Paul laughed. “Your—all right. You win. Hey, when are we going to take this tin can out on the road?”
“Soon,” Lewis said, turning off the garage light and holding the door for Paul. “Soon.”
“It’s just that…” Paul said from the alleyway.
Lewis stopped. “Yeah?”
“Amanda was always out for Amanda. That’s why we didn’t get married, I think. You get the sense that she’s really working for herself in everything.”
Lewis shrugged. “Aren’t we all?”
“But it’s like… ah, it’s hard to explain, but if she joined in with us she’d expect her objectives to dominate.”
“See what they are,” Lewis said. “If she’s the fire-eater you remember that shouldn’t be a problem. Do you trust her?”
Paul thought for a minute. “I did. We’ll see if I still do.”
Paul went home. Grace was at another sleepover and Valerie had said she had stuff to do. Paul had come home early after work and found her getting dressed upstairs. He had his own meeting with Lewis and hadn’t argued.
The house was in darkness. He went around turning on lights and then pulled down all the shades. There was fried chicken left in the refrigerator. He reached for a Tab but then grabbed another beer and plunked himself down in front of the TV.
When the TV came on it was turned to Fox news. He decided against listening to more neo-Soviet propaganda and flipped to a movie on one of the nostalgia channels. At one point he thought he heard Val’s car come up the street and muted the volume but the car pulled into a neighbor’s driveway. He realized when he un-muted the television that he hadn’t been paying attention to the plot.
Amanda Hutch. Was it really 28 years ago…?
“Don’t you want to sit in the bar?” he had asked her.
The Thursday night crowd at The Chestnut Tree, just off the Cornell campus, had been unusually sparse, and Amanda always preferred the bar in order to smoke. This time, however, she shook her head.
“Let’s sit in the back.”
Must have something to talk about, Paul reasoned.
As she made her way to the back he ordered the usual from Sal, a pizza half mushroom and half hamburg, and without being asked Sal filled a pitcher with beer and handed two mugs to Paul. When he reached the rear booth Amanda already had her coat off. He filled both mugs.
“I got the decision today,” she began right off. “From the Committee.”
Paul sucked in his breath.
“It was filled with the usual summation. Crap about me espousing dangerous thoughts. Undergraduates find my seminar ideas uncomfortable and subversive. My teachings and lectures are basically ‘history with an agenda.’ That type of crap.”
She laughed. “It was just over 45 years ago the tide in this country was running the other way and everyone was witch-hunting Communists. Now look.” She laughed again, this time more ruefully. “You gotta’ love the irony.”
Paul took a swig from his mug and waited.
She stared off around the pub, not looking directly at him. Finally, she pursed her lips and turned toward him.
“They said they won’t approve my certification. They’ll even hold up my PhD.”
When Paul started to speak she held up her hand.
“Oh yeah, they can,” she said. “They can do it. They can keep me from getting a job at even a community college.”
“Isn’t, isn’t there any, any appeal?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. Nothing.”
Paul sipped his beer. Amanda’s lay untouched in front of her.
“There’s no one you can go to? Nothing you can do?” he asked.
“There is something I can do,” she answered. “Their letter started off with their ‘findings.’ They concluded by saying that they thought I could benefit from some re-education. The bottom line is that if I agree to teach American history over in Leipzig, right in the heart of the Reds, they’ll grant me a provisional PhD. I think they need teachers over there and this is just a ruse to get one.”
She was angry, and despite the sarcasm Paul knew she was hurting.
“For how long?” he asked.
“Five years,” she answered immediately, and it was at the moment of hearing those words that Paul realized that no matter what, his life from that day forward would never be the same.
He sipped more beer, and then drained it off and refilled his mug. He studied Amanda’s face.
“I love you, Paul,” she said. “And I always will.”
“I love you too,” he answered, but she was already shaking him off.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to marry you. I want to… I don’t need to teach. At least not in college. We can get married, and I can teach elementary school or junior high school, or heck, even high school, maybe. The Committee can’t do shit about that. We can settle in some small town, maybe even back in your New Hampshire in some place where they don’t give a fuck about the Committee. If we stay in the Northeast District they can’t touch us here. Not really. Not at the high school level. We can do it.”
The light from the fireplace was dancing off her face. She was beautiful, and on this evening the reflection from the glowing embers gave her face its own glow, one he had never seen before. She was so alive, full of spirit and fight. Her eyes were the color of Cayuga Lake, yet whenever he told her that she would laugh him off and ask if that were before or after it had become polluted.
It had all suddenly become so complicated. He struggled for words.
“If you’re teaching in Hicksville, where am I going to teach?” he asked. He knew he was at that point in his life his grandfather told him everyone reaches. Do you do what is most comfortable or do you do what is right?
“You can’t,” he said, wishing even as he spoke that he wasn’t saying it. “Amanda, you love history and research more than anyone. You live it. How long would we be happy teaching high school in some small town? How long before you began resenting your decision, resenting everything we had given up, and then resenting me because of it? You’re not a high school teacher, you belong in a major university. We’ve got to prioritize. Leipzig is only five years.”
At some point Sal had brought over the pizza, and, seeing their faces, put it down without his usual banter. But, as with the beer, Amanda never touched the food.
Chapter 6
Tonight was probably as good as any. She had heard Ginter and deVere talk about “grabbing some dogs outside the park.” They were attending another baseball game. They had both left the lab by 4:00, and once they were gone, the support staff had quickly found reasons to leave. Natasha stood alone outside Paul deVere’s lab.
She slipped her right hand inside the v-neck of her shirt and lifted the chain from which her DNA-encoded pass card dangled. Taking the card in her left hand, she swiped it through the lab door’s scan reader while simultaneously placing her right hand on the palm reader.
“Natasha Nikitin, Access Denied,” came the computer voice from the door speaker.
Well, it was worth a try, Natasha thought, smiling wryly. Now she would have to do it the hard way. She walked down the hall, passing deVere’s and Ginter’s locked offices. It was unlikely that she would have any better luck with those doors, and she would only increase the possibility of discovery. Two weeks before she had walked into Paul deVere’s office and found him checking the computer’s log of accesses to his office. A task of boredom? Or was there something to hide in the office? She had slipped in once when he had gone down the hall to visit the “little scientists’ room,” but her hasty search had found nothing. Tonight she would be more thorough.