But, as Cindy was to remember in years to come, she did not say Stop; she did not push him away.
Jack was moving her body, arranging their positions. And then, yes, he did what he had done so many times before in similar situations.
Cindy said, “Oh my God!”
But Jack had gone too far to stop, so he continued to the end, and through the haze of alcohol and grief, Cindy felt her body responding. She tried to make it stop. She was as limp as a rag doll; she felt incapable of movement. Nevertheless she was moving, responding. She fought against this. Owing to Jack’s peculiar method of approach, Cindy was still wearing her panties. They had been twisted into a sort of tourniquet, shutting off the circulation in her left thigh. This was painful. She concentrated on the pain, tried to fill her mind with it. But her body took over, and though it was the last thing in the world she wanted to happen, she was taken by the wave.
5 Cindy had realized that Danny’s furlough would coincide with her cycle of fertility. Before he came home, before she ovulated, she went to a gynecologist who removed the intrauterine birth-control device she had worn since adolescence. Cindy told Danny nothing about this, and as they made love every day, several times a day, he supposed that nothing could come of all this copulation except pleasure.
A week after Danny left for Vietnam, she missed her first period. Ordinarily this would not have upset her. Her cycle was irregular and she had been late many times in the past. When this had happened in the past, she and Danny always renewed their promise to each other that if she really was pregnant they would marry and have the child.
However, this child might very well be Jack’s—and if it was, she realized that she was capable of killing it with no more thought than was required to crush an insect. There was no way to know which man was the father—the one she loved or the one she hated. Even after the child was born she could never be sure. How could she ever love it if she could never know for certain to whom it really belonged?
The desire for control was very strong in Cindy; it was her real religion. She had learned in Sunday school that good actions produced pleasant consequences and bad actions, unpleasant ones. All her life she had avoided unpleasant consequences by behaving herself, by planning ahead, by making things come out the way she wished. Now she was losing control of everything at the same time—her own body, her own life.
Cindy longed to hear from Danny. He had not called her from California before his plane took off for Vietnam. He had never written a letter in his life. The rational part of Cindy’s mind told her that he had not called because he had not been able to get to a telephone; the other part of her mind told her that it was because he was still angry at her—that he might die in a state of anger. On television every day she saw American boys wounded, dying, dead in their body bags. Danny’s fate and the fate of the child she had wanted to have—but whose existence, whose chance of life, she feared as much as she feared the possibility of Danny’s death—joined in her mind, got mixed up in her dreams.
She waited, checking for menstrual blood ten times a day, trying not to think about consequences.
She had never been so alone in her life.
Cindy loaded her car with clothes, books, her electric typewriter, the unwashed bedding that still smelled of Danny, and drove to Columbus. She moved into her new little house—almost a doll’s cottage—and started her new life as a law student.
Most of her professors and nearly all of her fellow law students were opposed to the war. In one of her classes the professor humiliated a student who had fought in Vietnam, asking him questions on legal ethics and turning his answers into an argument about the morality of a modern technological society using its machines to slaughter the population of a defenseless primitive society. On the faces of her classmates Cindy saw a certain look of triumph when the veteran, who limped from his wounds, was stricken dumb by the eloquence and ardor of the professor.
By the first of October, Danny still had not written or called. Cindy watched the evening news on CBS at seven o’clock and ABC at eleven, then woke up early to watch the news segments on the Today show on NBC. By covering all three networks, Cindy hoped to catch a glimpse of Danny, but she was afraid that this would actually happen and the Danny she would see would be the tormented, dying Danny she had seen in her dream. She could not sleep. At night she studied until she could no longer comprehend what she was reading, and then wrote Danny long, half-coherent letters.
The letters never caught up to Danny, but Cindy had had her telephone in Columbus connected before he left, so he knew the number. On October tenth, a week after her second period had been due, he called her collect from Saigon. She covered the mouthpiece and sobbed when she heard his voice.
Danny told her how bad the chow was, what lousy movies he had seen. Half the army in Vietnam was smoking dope, the other half was drunk. It was a lot like going to Kent State except that everybody had a short haircut and a gun. The officers were like coaches, full of shit about discipline and game plans and team spirit, and living off other people’s sweat and reputation.
Cindy said, “Are you in the fighting?”
“Not especially. What we do is go for long walks with guns and grenades hanging off us and try to make friends with the natives. Scares the crap out of them, but you know me—just old John Wayne who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Where in Vietnam are you, exactly?”
“Military secret. But watch out for me on TV. I wrote you a let—”
The line crackled; he was gone. They had been cut off by a timer. Into the dead connection Cindy said, “I love you,” forming the words, not speaking them aloud.
A week later she received Danny’s letter. After class that same day she caught up with the limping veteran and showed him the return address: I & R Plt., 1st Bn., 26th Inf., 1st Inf. Div.
He read it. “So?”
“It’s my boyfriend’s address. What does it mean?”
“It means he’s got his ass in the grass.”
“This is a combat outfit?”
He snorted. “You could say that.”
Cindy said, “Look, I just show up for class with that jerk, just like you. Give me a break.”
The man shrugged. “What Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoons do is, they go out on patrol all by themselves and try to locate the enemy. Draw fire. Then they radio back to the battalion and wait for everybody else to move up.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
He was still unsure of her motives. After a pause he said, “It is. The First Division operates in War Zone C, which runs from Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border. That’s where all the best gook outfits hide out—just across the border in Cambodia. The First Division goes in after them. Your boyfriend is probably walking point.”
Cindy knew from television what that term meant. It meant that Danny was the first American soldier the enemy would see as they lay in ambush in the jungle.
She said, “I see. Thanks.”
Her voice trembled. For the first time, the vet showed some human feeling. He said, “What’s your name?”
“Cindy.”
“Hang in there, Cindy,” he said. “He’s got a good reason to be careful.”
6 As soon as the conversation ended, Cindy drove to a clinic off campus and took a pregnancy test. A woman called with the results a couple of days later, early in the morning.
She was pregnant.
Cindy had been studying all night in her nightgown and robe, and after hanging up the phone she stripped these off and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was absolutely beautiful.
Better than anyone, she knew how perfect her own body was. She had always loved it. Now she thought of what might be growing inside it, and for the first time since she and Jack Adams had done what they had done and spoiled the pleasure she had always taken in looking at herself, she met her own eyes in the mirror. If the child was Danny’s, Danny would never die, and she and Danny would never
be separated. The child would carry Danny’s genes and her genes into the future, and it was possible that the right combination of egg and sperm might someday, maybe centuries from now, come together and result in another Danny—black hair, blue eyes, mirthful smile, amazing grace. And memories he did not even know he had.
But if this fetus belonged to Jack Adams, it too would perpetuate something—the shameful memory of the betrayal she had visited on Danny in her weakness and folly. Like a shudder, dark and unbidden, guilt and shame and hatred ran through her flesh one after the other, like the orgasms that Jack had given her.
She brushed her teeth, showered, dressed, and went directly to the abortion clinic.
In the recovery room, Cindy was awakened by a nurse—the same one who had helped with what they called the procedure.
“Which was it?” she asked.
The nurse said, “It was an embryo, Cindy.”
Cindy sat up on the gurney. “What was it?”
“We’re not permitted to say.”
“I want to know.”
“It really is better not to assign human characteristics to it.”
After a moment of silence, eyes locked on the nurse’s, Cindy said, “I insist.”
“Okay.” The nurse looked at a chart. “First trimester male embryo,” she said.
“Hair color?”
“We don’t make a note of that. How are you feeling?”
Cindy didn’t answer.
“A little woozy?” the nurse said. “That’s normal.”
She took Cindy’s blood pressure, then her pulse, and, after she was through, held on to her wrist for a moment. She looked down with a practiced, smilingly sincere expression of—what?
“Cindy, listen to me,” the nurse said. “Nothing happened here that you need to feel anything but good about.”
“You may be half right about that,” Cindy replied.
Two
1 Off a clown-white Haitian beach, while suspended from an inflated plastic ring in surf that was the exact temperature of saliva, Peter revealed the outline of his plan for Jack Adams.
First, he was going to bind Jack to us for the rest of his life. Then he was going to manage his future in minute detail. And then Jack was going to be elected president of the United States.
“Legitimately, in an honest election,” Peter said. He named the year. “It is perfectly possible.”
I said, “You’re going to turn the president of the United States into an agent of influence?”
“No, Dmitri,” he replied, “you and I are going to turn Jack Adams into an agent of influence, and then with our help and advice and moral support, Jack is going to transform himself into the president of the United States.”
“Are you going to tell Jack why we are doing all this for him?”
“Of course not,” Peter replied. “He will be unwitting.”
You blink? You wonder if Peter was mad? Resist the impulse to disbelieve. Peter was not mad. He was something even more unsettling, an original thinker. To Peter, the student of the American psyche, this plan to make the ultimate dream of the KGB come true was not a grandiose objective. It was an obvious operational objective that needed only the right plan, the right touch, and above all, the right asset to succeed.
“Let’s swim out a little farther,” Peter said.
As before, he spoke in a conversational voice, but with his back to the shore so that his words would be carried out to sea. Useless precautions are the silent prayers of espionage. Between us and the beach, half a mile away, several swimmers approached, round dark heads bobbing in the swell: the same smiling boys and girls who had driven us into the water earlier by shadowing us, offering delights, as we walked along the sand. These children were no threat to our secrets. All they were interested in was money. But Peter had ordered me to meet him here, at a resort hotel on a remote point of land, so that we would be absolutely alone. He had imagined that we would be undisturbed. And as always, he insisted on having precisely what he had imagined.
Farther out, the surf was higher. We rose and fell several meters each time a sluggish wave rolled in from the open sea. We swam clumsily in our plastic doughnuts. It was quite unsafe to be so far from the grip of the land. Even the little prostitutes, who swam like fishes, thought so; they turned back. I am not at ease in tropical waters. I wonder about sharks, barracuda, treacherous undertows that might sweep one out to sea.
Oblivious to exterior realities, Peter resumed his monologue. He had been thinking about this project for years, looking for the right man, waiting for the right moment. Now the Vietnam War, combined with pathological fear and loathing for that nemesis of the faithful, Richard Nixon, had provided the moment. History had turned America upside down. Golden opportunities were falling out of its pockets.
Jack Adams was just the man to snatch these opportunities; Peter was sure of it.
I said, “The fact that he seems to be a born liar doesn’t bother you?”
“Lies are the truth of the Left,” Peter said, flicking my question off the table like a crumb. “The revolution has always lied about everything for its own reasons. So does Jack for his own reasons. We will make the reasons the same.”
Peter continued with his main line of reasoning. Jack’s humble origins were precisely the thing that made him the ideal lump of clay. With rare exceptions, American presidents came from exactly such origins. Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Carter—all were nobodies from nowhere, poor boys like Jack who escaped from obscurity as a result of highly unlikely combinations of circumstances.
“Almost always they are from families that are not merely humble, but scorned,” Peter said. “Religious fanatics, bankrupts, outcasts. There is always a deus ex machina involved: The unlettered Truman catches the eye of a political boss, the charming athlete Eisenhower is appointed to West Point, the resentful lone wolf Nixon answers a want ad and is elected to Congress. Only in America.”
Jack Adams’s deus ex machina would be us—or, rather, Peter.
No one must ever know about our hidden hand. Not even Jack. And especially not Moscow. We would run this operation outside the apparatus. To the rest of the KGB, Jack would be just another ineffectual American asset, another of Peter’s wild gambles, a waste of time and money.
I said, “A question. This is going to cost a lot of money. If Moscow knows nothing about this operation, how will we pay for it?”
“Certain arrangements have been made,” Peter said.
That was all he told me, then or later. It was all I needed to know. I assumed he had devised some way to bury the expenses of this operation in the labyrinthine budget of his directorate—called “Peter’s Follies” by the rest of the KGB. He pounded into my head the absolute necessity of compartmenting Jack from the espionage directorates. They must never know how important Jack was, they must never be able to touch him, never be able to demand their money’s worth, because they would destroy him with their stupidity, just as they had destroyed Alger Hiss.
I said, “Alger Hiss? I thought he belonged to the neighbors.”
The neighbors is slang for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, to whose Washington network Hiss, an American diplomat, was said to have belonged in the 1930s and 1940s.
“He did,” Peter replied, “but they are all alike. All they can think about is stealing secrets. They destroyed an asset who was in a position to give history a shove by sabotaging U.S. foreign policy—blew their own agent. And why? So that he could rifle wastebaskets in his spare time. They would do it again.”
This Hiss story, said Peter, was a political Passion play, a triumph of faith over reality. Hiss may have been convicted in a court of law on the basis of secrets copied down in his own hand and handed over to the Russians, but the progressive element in the United States adamantly—furiously—refused to believe in his guilt. For half a century—and this was the part that Peter loved because it was such an inspired diversion—they defended Hiss’s innocence as if it wer
e their own, which of course it was, since this fallen angel was the archetype of the good liberal. By admitting that he was something other than he seemed to be, they would be admitting that they also had something to hide. They wore his clothes, spoke in his vocabulary, thought his thoughts. To those who were so much like him, Hiss was not a traitor but a prophet sent from the twentieth-century version of heaven—the socialist motherland—only to be condemned before his work was done by an ignorant mob controlled by a corrupt priesthood of reactionaries, the Republican Party.
“It’s the Jesus story all over again,” Peter said, “with Marx as the father, Alger as the son, Whittaker Chambers as Judas, the FBI as the Romans, Nixon as Pontius Pilate, and the liberals as the disciples, preaching the word, proclaiming the holiness of the martyr. Do you understand the opportunity, the power this puts in our hands? The holy spirit is in them unto the third generation. They are an unconscious underground, demanding no support, requiring no instruction, driven by blind faith and the thirst for revenge. All we have to do is give them another Messiah who reminds them of Alger and this time they will kidnap him from the cross. Alive.”
Gulls circled and cried overhead, as if summoned by Peter’s wisdom. He treaded water until they went away. Then he returned to his parable.
“The same people who beatified Alger will discover and love Jack—the Jack we are going to design for them,” Peter said. “They will invest every kopeck of their moral and political capital in him as soon as they hear him speak in parables. To them, Jack’s weaknesses will be strengths, his lies truths, his crimes miracles.”
“His masters invisible?”
“Not entirely. We must give them signs. Everything depends on their understanding exactly how this rabbit was pulled out of the hat.”
Peter’s contempt for those Americans who loved us was breathtaking, but that is the revolutionary’s way. All that mattered to him was the outcome. He would gladly use fools to gain his ends—in fact he could hardly attain his ends without their help. And then he would shoot them before they did to him what they had done to their own country. He would no more let such weaklings survive than he would marry another man’s worn-out widow after screwing her for twenty years of secret afternoons in her late husband’s bed.
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