Red, White, Blue

by Lea Carpenter

  “I think it’s quite like a house,” he said, with absolute confidence. “A very large house with many rooms.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He had gone on to talk about the rooms, how there is one for forgiveness, one for rest, even a room for joy. The joy room was vast. It contained a central courtyard floored with stone. “Joy needs her space,” he had said. Anna often thought about that courtyard, which included hibiscus vines and bougainvillea, a magical glass trellis. He described how from this room, you could see all the way to the edge of the earth, to the sea. Her father had taught her many things, defined her views on literature, manners, God. And emotion. He had prepared her to expect a certain level of creativity, or romance, in relationships. Set her up to expect comfort when she felt in crisis. He knew clouds and angels weren’t quite enough, when asked about Heaven. In this and other things, he set a bar.

  * * *

  —

  That bar broke hearts. Anna’s first love had been older and had taught her how to love. Her second became her husband and would teach her how to let go. There were others, each of whom would eventually mention her “high emotional bar.” This always shocked Anna; What bar, she would say. Or, What’s your definition of high. She was unaware of measuring, even as she clung to her yardstick. She was unaware that her real understanding of love came not from university or from marriage but from her father. The game of measuring beaus against fathers is common and unfair. It’s rigged against the beaus whose flaws we see clearly in favor of fathers whose flaws are obscured, or willfully hidden, in the presence of a child.

  * * *

  —

  The last time Anna had used her yardstick was with the guy she met on her honeymoon, at the hotel by the ocean at the Cap. The honeymoon wasn’t really a honeymoon, as it took place almost seven months after the wedding, but as it was their first real time away since exchanging vows, since burying her father, and her husband had been insistent about framing it that way. Honeymoon, honeymoon: He must have repeated the word ten times in the Air France departure lounge alone. “Can’t we simply say holiday,” she’d asked him. His enthusiasm made her shy, but his enthusiasm made him who he was, it was the center of his charm. He adored her and was proud of her, and he wanted to show off the celebration of that to anyone and everyone. “Holiday,” she repeated, as they waited in line to board the plane. And he had picked her up, and looked her right in the eyes and said, “I love you. You are allowed to be happy.” He had a point.

  She’d started seeing a psychiatrist that summer and quickly concluded that everyone was seeing shrinks, hoping maybe more for forgiveness than epiphany. Anna sometimes fell asleep in her sessions, and the shrink said it was because in a “framework of safety” she could rest. She preferred the theory that talking about her problems bored her out of consciousness.

  The trip would be a chance for rest, though. She could finally find the right time to tell her husband her news. He was busy these days, and absent, though he didn’t mean it, it wasn’t an active thing against her. He was preparing to sell his company, which he referred to as “the baby.” He was the sole founder and owner and would tell people it had been “another case of Immaculate Conception.” When they landed in Nice he got a text telling him the baby had been valued at a very heady number.

  “What does that number mean,” she’d asked.

  “Freedom,” was his answer, which she interpreted to mean he didn’t know.

  On their second day in France she was alone again in the afternoon while he worked, so she went to the bar. The only other person there was reading a book and eating olives. Later, he would claim that when she sat down he had asked, “Lune de miel?” the French phrase for honeymoon. He would also claim that she had answered shyly and in perfect French, “No, only holiday.” Answering yes would have prompted questions about the wedding and elicited answers about the story, why the honeymoon hadn’t followed the wedding, and then if she said what had happened, there would have been shock or sympathy. A little white lie was so much simpler.

  Anna could recall only what she was wearing, a white eyelet dress found online. The necklace her father had given her for her thirtieth birthday, a gold pendant dotted with tiny blue stones, one for each of her years.

  At the bar the guy had pushed a silver cup of peanuts toward her. She took two. “They import those from Georgia,” he’d said, teasing, mocking the pretense of silver cups for such a simple thing as peanuts. Something in him had drawn her out. Something in him had made her feel calm. It wasn’t physical or illicit. It was simple: He was listening. He was hearing her. She was telling him who she was and he was hearing it. Within an hour she was telling him about the wedding and the snow and the loss.

  * * *

  —

  And also there is a room, where one dies.

  At the end of the first chapter, the first video, the camera pans back and she can now see the boy. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” says a woman’s voice.

  The boy moves his face so close to the camera you can see only a blur.

  “Superman,” he says.

  “What’s so special about Superman?”

  “He gets to save the world.”

  Q.

  A.

  Look, the average age of a first-tour operations officer is under thirty-five. You are sending many of these single—or let’s call them “geographically single”—guys to foreign places. They will date local women. They’re human. So the question always arises, At what point do you fill out the report? Your father liked to say, “You fill it out after five dinners, or two breakfasts. One breakfast, it’s on the house.” Though in my experience, there weren’t many meaningful breakfasts. Meaningful breakfasts are an occupational hazard, and while no one writes down a list of those hazards, everyone knows what they are. It all goes back to paranoia and distrust. Paranoia and distrust, especially of foreigners—the exact same people we were sent over to befriend and seduce, befriend and betray. I remember once telling a new guy he needed to mind the reports, that they were “simple protocol.” Your father was there and he said, “Protocol. Or, as we called it, survival.”

  * * *

  —

  When I started I had absolutely no idea about anything. I didn’t know what the word threat meant. The definition, and the author of that definition, isn’t disclosed at the Farm. Later, you learn. A threat is a situation that requires you to make an immediate decision, and the options usually aren’t right choice and wrong choice. The options are usually complex choice and really complex choice. If you’re blessed there’s occasionally a third option: the “only one.” The idea of only-one scenarios was explained to me at a bar one night, watching girls order drinks. One of the girls was particularly striking, less for beauty than for her height, rare in that part of the world. “That’s an only-one scenario,” someone said. When I asked what that meant he told me, “A situation where the only option is equally seductive and terrifying.” Then he said, “You know, removal of a dictator, falling in love, equally seductive and terrifying.” See how many things you can think of that fit into that category, Anna. Here is one: organizing the extradition of an asset to save her life while risking your own.

  Space.

  “Look at this tangle of thorns,” her father would say, when he would find Anna in the kitchen, amid one of her messes. She’d loved cooking when she was a girl, and had devoured the recipe books her mother left behind—M.F.K. Fisher, Escoffier. He would find her at ten or eleven or twelve, the same child who grew up to be so controlled and meticulous, covered in flour surrounded by pots and cracked eggshells, the cook having indulged her by letting her loose. “My little act of creative destruction,” he called her. Those nights her father would slip off his jacket and roll up his sleeves and join her. As she grew up they spent hours in that kitchen talking food and art and life. Anna couldn’t recall many
nights between ten and fifteen when he wasn’t home. A girl’s life is defined by school, family, eventually by boys, later motherhood. Her father’s life was defined by her.

  * * *

  —

  What else did Anna’s mother leave behind? A legacy of taste, of how things should be and where one must travel, of what constitutes a proper hospital corner (even as she herself had never made a bed), and what the finest five-star hotels were in any city between Edinburgh and Istanbul. Her mother exemplified a kind of perfection other women tried, and failed, to crib. Though it wasn’t so much the perfection that was her art—perfection being eminently crib-able—as it was the effortlessness that attended it. Anna’s mother never broke a sweat, excepting on the tennis court. She sort of floated above.

  She had gone to the right schools and married the right man. She had delivered a beautiful baby girl she would dress in smocked Spanish jumpers for outings in Central Park.

  She was adored by everyone and seemed to bestow adoration democratically in response. Her most formidable gift was her ability to perform, and her finest performance was as the sine qua non of humility, that girl from a grand family who would never trade on it.

  In private she could be wickedly subversive and even critical—of her peers, even of her husband, who had come from a very different world, and whom she loved more than he loved her. Wickedness comes from loneliness, though, and Anna’s mother knew it. She knew that her long line of perfect performances had led her to a prison of her own design. A prison on Fifth Avenue, how absurd. Though that is how she felt. No one was going to rescue her. No one would have questioned her, as everyone felt she had the perfect life, right down to those smocked dresses and that little girl who would without question grow up to be like her mother, another thoroughbred. And so one day, tired of performing, she left.

  * * *

  —

  She would tell herself her job was done. She would tell herself that she had given everything she had to her little girl, and that when there was nothing left to give…She would insist on a narrative about life in general which Anna spent a long time fighting and scorning, one that says we are always free to leave, that we have only ourselves to mind. That one must take risks. Ironically, this was not a narrative Anna’s father believed in. Ironically, as he understood the concept of risk. He understood it so well he believed it should be confined to work, to math. When it came to private life he believed in duty and rule and precision. His narrative was that his wife had given up, that her entitlement had ruined her, that entitlement was a cancer. His narrative was that when you love something you give your life for it. At least, that was how Anna understood him. That was how she understood them both, and she had confidence in her understanding of who they were, as all children do. Later, when she was old enough to have confidence in her own choices, she would consider that understanding, those opposing narratives. She would have to choose one over the other.

  * * *

  —

  Children intuit the emotions of their elders. They cue their own emotions off of those. Anna’s mother possessed an even, chilly temperament. Her father was warm and intense. One might say, observing things, that if she had to lose one parent it might have been better to lose her mother. Though who can say. Anna would be raised well by a raft of other adults, Irish nannies, her father, his girlfriends. And in ways she would raise herself. Though a child doesn’t really think about who is raising them. A child thinks about who is setting bedtimes, or selecting what goes under the tree. A child thinks adults are people who police and protect them. It doesn’t occur to a child that what parents are trying to do is actually raise an adult. It doesn’t occur to a child that parents are just trying to do the right thing. Like all those years later, all grown up in that bar on her “honeymoon,” Anna was also only trying to do the right thing.

  * * *

  —

  A man who quotes Nabokov apropos of cracked eggs: That was Noel. He’d studied English at Virginia, and stayed on for an MFA. He’d met her mother at a party on the North Shore. He had ambitions to be a writer but was too poor to pursue poetry alone, so he went to Wall Street. That had worked out well for him, to his own amusement. It turned out that slant rhyme wasn’t his only gift; he could also select stocks. He would forever refer to the financial world as “life at the putty-knife factory,” though he rarely discussed his work. When she was little, Anna knew only that Noel did something involving math, and a commute below Fourteenth Street.

  When he left the bank to start his own thing, his office was a walk-up with two desks and a water cooler. Later his office was a great glass box designed by a Pritzker Prize recipient. He’d met the architect at a dinner in London. He’d been seduced by the man’s riffs on transparency, and the meaning of space. Thirty years after completing his dissertation at a diner in Charlottesville, Noel had become an icon. Though not as he had thought he might. Not as the new Lowell, or Merwin. He was a pillar in another field, in demand for another kind of virtuosic talent. He could value things, and by that point not just stocks. He could accurately assess the price of an Old Master, or a Jeff Koons, at a glance. He could tell you how housing starts in Shanghai might affect the price of salt. Still, he never lost his taste for the philosophical. He could contemplate the meaning of space. On his fiftieth birthday his daughter gave him a silver cup engraved with one word: POET. He referred to it as his finest deal toy.

  * * *

  —

  Anna always imagined her mother had left because being with a man like Noel was unbearable in a way. Everyone wanted a piece of him. Perhaps her mother never felt she’d been given her share. Perhaps her mother hadn’t felt imprisoned at all but, rather, not quite imprisoned enough. Did the right interpretation of the past matter. Anna wasn’t sure. She would spend at least part of the rest of her life trying to find pieces of that puzzle. By the time she was nearing thirty-three, and the arrival of her own puzzle, she had nothing but an outline of the story of her own life.

  So much was missing. Speaking of the meaning of space.

  Her mother’s name was Lulu. Which had originally been Eleuthera.

  Q.

  A.

  When people asked your father what he did for a living he would say, “I move things around,” which we always found amusing. He always had an answer, didn’t he. He was tough on us, and we deserved it, when you’re new you’re always a little stupid. He would look at you for a full minute, lean over your desk, and say, “You are in the business of realignment, that’s all, you move things around. Don’t get too noble about it.” Any pretension about the profession sent him raging. I think that was one reason he chose me. We shared a simple philosophy. We believed that, like priests, we were called to this. And while we shared a strong cynicism about the work we knew there was no quitting it. You don’t quit the Church. What we did—it’s really just ordinary life, Anna, ordinary life sped up. Every interaction you have which clicks, you hold on to and build on. Every error, you either exploit or forgive. You work on your timing, you work on your ability to empathize. Noel told me timing plus empathy equals a successful recruitment, that timing plus empathy can even, occasionally, avert an attack. When I asked him to clarify what he meant by timing he said, “when to shut up, and when to talk.” Timing simply meant knowing how to listen.

  Realignment.

  Lulu would call her daughter periodically and say things like, “Solving all the problems in Africa is not the same as solving all the problems in yourself,” to which Anna would reply, “I’m not solving all the problems in Africa,” even though she thought she kind of was, or that at least she was moving the ball. Like her father, Anna loved working on things that were foreign, or exotic, to others. She believed Noel had done that, too, that he had spent his days making complex mathematical decisions that resulted in wealth creation, though “realignment” was the word she heard him use most often when p
eople asked what he did. “Realignment” doesn’t mean anything does it, though it passes at a party, and then, as over time, friends believed they knew Noel and understood exactly what he did, they stopped asking. The more known you are the easier it is to hide, deflect. “Realignment” was Noel’s defense against truly being known.

  Anna loved her work for the foundation. She believed in Africa, and the idea that empathy and investment could create solutions to such diverse threats as AIDs, Ebola, the extinction of a species. Anna’s belief in the work was a means to another end, a reason to stay late nights, an excuse to crowd out other experiences. Like, increasingly, love. Or commitment. At some point at some party when asked what she did Anna started simply saying, “realignment.” She was doing exactly what her father had done, defending against being too known. Without even being aware of it, she was operating under a different kind of cover.

  And Lulu observed all this from a distance and kept close watch on it. Lulu worried that her daughter was actually totally lost. She would listen to Anna talk about her life then say, “It sounds absolutely fascinating, but maybe you’re just running away from all the baby carriages.” And though Anna said nothing she was thinking that her mother was in no position to lecture anyone on anything. Especially running away.

  Q.

  A.

  Anyone who has done a tour in a war zone has never done a real tour. The time from meeting someone to getting him or her to spy for you in a war zone could be ten minutes. In Beijing it could take ten years. Baghdad Station was the largest in the world then. Saigon was the largest station in the seventies. We’re not a war organization, Anna, but when you’re invited to a ball you put on a tux.