Eden in Winter

by Richard North Patterson

  ‘The time I wasn’t in school or learning roles, I spent with my friends. We catered parties to make money; did a little cocaine; sweated through exercise classes to stay in shape. Sometimes at pool parties in the Hamptons, coke-addled guests invited the caterers to jump in with them – the ones with the sleekest bodies – leaving the most light-fingered of us to scrounge leftovers for the rest. I went out with guys, but nothing serious – I was too busy, I told myself, and that was true enough. For the last two years of school, I lived with a girlfriend in a fifth-floor brick walk-up in the West Village, and the man both of us saw most was the masturbator in the next building. Par for the course, my room-mate assured me – there was a pervert for every block in Manhattan.

  ‘Day after day, I dedicated myself to acting. I never wanted to be a tabloid personality or a red-carpet actress. I wanted to stretch myself in the most challenging parts, to play them with nuance and humanity. I learned my plays cold, then experimented with the best way to deliver each line. I was always on time for work, and supportive of the other actors, knowing we could make each other better. My career was going to be about the craft, not the money. I knew very well about the harsh equation for actresses – career dwindling as they aged, scratching for bit parts as the mother of some guy barely younger than they were. I was obsessed with becoming that rare, exceptional woman who was good enough to last.

  ‘And then, at twenty-seven, it started to happen.’

  Stretching to rest her back, Carla felt a sharp, sudden pain: the baby kicking her stomach. She touched the place where this happened, as if to answer him. It took a moment for her to recall the state of mind she described to Adam.

  ‘It was just after graduation, and the part was in a small independent film. But I had the lead – a beautiful but destructive young woman who can’t give or receive love, and ends up sabotaging her own happiness.’ Pensive, she felt her typing slow. ‘I was, perhaps, too good. I seemed to know the role from the inside out.

  ‘When they opened the film at Sundance, I was praised for the “frightening authenticity” of my portrayal. Truth to tell, I even scared myself a little. But I understood something else: as confident as I was on stage, my first and greatest love, my face registered in close-ups. What I felt wasn’t vanity, but a cool, knowing appraisal of the woman other people saw.’

  Pausing, she considered this, a fateful pivot in her own life. ‘So I expected change,’ she went on. ‘But not something so profoundly different and, beneath the surface, so potentially corrosive.

  ‘A television executive was in the audience at Sundance. A month later, he asked my agent if I’d audition for the pilot of a proposed series for N.B.C. Your all-time favourite television programme,’ she added dryly, ‘the grittily authentic dramatic landmark, Deep Cover: a virtual documentary of the life of an undercover espionage agent, complete with constantly shifting identities, luxurious hotel suites in pseudo-European settings, and the ultimate weapon of any well-trained operative – cleavage. Acting, I was assured, was also desirable.

  ‘It was so far from what I had in mind that I told Betsy – my agent – I didn’t see the point. But there was no harm in doing it, she argued – it was good exposure, and I was unlikely to get the part. She probably knew better all along. I was an actor, not a model. When I did the screen test, I absolutely nailed it. They wanted sex appeal; what they got, the producer told me, was an actress who popped through the screen. I was perfect for playing a tough girl, he told me, and that was certainly right. I was one. Or so I thought.

  ‘Anyhow, I had to decide. The role would put me on the map, and Betsy with it. I could see how much she wanted this, though she spelled out the pros and cons as fairly as she could. To carry the show, they needed an actress with physical agility and sex appeal: the “almost feral complexity” I brought to it (her words, not mine) would stamp the role as my own. They’d pay me a lot less than a bigger name – $10,000 a show to start, roughly a quarter million if the show was green-lit for an entire season – which still was way more money than I’d ever seen. If the series flopped, I wouldn’t lose much – I was more of a stage actress, after all. And if the show took off, I’d be a household name, sought for the female lead in plays or movies whenever I was on hiatus.

  ‘Still, the downside of success was plain enough. A T.V. series would be a big diversion of energy from serious acting. Worse, they wanted a seven-year commitment, albeit with ever-escalating money. I’d have to move to L.A., leaving my friends behind, for a 24/7 immersion in a part that didn’t speak to my soul and threatened to make me feel like a hamster on a wheel. And I’d be a celebrity, suddenly recognizable in ways I never wanted. For me, acting was about hiding out, the polar opposite of being famous. With an almost chilling premonition, I knew that signing on would be bad for me.

  ‘But I was a blue-collar girl, really, and I felt guilty sneering at a chance other actresses would kill for. And for years, I’d just been scraping by. I told myself that the money would buy me the security, later on, to do the parts I wanted to, not snatch at anything to pay the rent. And too many good actors, I knew too well, went broke and wound up selling real estate. So I took the role, hoping in the deepest part of me that the show would tank.’

  Her fingers stopped. ‘Your mother,’ she informed her stomach, ‘was delusional.’ Then she continued typing.

  ‘You know the rest, Adam – you once admitted to watching me on Monday nights. The show was the big new hit of the season, especially among our target audience, guys your age. So thanks a bunch.’ She grimaced at the line, then added swiftly, ‘Truth to tell, mea culpa. I was too good an actress not to give it everything I had. The Emmy nomination that followed lulled me into thinking I’d done the right thing. Sure enough, offers started pouring in for me to do movies over the summer break.

  ‘But in real life, I began playing the hamster. The schedule was a killer. Six days a week I’d get up at four, go to hair and make-up for an hour and a half – I was the girl, after all – and then act in virtually every scene. Fifteen or sixteen hours later, they drove me “home” in a limousine to a rented place in Bel Air, filled with art and furniture someone else had chosen for me.

  ‘During breaks, I checked in with my “people”. Suddenly I had a lot of them: Betsy; a business manager to look out for my money; the accountant he’d hired to help; a publicist; an assistant to keep my schedule and fend off calls; a personal trainer. Thanks to my manager, I suddenly had my own production company, with people to run it. Most of them were on commission, the rest on salary. It was like a parody of success from a Hollywood movie about Hollywood – later on, when I pieced it all together, I realized I was keeping about twenty-five per cent of what I made. But I was too busy and too important to do the counting myself. Too busy even to grasp how lonely I was.

  ‘The only people I saw regularly were on the show – actors, writers, the directors, and the crew – or the people I was paying to look after things. Guys were coming out of nowhere, wanting to date me, but I had no time. Every now and then I’d coke up to get myself through some late-night party.’ She closed her eyes, feeling again the vertiginous rush of change. ‘I became this little industry – posing for the cover of magazines, endorsing a line of make-up. All, my manager assured me, to enhance my income and career.

  ‘The reality crept over me by increments. Two seasons later I was getting $150,000 an episode, about three million dollars a year. But the series had defined me. Other actresses were getting roles I wanted but had no time to pursue. The plots grew more outlandish, the role numbingly the same. To amuse myself, I started doing accents I’d learned at N.Y.U., a mockery of the serious work I’d trained to do. I was under more pressure to stay beautiful and slender; the cleavage grew ever deeper. Now and then I’d imagine adopting a child.’

  Which omitted, Carla acknowledged to herself, the crucial subject of men. But she was not ready to broach this to Adam; it was too personal, and who knew if he really cared? And if he did
, that would lead inevitably to the incendiary subject of Benjamin Blaine.

  ‘Somehow, I’d imagined success would help me to discover the “real” Carla Pacelli. But there was no real me. The one truly authentic thing about me – my passion for the craft – was crumbling.

  ‘Even if you didn’t already know it, you could guess the rest – another cautionary tale from lotus land, lacking even the virtue of originality. I was exhausted, mentally and, I suppose, spiritually. So I rationalized that alcohol would calm me down, and that a little coke in my trailer would keep me going. After a while, I threw in Valium to help me sleep.

  ‘At first, the producers pretended not to notice; whatever kept me going was fine. But when I started getting shaky on the set, overacting or blowing my lines, they wrote in a secondary role for a very pretty and aggressive younger actress, playing my protégé and rival. If anything, the fact that she couldn’t act much deepened my insecurity and self-contempt. When I could stand myself no longer, I started going to more parties. I’d found a new role – Carla Pacelli, the television star, acting out a downward spiral: the woman you saw in that mug shot, headed for Betty Ford.’

  She stopped to read her own words. ‘Again, I worry that so much of this is self-indulgent, a woman with too little to say answering questions you never asked. But your question about my career inevitably raises why it ended. And what I faced when the dreamscape turned real.

  ‘The money vanished, too. My business manager, it transpired, had told me just enough to keep me from questioning where my income was going – to line his pockets, and that of the eminent Ponzi scheme operator who’d conned him – a tsunami of dishonesty and greed that stung a number of his show business clients.’

  What seared her, Carla thought now, was her own carelessness – as though riches were her due, and would keep on coming endlessly. It took a real lack of character, she reckoned, for a girl who had no money to become a woman who took it for granted. But that led Carla to the void within her.

  ‘Coming to Martha’s Vineyard was another escape, it’s true. But what I really wanted was peace, more time to face hard truths with a certain merciless clarity. I’d been running all my life, and what I finally learned was that you take your demons, or your emptiness, everywhere you go.

  ‘Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that “Hell is other people.” But I’d made my own hell, and the men and women I encountered at Betty Ford wound up enriching my life. As I get stronger, I’ll reach out to friends I valued in the past, and lost track of. Perhaps I can even help my mother, as much as she cares to be helped. But no other person, not even this child, can fill the empty spaces, or change someone who doesn’t want to change.

  ‘It seems simple, I know. But it took me thirty-three years to understand that there is no magic that can transform you. Only honesty and, I hope, a certain level of compassion. I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive my father. He’s responsible for all the damage he did, to my mother and to me. But I also know that none of us are Adam and Eve. Our parents start as children; the sins they practise aren’t original.’

  Including Benjamin Blaine, she thought but did not write.

  Motionless, she reflected for an indeterminate time – lost to her – before she went on. ‘This may seem presumptuous,’ she concluded. ‘Perhaps it’s instinct; the sense of one being about another she doesn’t truly know. But, however different we may be, I think some common themes may permeate our lives. And you’ve shown me more grace and understanding than I had any reason to expect. So I guess what I’m trying to do is open up things between us. For whatever that means, and for whatever good it does.

  ‘Please know that I’m thinking of you.’

  She stopped there, unwilling to erase the last paragraph, yet troubled by her own confusion. What she was raising was a possibility of a more intimate relationship, though it was hard to imagine how that could be – she was an alcoholic who had failed in her only career, pregnant with Ben’s child, and, but for his troubling death and poisonous will, they would not have met at all. She was a real prize, no doubt, especially for Adam Blaine. But she had written these last words, and could not bring herself to retract them.

  Before, she had chosen men who could never meet her needs – whatever they were – and so could always imagine, and even desire, the end of a relationship. And acting, and all the issues surrounding her father, had kept romance at bay. Her first relationship in recovery had been with Benjamin Blaine. Though she valued his strength, and his support, she had known it could not last – first, there was his marriage, flawed though it was; later, there was the inevitable fact that the cancer in his brain would kill him. However sad, an end. Just as Afghanistan might be the end of Adam Blaine. Yet she prayed this would not be so, and knew that these prayers were not entirely selfless.

  Perhaps she could not disentangle this impulse from Ben himself. As a father, Ben had damaged Adam, as he himself was damaged. Did she have some mystical, perhaps neurotic belief that she could reach back in time, salvaging Adam as no one could salvage Ben? Or did their mutual entwinement with Benjamin Blaine preordain another ending and, yet again, eliminate the emotional risk to a woman who might never learn to trust?

  Hand resting on her stomach, she spoke to her son.

  ‘I hate to tell you, sweetheart, but your brain-addled mom still has a way to go. So I hope you can bear with me. But if it’s any incentive to get yourself born, even though we haven’t met yet, you may be the only man I’ve ever really loved.’

  The telephone rang.

  Strangely apprehensive, she answered it. ‘This is Dr Stein,’ he told her in a sombre tone. ‘I’d like you to come in.’

  EIGHT

  The next morning, Adam and his new team collected a Toyota S.U.V. and began the long drive from Kabul to Khost, a frontier town near the Pakistan border.

  There were four of them: Hamid, who drove; Philip Rotner, a saturnine and burly special forces medic; and Steve Branch, the Navy Seal who would go with Adam into Pakistan. Less than twenty-four hours ago, Adam had not known that Rotner or Branch existed, or that the fate of the P.O.W. would implicate his own. Now he thought of Benjamin Blaine. ‘All of us,’ he had told Adam, ‘live five seconds, or five feet, from tragedy. But most people never learn that.’

  Ben had meant this to contrast the obliviousness with which normal men meandered through existence – dodging random chance while never perceiving that tragedy lay in ambush – with his own venturesome and often dangerous life: combat heroism in Vietnam; covering wars and savagery for his novels. He savoured each day more, Ben had argued, because he never forgot its perils. Ten years ago, Adam, too, had assumed these risks and, with them, a certain fatalism. But now, thinking of Carla, he envied the ‘sheep’ – as Ben had called them – the heedlessness they thought to be security.

  He wondered if his companions entertained such thoughts. When they had met the afternoon before, his clearest impression had been of competence and resolve. Gathering their weapons, supplies, and strike rations, they had reviewed their plans with a phlegmatic air that, in the case of Branch, did not quite conceal his adrenalized anticipation of a mission that was his reason for being. Now, Branch sat in the rear with Adam, a lean, sandy-haired man with sculpted features and narrow blue-grey eyes that were sharp at their edges, as if a youth spent hunting in rural Alabama – scanning bushes for deer, or the sky for birds – had changed their shape and function.

  Adam, too, had grown up outdoors. But when he refused to join his father in, as Adam had put it, ‘murdering Bambi’s mother’, Ben had rejoined that Adam was too much like his own mother. Like his real father, Adam supposed Ben had meant. Jack had despised hunting – to Adam’s knowledge, the only life Jack had ever taken was his brother’s.

  Enough, Adam rebuked himself. The past or future had no place here. He willed himself to feel the blank resolve he read on Branch’s face.

  Laconically, the two men talked about their recent past. Branch related his regrets a
bout missing out on the bin Laden raid, remarking, ‘I hear Osama’s porn collection re-defined the term “double-standard”.’ In turn, Adam gave an account of his role as dispenser of Viagra to a tribal chief. ‘A true hearts-and-minds operation,’ Branch observed. Neither man ceased his careful survey of the rugged foothills outside. Under Adam’s shirt was a Glock 19 with a threaded barrel and flash suppressor; on the belt that secured its holster was a straight blade knife. Beneath the seat was an A.K.-47.

  The S.U.V. was ordinary civilian gear – special features like blackout windows would only draw attention. In the glove compartment, cards bearing the C.B.S. logo – of which the network was wholly unaware – identified them as ‘logistics producers’ for C.B.S. News. If they were stopped, Hamid would speak for them, concealing that the others were fluent in the two major regional dialects. Their first order of business, by no means assured, was to position themselves near the border.

  Angling toward the south-east, they began the climb up and through the difficult mountain passes. In late fall, the lower areas still had temperate weather, but, as the S.U.V. laboured ever higher, there was snow on the ground. Soon they stopped to put on snow tyres; as the road grew narrower the strain showed on Hamid’s neck and shoulders. The closest comparison, Adam thought, was driving through Colorado at twelve thousand feet on a single-lane road. But the greater threat was Pasha Khan, a casually vicious warlord whose minions ran drugs, guns, and whatever contraband they could smuggle through these passes. They did not like strangers, much less Americans.

  On the left, the ravine became sheer. Grunting, Hamid strained to negotiate a vertiginous curve. With barely a foot between the tyres and a hundred-yard drop, he braked so abruptly that Adam tensed in anticipation of a free fall.