Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  One evening, Stan and I went out looking for dead-drop sites. I was driving, as I always did, for practice, and at an intersection I became confused. “Shit, Stan,” I said. “I’m lost again.”

  “Straight ahead,” he said unthinkingly. I pressed on the accelerator. Suddenly an SUV rocketed past and nearly clipped the hood off our car. The driver leaned on his horn. With the Doppler effect, the noise was hysterical at first, then reproachful. “Whoa, Nellie,” Stan said evenly, glancing up from the newspaper he was reading. “You have a stop sign. He doesn’t.”

  I pulled over to the side of the road. I was trembling. I braced my arms on the steering wheel and put my head between them. “Stan, I just nearly got us killed. I nearly got us killed. Why am I so bad at this? Why do you know where we are when I don’t? I’ve driven these roads as many times as you have. How come you never get lost and I always get lost? Why didn’t I notice he was coming?”

  Stan handed me a clean tissue from the glove compartment and waited until I stopped sniffling. He put his hand on my shoulder. “When I started driving,” he said gently, “I made all sorts of mistakes. I rear-ended my high school band teacher. I got lost all the time too. But I’ve been driving for fifteen years. I can devote more mental energy to navigating now because I’m devoting less mental energy to the basic, mechanical driving skills. I drive on autopilot. You have to think about just driving safely, so you have less energy for noticing landmarks and the other things that help you get your bearings. It’s normal. But I promise you: You can learn this skill, and you will. I’ll help you every night. You’ll be fine. You’re going through a normal stage that everyone goes through.”

  “I don’t know if I’m cut out for this job.”

  “Of course you are! That’s not even a question. I know you are. You’re far more intelligent than anyone else here. If for a second I didn’t think you could do this job, I would tell you honestly. I love my country, remember? I wouldn’t encourage you to do this if I didn’t think you could do it. You can do it well. You’re so bright and talented, Selena. If anything, you’re too good for this job—you’re going to get bored with it.”

  “You think?”

  “I think. You know,” he said quietly, “you undervalue yourself. You really do. Not just in this job but in your whole life. I mean, what were you doing with Paul? He’s such a fucked-up loser. He’s sleazy. He uses women. Why would you have given a man like him the time of day? You’re worth so much more than that.” There was pain in his voice. He had never mentioned Paul before and I hadn’t known he knew about it, but I supposed everyone did. “You deserve a real man, a gentleman, someone who cherishes you.”

  “I’m sorry, Stan,” I said, rubbing my red nose. “I didn’t mean to go all blubbery on you. I’m overtired. I’ll get a grip. Thanks for being so patient. I really don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here.”

  I put the car into drive and eased back into traffic.

  When I came to class the next day, Iris pulled me aside to tell me the news before anyone else did. Paul had resigned. Just like that. Annette had broken up with him, and he had decided that he would rather leave than go through training watching her from afar. His seat in the auditorium was empty.

  He came to my room after class to say good-bye to me. “Paul,” I said, grasping his hands. “Are you sure?”

  He let go of my hands and sat down on my bed. He was unshaven; he had lost weight and the hollows under his cheekbones were deeply recessed. “Honey, it’s okay,” he said. He had never called me honey before. “It’s okay. Don’t be so sad. I just can’t go back to living the way I was before I met Annette. I don’t want to be a seducer. I don’t want to keep lying to everyone. I’ve had enough.”

  “But it’s just a relationship! You know you’ll get over it. How can you let this destroy your career?”

  He didn’t look at me; he seemed to be contemplating something far in the distance, as if he were looking out over a vast desert, although the only thing in front of him was the bare wall. Finally he said: “Didn’t I just explain that?”

  He stood up. He told me I was the only person in the CIA whom he wished well; he kissed me on the forehead and he gave me the limp red rose that he had tried to give to Annette before she made her rejection unequivocal. He slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and he was gone. I sat on my bed looking at that rejected rose for quite some time.

  I never saw him again.

  A few days later, we were instructed to attend a mock trade fair, where we were to begin practicing our lessons in recruitment. The instructors would play members of the government of the People’s Republic of Turkrapistan, a country that looked remarkably like rural Virginia, where every government official had financial problems and a sick child and every minister sooner or later found his way onto the United States’ payroll. Each student had been assigned his own target. I was supposed to look for Elvis P. Avidoff, deputy undersecretary of trade and labor.

  Stan and I agreed to help each other find our targets; he was looking for Lieutenant-General Felix G. Lustifer. Stan and I drove to the trade fair together. We were supposed to recruit our targets within three weeks. “Everyone will succeed at this one,” Stan said. “By the time this exercise is done, Turkrapistan will be the most penetrated country in the world. The first one is supposed to be a confidence builder. Or anyway, they make it easy enough so that if you can’t do it, you flunk out, because you’re obviously a total loser.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve heard about it.” He shrugged. Stan always knew this kind of thing.

  That year, the Turkrapistan Ministry of Commerce and Trade rented a local conference hall for the Turkrapistan: We’re Open for Business! fair. The reception had already begun when we arrived; the instructors were pressing against one another to get at the little shrimp on toothpicks and the bite-size wieners wrapped in pastry dough. Stan ambled up to me after fifteen minutes and told me where to find Elvis: “He’s over there,” he said, pointing discreetly at a thin-faced man with silver hair and a pallid complexion. “He’s stupefyingly boring. Enjoy.”

  I sidled up to my target and made an excuse to introduce myself. Stan wasn’t lying. The man spoke in a quiet monotone and had no hint of a sense of humor; his eyes were dead. I struggled to make it past the pleasantries and to find this man’s passion, dropping hints about golf, music, gardening, cooking, but I struck out each time. He barely registered my suggestions. He mentioned eating lunch, and I thought that might be my entry—You eat? Why, what I coincidence, I eat too!—but his inanimate expression told me this wasn’t the key. I looked at Stan, who had found his target without my help and was making him laugh uproariously. Finally, Elvis dropped the big hint: “I like to collect stamps,” he said.

  “Really!” I answered. “What a coincidence! I’m a passionate stamp collector. I’d love to compare our collections!”

  Stan told me after the reception that his instructor wanted to pound tequila and go to strip clubs.

  From then on, I contrived to invite Elvis to lunch or tea every other day, attempting to build his trust and develop that elusive rapport they kept talking about in class. I talked philately for hours. I allowed him to suggest the restaurants he liked, and I always picked up the check. It all went on a government expense account. I encouraged him to tell me about himself, behaving as if everything he said were richly fascinating.

  In fact, Elvis P. Avidoff was so aggressively boring and self-involved that I yearned to strike him. I wondered if he was boring me on purpose to test my patience or if this in fact was the nature of the man who played him. I smiled and nodded as he launched into interminable, almost lobotomized accounts of his failure to advance at his office. He told me about his daughter’s struggle to overcome a speech impediment. We both knew where this was supposed to go: At the end I would offer to help his daughter get the medical attention she needed in exchange for clandestine updates on Turkrapistani trade policy. Your daughter
drools when she says the letter r? That’s a terrible shame. I know a doctor who can help, in America. He’s very expensive, but I think we can find a way to make it happen. Later I found out that he really did have a disabled daughter, and I felt ashamed for hating him so horribly.

  At our third meeting, Elvis confided that he had been passed over for promotion yet again. “How shameful and shortsighted that your government fails to recognize your talent,” I said. “I find our conversations so rewarding, and your insights about Turkrapistani politics so incisive. My government would love to have a man on the ground here with your knowledge and abilities.” Elvis of course added that he was having money troubles and couldn’t pay his daughter’s medical bills. Stan was right; this exercise was paint-by-the-numbers.

  Every evening, after class and my assignations with Elvis, Stan sat by my side as I drove through the back roads, gently correcting my braking technique, teaching me to anticipate the actions of other drivers. One day, I overheard a group of instructors talking about me. They were drawing straws to decide who had to ride with me in the next exercise. But then one of them spoke up: “Hey, guys, she’s gotten a lot better lately. I went out with her last time and it was no worse than being with any of the rest of those numbnuts. Give it a rest—she’s trying hard.” I could have kissed him for that; it was like the sun coming out after a Scandinavian winter.

  The sad sack who played Elvis seemed to relish his captive audience. It must have been wonderful for him that I was forced to listen while he behaved like the self-absorbed old fuck he was instead of the obsequious case officer he was usually obliged to be. He wallowed in his role, confessing decades of marital problems, financial anxieties, and professional frustrations in that soporific monotone as I listened sympathetically, cocking my head to the side and from time to time making small feminine noises of compassion and encouragement. I became certain that everything he told me was true, his life story conveniently masked behind the fiction of pedagogy.

  He told me that his teenage son had come home drunk the night before and had said unspeakably cruel things to him. His eyes moistened. “He called me a liar,” he said. I patted his hand. He told me that his sister had died of bone cancer and that he hadn’t once visited her in the hospital. He had been too busy at work.

  “That doesn’t make you a bad person, Elvis,” I told him over dinner as I imagined his sister dying alone. “You did the best you could.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course I do. You know, you undervalue yourself. You really do. Not just in your job but in your whole life.”

  I pitched him that evening and he accepted, ahead of schedule.

  We received reviews of our performance after every exercise, and Elvis gave me warm praise. “An excellent listener,” he wrote. “Outstanding people skills.” That evening, Stan and I drank scotch together in my room to celebrate my success. I allowed myself to become a bit lightheaded. We talked as usual about the day and our instructors and our classmates, and as usual he looked at me with misty, longing tenderness, as if I were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. As it grew late, he got up to leave, and when he left, the room was perfectly silent. I lay on the bed in that disheveled, sullen little room and felt achingly alone, a little drunk in a melancholy way, and I was sorry he’d left. On an impulse I picked up the phone. It rang in his room, and when he picked it up—he knew it could only be me, and he knew why I was calling, and his voice was so happy and warm—I said, “Come back. I don’t want you to go.”

  “I will,” he said, neither hesitating nor questioning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  When I reached for his hand and pulled him toward me, he answered by climbing into my bed and folding me in his arms. He felt strong—despite his soft appearance he was surprisingly muscular, ursine—and I lay against his chest as he held me and stroked my hair. We lay like that for a while, surprised by ourselves and each other. When I looked up at him, his face was sweet and happy, and his small eyes glowed brightly, like a raccoon’s. He was delighted with himself and with me. I had never seen anyone so happy just to look at me. He whispered to me all night long, telling me stories and babbling gentle nonsense. “You’re so soft and small and you smell so good,” he said in wonderment, as if it were the first time he had ever touched a woman.

  I told him I thought we should keep this to ourselves, aware that privacy in our group was impossible, but hoping against hope for a few days before our romance became public property. “It will be our little secret,” he answered. “No, it will be our great, big, enormous secret,” he murmured, and I laughed. We didn’t sleep at all, although that night we didn’t make love. We talked and cuddled and exchanged secrets. He kissed the back of my neck, very gently, very slowly, and I felt it all through my body, the warmth radiating in waves. I felt safe and protected.

  The next day, we struggled terribly to get through our lectures. I was so tired I thought I would die, but I felt peaceful, too. Stan asked me that day if I regretted what had happened, and I told him, honestly, that I didn’t at all.

  It was late winter, we were eager for spring, and we were nearing the halfway mark of the course. I began to make rapid progress. Our next exercise was a walk-in, an instructor impersonating a man who came uninvited to the embassy to volunteer his services. A mid-ranking officer in the Turkrapistani Police Constabulary, the walk-in had evidently embezzled money from the precinct to feed his gambling habit. The tip he’d received on a pony proved to be a bum steer, and he now feared his malfeasance would be discovered and he would spend his life in prison. He offered to sell us the constabulary’s surveillance log. He claimed they had been following one of our officers. He said we could have it for ten thousand U.S. dollars.

  I told him we were definitely, absolutely interested; I understood completely how a betting man could find himself in a little pickle like that; I would do what I could to help him, but I needed to receive authorization from Headquarters first. I arranged to meet him the next day at a discreet location in the woods so that he wouldn’t be seen entering the American embassy twice.

  On the afternoon of our assignation, it was pouring. I looked balefully at the rain, coming down in great thick silver sheets, making mud out of the entranceway to the classroom. It occurred to me that a diplomat ambling through the woods on a day like this would look mighty peculiar—distinctly suspicious, in fact. What would I say I was doing? One of the other instructors owned a chubby little terrier named Casey. I knocked on his office door and asked him if I could borrow Casey for the afternoon. “Sure,” he said. “He’s all yours. Show him a good time.” If anyone asked any embarrassing questions about what I was doing, I could say I was walking my dog.

  I fetched Casey at his master’s house. He hopped into my car, trusting fellow, looking tickled by the prospect of going for a ride. Perhaps he thought we were setting out to chase rabbits. He sniffed the seats. We drove off into the rain. Casey found a half-packet of Swedish Fish under the seat and wolfed them down before I could intervene, then put his paws on the window and watched the woods go by.

  I drove past the armed guards at the gates and merged onto the interstate. Suddenly, as if someone had plugged him into a power outlet, Casey went berserk. He began yapping and ricocheting off the windows, scrabbling at the upholstery, acting as if he were being deprived of oxygen. I tried lowering a window so he could put his nose out; he tried to jump out. I levered the window back up; he got his head stuck. I murmured something soothing; he yapped. I yelled at him to shut the fuck up; he yapped some more. Two months before, I’m sure the distraction would have caused me to drive into an embankment, but under Stan’s tutelage my skills had improved, and I proceeded steadily through my surveillance detection route despite the rain and chaos.

  When I reached my destination, Casey rocketed out of the car door as if someone had lit a firecracker under his ass. I bolted after him, caught him at last, and snapped the choke chain around his neck.
He performed a melodramatic pantomime of asphyxiation, then began yanking me through the woods, zigzagging right and left, sniffing every shrub, every stump, every mushroom, pausing only to urinate every ten seconds. The rain worsened; thunder and lightning commenced. I couldn’t control the umbrella and the dog at once and became soaked.

  I met my instructor at the designated place, exchanged the prearranged safety signals—Is the local dry cleaner careful with silk? I don’t know, I hand-wash my shirts—and made the swap. He took the money; I took the surveillance log. The dog leaped at his leg and attempted briskly to copulate. When I returned to the car, the animal did his best to smear every surface in the vehicle with mud, rainwater, filth, and dog hair. He made sure to roll and shake on every seat. I believe he urinated again.

  Casey regurgitated in the backseat when I rolled over a speed bump. He was still soaking when I handed him back to his master; he was only a third the size he’d been when we left. “I’m sorry about this,” I said. “I know this isn’t the condition he was in when I borrowed him.”

  His master examined him with an air of annoyance. “You didn’t give him anything sugary to eat, did you?” he asked suspiciously. I remembered the Swedish Fish. I decided to deny everything.

  “Um, no, why?”

  “He can’t handle sugar. Makes him totally hyperactive. Made him bite a kid once.”

  Well, gee, mate, I wish you’d told me that beforehand.

  But the instructor who played the Gambling Schnook, a shrewd, foxy, rather attractive man of Irish descent, liked the touch of bringing a dog to our meeting. He posted my cable describing the encounter on the instructors’ bulletin board as an example of “a student who doesn’t have her head up her ass.” When I saw that, I ran to Stan to tell him. He smiled knowingly. “See? I knew you would be good at this,” he said.