Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields

  “You didn’t say you were coming . . .” At least her FBI escort isn’t scheduled to show up until ten, she thinks with relief.

  “May I come in anyway?”

  “Of course, I— Are you all right?” He looks jangled, distressed.

  “I need a drink. Still have some of that grand Scotch? Zeke!”

  “I’m just leaving. Don’t mind me. You’re here to save the day and I can go back to my quiet little life.” He kisses Rosalind’s cheek, twists one of her curls around his fingers. “See you, Bunny. It will all be okay, I’m sure.”

  When he’s gone, Weaver drops wearily into an armchair.

  “What did he mean about it being okay? What’s happened here?” Weaver looks around. She and Zeke made some progress, yet there’s sheet music thrown under the piano bench, a picture frame crashed and cracked by the radiator, too many books still unshelved because Zeke found them irresistible.

  “I was broken into last night.”

  His eyes grow wide. “Dear God,” he says. “And you’re just right as rain?”

  “It could have been worse. I wasn’t here. And, honestly, I can’t see that they took anything. Not my jewelry. Not my forty-five bucks in the drawer by the fridge. I’d say they were looking for something and didn’t find it. Mistaken identity maybe . . .” She sounds too cheery, but it’s the only way she can think to tell him, without letting on she knows it’s his fault. She finds the bottle of Scotch and pours him a large glassful, though she realizes this long-hoarded bottle is now only a quarter full.

  “You didn’t call me?”

  “I was out with Zeke when it happened, thank God.”

  “Did they take that envelope I gave you? Did they take that?” His voice bends when he asks. The panic in his face is unquestionable.

  “No. It’s in a safe-deposit box at my bank.”

  “Thank God,” he says. “Thank God. Did you call the police?”

  “Yes. They took fingerprints.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “What?”

  He just shakes his head. “Hopefully, the police don’t have their fingerprints on record.”

  “Whose?”

  “The people who want that envelope.”

  “So, in your mind, that’s what this is about? Your envelope? And you’re hoping the police won’t be able to identify the people who did this? Jesus, Weaver. What have you gotten me into?”

  He sets down his drink with a thunk and stands swiftly, clearly struck with a horrible thought. Grabbing her hand, he throws open the front door and draws her out into the hall. Shuts it tightly.

  “Where are you . . . what are we . . . ?”

  He puts his finger to his lips.

  Halfway down the hall he whispers, “Christ. Your apartment is bugged.”

  “Bugged? I don’t understand.”

  “With listening devices. I don’t know why I didn’t realize. That’s the only way they could have known I gave you the envelope. They heard me talk about it when I handed it to you. Goddammit to hell!”

  For a moment, she’s confused. He’s not speaking about the FBI phone tap. This is worse. Is he just paranoid, or is it true? Have they heard her making love to Weaver? Do they know that Charlie spent the night last night even if Weaver doesn’t?

  “Why would anyone want to listen to me?”

  “Let’s walk down to the lake and I’ll tell you,” he says. “Grab your purse and I’ll take my drink. Just stay quiet, though, until we get outside.”

  “You don’t think anyone will think it odd, you marching down the street with a glass of Scotch?”

  “I don’t give a damn what they think,” he says. “Get whatever you need; then let’s get the hell out of the building.”

  “I’ve got to change out of these dungarees, for one thing. I can’t go out at night like this.”

  “Then do it and hurry up.”

  In her bedroom, changing as quickly as she can, she can hear her own heart pounding so loudly she imagines her eavesdroppers could pick it up. If her apartment really is bugged, what did she say to Charlie last night or this morning? Won’t they realize he’s from the FBI? And the other two men who came to dust for prints: the way they discussed sectioning off her apartment for prints. They heard that too. Doesn’t it put her at risk? And Weaver too . . .

  In the elevator, she finds it hard to breathe. Weaver fixes his eyes on the indicator and doesn’t say a word. Frank nods at them as they attempt to walk out nonchalantly, Weaver with a drink in hand. The sky is cloudless, an elegant blue. A Van Gogh sky, magical and starry. The fact it’s such a nice evening mocks them. Her breath grows even more constrained, and the street begins to roll before her eyes.

  “Weaver, I think I feel faint,” she says.

  “Oh Christ,” he says. “You must be hyperventilating. Take long breaths and be sure to breathe out all the way. You’re not actually going to pass out on me, are you?”

  “Is my apartment really bugged? Have people been listening to us making love?”

  “Nothing we can do about it now,” he says coolly.

  “You always said I was too noisy in bed.”

  “I was just teasing you. I like the sounds you make. Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about this.” Transferring his Scotch to his other hand, he slips his arm around her waist. “You’re not going to crumple on me here, are you? Breathe slowly.”

  She breathes. The wooziness lightens but doesn’t go away. The bridge of her nose buzzes. But of course, she hasn’t eaten since lunch.

  “Are you saying it’s your fault they’re listening in?” she asks.

  “It’s a good bet.”

  “And who are they?”

  He shakes his head weakly. “Breathe,” he says.

  She takes long breaths, focuses on breathing out. She feels anger to her fingers, senses a narrowing in her throat. Her place being ransacked was awful. But thinking that someone’s been listening to every single thing she’s done . . . for how long?

  “Cup your hands around your mouth and nose and breathe into them. I’d give you a paper bag if I had one.”

  “You did this to me,” she says.

  He looks sad, sheepish even.

  “I don’t know what you’re involved in. And yet you’ve made me a target,” she says.

  He nods, looking wounded. The color leaves his face. “I don’t blame you for being angry. Here, rest for a moment against this wall.” She half sits on a brick fence that surrounds a large, attractive house. She remembers that he sat her here once before, to kiss her, long ago, during the war. They walked together all the time then, scouting for windows that were uncurtained and well lit, so they could peep into the houses. What an irony that in those days they enjoyed spying on others, felt it was a fine thing to do! Now Weaver pets her hair, watches her with concern, in a way he never has before. He’s worried about her forgiving him. He has no idea the Russians might now know the FBI are involved. And she can’t say a word. How has she gotten here? Furious at him, fearful for him. Breathe, she tells herself. Breathe.

  After a long while, he says softly, “What do you think, love? Are you well enough to walk down to our bench?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he says. “I came tonight to tell you something.”

  * * *

  Charlie orders a steak and a beer. He’s never been a huge drinker. But he’s counting on it to lubricate the conversation. Sondra orders some sort of cocktail with a maraschino cherry stabbed by a fluffy purple toothpick. The last time he ate out was at the Berghoff when he was following Rosalind. He remembers watching her enjoying her niece’s company, while he sat awkward and alone. He assumed then that she was unapproachable. He’d give anything to be with her tonight instead of Sondra, who pops the drink’s cherry into her mouth first thing.

  “I love mara
schino cherries,” she says. “They’re so indulgent.”

  He smiles, stops himself from saying that he abhors them, that they taste like cough medicine.

  “I’m a cheap date,” she says enthusiastically. “One drink and I’m in my cups.”

  “Then maybe you’d better hold off drinking it until the waitress brings bread or something.”

  “You’re no fun.” She pokes his arm, and when she does, he thinks of Rosalind tenderly reaching for his hand, stroking it, looking into his eyes. Those dark eyes of hers. The soft scallop of her mouth. He shakes off the memory, needs to get through this evening. And it becomes challenging, for as Sondra continues to drink, she becomes more talkative, until she waves for the waitress to bring another.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asks. She doesn’t notice when he doesn’t answer. Is this how Sondra acted all the times Peggy set her up with other men? Does she think he wants her a little tipsy? He supposes there are men who would gleefully take advantage of a girl too compromised to know what she’s doing.

  He’s relieved when the salads arrive, heads of iceberg lettuce cut into wedges, buried in thick waves of Thousand Island dressing. She cuts hers into pieces and crunches away, telling him about her job at the church, waving her fork. He cuts his with his knife alone, wondering if he can manage to slice off a piece without launching the wedge, since he doesn’t have another hand to stab it with a fork. She talks about her brother, whom he knows. About her parents and how she worries about them growing old. Maybe he should give up on the lettuce? He tries to pry it apart with his fork, then settles on skewering the wedge with the fork and pressing the fork against the plate with his left wrist while he cuts with the knife. He’d be too self-conscious to do this in front of Rosalind. But he recognizes Sondra’s too tipsy to care.

  “It’s always the single daughters that end up moving into their parents’ house, tending to them. That’s me. The single daughter,” she says. “I ought to wear a badge.”

  After the salad, she waves to the waitress and asks for yet another drink. Charlie imagines crossing his arms and laying his head down on them. It’s going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Rosalind and Weaver have reached the beach and their bench.

  “You okay now? Want to sit?” She claims the same side of the bench where she always sat overlooking the water in the past. How many times did they come here to find solace, to fight, to cry? He leans over and sets his drink on the ground, then straightens and lights a cigarette. He has to cup his hands to protect the flame from the lake breeze, and that’s when she sees his hands are unsteady.

  “So, tell me,” Rosalind says. “Who bugged my apartment and why?”

  She waits for the lie, the pivot, the silence. But he stares straight ahead over the water and says, “Some Russians.”

  She’s too staggered to speak for a minute. It’s the last thing she expected from him: honesty.

  “Oh, Russians,” she says. If Charlie hadn’t clued her in, surely she’d react with sarcasm, wouldn’t she? “With so much excitement going on at my apartment, of course, how could Russians stay away?”

  The muscles in his jaw twitch. “I know it sounds absurd.”

  “You bet.”

  “For a change, I’m telling you the truth.” This shakes her too.

  “I got myself into something unknowingly years ago,” he says.

  “Unknowingly. With Russians?”

  “Yes.” He sits down beside her.

  Looking out over the empty beach, she recalls other nights they sat side by side on this bench in pained silence. He wouldn’t talk about marrying her, never spoke about children though she ached for them. Later, when she suffered with pulsing regret over the photographs she’d seen of Japanese buildings reduced to collapsing skeletons, burned bodies, melted faces, “Don’t you care what we’ve done?” she entreated him. “Don’t you feel shame for what we created?” While she wept, he just smoked, waiting for her to get over it. He kicked the butts of his cigarettes into the sand after he ground them out on the concrete pad with his shoe. She usually read his refusal to comfort her as his Englishness, his cool intolerance of open emotion. She should have hated him then but didn’t. All lovers have their faults, she told herself. All lovers present obstacles. She understood her raw pain was an obstacle to him.

  This evening, he hunches over, his eyes peering out at the dark lake, waves lapping in sudsy gulps at the edge of the sand. He sucks on a cigarette, and when he exhales, the wind lifts the smoke, making it dance. As it disperses in a swirl over the water, she lays her hand on his back reassuringly, waiting for his confession. She will always love him. It’s her curse. Despite the fact that he’s endangered her. By choosing to spy on him for the FBI, she’s also endangered him.

  He smokes the entire cigarette down in silence, then grinds the butt into the concrete, lights another. All the while, his hands are shaking. She waits. In the loaded silence, she struggles. Whatever he tells her, won’t she have to tell Charlie? Won’t she be required to betray him? Won’t she end up as his judge, perhaps his executioner? She’s loved this man. A man who’s betrayed his country. He might have shared information about the atomic bomb. This man may have put the world’s fate in the enemy’s hands. And now, maybe, the hydrogen bomb. Is it too late to stop him? She shivers.

  “Before I tell you about the Russians,” he says, “I need to tell you something else. Something more important.”

  How could anything be more important?

  “Roz, I have cancer.” He says it so flatly, the words spin weightless and sharp between them. They send a blade through her throat, cutting off anything she might ask. His new leanness, his surprising exhaustion. Cancer. She immediately hears wind in her ears, sees hospital wards filled with wasting men. Weaver. Cancer. Two more disparate things never existed.

  “Do you remember after Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . how I went to Los Alamos for a while?” he says.

  She nods.

  “I’d say that’s when I was exposed . . .” After a long pause, he says, “At the Trinity Site.”

  “You went to Trinity?” Trinity was where they first tested the bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico. The Journey of the Dead Man desert struck her as an uncannily appropriate name, especially after they dropped the bombs on Japan.

  “I was brought out there a month after the test, after Nagasaki. They wanted to take readings. You don’t remember?”

  She shakes her head.

  * * *

  He has cancer. It somehow blocks out everything else. She puts her face against his curled-over back, breathes in his distinctive, smoky scent, recalling with horror how she once wondered when it would be his turn to suffer for creating the bomb.

  He draws on his cigarette. “Right after the explosion they rolled a lead-lined tank out there, and the radiation was much higher than they’d expected. A little over a month later—just after Japan—Kenneth Bainbridge wanted to send a team out to measure it again, to gauge the gamma-ray intensity and see how much decay had occurred. The Japanese were contending that their bomb sites had been left so hot, no one could live in either town for seventy years. They ‘volunteered’ me to go out to Los Alamos, to oversee a small crew. You were so unhappy after the bombs. You didn’t want me around. I was relieved to escape. I know I wasn’t very comforting.”

  She shrugs. “Maybe I couldn’t be comforted.” She remembers how angry she was. Angry at him, at the world, such an unforgiving lover. She pushed him away. And now she’s surprised how the fact that he’s ill mutes her present furor. Makes her want to forget what a traitor he is.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “We drove out to ground zero with dosimeters. The plan was to prove the Japanese wrong.”

  “How hot was it?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. The meters sai
d that the radiation had decayed much more rapidly than expected. The powers that be were delighted. Destruction and hardly any aftereffect. Except, there are plenty of things we didn’t know, still don’t know about aftereffects. Almost all of us on that little mission have become sick in one way or another. We were tromping all over the site like a day at the beach . . .”

  She can’t help wondering: Was escaping her misery the reason he decided to go?

  “How do you feel now?” she asks.

  “I’m tired at times. I didn’t know I could be so tired. They say I’m beginning to grow tumors in my bones. But I don’t feel them yet, thank God. When they start to break the bones they reside in, the doctors have warned they’ll become excruciating. I pray I don’t live that long . . .”

  “Weaver . . .”

  “God, whatever you do, don’t pity me. I couldn’t bear it.”

  “You should quit the lab.”

  “And do what? Stare at the wall? I’m not sick enough yet.”

  “Do things you love.”

  “I don’t love anything but work . . . and you.” He looks at her and his eyes are as dark as she’s ever seen them. Thoughtful. Devoted. Not his laughing eyes. But the ones that are tired of secrets. “That’s why I kept calling. I would have knocked on your door for a century just to get you to give me another chance. Except, of course, I don’t have a century.” He touches her hair in a tender, focused way that hardly seems like Weaver. All that cool, British bravado gone. At the very moment that she’s poised to betray him.

  “What kind of cancer is it?” she asks.

  “It’s called multiple myeloma. My body’s producing too many plasma cells. They cling together in the marrow of my bones, will grow, take over. Right now, the only real symptom other than tiredness is that I often run a fever. Maybe you’ve felt how hot I get . . . Do you appreciate the irony? It’s as though our bomb is now inside me. Preparing to explode.”

  He makes a horrible explosive sound. He’s always been so hale. A redwood in a forest of spindly pines.