As we drove I debated whether to tell Stan that Byron and I had once had a one-night stand. It hardly seemed relevant now, but I felt that if the position were reversed, I’d want to know, so I told him.
“You’ve slept with this guy?”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I should have mentioned that sooner. It was years ago. I don’t even remember it now. I don’t think about him that way anymore, don’t worry. He’s really changed—he used to be a fun, happy-go-lucky guy, but now he’s become almost oppressive about this Orthodox Jewish stuff, especially since he got married. He doesn’t even eat out anymore unless it’s at a kosher restaurant. Does it bother you? We don’t have to go if it does, we can still cancel—”
“No. It’s fine. Let’s go.”
Stan was charming at dinner. By the end of the evening he had Byron’s wife eating out of his hand. He complimented her on her yellow sundress with thin spaghetti straps and asked if she had ever danced his favorite ballet, Coppélia. He did magic tricks for the two girls, delighting them by making coins appear from their ears and disappear just as mysteriously. He spent a half-hour earnestly discussing the new HUD regulations with Byron. Afterward, Byron and I played with the girls on the lawn while Stan and Byron’s wife did the dishes and watched us from the kitchen window. The girls begged Byron to perform a headstand and he obliged, kicking his toes into the air. His T-shirt dropped around his shoulders and I noticed that he was as well built as ever. For a second I thought of Stan attempting similarly to invert himself, then shook the thought out of my head. It was like trying to imagine him dancing Coppélia.
We got through the evening without having to answer too many questions about our imaginary jobs. We left early; we both wanted to get some sleep. We made all the usual promises about how we all had to see each other more often.
On the drive back, Stan was unusually quiet. “Is anything wrong?” I asked.
“I’m fine.”
“You seem quiet.”
“I’m fine. Really. I just don’t feel like going back to the Farm tomorrow.”
We kept driving.
Then he asked: “So how was it with him?”
“It was a long time ago—”
“No, I’m just curious—is it true what they say about black guys?”
“Like I should remember?”
“Were you drunk? I mean, how did it all happen?” He pulled into the left lane and passed a semi, pressing hard on the accelerator.
“Stan, why are you asking these questions?”
“Honestly? Honestly? Because when I think about someone else touching you, it makes me want to vomit.”
“It was years ago! It only happened one time. It was college. He’s not at all attractive to me that way anymore, not at all. Why are you behaving like this?”
“Me? I’m not the one who spreads my legs for everyone!”
I was too stunned to speak. We drove the rest of the way in pitch-black silence.
Once we were home, Stan finally told me what I had come to suspect. To impress me, he had reinvented himself as someone much jauntier and more cocksure than he truly was, a man of experience and savoir faire. But all those women he’d alluded to, the ones who liked to be tied up and spanked, were in fact just one woman who liked to be tied up and spanked. He had been with her through most of his twenties; she was the one who had left him when he joined the CIA. “I tied her up and spanked her a lot, for what it’s worth,” he added forlornly.
He had loved a girl in high school, he told me. She was his first, and they had been lovers for three years. “She was beautiful,” he said, “and she was a flirt, like you.” When they graduated, he had proposed to her; she said she wasn’t ready. He went to Cornell; she went to the big state university. One night she called to tell him she wanted to date other men. Destroyed, he told her never to call him again. Two months later, she called anyway; she was angry, she was drunk, she told him that she had slept with six men since they had broken up, then she told him that before she left she had aborted his child. Stan had never known she was pregnant. As he told me this, his arms were tight across his chest and his jaw was tense.
“A couple of times,” he added, “I’ve gone out a few times with a woman, and things have seemed good to me, and then one night I walk into a bar and she’s there on some other guy’s lap. Then Margaret left me because I joined the CIA. I’d always thought we’d get married sooner or later. It’s not that I don’t trust women anymore, it’s just that now I think I’ve got to cut the deck before I play.”
Where had he found the confidence to pursue me as he had? “Are you kidding? I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to you for a whole year. I watched you for months. I wanted you from the moment I saw you—you had the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen, and you were so flirty and sexy—and you didn’t even know I existed. Then you started seeing that asshole, and for a while I gave up, but when you two broke it off I thought I might have a chance if I could only get near you. That’s why I started smoking, that’s why I started reading that god-awful Sanskrit literature, and that’s why I arranged for our rooms to be near each other when we got to the Farm.”
“You did what? How?”
He shrugged. “I’m good at getting things done.”
But Stan couldn’t understand how I could have had so many lovers before him, when I was so unique to his experience. “It doesn’t make sense to me. You’re so vulnerable with me when we make love—how could you share that part of yourself so easily?”
I had no idea how to take that, and no idea what to say.
The next week, Stan, Nathan, and a few other students went back to Headquarters to attend a three-day seminar on covert finance. Stan and Nathan drove together. The CIA had a number of complex methods of moving money around the globe, and the bookkeeping involved was particularly labyrinthine: Large sums of taxpayer money had on occasion gone missing between Bermuda and Berlin, with a great deal of finger-pointing ensuing, the specialists in covert bank accounts accusing the folks in covert credit cards of misfiling the relevant records, and vice versa. The cash that flowed through phony entities every year was a tidy sum, and senior management had of late become particularly concerned about the amount no one seemed able to locate. Laundering money was a fastidious business, and Stan thought it would be useful to master it.
While Stan was gone, I practiced handing over one of my assets, PLUMBBOB, to Kirk. Assets become extremely attached to their case officers, so the handover is a delicate moment. We were told to take pains to laud the new case officer as “one of the very best, someone with whom I would trust my life” and to make sure our colleagues were thoroughly briefed about the asset and his emotional needs. Kirk and I spent three days in a motel room with PLUMBBOB, curing him of his angst. When Kirk revealed to PLUMBBOB that he too was a military man who abominated the idea of women in the modern army, PLUMBBOB began to warm to him. Kirk was competent and workmanlike, but he lacked finesse, and I missed discussing the case with Stan at the end of the day. The handover complete, I bid PLUMBBOB farewell and left him with Kirk in the motel room, the two soldiers engaged in a discussion of Second World War field artillery. I noted with excitement that I might have time to fit in a short nap before Stan’s return.
But when I got back to the Farm, Stan was waiting for me in the parking lot. I pulled up and sang, “Hey, sailor! Welcome back!”
“Hello, Selena.” He gave me a single sharp glance, as if verifying my identity, then nodded in the direction of a vacant parking spot. His body was ramrod-straight, and he seemed to have grown bigger.
I parked and walked over to him. “What’s the matter?”
Stan didn’t move to embrace me. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Nathan spoke to Jade last night. Evidently, everyone knows you spent last night with Kirk.”
“Nathan said what?”
“You heard me.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“How could y
ou do that to me? After all I’ve done for you?” He was shaking with rage. He looked as if he hadn’t slept.
“Are you out of your mind? You’re going to believe Nathan before you believe me? Nathan hates me. You know that. He can’t stand to see a man and a woman happy together. God, I’m going to kill that little fucker!”
“That’s your theory, huh?” He looked out over the parking lot, scowling in the sun. The other students were pulling in from their meetings. He eyed each of them in turn. His mouth was a narrow slit.
“Did Nathan try to justify repeating this rumor to you in any way?”
“He said he was telling me because he cared about me and he thought I deserved better. He said that everybody knew.”
“Christ almighty! That little prick! Stan, I would never do that—never!—Kirk’s an asshole. Nathan’s a psychopath. I love you, and you can fucking well ask Iris where I was last night, because I was in her room until midnight. Go on! Ask her!”
His face softened, and he looked hesitant. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Think that I love you.” I took his hands in mine and looked directly into his eyes. “It is not true. It will never be true. You have got to trust me. Please. Don’t destroy us like this.”
He looked at me, trying to read my thoughts. I felt tears coming into my eyes. Finally, his body relaxed, and he said, “I’m sorry.” He put his arms around me and held me tightly. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I hate myself for being this way. Forgive me. I’m so sorry.”
Stan seemed fragile for a while. Watching me brush my hair that night, he grew melancholy. “Is it just arrogance for someone like me to think I could keep a beautiful woman like you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “sheer arrogance.”
The next day, when I knocked on his door, I found him sitting in his bed, propped against his pillows, wearing his reading glasses, a thick paperback in his hands. The title of the book was Overcoming Jealousy.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
He put his mechanical pencil down on the bedside table. A blush passed over his pale skin; he didn’t look up at me. “I found it at the bookstore,” he said.
“Can I look?”
“Sure. Here.”
I looked: The author was a clinical psychologist from California. The margins were dark with Stan’s tidy, parsimonious script. The first comment I saw read: Could I be so repulsive???
I handed the book back to him. “What do you make of it?”
“I don’t want to be a jealous man. It’s not worthy of me and I know it’s not fair to you.”
I knelt down and pulled his head to my chest. I kissed his forehead, and his temples, then his mouth.
The Turkrapistani foreign minister was coming in from the cold. Terrific news to be sure, but in practice it meant that the students had to wait up all night in the mock station, standing on alert for the word that he had crossed safely. We were taking him out in the trunk of a Ford Fiesta with phony license plates. The instructors always hated playing that role.
We were getting bored and antsy. First we played Truth or Dare, then we swapped Helen Keller jokes. Mark suggested a stupid game he’d learned during his interim assignment on the Iran Task Force called Tell Me a Secret. You had to ask one of the other players to tell you a secret about a country—France, China, Brazil—but the respondent had to answer in the accent of the natives of that country, and the reply had to involve a famous national dish and a covert military strategy. “Tell me a secret about Russia.” Mark leered at Allison. “In Mother Russia,” Allison replied, gurgling her r’s throatily, “we make borscht weeth peeg urine, to make troops strong like bull!” You had two seconds to answer. If you couldn’t think of a response, or flubbed the accent, or forgot the national dish, you were eliminated.
“Selena,” Allison said to me. “Tell me a secret about France!”
“Ah oui! In la France, we wedge zee brie in our ears! When zee German troops arrive, zey play zee Tannhäuser ovair and ovair, but zey do not understand why zee Frenchmen are nevaire afraid!”
I remained in the game.
For some reason, Stan just couldn’t get it. Usually, he was the first out of the gate with these kinds of games, but this one stumped him. Maybe he was just tired, or maybe the others were picking on him. “Stan!” said Allison. “Tell me a secret about South Africa!” That flummoxed him. What the hell was the South African national dish? He made a game effort: “In South Effrika, we take our coffee strong and bleck, like our gardeners!” Instantly, there was a chorus of complaints: Coffee wasn’t a South African national dish, and that wasn’t a military secret. He was eliminated from the round.
We played round after round, and each time, Stan was eliminated on his first try. Vaguely tickled to see him humiliated, the other students began to tease him. “Stan! Tell me a secret about Nicaragua!”
“Stan, tell me a secret about Sierra Leone!” He couldn’t think of the dishes, he couldn’t do the accents convincingly, and no matter what he said, the other students eliminated him, making loud Gong Show noises after his replies. He was getting more and more upset. I could tell he was too tired to see the funny side of it, and I felt bad for him. I wanted to comfort him, but I knew he would only be more embarrassed if I did it in front of the others.
At sunrise we got the word that the minister had died in the trunk. It happened from time to time. It was a shame. Allison was elected to write the we-regret-to-inform-you cable to Headquarters. The instructors loved giving us exercises like that, where the whole point seemed to be to make us lose a night’s sleep. “That’s the way it is out in the field,” they would always say if anyone complained. “Suck it up.”
We went back to our rooms. Stan was foul-tempered. We’d stayed up all night for nothing, and he was smarting from the other students’ ridicule. I put my arms around his neck and caressed his cheek. I stood on my toes and gently whispered in his ear, “All right, tell me a secret.” I meant it to be a flirtatious invitation, but I think Stan thought I was laughing at him too. His face turned red.
“You want to know a secret?” he hissed. “I’ll tell you a goddamned secret. My secret is I don’t got time for this crap. I’m not just some jerkoff junior trainee like those guys. I’ve done real ops. I’ve designed operations that only four people in the world know about—me, the head of the Special Activities Branch, the DCI, and the president of the fucking European Central Bank! That’s a fucking secret.”
“What?” I said, shocked and confused, trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
He sat down and put his head in his hands. His face was lined with fatigue. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“What the hell do you mean?” I insisted. “Who are you?”
Stan slumped his shoulders and hung his head. All the anger had drained out of him. He took my hands in his. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that to you. It’s not true. I was just blowing off steam. Please don’t repeat that to anyone else. I don’t know what made me say that. I’m just overtired. Promise me you’ll forget what I said.”
“Stan, come on! How can I forget that? What did you mean, that you’re not a trainee like the others?”
His eyes narrowed. “Selena, I will only say this once. I cannot talk to you about that. Don’t ask me again. You have to live with the fact that around here, there are some things you can’t even discuss with your girlfriend. You are to forget what I just said. You cannot mention that to anyone or we will both go to jail. Do you get it?”
I saw that he was absolutely serious, and terrified by his own lapse. I knew that nothing I could say would convince him to tell me another word.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve forgotten it. Let’s get some sleep.”
Kirk, who had been a Marine, and Joe, the former Green Beret, had been arguing since they met about which service was more manly, and as we grew more fatigued, the dispute became less and less of a joke. Kirk cl
aimed to have read some statistic that 90 percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 were former Marines. Joe was using his precious spare time to research the question. Every day he would show up with the biography of another executive: “Head of Procter and Gamble: not a Marine. Where are all your goddamned Marines?”
They were both driving us nuts.
I wasn’t there the night it happened. They had given us the evening off for the first time in months so that the instructors could attend a mandatory workshop at Headquarters called “Toward an Intelligent Intelligence Community: Educating the Educators.” Stan and I had already decided we wanted nothing to do with the others that night. We went back to his room to take a nap and then to play Trivial Pursuit, a game we contested as if we were France and Germany fighting for the Alsace-Lorraine. So we missed the whole thing, which was probably for the best.
Joe and Kirk and the rest of the boys went to the bar. They were celebrating something, a basketball victory, I believe, but mostly they were just happy to have an evening without work. A bit too much to drink was had, that much was clear, and the headiness of an evening off made everyone a little giddy. Since I wasn’t there, I’ll never know what really happened after that. I heard many versions of the story, and each one was so different, you would never know the same episode was being recounted. But what seems certain enough is that Joe started in again about how the Green Berets were the most elite and highly trained forces on the Planet Earth and the Marines were just cannon fodder; Kirk was about to come back with the same old thing about the Fortune 500, but Allison, who was sitting with them at the bar, just couldn’t take it anymore. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said disgustedly. “Why don’t you guys just whip it out to see who’s bigger and settle this once and for all.”
She was being sarcastic, but Kirk thought this was a terrific idea. He immediately dropped his pants and whipped out little Kirk with a magnificent “Semper Fi!” Not to be outdone, Joe dropped his shorts too and began shouting something incoherent about Pearl Harbor. Kirk apparently took matters in hand and clambered onto the counter, hollering, “This is my rifle, motherfuckers!” Joe was on the verge of demonstrating that it was possible to urinate from where he was standing all the way to the pool table when someone convinced the two of them that maybe they should put the damned things back in their shorts, and I guess someone else took them back to their rooms and hosed them down, and they were both back in class the next morning, a little worse for wear. When I heard about it the next day I was sorry to have missed the show, although by some accounts (again, the story varied depending on who was telling it), there was not quite so much to see as one might have hoped. “White guys,” Iris sniffed.
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