Well, that was the way I thought about it anyway-as a kind of art, a kind of story we were telling with our lives, a kind of lovely dance. Right up until the moment of climax, right up until the moment I came, holding her naked in my arms and thanking God-really, thanking God-for the late-life blessing of her. And then it all crumbled in my mind to ashes. What is it, I wonder, about the male orgasm that vaporizes every standing structure of sentiment and enchantment?
An hour later I sat bitterly in the dark, smoking a Sherman by the open window, staring balefully at the shape of her asleep on the bed. The taste of the cigarette brought my meeting with Densham back to me. His squirrelly, nervous voice beneath the smoke and music...We’re activated. Activated and blown. In a week, a month, a year, we’ll each get the call to serve the jihad. Refuse it, and our masters hurl us out a window. Accept it, and the Americans run us down with a car in some alley. We’re dead either way.
She stirred in the shadows and murmured my name. Then, finding me there at the window framed by the relative light of the night city, she propped herself up on an elbow. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Which was it?” I said to her. “Did he take the mission or refuse it?”
“What? Who?”
“Densham. He said he was going to turn them down and trust in the protection of the Americans. But I don’t think he would have had the courage in the end. Once he was actually confronted with the choice, it would’ve been easier just to go along.” The words came out of me in a low, tumbling rush. “He would’ve told himself that he was all wrong about the Americans, that they had no clue about us, that that’s why Stein had gone along and gotten away with it scot-free. He could’ve convinced himself of anything if he thought it meant being with you. You were all he wanted, what he was living for. And there you were, all the while, waiting patiently, watching to see what he knew, who he spoke to, which way he’d turn. Just like you’re doing with me.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was chilling. She didn’t even bother to pretend.
“I suppose that means that you are with the Americans,” I said. “He took the mission and you had to stop him… Or, who knows, maybe you’re one of ours. Maybe he did refuse and that’s why you did it…”
“What time is it?” she murmured. “I’m sorry-I’m still asleep. Whatever it is, we can talk in the morning. Come back to bed and be with me.”
Eventually, the mood passed and I did.
Strangely, as much as I was expecting the final call, it came unexpectedly. Because I was that lost in her, that immersed in the living dream of our romance. Hours and days at a time, I would forget the call was coming, though I always knew. When it finally did come, nothing could have been further from my mind.
We were in the park. It was an early summer’s day. We were eating lunch at the café overlooking the lake. I was telling a funny story about a website I had sold to a teenage millionaire who had dropped out of high school and had all the money in the world but no manners whatsoever. She was laughing in the most charming and flattering way, graciously covering her mouth with one hand. I was thinking how lovely, how truly lovely she was and what a joy.
The phone in my jacket pocket began to vibrate. Normally, of course, I wouldn’t have answered during lunch, but this was the third time it had gone off in as many minutes.
“Excuse me,” I said to her. “It might be an emergency at my office.” I believed it, too. That was how completely submerged I was in our fairy tale.
I fetched out the cell phone and held it to my ear and even then, even when I heard the cantata in the background, it was a moment before I understood. Bach 140: the first part of the signal. And then a voice said, “George?” which was the other part.
“I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” I responded automatically.
“Oh, sorry, my mistake,” the man said. The music was cut short as he hung up.
I slipped the phone back into my pocket, my eyes on her the whole time now.
“Wrong number?” she said finally. Just like that, completely natural, completely believable.
And in the same way, the same tone, almost believing it myself, I answered, “Yes. Sorry. Now what was I saying?”
As we walked back to my apartment, I found myself saddened more than anything, saddened that it was over. Though the light of the summer day stayed bright through the late afternoon, it had acquired, I noticed, an aura of emotional indigo, a brooding border of darkness that I remembered seeing in my college days when I had walked a lover to the train station for what I knew to be the last time. Now I held her cool hand in mine and glanced down from time to time at her fresh, upturned face and listened to that flowing, ladylike diction as she chattered about this or that future plan-and I ached for every passing minute, every minute that brought us closer to the end.
“Why don t you pour us some wine?” I said, as I helped her with her coat in the foyer. “I just have to check my e-mail for a moment.”
I went into the study, consciously cherishing the domestic noises she made moving around the kitchen. I switched on the computer.
Our procedures had last been updated more than twenty years ago. They still included quaint arrangements like drop points and locker keys and corner meetings. I doubted that sort of thing was operational anymore and, as it turned out, I was right. They had sent the material straight to my computer: an untraceable packet that simply appeared as an icon on the desktop when I turned the machine on. I didn t read the whole code. Just enough to see what it was. A virus I could spread through my backup apparatus so that my clients would lose some of their files. Then, when they went to restore the files through my service, they would be rewritten with instructions that would plant minor, undetectable but ultimately devastating glitches throughout entire systems. It was, in other words, a cyber time bomb that would hobble key security responses at essential moments and render the nation helpless to defend against… whatever it was our camel-fucking friends were planning to do. At a glance, the business seemed quite elegant and devastating. But I think what struck me most about it was its clinical and efficient realism. It was as devoid of romance as a bad news X-ray. It pushed the whole notion of romance out of my mind.
Maybe that’s why I seemed to see her afresh when I walked back into the living room. There she stood now in the center of the floor with our wineglasses, one in each hand. Wearing a pleated skirt and a buttoned blouse and a pearl necklace against her pink skin. It was the first time she seemed simply fraudulent to me. Beautiful, but fraudulent. Like a satire of a fifties housewife. Not even that. A satire of a television program about a fifties housewife. The sight of her brought a bitter taste of irony into my mouth and into my mind, and as I took a glass from her, I smirked into those wonderful eyes-while they regarded me with nothing I could detect but wide, blue innocence.
I sat in my favorite easy chair. She sat on the rug at my feet. That, too, in my suddenly prosaic mood, struck me as somewhat overintentionaclass="underline" a patent construct, a cynical tableau of a woman modest in her youth doting on a somewhat older man in his authority.
All the same, I held my glass down to hers and she lifted hers to mine and we clinked them together. I sipped and sighed.
“I was raised,” I said, “in a town called Centerville.” I don’t know why I felt I had to tell her this, but I did. It was the last act of the play, I guess. The only way I could think to keep it going just a little longer.
She did her part as well. She put her head on my knee and gazed up at me dreamily as I stroked her hair. “Yes,” she said. “You’ve mentioned it. In Indiana, you said.”