All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  “I think you should have this,” he said.

  “Oh god.”

  “If you’re going to live all by yourself down here—”

  “Oh my god. No.”

  “You should be able to protect yourself.”

  “No way. Absolutely not. I don’t think that’s legal for me to have.”

  “All anyone needs to do is turn on the news to get an idea of how they’re enforcing those laws.”

  He took out a package of bullets. “Let me show you how to load it,” he said.

  “How about I get a baseball bat. I wouldn’t be able to sleep with that thing here.”

  “You could move home any time.”

  “Dad.”

  I’d seen hundreds of them on-screen or in policemen’s holsters, but I’d never been in the position to touch one. It was a small pistol, something I could picture a Barbara Stanwyck pulling from her purse. I’ll acknowledge that I was not completely uninterested. In the Barbara Stanwyck idea, that is, the pulp glamour.

  I looked at my father. He was sweating. Something he’d always had in him had been amplified. He’d always been anxious, as though whatever had kept all of us healthy and more than adequately fed and clothed might disappear at any moment, and it was his singular burden to hold up the roof over our heads. And now he was still straining to hold up that roof, only there were four different roofs, five if you counted my mother’s Philadelphia condo, all held up by one hand while with the other he kept opening door after door, looking for the one that led back to the life we’d lived together, under just one roof. Yet each one he opened led to an empty room or a crummy apartment or a brick wall. I had this sense of my dad wandering around Washington with that tiny gun, wishing to rectify the present, to bring it in line with what he’d pictured for his so-called golden years.

  But there. I heard him breathe. Saw him seeing. Saw him trying to tie my shoelaces again and for once didn’t resent it. Saw how confusing it was for him, to find me like this. The daughter who should have been someone’s wife by now, someone’s mother too, living in a house with three or four bedrooms and a pool in back. Saw for the first time how in not doing those things I hadn’t just chosen a different path for myself but had in some way left him all at sea.

  “I just—” he began.

  He sat down.

  And then—what else could we do?—we sat there at the little table that was my dining table and desk, that had (dis)arrayed over its surface salt and pepper shakers, a gas bill, a newspaper, a dirty paper napkin, and now a handgun. I offered to make tea. He opened the newspaper. It was almost okay, but then every so often I spotted the gun again and felt frantic to get rid of it.

  He stood up and went to examine the busted window latch a second time. “Where’s the nearest hardware store?” he asked. “I bet I could fix this.”

  “I promise I’ll call my landlady and get her to take care of it,” I said.

  “I’ll even pay for it.” He took out his wallet. “Here, here’s a couple hundred.”

  “Dad!”

  Near the window was a stack of books, my research materials, and too late I saw that A Call to Honor by James Singletary was right on top. Dad hadn’t noticed it there—until he did, turned and looked at it.

  He picked up the book. I waited for him to say something. He set it back down.

  “It looks like this latch has been broken for a while,” he said.

  “It’s not very good.”

  “No.”

  “I mean the book,” I said. “The book’s not great.”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “No.” He avoided my eyes, preemptively deflecting all the questions I wished I could ask about Singletary, about the lying that Dad said he’d done.

  I tossed one at him anyway. “What was he like to work with?”

  “A pest.”

  “What about your book? Have you been working on it?”

  His look was remote. “I could give you what I’ve done,” he said, sounding as if he were recalling something. He was repeating a suggestion I’d made.

  “That would be great. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, actually.”

  “About what?”

  What indeed? “I guess, the choices you would’ve had to make, or—I’m sure you didn’t agree with everything, but you were there and, well, you know…”

  “I was there,” he echoed, musingly. “I don’t make any excuses for that.”

  “But I’m sure there’s a lot to say that isn’t even about blame or responsibility. So much time has passed.”

  “It has,” he said. “It has. I wanted to write something, but now—”

  It occurred to me that we were both stalled writers; that was something we had in common. “What about you?” he said abruptly.

  “What am I writing?”

  “How are things?”

  “They’re good.”

  “You need money?”

  “Dad. Really. I’m working.”

  “But it doesn’t sound like—listen, maybe you need to quit that and figure out what it is you actually want to do.”

  “Doing nothing has never really given me much insight—I just get depressed.”

  “Everybody’s depressed, everybody. When did that happen?” He came back to the table and sat down.

  I told him I didn’t know.

  “Are you depressed? Like right now?” he asked.

  “No. Not really, I don’t think. But I’m not even sure I understand what counts, technically, as depression.”

  My father squinted—or winced? “Have you eaten? Is there someplace to eat around here?”

  “Actually I’m—I have plans this afternoon,” I said. It was a lie.

  I asked him to take the gun with him, but it was still there on the table after he left, and he had managed to stash the two hundred dollars underneath it while I wasn’t looking. Whatever neutralizing effect had been achieved by talking was now unachieved; there was a little pistol on the table. I didn’t even know whether it was loaded, whether there was a bullet in it already, whether it was cocked, was there a manual for it online? I didn’t know how to determine such things. I wanted to just throw it away. I found a pillowcase and deposited the thing inside, gingerly twisting the fabric around. I put that on a shelf in the closet. I took it down and jammed it under the bed. I retrieved it and set it back in the closet. I plucked it out again. I stuck it under the bed.

  I turned on the television. A gray compound with smoke flushing from behind the walls: armed men had attacked the U.S. consulate in Jeddah. They’d rear-ended a truck as it was about to pass through a gate and then sped into the compound, throwing grenades, killing five “non-U.S. employees.” I pictured some Filipino groundskeeper on a work visa, with a wife and three kids who were now fucked, they were there in my head for an instant and then they were gone, poof, replaced by the statement that our president had made: “The terrorists are still on the move.”

  On the move, I repeated to myself. And here was Deputy Secretary of State Armitage at a press conference, Armitage whose name cropped up everywhere lately, the name itself so perfect, like the name of some upscale arsenal, a swank hotel for surface-to-air missiles. The Armitage. He’d been at the Pentagon back in the eighties, I’d read that somewhere, the same time my dad was at the White House. A friend to all the old freedom-fighters. A survivor. Now there were those who considered him too cautious—not enough froth at the corners of his mouth. But he’d hung in there. He stayed on the team. Perhaps I’d underestimated the burden of that, of loyalty I mean, since I’d never had to be loyal to much of anything. I let him finish talking, this other dad, before I turned the TV back off.

  Was it loyalty that had compelled my father to stay in his job at the White House? Or inertia? Or did he just fail to realize how far things had gone, until after they’d gone too far?

  Although Tim is the one who works on the NSC staff with Li
eutenant Colonel North, it’s Dick who befriends North and who later ropes Tim more fully into the operation. It’s Dick who one afternoon sits in the dusk of an unlit government auditorium and watches, from a metal chair, one of North’s slide shows: scenes of war on a pull-down screen. There are the slides of the boys in the jungle, preparing for battle, and then there’s the one of a lone wooden cross planted on a new grave. He listens to North urge in his throaty near-whisper: We’ve got to give them more … than just the chance to die.

  Mitchell’s boss, the assistant secretary, lets him help out with some of North’s activities. As an employee of the State Department, Dick is bound by certain rules, but those rules don’t prevent him from learning of the more than $27 million recently deposited in a Credit Suisse account in Geneva for the benefit of the Contras. Nor do they keep him from strategizing about how to take down the Sandinistas’ Soviet helicopters, nor from weighing in on North’s idea to detain or maybe even sink a Nicaraguan merchant vessel suspected to be carrying arms shipments. It’s as though time itself runs faster in room 392, as the rest of the capital plods on, mired in debates about welfare, warnings about drugs, and endless analyses and forecasts in re gas prices or farm subsidies or the interstate highway system.

  You ought to come see what we’re up to, Dick brags to Tim, making it sound like they are designing some secret weapon. All but smacking his lips. He tells Tim about the weekly meetings of the Restricted Interagency Group, in which a dozen people assemble on an upper floor at Foggy Bottom to discuss training programs, the southern front, the availability of Maule light aircraft, getting Costa Rica to cooperate. A peculiar, febrile logic prevails in those meetings, and so for example nobody sees any contradiction in enlisting a couple of businessmen to set up a vaguely defined covert operation involving a mesh of shell corporations and that account at Credit Suisse, and calling it “Project Democracy.”

  At State, the RIG men are known as the cowboys.

  In the middle of the summer, Dick is promoted to a new position. During that same pool party that might or might not have been thrown as part of an ill-conceived and redundant effort to raise money from the Saudis, he tells Tim the news. It’s a special office for aid to Nicaragua, he says, his voice low and burbling. It’s just been funded by Congress to do humanitarian assistance.

  Humanitarian assistance? Tim asks.

  As far as I’m concerned, everything we’ve been doing is humanitarian, Dick says, as he stares through the patio doors at the girl by the pool, Tim’s oldest.

  You’re not kidding, are you.

  Not at all.

  * * *

  Tim himself is not so sure, in the summer of 1985, about everything they’ve been doing. Inside North’s office, people joke that they’re all going to wind up in jail. Is that funny? For Tim a hole of worry opens up, and the wider the hole becomes, the more he wishes to tell Jodi. He believes he would never improperly give up sensitive information, just as he would never cheat on his wife, but whenever he meets with Jodi, the possibility of both transgressions buzzes through him, and he returns to his desk more energized than he was before lunch.

  He never has to explain much to her. Trying to tell Eileen about work, it’s like trying to describe a sport she’s never seen played, while Jodi knows the game intimately. Not that work is the only subject. When I can’t sleep, he finds himself telling her at one lunch in July, I imagine I’m back home, in the town where I grew up. I go through the downtown and remember what each store was, and I’ll go in and out of them, and then walk over to the park or the school or our house.

  Sometimes I try to picture the ocean, Jodi says, but I can never hold on to it. I go back to thinking about what I have to do the next day.

  After she has emptied her plate of everything but the parsley sprig, she wipes her mouth and takes a reporter’s notebook and a pen out of her purse.

  All I want to say is that we’ve got a whole lot of talent over there that’s going to waste, Tim says. Not to mention people being paid to do essentially nothing, and this is the process by which the president is being advised on national security issues. It’s … it’s a mess.

  It certainly sounds that way.

  He continues: But it’s not all McFarlane’s fault. He’s not getting what he needs from on high—he’s stuck.

  Right.

  But that’s not to say, I mean—he could at least talk to them. You don’t just stick your head in the sand either. I want to make sure this is on background.

  Of course.

  Tim is tempted to say more. Everyone suspects everyone else of leaking anyway, so what’s the difference? And then Jodi all but says it for him.

  So instead you’ve got North making up the Central America policy as he goes along—

  I don’t know if I would put it quite that way, Tim interrupts. I’d just say he’s been kind of the point person on it. The thing is—

  You could do a better job, couldn’t you? she says. Better than McFarlane.

  That’s not what—

  But it’s true. You’d be great at it.

  Maybe someday.

  Tim heads back to the office entertaining a vision of himself in eight or ten years, serving as national security advisor. It is possible, isn’t it? Ascent. A good seat in the Sit Room. To deliberate at the highest level. All that infighting and backbiting he sees around him: Does he think he could rise above it? Not exactly, but he thinks that he could, in time—and in another administration—manage it. When he was younger, what he’d said to Eileen was, I want to make a difference. Well, who didn’t? But now that he knows the process intimately, knows that so much of it is convening meetings, requesting studies, updating intelligence estimates, conferring over the phone, negotiating, wheedling, manipulating … Still it is remarkable, that he works in the White House; it still makes his heart rattle. He has a tiny surge of feeling every time he walks in the building.

  * * *

  Have you seen tomorrow’s paper?

  Dick Mitchell is asking Tim. The two men are drinking at a small, dim, nominally Irish tavern, which does most of its business during the day—but where the painted green door remains unlocked into the evening for the benefit of a few people, mostly men in their forties and fifties, who stop in after work. A pale woman with deep-set eyes and a halo of dark brown frizz is tending bar. She looks as though she’s spent her whole life reading in bed, and is appealing in her lazy, yolky way, especially to men so estranged from their own bedrooms that half of their desire for a woman is a longing for sheets and pillows and the untroubled sleep that might follow sexual release.

  Why would I have seen tomorrow’s paper? Tim replies.

  Remember how that reporter in Miami wrote about North’s trips to Honduras? Guess who wrote a follow-up for The Post?

  Something about the building is off-kilter. Maybe the floor is uneven, or the ceiling is, or the liquor shelves were installed at a barely perceptible, but then again perceptible, angle. From the doorway the wooden bar itself looks higher at one end and lower at the other, though when you are up against it, the effect disappears—liquids are level with the glasses that contain them.

  Sitting targets: those words came to Tim shortly after he arrived, as he pulled out the bar stool and lifted a wet coaster off its seat. He then sat without moving, a well-mannered pupil, while Mitchell waved his hands around and said it was about time they had a drink. It’s been weeks since we’ve seen each other outside the office, hasn’t it. About time. There was an element of performing for somebody, even after the bartender returned to her science fiction novel. A television flashed footage of airplanes and Arabs.

  Our little friend Jodi. She never mentions him by name, but it’s clear enough, Mitchell says.

  Earlier that summer Mitchell brought his new wife and her son over to the house. The boy—was his name Ron?—quickly started after Courtney, and Tim spent the afternoon gripping things (his beer, the frame of his chair, Eileen’s arm) too tightly. The two kids wen
t into the house together, and Tim wanted to go after them, but Eileen held him back. It’s all right, she said. But how did she know? People were always saying it was all right, as if you could make things well just by speaking the words. The boy had been too confident.

  And then Mitchell concocted that scheme to hit up the Saudis for Contra money, appealing to a diplomat he’d met at a party. Tim couldn’t remember at what point Mitchell had become a Contra booster, much less why he let Mitchell persuade him to go along with it, but the party was a bust, and now Tim thinks of it with embarrassment.

  Mitchell himself never blushes or breaks a sweat. On his broad face the features have been carefully molded from fine, northeastern clay. His eyes are clear blue. He’s always all right, always makes Tim feel that really there’s nothing to get worked up about, no knot they can’t cut their way through, given their degrees, their network of contacts, their important positions—it was like this even when they were summer interns at what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

  Dick starts talking about his vacation, for some reason. What’s remarkable is that he went on a vacation, and not even at Christmas or late August when everyone leaves town. This was in the spring. So we were out in Carmel for a couple of days, Mitchell says, and Tim’s attention wanders, until he goes back to talking about tomorrow’s big news.

  Just wait until you see tomorrow’s paper, Mitchell says. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day at the office.

  Another Nicaragua story.

  There’s some strong stuff in it. No names, but you’ll see. It’ll get some reactions from your pals at the Capitol. Barnes. Definitely Barnes.

  The hell with Barnes. What’s in the article?

  I don’t want to misquote, Mitchell says. Wait and see.

  As they are leaving the place, they see in the distance Red Menace, headed away from them. His walk is a military scuttle, erect and quick. There’s a restaurant in town called the Dancing Crab, a name that would also suit Singletary with his air of trotting on two claws.