Secret Lovers

by Charles McCarry

  “I’m going now,” she said. The sentence began in a whisper and ended in a sob. She shook her head violently, as if to drive away a voice, and lifted first one foot and then the other, putting on her shoes.

  Christopher sat on the disordered bed. His hair was still wet and he rubbed it with a towel. Cathy’s head was turned away; she bit her lower lip. Christopher saw that she was watching Christopher’s face and her own in the mirror. He caught her eye in the glass.

  “Stay until I get dressed,” he said. He put nothing into his voice. Cathy was waiting for a sign. Her face turned toward Christopher’s as if an invisible hand had grasped her chin and forced her to look at him.

  “We’re going out together,” she said, “is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s all?”

  Christopher moved her away from the dresser; she misunderstood the reason why he put his hands on her, and resisted. “I want a clean shirt,” he said. Cathy clenched her fists and tightened her eyes. “I want to tell you things,” she said. “Paul, listen to me.”

  “No. Cathy, I think we’ll both feel better if we do normal things for a while–walk, have a drink, have some dinner. Then you can say anything you like to me.”

  In a breaking voice, she said, “Nothing touches you.” As she spoke, she watched in the mirror. Christopher’s eyes changed and he turned away. Still watching herself (Christopher could feel her behind him, facing the glass ), she said, “It was Franco Moroni. You ought to be willing to hear the man’s name.”

  “Later,” Christopher said. “Not now.”

  Cathy was trembling. “His body is covered with black hair,” she said. “It was no good. In the end, he wanted me to lie to him about it. Do you know what I said to him, Paul? I said, ‘It’s not really adultery if the man can’t give you a climax.’ He slapped me and threw my clothes at me and told me to get out. He takes pills, pep pills, handfuls of them.”

  Christopher waited for her to stop speaking. “Do you feel changed?” he asked. “Are you different than you were before this happened?”

  Cathy put both palms flat against her stomach. “I don’t know,” she said.

  She shuddered. “Nothing touches you,” she said again. “Nothing.”

  She undressed quickly, pulling the sweater over her head, kicking off her shoes, turning her skirt and slip inside out as she pulled them off by the hems. She saw the look in Christopher’s eyes and laughed.

  “No,” she said, “not that. Don’t worry. I need a shower.”

  In the bathroom door she paused and looked over her shoulder at Christopher. The smile she gave him was a smile of forgiveness; he had not given Cathy the anger and jealousy she wanted, but she was ready to pretend that all was once again as it used to be.

  “Make us a drink,” Cathy said, in her lightest tone. “We’ll have it in the living room and watch the sunset. The sky is beginning to be nice again in the evening.”

  4

  Cathy wanted to dine in Trastevere. Christopher knew that she thought she would be safe there from Franco Moroni, who spent his evenings on the Via Veneto. There he could be seen by motion picture people and by foreign girls who wanted to be in his films. He had begun as an actor. Discovering politics, he went on to make movies about revolutions in which the creatures he loathed–American millionaires, American spies, American girls–died screaming for mercy. “In Franco’s films,” a Communist journalist called Piero Cremona had told Christopher, “only Arabs have virtue–a view of the human race that is unique to Moroni.”

  It was warm enough to eat outdoors, and Cathy and Christopher sat at a table in the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. Cathy finished all of her fettucine and most of her scampi. She drank no wine in Italy. She had a sensitive mouth and could taste each ingredient in even the most complicated dishes. “I haven’t really eaten anything since you left,” Cathy said, “you take my appetite with you when you go.” Then she put down her fork and stared at her hand, palm upturned on the tablecloth, as if she had lost the right to say such things to Christopher. A group of strolling musicians came to their table and the singer, an ugly youth with a true tenor voice, gave Cathy a rose after he had sung to her.

  Christopher paid the bill and they walked back to the river, then northward along its banks with the mass of the Janiculum Hill, lights on its face like droplets of rain on a windowpane, rising to their left. Cathy walked a step ahead of Christopher. She didn’t know the streets, and she gave a little gasp of surprise when she found that she had led them into Saint Peter’s Square. It was deserted. She went on walking, with Christopher following after, until they were among the tall columns under Bernini’s colonnade. Cathy put her hand on one of the columns, as high as she could reach, and stood in that position, motionless. With her back to Christopher, she said, “May I speak?”

  Christopher made no gesture. Cathy, sighing, turned around and held out her hand to him. He took it, and she pulled him toward her. The light from the street was yellowish and weak, and the mass of the basilica absorbed most of it, so that Cathy and Christopher, under the colonnade, stood in darkness.

  “You’ll have to put your arms around me,” Cathy said. “Otherwise I can’t do it.” He did as she asked, and she slid her arms around his waist. She shook her hair away from her face so that their cheeks touched, and with her lips against his skin, began to speak. Christopher moved a step to the right so that they could lean against a column; Cathy’s whole weight hung in his arms. She stumbled when he moved, then righted herself and again found the position she wanted.

  “Ever since I’ve known you, Paul,” Cathy said, “I’ve realized that you don’t like the things between us to be said out loud. Maybe everyone is that way if you love them. I don’t know. I’ve never loved anyone else. I know you don’t believe that. But with you, Paul, I feel like a person who wants life desperately, but knows she’s dying. That’s how you make me feel, it’s nothing you do or intend, but all the time I’m with you, I’m frightened, terrified, because I believe that no one can feel what I feel for you and go on living. I think I’m dying. All the time.”

  Her voice was a murmur. Christopher could barely hear her. “You think no one can know anything about you,” she said, “but I can read your body. I know, and I’ve known ever since we went to Cannes together and made love for the first time, that you think I’m a clumsy lover. And selfish. Isn’t that true?”

  Christopher said, “Yes.”

  “Still you want me a lot, really want me, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I disappoint you in bed every time, no matter what I do or try to do for you, because I don’t know how to make you happy.”

  “That’s not true, Cathy. You lose yourself, I think. I’ve never seen anyone like you.”

  “You’ve had better girls than me.”

  “Cathy, I’ve never had a girl I wanted as much as I want you.”

  She hung in his arms, fragrant, breathing softly; he felt the twin streams of breath from her nostrils against his neck. Christopher shifted his own weight.

  “Don’t move,” Cathy said, “please don’t move. I think there was, at some time in the past, a girl.” Her voice broke. “Don’t move, I’m not going to cry. One girl out of all the ones you’ve had. I think you loved her the way I love you, Paul. I think she spoiled you for me. She poisoned you. You wrote those poems to her, and now you never write poems.”

  “Cathy, there was no such person.”

  “Pau 1, I can’t believe that, it’s a lie.”

  Christopher tried to push her away so that he could look at her but she resisted. He put his hand on her face and spoke into her hair.

  “Cathy, I don’t lie in our part of life. I tell you the truth, and only the truth.”

  Cathy uttered one harsh sob. As if the sound had released her, she stepped back out of Christopher’s arms.

  “But if it’s not a lie you’re telling me, if there was no girl, then what does that make
me?” she asked:

  5

  Someone in Paris, Christopher never discovered who, had given Cathy the book of his poems. After reading them, she had flown to Rome; he found her waiting in his apartment when he returned, exhausted, after a long operation in Africa. Cathy had persuaded the portiere to let her in; she had only had to smile at him, she said, and give him five thousand lire.

  “How much is that in real money?” she asked Christopher. He told her; he didn’t like the phrase, but it was one of Cathy’s favorites. “It expresses exactly what I mean,” she said, “dollars are real money–if I were an Italian I wouldn’t accept that funny-looking stuff.”

  Christopher’s poems had excited Cathy. When she first read them in Paris, a month or two after they met at Saint Anton, she and Christopher were not yet lovers. A few weeks before, he had called her in Paris and taken her to dinner. She told him she was perfecting her French and studying the piano. She lived with a maid and a cook in an apartment owned by her parents in Auteuil. Her father liked to be in Paris for the racing season; he bred Thoroughbreds in America, and his friends were horsemen too. “Papa likes to know what a man is going to say to him before he starts to talk,” Cathy told Christopher. “If there’s no horse in the first sentence, he knows he’s in the wrong company.”

  Cathy invited Christopher to lunch in the apartment. He expected to find other guests, but they were alone. Facing each other across the center of the table, they ate fresh salmon in midwinter. The maid, a bony woman in uniform, clucked over Cathy, urging her to finish the food on her plate. The dining room had an enormous north window, and Cathy sat facing this source of light. There were no shadows on her face, and her eyes, which changed from gray to blue according to her mood as the pupils enlarged or shrank, were fixed on Christopher’s face. She wore a blue frock and a scarf at her neck. Behind her was another window, and its white frame enclosed her like a figure in a painting, with the city in its winter mist brushed into the background. It seemed impossible that she could be a living woman: Botticelli might have imagined her color, Gainsborough her bones. Cathy, watching Christopher’s amusement, asked him, for the first time, “What are you thinking?” For the first time, Christopher refused to respond.

  They kissed lightly when he left. His hands were on her waist. She moved her body inside her clothes, and with this small gesture awakened him sexually. In the street below her apartment, he laughed aloud at the strength of the desire he felt for her; he had never felt such heat for a woman, or known so surely that it was returned.

  While Christopher was in the field, and actually operating, he had no sexual thoughts. Cathy did not change that in the weeks that followed, but when he found her waiting for him in Rome, he told her, truthfully, that he had been thinking about her and about nothing else during the long plane ride from Léopoldville. “I know, I think of nothing but you, and I’ve been sending out messages to you,” Cathy said. “Reading your poems told me what I guess I already knew. I love you. I want us to make love, and afterward I want to watch us making love in the poems you’ll write about us.” Christopher explained that he had stopped writing poems. Cathy paid no attention. She did not at that time doubt the power of her beauty. “We mustn’t become lovers in a city where we know anyone,” she said. “We have to be alone. Let’s go to Cannes, now.” They took the five o’clock plane.

  In the hotel room, unclothed, Cathy changed. She lost her lighthearted way of speaking, her smile, her grace of movement. She ceased flirting. Giving Christopher her body was the most serious act she had ever carried out. She tried to say so. “When I look at you,” she told Christopher, “I see only you, I don’t see myself. That’s never happened to me before.” She asked Christopher if she had made him happy. He didn’t reply.

  Next morning, at breakfast, Christopher watched Cathy peel an orange. She turned the fruit against the knife so that the skin came off in one long unbroken spiral. He wondered how she could do everything else with such effortless skill and be so blundering a lover. She told him that she was a virgin. He thought that she would learn technique. She came around the breakfast table with her mouth filled with food and kissed him and led him back to the bed. They spent a week together on the Côte d’Azur. At the end of it he handed in her name to Headquarters for clearance. A month later they were married.

  He told Patchen, his best man, that he had spent less time and thought in taking a wife than he had ever done in recruiting an agent. “With the agents,” Patchen had said in his uninflected voice, “you were doing the seducing.”

  6

  Beneath the colonnade of Saint Peter’s, Cathy came back into Christopher’s arms. They swayed slightly, like a couple waiting on a dance floor for the next song to begin.

  When she spoke again her voice was stronger. “I thought I could swap Franco for that girl in your past,” she said. “Hurt for hurt was my idea. I wanted to make an exchange, the way you do with captured spies, on a bridge between the free world and the beastly world.”

  Cathy did not speak for a long time. “It was the loneliness,” she said at last.

  Christopher waited. He knew well enough what she was going to say, and what she meant.

  “You never take me with you into yourself, and that’s the only place I want to go,” Cathy said. “You never understand what I mean when we talk about this.”

  Christopher sighed; Cathy put her fingers on his lips, hiding his displeasure for him, as if she knew he would not want her to see it.

  “I’m lonely even when we make love, Paul,” Cathy said. “I know you don’t know what wanting someone you love can be like. I know because I love you. You can’t love, can you?”

  “Yes,” Christopher said, “I can.”

  “Then you can’t show it, you can’t let go. I feel it in you. It’s that God-damned work you do. Paul, what happens when you go away?”

  “Mostly nothing happens, Cathy. It’s a question of control. I try to control circumstances. That’s what I’m trained to do.”

  Cathy stepped away from him again. “When does the control stop?” she asked.

  Christopher made no effort to touch her. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “I don’t know if you can understand. I doubt if anyone can who hasn’t lived the life. Cathy, I use people. I make them trust me, sometimes they even love me, and I betray them. I make traitors of them. I give them money and advice and they sign for it with their thumbprint, their actual thumbprint. That way, if they get out of line, we have incontrovertible proof that they’ve taken money to commit treason. We can mail the evidence to their secret police. They know they’re agreeing to blackmail in advance. Sometimes they’re ruined, sometimes they go to their deaths. I make these things happen. I couldn’t do it if I felt anything while I was doing it. To stay sane, if that’s what I am, I’ve learned to put my emotions somewhere else while I’m committing an act with another human being.”

  Cathy stared at him, nodding, as he spoke. “What do you think of these people, these agents, that you’re manipulating?” she asked.

  Christopher said, “In my way, I love them. I love secrets, we all do. That’s why we do the work. While we’re working, we’re together in a region of experience where very few humans have ever gone.”

  “Love them? You just said you feel nothing while you’re with them.”

  “No. I said that I put my emotions aside. Because what I feel is so strong that I couldn’t do the job if I let myself go free.”

  “And you’re telling me that this–what do you call it?–this technique spills over into our lives and into our bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand,” Cathy said. “Then there’s no difference. Absolutely no difference.”

  “In what?”

  “In loving you, Paul, and in lying down and letting Franco Moroni masturbate in me.”

  SIX

  1

  “There’s too much of the Sybarite in you,” Patchen said, as a plate of quenelles was s
et before Christopher. Patchen had ordered raw spring vegetables as his first course. Rich food annoyed him in the way that cigarettes annoy a nonsmoker. Patchen himself had made this comparison. Years before, when he and Christopher had been undergraduates, Patchen had come back to their room after buying a Radcliffe girl an expensive meal in Boston. “She smelled of food all through the theater and all the way home,” Patchen had said. “Like a full ashtray the morning after a party.” In the end he had married another Radcliffe girl, one as thin as he and almost as still. Christopher had dined with the Patchens in Washington a dozen times, and had never been given anything but rare roast beef, green salad, and Stilton cheese that Patchen bought in England to set off the clarets he had shipped to him from France.

  “What did you think of Kamensky’s book?” Patchen asked.

  He had given the rough English translation to Christopher the night before, at midnight. It did not occur to him that Christopher might not have read all seven hundred typed pages in the twelve hours since.

  “It’s a pedantic translation, but you can see what the novel must be. I want to read the Russian.”

  “Yes,” Patchen said, “but can it play the guitar?”

  This was a joke between them from their first days in secret life; they had been trained by a man who had once run, or had invented for their education, an agent inside Nazi Germany who had gained entry into the highest circles of the regime because he could play the guitar and was always welcome at parties. “Always ask yourself,” their trainer would tell them, “whether your asset can play the guitar.”