I removed my shoes. I removed my makeup. I removed my gown. I stood in my tub and let the scalding water run over my body. Then I got into bed and slept—into the day, and into the next night.
When I awoke, I went into the bathroom and knelt on the cold floor. Counting six tiles from the wall, I pried my fingernail under the one loose tile. My red nail broke. I bit the rest off and spat it onto the floor. Removing the tile, I picked up the business card: SARA’S DRY CLEANERS, 2010 P ST. NW, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Turning the card over, I thought of Irina. I wanted to remember everything. I wanted to catalog, then file away my memories of her so I could pull from them in the future, protect them from the influence of others, protect them from the cruel distortion of time, protect them from the person I knew I’d have to become.
Once I made the call, there would be no turning back. A double is a bit of a misnomer: one person doesn’t become two. Rather, one loses a part of herself in order to exist in two worlds, never fully existing in either.
I remembered seeing Irina at Ralph’s: how she sat on the edge of the booth, her legs half in the aisle, when she turned her head in my direction for the first time. I remembered the pink bubble gum she bought at the gas station in Leesburg on our way out to a vineyard that turned out to be closed. How we went sledding the night of the first snow at Fort Reno, the District’s highest point. How I balked when I met her in Tenleytown and she held up two pea-soup-colored trays she’d taken from the Agency’s cafeteria. I pointed at my heels and told her I couldn’t possibly. How I relented when she asked if I’d try just once. How the wind felt in my face as we rushed down the icy hill.
The time we ran into a Safeway ten minutes before it closed, in search of a birthday cake. It wasn’t my birthday, or hers, but Irina insisted we get it, even asking the baker, who’d already undone his apron for the night, if he could please write my name on it, with an exclamation point, in blue icing.
When we watched airplanes land at National from Gravelly Point. How we huddled together under a blanket when a flash of light appeared in the distance. How the sound of the planes’ engines grew louder and louder until they appeared overhead. How they looked so close we felt we could reach up and touch their bellies.
I even wanted to remember that morning in my apartment after we’d made love—when everything unraveled like a loose string on a sweater. After she left, I went to my closet, where I’d hidden a gift I’d bought her: an antique print of the Eiffel Tower. After seeing Funny Face, she’d said that we must go to Paris together someday. The tiny tower was the size of my palm, its intricate lines drawn by dipping the tip of a needle in ink. I’d had it framed and wrapped it in butcher paper, tied with red string. I had planned on giving it to her for Christmas, but it remained in the back of my closet.
I held the business card in my hand. I memorized the address, lit a match, and watched it go up in flames.
CHAPTER 16
The Applicant
THE CARRIER
The Bishop’s Garden was empty, the side gate unlocked. The bare trees formed black shadows against the illuminated National Cathedral. The cherub-covered fountain was turned off for winter, except for a steady drip to keep the pipes from freezing, the garden’s famed rosebushes just thorny shrubs.
Three footlights along the path hugging the stone wall were burned out—as they said they’d be—but with the full moon and the lit up cathedral looming over the garden, I had no trouble navigating along the path and through the stone arch to the wooden bench under the tallest pine.
I brushed off the thin layer of snow and dead pine needles and took a seat. A sudden movement behind me caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention. I looked around: nothing. Had I been followed? I looked up: Two yellow lanterns hung high in the towering pine. An owl steadied herself on a branch that seemed much too small to hold her. She swiveled her head, surveying the garden for an unlucky mouse or chipmunk. She was a regal bird, there on her throne, poised to pass judgment and carry out the sentence herself. She paid me, a commoner, no mind as she patiently waited for her dinner to appear. To operate fully under instinct was a gift given to the animals; how much simpler life would be if humans did the same. The branch creaked as the owl shifted her weight. With a flap of her wings, she coasted up and over the garden’s wall. It wasn’t until she was gone that I noticed I’d been holding my breath.
I pushed my red glove back and looked at my watch: seven fifty-six. Chaucer was due in four minutes. If he was late, I was to leave immediately and take the number ten bus to Dupont Circle. If he was on time, I was to take a small package from him, two rolls of microfilm containing Doctor Zhivago in its native Russian, then board the number twenty bus and deliver the film to a safe house on Albemarle Street.
It started snowing, and I watched the flakes dance in the spotlights pointing at the cathedral. My thighs began to itch, as they did whenever I was cold, and I tightened the belt of the long camel-hair coat Sally had insisted on buying me when she noticed the cigarette burn on my old winter jacket—a small gift from a man who’d bumped into me on the bus. I took off my red leather gloves and blew hot air into my balled-up fists. When I released my fingers, my engagement ring slipped off and clinked to the cobblestones. It was two sizes too big, and I hadn’t gotten around to having it properly fitted. But my, it was beautiful. Teddy’s grandmother had given it to him when he was a boy, telling him that someday the woman he’d love for the rest of his life would wear it. He remembered telling her he’d never marry—he’d be far too busy fighting Nazis, like Captain America. His grandmother patted him on his head. “Just you wait,” she’d told him.
Teddy recounted this story before he got down on one knee at his parents’ house the day after my twenty-fifth birthday, just before the strawberry shortcake was served. Instead of looking at Teddy, I looked at my mother, who beamed with a look of pride I’d never before seen in her. Then I looked at his parents across the table, smiling as if their baby boy had taken his first steps. Then I looked back at Teddy and nodded.
It was a beautiful ring, but I hated wearing it. Wearing it felt like a cover.
I knew that what I really wanted was impossible. But I wanted it anyway. I wanted the excitement, the home, the adventure, the expected, the unexpected. I wanted every contradiction, every opposite. And I wanted it all at once. I couldn’t wait for my reality to catch up to my desires. And that need was my constant companion, the underlying current of nerves that caused me to overanalyze every interaction and question every decision—the source of the never-ending conversation in my head that kept me up nights while Mama snored softly on the other side of the thin wall separating our bedrooms.
I knew what people called it: an abomination, a perversion, a deviance, an immorality, a depravity, a sin. But I didn’t know what to call it—what to call us.
Sally had shown me a world that existed behind closed doors, but it still didn’t feel like my world, my reality. All I knew was that I hadn’t seen Sally since the night I spent at her apartment two weeks and three days earlier, and that in those two weeks and three days, I hadn’t spent one waking hour not thinking of her.
I picked up the ring and put it back on as the cathedral bells rang out eight times. After the final bell, Chaucer appeared, as planned. There had been no sound—not of the gate opening, nor of footsteps. He arrived silent as snow, wearing a long black coat and a plaid hat with flaps that covered his ears. With his funny hat and curious expression, he reminded me of a basset hound. “Hello, Eliot,” he said.
“Hello, Chaucer.”
“Lovely night for a stroll.” His accent dripped with the articulations of a high-class Londoner.
“Indeed.”
He remained standing, and a beat of silence passed between us. He made no move to hand me the package, but turned and looked up at the cathedral. “Impressive structure. You Americans do love m
aking new buildings look old.”
“I suppose so.”
“Take bits and pieces from the Old Country, cobble them together, and put the old American stamp on it, isn’t that right?”
I wasn’t about to debate him, nor did I understand why he seemed to want to debate me. Maybe this was what the men did when they met like this, but I had no time for the volley of clever banter. There was a job to be done.
He looked hurt at my nonresponse and reached into his coat, handing me a small package wrapped in newspaper.
I placed the package in my Chanel purse.
“Let’s do this again sometime.” He tipped his hat and remained standing there as I left.
The thrill never dampened—like the moment when a roller coaster crests at the top of the hill and pauses just before it lets gravity pull it down. I walked to the corner of Wisconsin and Massachusetts. But instead of boarding the number twenty bus as I was supposed to, I walked the twenty minutes to the large Tudor house at 3812 Albemarle. If I couldn’t have everything my heart desired, at least I had that moment, that feeling—and I wanted to savor it as long as possible.
* * *
—
After slipping the package into the safe house mail slot, I continued down the hill to Connecticut Avenue, where I caught a bus to Chinatown.
A wall of warm air and the smell of fried rice greeted me when I walked into Joy Luck Noodle. The host pointed to a back table, where Sally was pouring herself a cup of steaming tea from the small iron kettle kept warm by a flickering tea light. She hadn’t noticed me enter, and when we made eye contact, I felt that familiar inner gasp.
Two weeks and three days since I’d seen her—since the day I told her Teddy and I were engaged, since the night we made love. That night I’d felt I’d been changed from the inside out—into the kind of person who is confident in her every action, someone who doesn’t question her every thought, every move. But seeing her sitting there made me want to retreat to the bathroom and steady my nerves. When Sally gave me that smile of hers as I took off my coat and hung it over the back of my chair, for a moment I relaxed.
She looked beautiful as always, except for the caked makeup she’d attempted to cover the bags under her eyes with. She wore a brocaded green silk turban, but the strands of her red bangs peeking through appeared stringy and unwashed. As she reached for her teacup, I noticed her shaking hands.
“Tired? Hungry?” she asked in our own coded language.
“Hungry,” I said. “And I need a drink.”
We never talked specifics of our missions, but tired meant things hadn’t gone well, hungry meant things had, and need a drink meant exactly that.
She signaled for the waiter to bring us two mai tais. “I went ahead and ordered us the cashew chicken and pineapple fried rice.”
“Perfect.” I took off my gloves and set them on the table. Sally’s eyes drifted to my left hand for a moment before looking away. She let the silence linger—an old trick she must’ve forgotten she’d told me about, something she picked up during the war to get people to start talking. People will do anything to fill an uncomfortable silence, she’d said. I sipped from my mai tai and remembered Sally had prefaced her invitation to a late dinner by saying we needed to talk. I’d thought nothing of it then, but now it was all I could think about. “You wanted to tell me something?” I fished out the blue paper umbrella from my drink and popped the cherry on the tiny sword into my mouth.
“Nothing big.” She sipped her drink through the blue straw, careful not to disturb her lipstick. “Just wanted to find out how your New Year’s Eve was.”
“Two turns down the bunny slope and I was done. Spent most of the night in the lodge sipping hot cocoa by myself.”
“I imagine Teddy’s a fine skier. The naturally athletic type.” She rarely mentioned Teddy, and certainly never complimented him.
“I suppose so.”
“Well, my New Year’s Eve was as lovely as ever,” she said after another long sip. “Went to a party. Danced all night. Drank a little too much, you know how it goes.”
She was punishing me. “Sounds like a gas.”
The waiter came with our chicken, and again I was thankful for a chance not to talk. Sally wielded her chopsticks like a pro. I reached for a fork and stabbed a piece of pineapple.
After the waiter took away our plates, Sally took a deep breath and said in rapid succession that we could no longer see each other, that she was thankful for the time we’d had together and for our friendship but it would be better for both of us if we went our separate ways, that she was about to be too busy with work and wouldn’t have much time for socializing anyway.
Her words felt like kicks to the stomach, again and again, and I could hardly breathe by the time she was finished. The word “friendship” stung the most. “Of course,” she concluded, “we’ll remain on professional terms at work.” It seemed she wanted to say more, but didn’t.
“Professional,” I repeated.
“Glad you agree.” Her indifference was cruel. I wanted to tell her I didn’t agree. No, I wanted to scream it. The thought of no longer spending time with her, of having to treat her professionally, of having to pretend there was never anything between us, made me sick. I wanted to tell her I’d rather walk barefoot across barbed wire than make polite chitchat with her in the elevator. And I wanted to ask her how she could—how it was so easy for her to turn off the switch.
But I didn’t say anything. And it wasn’t until after I stood up, after my knees hit the underside of the table, spilling the pink mai tai on the tablecloth, after I turned to leave, after I heard her tell the waiter I wasn’t feeling well, after I stormed out, after my walk broke out into a run—it wasn’t until after all that that I realized my silence was also an answer.
CHAPTER 17
THE TYPISTS
We’d speculated about Irina since she’d arrived at the Agency. And our suspicions were confirmed shortly after Sputnik took to the skies and Gail saw her name on a memo pertaining to the Zhivago mission. She never spoke of the work she did after hours, and we never asked. Like a good Carrier, Irina said nothing of the secrets she carried. But still, it wasn’t long before we found out the rest.
What made Irina stand out in the typing pool was precisely that Irina didn’t stand out in the typing pool. Despite the winning lottery of ingredients comprising her physical appearance, she had the ability to go unnoticed. Even a year after her joining the Agency, she still managed to fly under our radar. We’d be reapplying lipstick in the ladies’ room when she’d startle us from behind, saying that that shade of pink was a nice color for spring. Or we’d be toasting during happy hour at Martin’s and she’d clink our glasses a beat after we thought we’d clinked with everyone. At lunch in the cafeteria, she’d get up to say she had to return to work when no one remembered her having sat down with us in the first place.
Her talent for going unnoticed did not go unnoticed; and with her father having died at the hands of the Red Monster, she had the makings of a perfect asset. After some training, a memo went through the chain of command and Irina was put into the field. And she was good at her job. Irina’s first missions consisted of delivering internal messages around town, but as she proved herself, her assignments carried increased importance. That cold January night in the Bishop’s Garden was her first with the Zhivago mission.
After leaving HQ that evening, she took the number fifteen bus to the corner of Massachusetts and Wisconsin, walked around St. Albans School to the cathedral grounds’ back entrance, and slipped into the garden through the iron side gate.
Irina was likely wearing her new long camel-hair coat with the brown collar and the red leather gloves Teddy had given her. The day after she received the gloves, Irina had shown them to us. “Aren’t they pretty?” she asked, fanning her fingers as we stood in line to have our hats, coa
ts, and pocketbooks inspected on our way into HQ. “A little small, but they’ll break in.” We all agreed that they were very chic and that Teddy had excellent taste. All except for Sally Forrester, who took one look and said they were knockoffs.
Under the red gloves would have been Irina’s new diamond ring, which Teddy had given her the day after her twenty-fifth birthday. It was a tasteful Art Deco number with a diamond whose size surprised us. We knew Teddy came from a wealthy family, but we had no idea they were that wealthy. The stunner was too large for her ring finger, and she’d yet to get it resized. During work hours, she put it inside her desk drawer so it didn’t fall off when she was typing, sometimes even forgetting to put it back on again at the end of the day. If it had been one of us, we would’ve had it resized the day we got it. But Irina wasn’t the flaunting type.
A wedding in the typing pool always warranted much discussion, but Irina hadn’t seemed interested in discussing hers.
“Will you come back to work?” Gail asked.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“What are your thoughts on taffeta?” Kathy asked.
“Pro, I guess?”
We learned that Irina’s mother was planning the big day, using it to purge the last vestiges of her Russianness by throwing the most American of weddings. “She wants to have red, white, and blue carnation centerpieces,” Irina told us. “She’s planning to spray-paint the blue ones herself.”
To celebrate the engagement, we each pitched in a dollar to purchase a black lace negligée from Hecht’s. We wrapped it in silver tissue paper and placed it on her desk before she arrived. When she sat down, she picked up the package and looked around the room as we pretended to work. She tore a small corner of the tissue paper and a silk strap spilled out. Irina tried to push it back inside but only tore the paper more. She started to cry. We froze, not knowing what to do. One of a typist’s golden rules is never to let them see you cry. Of course, we’d all done it—but from the relative privacy of the ladies’ room, or in the stairwell at least. At our desks? Never.
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