Lion Eyes

by Claire Berlinski

  “One moment please . . . I’m afraid there is no listing available.”

  “What about Dave Melill?”

  “No, sorry, nothing under that, either.”

  From: Mail Delivery System

  Date:December 22, 2003 12:20 AM

  To: Claire Berlinski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

  This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

  A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  arsalan@hotmail.com

  SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:

  <arsalan@hotmail.com>:

  host mx4.hotmail.com [65.54.244.104]: 550 Requested

  action not taken:

  mailbox unavailable

  • • •

  I tried every number on the Isfahan University website. At last I reached someone who spoke halting English and told me that Dr. Safavi was on sabbatical; he did not know where he could be reached or when he would return. I wrote to every journal that had ever published an article by Arsalan, asking if they had contact information for him. I received only two replies, both suggesting I write to him care of Isfahan University.

  On the day after Christmas, ancient Bam, the jewel of Iran’s heritage, was destroyed by a massive earthquake. More than forty thousand people were killed. I scoured the Internet for a sign of him. Perhaps he had gone there. Perhaps he had commented to the press about the catastrophic archaeological loss. But I found nothing.

  At last, no longer knowing where else to look, I stopped looking.

  It turned bitter cold in Paris, and then it snowed. I worked on my book and finally finished it, submitting it months late. I wrote an article for a travel magazine about the muezzin of Istanbul, and another one for Runner’s World about Istanbul’s hidden running trails. I wrote a short story about a man who buys a cheap tattered book in a flea market in Istanbul, then discovers he is in possession of an undiscovered volume of poetry by Hafez. It was an idea Arsalan had given me. I worked on it for weeks, but the story seemed silly to me in the end. I never showed it to anyone.

  On some nights, I reread his letters. I remembered walking through the melancholy streets in Istanbul, past the weary sagging houses, past the tugra of the Sultan on the old fountains carved with Ottoman script, practicing my Turkish pleasantries in the shops. Arsalan and Istanbul were one and the same for me—even though we had never once been there together, he and I. Nonetheless, he was woven into my memories of the ruined streets, the roving packs of dogs, the men pulling wooden carts up the hill, the glowing mosques at twilight, the massive, dignified ships churning slowly down the Bosphorus.

  From: Imran Begum imranbegum@gmail.com

  Date: January 23, 2004 01:45 PM

  To: Claire Berlinkski claire@berlinski.com

  Subject: Re: Re: (No subject)

  Dear distant Claire on the other side of the Channel, I am sorry you are finding it difficult to let go. There are no ointments for disappointments. Only grieving gets the sadness processed. Pick up a cushion and scream into it when the Arsalan-related feelings, really about early for gotten experience, come up. Do some hitting too. Scream and hit until you sob or feel exultant.

  Avoid creating an extreme interpretation of the events! Do not scapegoat him or yourself as bad objects. Difficulty with nuance and degree is a factor that many of my most challenging patients have in common. As I grow older I begin to venerate the nuance, the shades of gray, the moment of hesitation between the Fascism of Alpha and the Communism of Omega!

  1:40 p.m. Three done and lunch introjected. Must run, time marches on as relentless and unapproachable as the Wehrmacht. Much love and care, Immie.

  The sun had given up trying to make it over the horizon. The cafés served hot chocolate and winter meals—pork knuckles with lentils, coq au vin, hearty red wines. The Pakistanis on the street corners stood over their big coal braziers, selling chestnuts wrapped in cones made of newspaper. Occasionally I searched for Arsalan on the Internet. I never found him. I did, however, find a forum on the Internet where women who had been disappointed by online romance came to share their stories.

  “You’re just looking at a computer screen, with no voice, animation, or even handwriting to connect you to a real person. This means you’re already in a fantasy. This is not the real world, but many people can’t see the difference. . . .”

  “It was exotic and magical. It happened so fast. It was so intense. . . .”

  “Women are much more affected than men by the written word. Women can much more easily become prey to a man who is just a clever writer. Women need to be very, very careful before they lose their hearts over the written words on a screen. . . .”

  “Our local psychologist’s office says his business is booming with women who’ve had their hearts broken on the Internet. . . .”

  “As for finding out the true reason for his sudden departure from this romance, it is possible that you will never know. He may be too embarrassed or too ashamed to ever tell you. Now it comes to living with the unknown and not allowing this to influence your enjoyment of subsequent relationships. . . .”

  “The illusion of romance on the Internet is dangerous. A man can pose as a compassionate lover, when all he really wants is sex. Once he’s slept with the woman, he wants her to disappear as easily as when he logs off at night. . . .”

  I added my story to theirs.

  • • •

  At last the weather turned mild. The crocuses began to peer up in the gardens and parks. An American man I met in a bookstore invited me to dinner, and I accepted. He worked for IBM, and he had an apartment near the Pompidou Center. But the magic of the Lion wasn’t there, and after a few weeks he stopped calling me and I stopped calling him.

  Samantha and I kept writing to each other, and weirdly, Samantha and Lynne kept writing to each other. They never saw each other; they just wrote, page upon page, every single day. Lynne could not give up the correspondence and neither could Samantha.

  Samantha finished her book and submitted it to her editor.

  Imran dated a policewoman named Meg, 37; an advertising executive named Alexa, 44; and a Jehovah’s Witness named Anne- Marie, 40.

  As time passed I wondered what had happened to Arsalan a little less, although on some days I wondered a little more. His birthday passed, and mine. They were two days apart. I remembered this, and I wondered if he did too. On the day, despite myself, my heart beat a bit faster when I went to the mailbox, but there was no card from him. The doorbell rang in the afternoon, and when I looked through the peephole I saw a delivery man with an enormous bouquet of flowers. I opened the door and ripped open the card even before speaking to him. They were from my brother and his girlfriend.

  I followed the news from the Middle East closely, especially the news from Iran. It made no sense to me, not, at least, when I tried to view the man I thought I knew through that prism: how did Arsalan, a passionate archaeologist with a needy, cross-eyed cat, fit in among the hardliners, the moderates, their intense insane doctrinal squabbles? Spokesmen for the Islamic Republic, wearing turbans, addressed note-scribbling Western journalists who asked them questions about the Iranian nuclear program. I would read the transcripts of these press conferences on the Internet and wonder how I could ever have thought I knew the man.

  Yet I had, hadn’t I?

  CHAPTER NINE

  . . . the witty dialogue and insights and observations about

  the CIA are so detailed they sound autobiographical . . .

  —Customer review

  of Loose Lips on Amazon.com

  Spring turned into summer. Nine months had elapsed since the Lion’s disappearance, and I no longer lunged for the phone when it rang. So when the phone did ring, I assumed it was my father calling to complain again about the repetitive stress injury he had develo
ped from his compulsive StairMaster regimen. He had called me every morning recently to tell me about this. “Hi, may I speak to Claire?” said a man—not my father—with an American accent.

  “Speaking.”

  “Oh! Claire? Claire, um, hi,” said the man. “This is Dave, Dave Melill, from Istanbul?”

  I had imagined receiving a phone call from someone who might have news of Arsalan for so long; yet when it finally happened I was unprepared. “Dave?” I said stupidly. “Dave? My God—where are you?”

  “Well, I’m in Paris, actually? I’m—”

  “In Paris? Where’s Sally? Is she with you?”

  “Um—” he hesitated.

  “Where is she? What happened to Sally?”

  “I don’t know. Sally and I are—separated now. Separated. She’s—I don’t know where she is. I haven’t spoken to her in three months.”

  “Why are you calling me? Do you know where Arsalan is? Do you know what happened to him?”

  “What?” He sounded confused. “I’m sorry?”

  I suddenly wondered whether he even knew what Sally was—I had heard of CIA employees who never told their spouses. “Dave, where are you, exactly.”

  “I’m in a hotel? Near the Bastille?”

  “Okay. What’s the name of the hotel?”

  “Um, hold on. It’s on the stationery. It’s the Comfort Hotel Bastille.”

  “What’s the address?” He read the address to me. I made him repeat it, and made him give me the phone number and his room number, too.

  “Dave, where the hell has Sally been for the last nine months? She disappeared after I last saw her. I’ve been trying to find her ever since. I’ve left message after message after message for her. I called your apartment in Istanbul over and over. Why wouldn’t she talk to me?”

  “Um,” he sounded hopelessly confused. “I . . . maybe . . . um, I was calling because do you want to have lunch maybe?”

  “Dave, stay there, okay? Stay right where you are, and I’ll come to the hotel and find you, right now, okay? Don’t leave; don’t move. Okay?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean, yeah.”

  “And you’re not going to leave?”

  “Yeah, sure, Claire. I won’t leave.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Hold on. Bye.”

  • • •

  Dave was speaking so slowly I wanted to reach into his throat and pull the words out with my fingernails. We were sitting in the bright summer sunlight at an outdoor café by the Bastille. He was mired in the dazed, miserable self-absorption characteristic of everyone going through a divorce. He had obviously not been eating well; he looked at least ten pounds lighter. He had cut off his ponytail. There were dark circles under his eyes. “She didn’t leave me, you know. I left her. I would have forgiven her for the affair. Anyone can make a mistake.” He shook his head. “But it was all the lies. That’s one reason I wanted to see you, because I have to know what really happened.”

  “And you think I would know?”

  “Yeah. Because everything changed when she came to Paris that weekend. She met someone. I’m sure of it. She came back so different. She was all distant, and she wouldn’t even talk about seeing a marriage counselor anymore. She just said, ‘Those headshrinkers are fucking quacks.’ ” He shook his head and brushed his hair out of his eyes nervously. “I want to know who she was with. Who did she meet.”

  “Dave, I don’t have any idea what happened to her that weekend. Believe me, I don’t. I’ve tried to find out too.” For the fourth time, I asked him what he knew about Arsalan. When I said “CIA,”he looked shocked. “You knew?” he said.

  I began trying to fill him in, but he stopped me. “I . . . I can’t talk about that stuff. I could get in trouble,” he said. It was the first hint he’d given me that he might be capable of thinking about anything but his broken heart. “She’s, the CIA, they have their attorneys trying to keep me from publishing my novel. And I’m not supposed to talk about anything related to that.”

  “What novel? Dave, just—can you please tell me if he’s alive?” The waiter interrupted us, bringing coffee and croissants. I paid no attention to the food. “Dave? Is he alive?”

  He looked at a flyer for a Chinese take-away on the ground, then began rubbing it in circles with his feet. He took a deep breath. “I don’t know . . . I’m not allowed . . . I don’t know for sure she didn’t tell me too much about that stuff.” He said it quickly, mumbling into his Phish T-shirt and running his words together.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “How can I get in touch with Sally?”

  “I don’t know. Even I can’t. We only talk through our lawyers now.”

  “Why is the CIA trying to keep you from publishing your novel?”

  “It’s—well, they can’t. They have no legal right. My attorney says no way can they stop me. I never signed a secrecy agreement; she did. They’re just trying to intimidate me.”

  “What’s in that novel?” I had thought he was writing a detective story.

  “It’s about a guy who’s married to a CIA officer. And it’s about how they lived in all these places, and he’s totally faithful to her even though there’s all these opportunities not to be, and he cooks for her every day, and he watches her lie to everybody else in the world but he thinks she would never lie to him. And then he finds out that she’s cheating on him, and she’s using all this spy shit to cover her tracks, but he’s not as stupid as she thinks, and he starts spying back because he has to know the truth.”

  “But this isn’t the novel you were working on in Istanbul, is it?”

  “No. It’s a new one.”

  “How long did it take you to write it?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “the novel’s what I really wanted to talk to you about? Because I thought maybe your agent would be interested. Because it’s a little like your novel, you know, the same themes, except mine is maybe a little more realistic. And mine has recipes?”

  “Recipes?”

  “Yes, because I thought that would help it sell. Recipes from all the places we went together.”

  “You went to Bulgaria and Turkey, right?”

  “Yeah. But the recipes are mostly American, because Bulgarian food is really awful. It’s recipes for those muffins you liked, and the apple-pumpkin pancakes. A lot of baking. Because that’s what it’s like, being married to a spy. You do a lot of baking.” All at once he started crying, right there in the café. “You do a lot of baking while that lying whore makes a fool of you,” he wept, shaking, with his face in his hands. The hungover French couple at the table next to us pretended not to notice. They looked pointedly in the other direction, embarrassed.

  “Dave, shhhh, it’s okay,” I said helplessly. “You’ll make it through this. You’ll be okay.”

  “You do a lot of baking, and you get pet turtles to keep you company because she’s away so much and you’re so lonely, and you love them but she just loses one while she’s out doing some goddamned spy thing, and then one day you go visit your mom in Wisconsin ’cause she’s sick, and while you’re home you check the turtlecam and you see your own wife, your own wife, screwing her boss right there on your living room floor.”

  “Oh, God, that’s awful, Dave.”

  “It’s so awful,” he sobbed. “It’s so awful. I loved her so much.”

  • • •

  I was reading Dave’s novel in the bathtub. The spiral-bound manuscript was more than two hundred single-spaced pages. The hero was an American from Wisconsin named Bob who was married to a CIA case officer named Jane. “I knew Jane was the woman I wanted to marry the instant I laid eyes on her.” Those were the first lines of Diamonds Are Supposed to Be Forever, You Lying CIA Bitch. “Little did I know when our lips first met that this was the beginning of a wild ride—one that would have me preparing an eight-course meal for the
acting director of the Bulgarian National Intelligence Service, a man they called the Venus Flytrap.”

  I could sort of see why the CIA didn’t want him to publish this.

  It wasn’t easy, I learned from the introduction, to find real maple syrup—the key ingredient in Vermont maple dumplings—in the Balkans. But it was worth the effort. The Venus Flytrap ate seconds, then thirds. “I made roasts and sauces, casseroles and pastries,” he wrote. “Once, I prepared a cream of pigeon soup while taking mortar fire. I baked cinnamon swirls to fortify an eight-man surveillance team during their stakeout of a notorious PKK safe house. I did it all out of love for my country, and love for one very special woman—a woman who turned out to be a lying, two-faced slut.”

  Dave devoted the first three chapters of the novel to Bob’s wooing of Jane, in college, and the fourth, unfortunately, to the consummation of their courtship, in a moist scene involving a lot of gasping and shuddering. “Her body began to tremble, and my name broke from her lips in a high squeal. Afterwards, she worried—it was a small town, where a girl could get a bad reputation. I told her I would tell no one. It was the first of many dirty secrets I was to keep for Jane.”

  Then followed chapter after chapter about Bob’s loneliness. While his glamorous wife jumped out of planes at the Farm, Bob baked butterscotch Toll House cookies. In Bulgaria, Bob learned how to use a professional chef’s torch to crisp the tops of the mocha crème brûlée while Jane disappeared for weeks on end without calling. “When she came back, she was starving. She couldn’t tell me where she’d been, but she said she never even wanted to look at a ploughman’s lunch again.”

  While she was away, he played tennis with the other diplomats’ spouses. “Ivana, the beautiful wife of the Czech ambassador, was lonely too. One day, while we were playing doubles, Ivana invited me back to her apartment. She asked if I would teach her to make real American hamburgers. She was wearing a tiny tennis skirt that showed off her long tanned Warsaw Pact legs. I knew from the look in her eyes that the American meat she wanted didn’t come from a cow. Firmly, I told her, ‘Ivana, I’m a married man, and I love my wife. All you do is take some ground beef; add salt, pepper, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce; and throw it on the damned grill.’ I would have never lied to Jane. Oh yes, I knew that Jane herself was a trained professional liar. I’d seen her in action. She could look a man in the eye and tell him that two plus two equaled five. She’d make it sound like God’s own truth. But I had known Jane when she was still a girl. I knew the innocent vulnerable core in my wife. And I thought what we had was pure—so pure that even the sinister cat-and-mouse world of international espionage could never corrupt it.”