, made a point not to be, as she put it, fetishistic with regard to food the way my father was. He wasn’t, though admittedly he did whip up plates of sandwiches for the random plumber or the Time Warner cable-repair guy who passed through the apartment. He had to feed people. To me that was a lot better than not offering your own sister even a cup of tea.

“Maddy, do you happen to remember anything from around the time I was fired?” I asked, determined not to beg for food.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean … I don’t know. Is there anything that struck you then that still sticks in your mind? The theory being that if it stuck, maybe it’s because you picked up on something important.”

“What’s important to me may not be important to you.” I braced myself for one of her discourses on subjective reality. But all she said was, “I remember you felt betrayed by your boss.”

“What?”

“You asked me what I remembered. I remember you telling me he was in the hall watching as you packed your stuff.” I nodded. “You said you asked him, ‘Wasn’t my work good?’ and he didn’t answer. He didn’t even say he was sorry this was happening to you. Nothing.”

“That’s right,” I said. My stomach grumbled. “He just stood there the whole time. It wasn’t as if he had to be there to make sure I didn’t steal the paper clips. There were two goons from Internal Security for that. Isn’t it funny? I’d totally forgotten this until you mentioned it. Anyway, there was no expression on his face to show he was thinking, Ah, too bad for Katie, or, Life is unfair, and maybe he was trying to ESP it to me.” The minute that was out of my mouth I regretted not saying “communicate it telepathically” so she wouldn’t think my vocabulary had completely degenerated from working in TV.

“Would you have been able to read him that well?” Maddy asked.

There might have been a flicker of sisterly sixth sense in her question. I simply said, “I’d worked for him for a year and a half. I knew him better than I knew anybody there, though I wouldn’t necessarily put CIA employees in any Most Soul-Baring Colleagues competition.”

“Think back. Did you read anything into his silence at the time?”

“That’s such a Mom question.”

My sister actually smiled, albeit a small smile that did not display teeth. “Are you avoiding answering?”

“I’ll tell you what struck me at the time,” I said. “He wasn’t looking at me with hate, as if he thought I’d committed treason. I was taking things out of my desk drawers and when I looked up I saw he was still there watching … not that he was the only one. What was weird was that he didn’t look away, you know, the way people do when they’re uncomfortable because you’ve caught them staring at you. Okay, Ben’s a worldly guy. He’s not going to turn bright red and start kicking the ground with embarrassment. But he didn’t even avert his eyes, not for a second.”

“And that seemed … ?”

“Strange. As if he expected me to somehow challenge him, or try to defend myself.”

I HAVE TO VISIT a sick friend in North Carolina,” i told Oliver the next morning.

“It might be better to call her.” He squeezed the very top of his nose, the part that was between his eyes —his private acupuncture point for calming himself while dealing with annoying people. “Visiting can be a really big strain.”

“She’s very, very sick.” For someone who hardly ever lied, I felt I was doing well. I especially liked the quaver in my voice on the second very. I hadn’t mentioned any particular disease because Oliver was one of those who shuddered during discussions of illness and death, but I was picturing a woman afflicted with a ladylike ailment that required lace-trimmed handkerchiefs; that way, I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about giving her cancer, even though she was imaginary.

“Sorry to hear that. I’ll tell you what.” He picked thoughtfully at the pink polo pony on the front of his XXL green Ralph Lauren shirt. “Send her one of those Harry and David baskets. The big ones with fresh fruit plus you get candy and nuts.” Nearly all producers have a congenital aversion to spending money, but understand sometimes it is necessary. So he added, “Charge it to my account.”

“She’s past being tempted by food. For all I know, she may not be eating at all.”

“Terrible, terrible.” The conversation wasn’t going his way. “Is she around your age?” I nodded sadly. “Sometimes it’s hard to understand God.” We both sighed. “I don’t know,” he went on, as if talking to himself. “A visit might be counterproductive. You make a long trip down there, she’s going to feel obligated to see you. I remember when my uncle Fred got really bad, we all flew to Louisville. My aunt Cora said, basically, ‘Thank you for coming but go home. He’s going to use his energy to get better, not to say good-bye to you all.’