Past Perfect (5 page)

“What?”

Ben came over to my apartment once more, three nights later. All that happened was he stripped down to his shorts, sat on the edge of my bed, covered his high-cheekboned face with his hands, and murmured, “Katie, I can’t.” When he removed his hands, there were actual tears in his eyes. That was it for more than a year, until I was fired.

Was he really crying that night? Did I ask myself: Is he a good enough actor to be able to turn on the waterworks at will? I did. But I couldn’t allow myself to decide if I’d witnessed a performance or the real McCoy. Was I crazed enough from losing him to wonder: Had someone in the Office of R & D come up with a top-secret gizmo that could be hidden in boxer shorts and, merely by the wearer rubbing his knees together, bring tears to his eyes? Of course not! But who knew?

At least as far as my being fired went, I was confident the decision had nothing to do with Ben. I myself had seen both his other ex-conquests remain at their jobs and work side by side with him — their sides no longer accidentally brushing against each other, of course. I’d heard rumors about there being one or two other women. Three or four. Maybe they’d convinced themselves (as I would have in time) that because he was stuck with the rich and raucous Deedee, his freedom was far more painful to him than their rejection was to them.

For a few seconds, I managed to stop staring at the screen of my cell phone. I glanced around my office. I’d always been nuts for toile, the fabric that uses only one color for a design against a solid background of another color. Adam’s and my bedroom was a red pastoral scene on white—eighteenth-century milkmaids, guys with George Washington-style wigs, and hunting dogs gamboling under trees —and our dining room was blue on white, this time with pagodas and less frolicsome Chinese couples. And no dogs.

So when QTV signed Spy Guys for a fifth season, Oliver, the aforementioned sourpuss producer, told me he’d allow me $2,500 to redecorate my office. “If it’s even one goddamn penny overbudget, you pay!” he’d said sweetly. So now my office was a ten-by-twelve room whose walls and chairs were covered with ridiculously buxom yellow women playing yellow lutes and flutes while smirking yellow French courtiers danced under trees —all of them yellow—in a cream-colored universe. I sat at my desk, an old farm table that periodically shot splinters into my flesh, and looked back down at the “recently received” readout of calls on my cell phone. Of course, there was no number for a call that I might have missed from Lisa Golding.

This was merely the four hundredth time I had looked at it since I’d left to take Nicky to camp. What did I expect, that Lisa’s number would morph onto the screen? I couldn’t figure it out: Why hadn’t she called back? Since my computer was already on, I began a list, using stars instead of bullets as I usually did in order to avoid feeling like a corporate, inside-the-box dullard. Now and then I did use smiley faces, but this time, dealing with CIA matters, I didn’t want any interference from outside-the-Beltway ultra-femme vibes. So, stars:

* Before she could call back, Lisa was shot dead in front of a Melrose Avenue boutique in L.A.
shot by a CIA op with a teeny poison-dart gun as she waited for a martini royale at a club in Miami Beach
garroted in the ladies’ room of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis / mowed down by a Hummer in Houston. (Yes, I was being glib here, trying to mock the notion that such melodramatic doings could happen in real life. But keeping an ironic distance was hard because if Lisa was indeed planning to rat out the Agency, she’d left real life far behind. Terrible things could happen.)

* Lisa had been drunk or high and going through an old phone book, trying to upset people she used to know and had always secretly despised.

* She wasn’t calling back because she wanted to keep me hanging so I’d be desperate. But desperate enough to do what? What could I have or do that she might need? I hadn’t a clue.

* Her call had been some sort of a lame joke in which she’d lost interest.

* She was dying to call back but was being chased by evil forces aligned against the national interest and couldn’t get to a phone. In Spy Guys, cell phones never died and evil forces were always vanquished. But real life meant real trouble.

* She’d lost my number.

The night before, I had dug around the back of the coat closet and found the small carton with my pre-Adam Washington memorabilia; among all the papers and photos was the Filofax I’d been using in those years, its leather cover now so cracked it looked like alligator. I must have been anticipating today’s big-time anxiety, because I’d copied down Lisa’s fifteen-year-old Washington phone number. And I dialed it.

Someone’s voice mail engaged after five rings. A man speaking a language that I didn’t think I’d ever heard before said in Thai or Yoruba or whatever, “I’m not in. Please leave a message.” Of course, it could have been “I’m standing over Lisa Golding’s dead body and there’s nothing you can do about it, heh-heh,” but the former seemed more likely. My guess was that Lisa hadn’t had that number for such a long time that it had been reassigned.

I couldn’t think of what to do next, so, even though I knew what would happen, I called the CIA’s general number. The voice on the “You have reached the Central Intelligence Agency” recording sounded perky yet sincere —what you’d expect from the female cohostess of a show on a Christian broadcasting station. Eventually, I got connected with a public affairs person who, just as I’d expected, told me he could not give out any information on current or past employees if indeed this Lisa Golding was or ever had been an employee of the CIA.

Not that it in any way would be productive, but I began wondering whether I should be worrying about Lisa. Panicking about her? I had no idea when she’d left the Agency: Ten days ago? Ten years ago? Had she quit or had she been fired? If she’d been fired, was it for cause? Or, like me, had she gotten the ax and had no clue why?

The last few years, I’d noticed that whenever I was mulling over something at work, my eyes were drawn to the computer screen, as if any question I was capable of coming up with—How hot is it in Tuscany in October? or Does God ever get vindictive? — could be Googled and answered. The only answer I got from the screen now was that I had thirty-six unopened e-mails.

So I did a search on Lisa’s name. Other than the Goldings I’d Googled before, there was nothing of interest, unless I cared to join up with all the Goldings spreading out the fruits of their family trees. And there was no trace of any Lisa I might have known among them. I closed my eyes and recalled a conversation (probably after she’d spent a January in Buffalo teaching some ex-KGB agent that you don’t settle an argument with the owner of a Laundromat by slamming the man’s head against a dryer) in which she had said maybe she’d made a mistake coming to the Agency. True, she’d wanted out of theater, but maybe she should have tried film.

With that recollection, I checked for her in every area code in and around Los Angeles. Nothing. I looked at the online membership list of the Art Directors Guild, the group that represented people who work in movies and TV, but she wasn’t there.

If this had been an episode of Spy Guys, His Highness would say to Jamie, “Wait! I had a little liaison with Countess Delphine, the one who’s married to the head of Jupiter Studios.” A fast cut to a mogul’s pool in Belair (our location scout would come up with some successful CPA’s pool in Hewlett Harbor on Long Island and we’d throw four or five potted palms into the shot). Javiero Rojas, who played HH, would be in a Speedo that looked like it was covering a giant chorizo. He’d lounge muscularly on a chaise next to an actress in a barely there bikini and a diamond bracelet—the latter would, of course, show she was an aristocrat—while a short, fat actor would take a cigar the size of an ocean liner out of his mouth and say, “Hey, Highness, my secretary tracked down that Lisa Golding you asked me about. She used to be an art director, but now she’s living at 4107 Pecan Drive in Columbus, Georgia.”

This being life, I was summoned to our producer’s office because Dani Barber, the beautiful but intellectually challenged actress who played Jamie, would neither get in front of the camera nor stop fanning herself with script pages and saying, “Boooring!” —her way of communicating to us, every few days, that there was something in the script that displeased her.

“I’m not quite getting my motivation in the scene at the Venezuelan embassy,” Dani Barber was telling me a few minutes later.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound as if I actually wanted to hear her answer.

She stroked her blond hair as if it were a lover she was trying to arouse. Dani was our Jamie, the ex-New York cop turned CIA agent. She played her with a Brooklyn accent so egregious that there wasn’t a week that we didn’t get letters from Brooklynites with phrases like “I am outraged,” “incredibly condescending,” and “no-talent skank.” Next, she put her nails to her teeth and pretended to gnaw on them, which of course she couldn’t because they were plastic, and instead of a hangnail, she’d wind up with a chipped crown. “Where do I begin?” She sighed.

I kept silent, knowing one, she was on the edge and, if she went over, it would mean an hour of her What do you want from me? Shakespeare is worth dying for and this piece of crap isn’t, but can’t you see it’s killing me? soft-voiced diatribe interrupted only by her dry heaves, all of which would delay the taping for another hour, and two, we were sitting in Oliver Waters’s office. Oliver was leaning back in his leather throne of a producer’s chair, giving the ceiling a view of his face, which, as usual, was probably contorted by some emotion in his customary range of pissed off to enraged.

For some reason, every time a pudgy African-American man is described in print, he’s a “black Buddha.” Oliver did have a fleshy, round face. His eyes were elongated, not from smiling but from being squeezed up by his balloon cheeks. As his mouth curved down instead of up, no one glimpsing him would come up with Buddha-ish adjectives like benevolent or enlightened. In the unlikely event anyone thought about him in religious terms at all, Oliver might suggest the god of dyspepsia.

Both he and I understood that Dani had been due before the cameras fifteen minutes earlier and was therefore costing us big money. Oliver went into his caring act, which was a wordless performance consisting solely of uttering that sound written as tsk. So I was stuck with having to be receptive to Dani’s latest insight while listening to his incessant chirping: “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“Let me put it this way,” she finally spit out. “If I’m going into the embassy pretending to be a guest at the dinner and have to wear this dress with my boobs showing …” She adjusted the spaghetti straps of her costume, an emerald green cocktail dress. Her alleged boobs were grapefruit-size implants (albeit the larger, Indian River variety), but her narrow chest with its convexity of ribs seemed designed to support breasts no larger than kiwis. “… would I just walk in like the March of the Wooden Soldiers? Wouldn’t I flirt, or grab somebody’s arm and rub up against him?”

“I see your point, Dani,” Oliver said. He had one of those husky Rod Stewart voices. Were he to say anything pleasant, someone might think, Ooh, sexy, the way he talks, but in the five years we had worked together on the show, no pleasant word ever passed his lips.

Oliver’s head swiveled my way, signaling it was my turn. I had to take it. True, the show was based on my book and I’d been sole writer for all the years of its existence, but when there was a difference of opinion between writer and star, it was a TV fact of life: star wins. Oliver, who had the sentimentality of a block of petrified wood, would not hesitate to cut me down if I could not get along with Dani. The network, of course, would back him up.

“Dani,” I said, “I have to give you credit: you’re absolutely right.”

“Then how come there was nothing, no guidance whatsoever, in the script?”

Oliver’s office was around the corner from mine, and his door was open. Each time someone’s cell tinkled or tooted, my heart seized up, even while realizing it was not Lisa calling me.

“Is it totally up to me to define Jamie’s growth?” Her words jolted me back to the present; I knew there was no escaping what passed for reality in my life, Spy Guys in the person of Dani Barber. “Because as I see it, Jamie’s changing a lot this season. Becoming stronger, and yet more humble.” Dani offered this insight with high importance, as if she were Max Planck first declaring his constant. “Right, Oliver?” A grunt of agreement broke from his throat. “So in effect my entrance should display Jamie’s femininity for everybody in the embassy, yet it would have a deeper meaning to the audience that even while she’s quintessential Woman, she never forgets that she’s an intelligence operative.” Just to be certain I wasn’t stymied by the complexity of her vision, she added, “Get it, Katie?”

“I got it, all right.” What I didn’t get was the phone call from Lisa Golding.

I KNOW YOU don’t want to hear this, my ex-brother-in-law told me that evening.

“Hear what?”

At that moment, I wasn’t so much listening to him as checking out his beard, or rather, lack of one. The last time I’d seen Dixon Cramer, his face had been darkly shadowed, the actor/artist look of I get better sex than you. Now he was so clean-shaven his tanned skin gleamed like a child’s. God only knows what this change signified, but it was obviously cutting-edge face fashion. I didn’t have to glance around the restaurant to know that slightly less cool men at other tables were unconsciously rubbing their jaws, regretting their scruffiness. Whenever I was with Dix, I always felt people must be wondering, How come he’s with her? Oh, maybe she’s a friend from high school.

“For someone who was a CIA analyst, you’re not being very analytical,” Dix was saying.

It had been four days since Lisa’s call, and I’d opted to have dinner with someone other than Adam. He’d made it clear he thought any conversations about Lisa Golding, the Central Intelligence Agency, and why I’d been fired were pointless. And becoming tedious. A couple of times I’d noticed husbandly eyes following me. They were not aglow with desire. More like, How did I come to marry someone so crazy? But thinking me crazy didn’t make him sympathetic to me, the way people shake their heads sadly when met with some poor soul in the grip of an obsession.