by Karen Olsson
“I don’t think I need ice.”
“I like to chew ice when I’m nauseous.”
“You mean nauseated.”
“What?” She pulled open the freezer and leaned over it, while I started to cry a little, because of the blood and because I didn’t want to present myself to my parents and their guests this way. I sat down and watched TV for a couple of minutes, but the blood kept coming through the paper towels.
“Mom?”
Outside, everyone stared at me. Suddenly there were gnats everywhere, gnats in my eyes. My mother sat me down on the deck and crouched there, lifting up the paper towel bandage, which was already soaked. Mr. Abdulaziz stood next to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, inhaling through my nose and then trying to wipe my nose with a bit of the paper towel.
“What happened?”
“I was cutting the watermelon.”
“Why were you doing that?”
Mr. Abdulaziz kneeled next to my mom. Lightly (and distastefully? Or did I imagine that?) he took my hand in his. My tears dried up and not only that, I felt my whole self shrivel, sensing some violation of his religion or mine. There was an unwelcome message in his cautious attention. Like it or not I was some sort of woman.
“You should go to the emergency room,” he said. “They’ll get you sewn up, don’t worry. For now you should keep your hand elevated.”
There was a brief negotiation over who would take me to the hospital. Every adult there volunteered him or herself, even Mr. Abdulaziz offered to go. I wished they would just send me to the hospital with Courtney. It fell to Dad instead: “I’ll do it, I’ll go,” he kept saying, with a martyrish note in his voice, as if repenting for not having kept his house in order. Although Mom objected, saying it made more sense for her to go, he went inside for his car key. The Abdulazizes announced they were leaving. “Oh no, stay,” my mother said, fooling no one. For some reason Dick came with us to the ER, maybe to keep my dad from panicking, since he was so wound up, while Dick sat shotgun, making jokes. I was in the backseat, holding up my hand, and he would say, “This girl keeps giving me the finger!” and so on until he leeched a smile out of me. He was there the whole time, there in the emergency room, and right outside the door as the doctor took a piece of skin from my arm and grafted it over my fingertip. It may not have taken any special valor for him to be there, but even now when I think of him it’s with a fondness, because of his company that afternoon, his reassuring attention. Dad, on the other hand, was so anxious he hardly said a word to me—he only began to relax on the way home, rolling down the windows and playing the Beach Boys and stopping at a McDonald’s for soft-serve cones and coffee.
Later, in retrospect, that abortive pool party would seem unreal, a hallucination. It was one occasion when my family’s history may have intersected with that of Iran-Contra, but the stories seemed all but impossible to put together. To bring my dad—the dad who fixed things around the house, washed the cars, ate chips—into that tangle of secret machinations and planes full of weapons parts, meant recasting him as a different kind of person, a naive gringo in a geopolitical melodrama. Yet to work the other way, to try to reconcile the bigger picture with the kitchen on Albemarle Street, with our life circa 1985, seemed just as distorting, the product an erratic family comedy in which a cartoonish Oliver North had an odd cameo. I could inflate everything or I could minimize and poke fun. It was the same thriller vs. satire problem I’d had with the screenplay.
But this much I do know: eighteen months after the party, the joint select committees’ investigators learned that my parents had entertained the special assistant to the Saudi ambassador, and they made a point of asking both my dad and Mitchell about it in the depositions each gave in advance of the hearings, as though perhaps a deal had been done poolside, i.e., my father and/or Dick Mitchell might’ve solicited an illegal contribution to the Contras from Mr. Abdulaziz. The suggestion seems outlandish to me. No way did that happen: I’m convinced. Still, I wonder whether they could’ve possibly meant to do it, intended to make their own freelance solicitation, until I’d interrupted them with my injury.
(From the deposition of Richard Mitchell, March 9, 1987)
MR. LEGRAND. What did you hope to gain from your contact with Mr. Abdulaziz? Or is it Prince Abdulaziz?
MR. MITCHELL. I was never clear on whether he is a prince or not. They have a lot of princes over there. He may have been one.
MR. LEGRAND. But in terms of your objective.
MR. MITCHELL. I would say that I was pursuing a relationship but not that I had a specific objective.
MR. LEGRAND. Did you notify your superiors at the State Department?
MR. MITCHELL. Yes. My boss was Elliott Abrams and I told him about it.
MR. LEGRAND. Did you notify anyone on the National Security Council staff, other than Mr. Atherton?
MR. MITCHELL. I personally did not. I believe Mr. Abrams may have mentioned it to Ollie North.
MR. LEGRAND. Were he and North friends, to your knowledge?
MR. MITCHELL. To the best of my knowledge they had substantial professional contact, which was friendly in nature. I would describe them as being close, on a professional basis.
MR. LEGRAND. And were you friendly with Mr. North?
MR. MITCHELL. Our interactions were always friendly.
MR. LEGRAND. Would it be fair to say that your friendly relationship with Oliver North ran counter to the prevailing attitude at the State Department?
MR. MITCHELL. He had his detractors, but it wasn’t a universal attitude within the department. Certain people considered him an activist.
MR. LEGRAND. Activist in what sense?
MR. MITCHELL. Very operationally driven, and capable of manipulating people in order to get done what he wanted to get done.
MR. LEGRAND. Did you share that view?
MR. MITCHELL. I saw him as someone who was very passionate and very effective.
MR. LEGRAND. Would it be fair to say that his detractors included the secretary of state?
MR. MITCHELL. I was present at a meeting during which the secretary of state told Abrams to “watch Ollie North.”
MR. BENNETT. Can we go off the record?
MR. LEGRAND. Sure.
(Discussion off the record.)
MR. LEGRAND. Back on the record.
The inquiry into the alleged solicitation was dropped, after it was revealed that the Saudis had already been contributing to the cause, secretly, for more than a year by the time of the pool party. Only a handful of people had been briefed on the Saudi contributions, and my father and Dick Mitchell had not been among them. Even the president may not have been fully briefed—at least that would become his defense. Nobody had the big picture.
We never had anything close to a big picture on Albemarle Street. I hardly had any picture at all. The scandal would bewilder me, it would become entangled with the general confusions and fears of adolescence, so that I still, all these years later, wanted to sort it out, to arrive at some kind of big picture for myself. What had my dad done—who had he been? I still wished we could collaborate, which is to say I wanted Dad to tell me what had happened and then I could write it, or both of us could, but if he chose to keep quiet I would go on trying to piece it all together, assembling fragments and figments.
I’m inclined to believe that Dick Mitchell was the type of person who would find older mentors he could flatter and profit from, men who liked to see themselves in him. In the early eighties, he’d met North, and though North wasn’t much older than he was, not a mentor exactly, Dick ingratiated himself with the lieutenant colonel. By that time my father was already on the NSC staff, and so it was easy enough for his friend to pull him in, to cut him a piece of the action. I’m not trying to blame it all on Dick, but had it not been for him I bet Dad might not even have known what North was up to. After all, there were plenty of NSC staff people who had no idea.
* * *
My quote-unquote ma
nager called me while I was at the grocery store. I always felt a quick jab of hope at the sight of Phil Franklin’s name on the phone display. Although I was not an optimist in general, I would enter contests (screenwriting competitions for one, but also raffles to win luxury cars or gourmet cookware, whatever was there to be won), and I answered phone calls from him in the same spirit, wanting to believe and so semibelieving that a studio executive had gone into raptures over an idea or a script of mine. That never came to pass, though. Now Phil announced he was quitting the entertainment business to help out a friend who’d started a custom yacht company in Marin County.
“You’re going to build boats?”
“Of course not. I’m going to sell boats.”
“Boats.”
“It’s a great opportunity.”
Here I’d thought of him as one of Hollywood’s enthusiasts, someone who would never leave the industry, but turned out he was just an enthusiast. His sentiment for TV and movies could be transferred to boats. And where did that leave me? Even though Phil had not actually helped me to become the working writer I’d hoped to become, his news was upsetting. Now I have nothing to go back to, I thought. It wasn’t necessarily true, but I thought it anyway. There was nothing for me in Los Angeles anymore.
The house was empty when I returned from the store. I didn’t know where Dad had gone. The answering machine blinked: Tim, this is Roy Kotler, I wanted to let you know I won’t be able to make it to the panel on Tuesday. I’ve got family coming into town, and … The event was less than a week away, and acquaintances of my dad’s kept calling to say they weren’t coming.
It had been a while since I’d found myself alone in the house where I’d grown up, and without my present-day dad to remind me that the twenty-first century was well under way, I started to feel as if I would wake up the next morning and have to get ready for school. That my sisters and my parents would all be in the kitchen, eating breakfast, reaching around each other for the milk—and when I pictured that ordinary, harried, unfeeling moment I both regretted what I saw there and longed to return to it, as though I might better appreciate something about it or even inject a larger dose of love into it than had been there the first time.
I drank a beer and watched TV, fell asleep to a report of another roadside bomb somewhere in Iraq.
When I woke up, I went online to look for temp work. I was so accustomed to making efforts that led to nothing, to writing pilots and pitch documents that wound up in wastebaskets—and meanwhile to taking jobs in production that, unglamorous though they were, I’d found by knowing the right people—that I’d almost forgotten there were other kinds of jobs that were more or less readily available to college graduates, at least in D.C. in 2004 there were. Although I was ten years too old for filing and Xeroxing, I sent in a résumé. I touted my experience with the relevant software. I talked to some woman on the phone for less than ten minutes, and the next week I landed in an office in Crystal City, consisting of a handful of small rooms that had been modern circa the midseventies and so were plain and dreary now, in a humble building linked by tunnel to underground shops and the Metro, so that I came and went without ever stepping out of doors, a working gopher. My desk had nothing on it but a telephone and a file tray. Between tasks, I watched the light change out the window.
I went to that job on the day of Dad’s panel, and after work I took the Metro straight to Farragut North and walked over to the S____Club, a private social club in an old mansion, where panel discussions were regularly presented for the benefit of its members. Standing before the club’s elegant facade, I felt ungainly, a low-caste temp, but I went in, and up the stairs, and into the library, a high-ceilinged, plush, fusty room lined with mahogany bookcases. Collapsible furniture had been set up: a narrow table, with six vacant chairs behind it, stood underneath a line of track lights, and on the other side of the table were chairs for the audience, a handful of them occupied by white people in black coats. Others, still on their feet, mingling and murmuring, looked at me and looked away. Dad had probably invited sixty or seventy friends and acquaintances, but here, ten minutes before the discussion was due to start, there were maybe thirty people total, at least some of whom, surely, had come in support of the other panelists. I found myself making excuses on his behalf. It was early in the evening, when much of Washington was still at work, and it was two days before Thanksgiving besides.
I didn’t see my sisters. They were both supposed to come—Maggie was going to take the train down and stay until Saturday. It took no more than this, their dual absence, for me to suspect that they were out somewhere getting a drink and analyzing my deficiencies (such as: the very insecurity and self-involvement behind that suspicion). A crackly “Helen!” interrupted my fretful reverie. It was my dad’s old friend Jodi Dentoff who, although she was quite a bit older than the last time I’d seen her, appeared with her magic intact.
Picture a stage, and now picture, in the wings, a well-seasoned pixie of a woman who’s seen the show a hundred times but still seems absorbed by it, wryly fascinated: that would be her. She came striding toward me wearing tall boots with tall heels, and even so she was short, rasping, touching me on the arm and calling me “sweetie,” which was what she called everyone. She stood before me as though there were nowhere she’d rather stand, and I sensed that there wasn’t a spot in the wide world where Jodi would not have exuded the same sense of good fortune—isn’t this wonderful, you could imagine her cooing as she entered, for instance, a yurt—and she fixed me with her big dark sponge eyes and instantly I was ready to tell her everything I knew and some things I didn’t know. She was a reporter and had that talent for making people want to talk to her, if you could even call it a talent, for it was as much a part of her as her physical features, inherent in how she looked and in how she looked at you, in her mix of sisterly warmth and perfect chic, in her plucked, arched brows, which prodded you to account for yourself, and in her very smallness, which put you at ease.
“I’m so glad your father is doing this,” she said.
“He’s been looking forward to it,” I said.
“How is he?” I had the sense that they were no longer very much in contact. It wasn’t a complete surprise, since I couldn’t think of the last time I’d heard him mention her, but there was a time when she’d been a frequent guest of my parents’, a good friend. Maybe that was all before the crisis, I didn’t remember. Or maybe the friendship hadn’t survived my parents’ divorce.
“He’s good, you know, out and about, teaching his class. He’s pretty much fully recovered.” Was that even true? I wondered. I’d come home to see him, and yet I’d repeatedly felt myself refusing to really see him.
“Recovered?”
“He had a heart thing. A heart attack.”
“What?”
“He’s doing fine, though.”
“Oh. Oh, I’m…” She stopped short. Her eyes went off someplace and came back. “Are you home for the holiday?”
“I’m here for a little while. I was kind of between things in L. A. and so I’ve been staying with my dad. I actually just started a temporary job, so. I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. I’ll probably go back sometime after the new year.” Around my parents’ friends I would find myself explaining my life in too much detail, trying to make it sound full and reasonable, though the effect, to my ears anyway, was to make it sound empty.
“How nice for your father.” She reached into her small black purse and took out a card case, then handed me her business card. “Let me take you to lunch sometime, I’d love to hear about what you and your sisters are up to.”
“That’d be great.” I didn’t think much of it, as I assumed that this was her way of ending a conversation, with the card and the indefinite promise of a lunch.
I claimed a chair in the row next to last, where there were three free seats for my sisters and me, and so placed myself directly beneath (I noticed too late) a claustral lighting fixture that hung from
chains and had put cracks in the ceiling plaster, a brass hazard I thought might well break free and plummet to the floor, or onto my head. The title of the panel—“Opportunities and Costs: Iraq Eighteen Months After the Invasion”—all but made me wish for such a catastrophe.
My father and the other panelists entered and were introduced: so-and-so from such-and-such, a fellow at the Center for X and Y, a former director of Z, the author of A, B, and C, a frequent contributor to D. Dad had been “an official in the Reagan administration,” now “an adjunct professor at American University,” which was far less of a biography than the rest of them claimed for themselves. As he was introduced he peeped at the audience, not seeing very many of the friends he’d hoped to see. I made my face as bright as I could, so that he would find me at least, but I was so far back, I didn’t know whether I was visible to him.
The room seemed to vibrate subtly from ambient noise, from ancient radiators and pipes, and microphone static, and bodies in seats. The moderator (bespectacled, bald) joked that he was especially proud to have netted a panelist from the Department of Defense, “because these days, when you invite people to talk about Iraq, it can be hard to get anyone from the government to call you back.” The man from Defense, who was maybe ten years younger than my father, smiled weakly, and once things were under way he made only brief sorties into the discussion. “The media needs to tell the positive stories about Iraq and not just the negative ones,” he noted, mentioning the upcoming Iraqi elections and “positive outcomes” in Samarra and Ramadi before going silent again.
There were two other men on the panel besides Dad and the Pentagon official, while the fifth panelist, a visiting scholar in a wine-colored shawl, was an elegant woman who kept her delicate chin lifted during the others’ remarks, in a show of listening. Her professional affiliations were with the University of Bristol and Johns Hopkins, her subject the failure to empower Iraqi women. She pronounced “nonnegotiable” with all six syllables, for example, “the inclusion of women in the political sphere is nonnegotiable,” and cited statistics on the relationship between the level of women’s education and employment in a country and that country’s gross domestic product. She undermined herself, I think, by tossing out academic terms that wouldn’t have resonated with that crowd—subaltern, hegemony, subjectivity—yet even those sounded lovely coming out of her mouth. Once she referred to “carefully tailored operations,” and I could only picture a company of soldiers dressed as she was, a flock of wine-colored shawls advancing across some desert.