Past perfect, p.14
Past Perfect, page 14
The morning after I saw Huff I decided I had to tolerate one day of home confinement. Having determined that I wasn’t going to get involved with a crazy person who lived in the mountains named Jacques, it was time to face the unpleasant fact that because I’d been playing the Find Lisa game, I hadn’t done my job: produce a reasonably clean first outline of the season’s last episode to show to Oliver. Now I had only one day in which to do it. Deciding what to write about was a no-brainer because, short of having the Spy Guys mutilate their genitals or mock God, I could let them do anything. But I couldn’t afford a single distraction.
In the fifth year of writing the show, I found I was running out of new villains and whimsical plot twists that held my interest. No matter what crazy concepts I brought forth —like a demented entomologist in Azerbaijan raising toxic carpenter ants to attack campers at Acadia National Park—no one stopped me. True, no one said, “Great!” but no one ever had. Viewers weren’t writing to the president of Quality TV complaining of the diminished quality of the scripts either. What was worse, I knew if I told Oliver that I wanted to leave, to develop another show, he’d either offer me a close-to-irresistible raise or the coproducer credit I’d been pining for since I signed for the job.
Sure, by this time I’d made enough money that I could take a walk for a while and smell the roses people were always talking about. Except where would I go after that? I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to write except spy stories. But a dark espionage drama, one that alternated anomie and angst with the occasional set of teeth being punched out, the kind of show that HBO would go for, wasn’t my style. And I wasn’t good enough at plotting to come up with a spy thriller like 24 or The Bourne Identity. And forget ripping-out-eyeball spy fiction: describing torture would be too disgusting for words. As for espionage erotica, I sensed I could write a graphic sex scene with words like throbbing, but Nicky would inevitably read it, or some mean critic would write that it lacked vérité or verisimilitude or one of those words in my sister’s everyday vocabulary. I took my laptop into the den, sat in Adam’s recliner, and began an outline about terrorists trying to form a cell in the United States by having their people masquerade as Hasidic tourists from Poland. No doubt it would bring in the usual letters, invariably in boring Times New Roman font, that would begin, “I am disgusted that you would be so insensitive ...” I finished the outline in three hours or so, interrupted by some bathroom breaks, making two cups of green tea, neither of which I drank, and downloading the audio of a spy novel, Prince of Fire, onto my iPod. That’s when I decided to call Jacques Harlow. I dialed.
I heard a click on the phone. A definite click. Then a close-to-subliminal hum, followed by a basso buzz. As I waited for his phone to ring I pictured the signal going through a series of silicone chips and cyber switches up to a Cingular satellite a thousand miles below the moon, then bouncing back to Earth only to be captured by the NSA, where cryptographers would ... Would what? I chewed off most of my lip gloss. A long cleeeek. I took a deep breath. Cut it out, I ordered myself. Is this the first time in your long life on the phone that you’ve heard a click? Half the time I was talking to a friend, one of us would hear a noise on the line. We’d mutter: “Did you hear that? What was it?” But what could it be? Some minor digital disturbance? Or a unit of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency whose sole purpose was to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens who were nattering on about why they hated sharing a bathroom with their husbands?
I heard another click. For all I knew, Jacques Harlow could live in some backwater where they hadn’t yet changed from rotary dial to touch-tone. Or maybe he had a thunderstorm over his house. As his phone began to ring, I realized I hadn’t rehearsed what I was going to say to him. But if I hung up now, he could have a record of my calling. Who cared? Hang up now! I clutched the phone with both hands. If my right hand fumbled, my left could come to its aid, slamming down the receiver before the two syllables of his hello emerged.
“Hello,” a man’s voice said.
“May I speak with Jacques Harlow, please?”
“This is Harlow.”
I wasn’t bad at reading voices, or maybe I was just good at reading things into voices. But I couldn’t get much from his. Maybe calling himself Harlow was his protest against the informal generation for whom “Hi! I’m your server, Scott” was the measure of distance between strangers. It could have been some snappy holdover from his military days.
“Mr. Harlow, my name is Katherine Schottland. I’m the writer of a TV show about two spies who work for the CIA.” I was hoping for an uh-huh or some acknowledgment that at least he was still on the line. I didn’t get any, so of course I immediately pictured him rolling his eyes at the imminent idiocy of what I was about to ask of him. How could I describe Spy Guys? Not with a word like lighthearted, which he might interpret as frivolous. I decided on: “It’s a good-natured show. Not a Three Days of the Condor take on the Agency.” I had to assume someone who’d been in Defense Intelligence had at least heard of that movie, one of the first—and best—about an evil conspiracy within the CIA. “I was speaking with Harry Van Damme ... Huff...” I took a deep breath and went on. “I mentioned I needed to speak with someone who has a sense of what was happening in the Agency in 1989, when the Wall — ”
“I know something about that.” He said it matter-of-factly. So far, he didn’t sound mentally unhinged.
“I have some questions I’d like to ask you. I realize this may not be a good time. I’ll be glad to call back at your convenience. Really, whenever — ”
He didn’t let me finish. “We’ll talk about that when you get here.”
“Oh.” I brought the recliner up to sitting position. “I actually didn’t factor in the time to come and see you, Mr. Harlow. I was hoping we could do it on the phone.”
“Don’t think so. Do you have a fax line?” I gave him the number. “I’ll fax you directions for getting here. I’m about three-quarters of an hour from the airport in Asheville.”
“That’s in North Carolina?”
“Yes.” It was a cautious yes, but at least he didn’t ask me if I thought I could follow directions.
“I’ll have to check my calendar and get back to you,” I told him. “We have a pretty tight shooting schedule right now. I honestly don’t know if I have time — ”
“I’ll fax directions. If you show up, I’ll know you were able to make time.”
Chapter Sixteen
MY SISTER AND I didn’t get together because we relished each other’s company. Both of us, I think (because naturally we never talked about it), wanted to be able to tell our parents, Oh, I saw Maddy/Katie the other day, to reassure them that despite the psychological axiom of sibling rivalry and our vastly different takes on life, they had done a terrific job bringing the two of us up. See? We voluntarily spent time with each other!
Why both of us felt that we needed to buck up these two adults who seemed more richly endowed in the ego department than we were was an interesting question. I probably figured that if I pondered that question too much, I’d decide my parents could live with reality and I’d wind up telling my sister to fuck off permanently. I assumed Maddy never answered the question either, not even with her higher IQ, not with the help of any of the eight thousand psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers to whom she’d gone since I’d been born. She called me to get together as often as I called her. We were due, I decided.
So, after I hung up with Jacques Harlow, I wrote a first draft of the script in a couple of hours. Then I wrote a long letter to Nicky. That calmed me: my son was the antidote to all that could be odd or dangerous. I ate a yogurt and a plum for lunch. Finally, I couldn’t avoid my sister. “I’m working at home today and finished early. How about I come downtown to you?” I asked. “We could take a walk or something.” She ruled out a walk —the angle of the late afternoon sun made her head pound —but yes, of course, come over. She wasn’t writing. She was blocked, though she had promised to read some new work at Bread Loaf in August. But now she would have nothing.
Her last comment underscored one of the many differences between us. “I’ll have nothing,” she repeated when I got to her loft. Three words, poetic parsimony. I, on the other hand, would have emoted: I have nothing. Nothing at all! Nada. Rien du tout. Gornischt — and that would have been just the preamble to my description of writer’s block. If I got it. Which I didn’t. Poets got existential despair. TV writers got a dental plan.
As for her emotional life, since she and Dix had been divorced she’d had a series of men. Maddy hated the word relationship so she referred to whatever she had going with them as liaisons. Liaisons sounds French, sophisticated, hookups with married men in nipped-waist suits who carry sex toys in Vuitton attaché cases. But her guys were mostly heterosexual variations on Dix: intelligent, better-looking than average, tending toward tight-crotched pants and trendy eyeglasses. What all the ones I’d met lacked, that Dix had, was humor.
Not only did these guys not do a thing for me, I couldn’t see how they did anything for Maddy. She and Dix had had great repartee, and while he couldn’t zap her congenital inertia and hypochondria, he’d lifted her spirits more than any of the antidepressants she’d taken. The good news about her post-Dix men was she never married any of them. The bad news, or sad news, was that afj age forty-three, she lived alone. Not even a cat. If she derived some delight or contentment from having no entangling alliances, like glorying in the freedom to turn on all the lights in her apartment at three in the morning and blast recordings of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry with no one to yell, What the fuck are you doing at this hour? it would have been fine. But pleasure was the one word not in my sister’s vast vocabulary.
“You’ve never gotten blocked?” Maddy asked.
“Well ...” I began.
“You haven’t, have you?”
“Could I please finish?”
“Go ahead.” My sister sighed. If I’d been feeling as lousy as she probably was, I would have slumped into a huge, comforting chair. Instead, I was in the chair with the big rolled arms while she sat in a straight-backed chair that looked as though she’d grabbed it from some flamboyant person’s dining room. Her own living room was beige or white, 1990s good taste with lots of linen fabric. Most of her furniture looked as if it needed ironing. But the chair she was in was lacquered dark red, Chinese style, I guess, with a yellow silk seat. She moved her back around, then shifted her weight from one cheek of her butt to the other.
“Maybe I’ve never been truly blocked,” I said. “But there are days when I call in and say I’m working at home. Then I drive to some outlet and buy stuff I don’t need: plaid umbrellas one time, four of them. Or I go to the bookstore when it opens and buy a load of books and come home to read. I can’t write those days. I don’t even try.”
“But that’s never happened to you for months at a time,” Maddy replied. The sentence may have started as a sigh, but there was so much feeling behind it that it sounded like a whimper from a baby.
“No. But most of the time I’ve been writing, there’s been a deadline hanging over my head. Back at the CIA, when I was doing reports: there was nothing creative there. I put a lot of people’s work into an order and ... did some clarifying. Many of them were academics and I had to make their language more accessible. And now, in TV, I’m always under the gun. The only time I didn’t have a deadline was when I was writing the novel.”
“Did you get blocked then?” Maddy asked.
“No. I was so desperate for employment—in the sense of being used for something. I was afraid that if I slacked off ...” She was crossing her legs, right over left, left over right, then back again. “Why are you” —I imitated her leg switches —“like that? Do you want to change chairs with me?”
“No.” She flipped her hand toward the rest of the living room. “I have lots of chairs.”
“You look uncomfortable,” I said.
I thought she was going to say something like Life is uncomfortable, but she said, “I’m not.”
“Fine.”
There was a moment of silence that grew more awkward because each of us was waiting for the other to break it. We were both nervous about talking at the same moment, then simultaneously saying, Oh, excuse me, then realizing neither of us had anything to say. I got out the first word only because I’d always had the faster reflexes. All Maddy managed was a sound like the i in if, and then she stopped because I had won.
“Do you think there might be a positive aspect to being blocked?” I asked. “Look, I always say that my subconscious is my best collaborator. When we map out a new season, I sit down beforehand and make an outline of what I want to present. After months of not working or even thinking about work, I’m amazed at what comes out. I mean, it all didn’t crystallize in that split second. Some part of my mind had been sitting in front of its own little computer and plotting out what ought to happen in the upcoming episodes.”
“Writing poetry is different.” It sure was. Maddy’s most well-known poem was “Soft Fruit,” about starting to eat a peach and having her teeth bite into a small, rotten spot and before she can pull back, there’s putrefied peach all over her tongue —though she wouldn’t use such an obvious alliteration as putrefied peach. But most of her other poems had the same idea: finding something terrible in the middle of a pleasant experience.
“Why is poetry different? Because there’s not necessarily a storv involved?”
“It’s not just a question of narrative,” Maddy said. Trust my sister to say “narrative” after I’ve said “story.”
“What’s it a question of, then?”
“I don’t know.” My coloring was more red and Maddy’s more yellow, yet if we stood side by side, there wouldn’t be a great difference between us. Normally. But now I noticed she had gone from slightly sallow to waxy. That happened when she was really low. Though I didn’t think she’d gained weight, she was looking more blockish. Like my father, except while his cubelike physique came from sturdy forebears and playing tennis, hers suggested a loss of muscle tone. What curves there were to her body had become squared off by flesh.
“Is your mind a total blank when you try to write?” I asked.
“It’s blank and in turmoil at the same time. I can’t explain it. I get up every morning thinking, This is it. Today I’ll take my notebook and put a new ink cartridge into my pen and I’ll begin with the first word that comes to mind. At the end of the day, it’s just the end of the day. The sun sets. Nothing’s happened.”
“You’re depressed?”
“Katie, when have I not been?”
Before I was born, when there was only you. Naturally I didn’t say that. “I know. But maybe this time is a little worse.”
“No. I’m actually in a good mood —for me. It would probably be your major depressive disorder. For me I’m all right.” I must have looked dubious because she added, “I am. And for God’s sake don’t go running to Mom and Dad.”
“I’m not—”
“I’m okay. I’ve gone through the usual dry spells before and I’ll go through them again.”
“Maddy, are you feeling suicidal?”
“No! Can’t I talk to you? Can’t I say I feel down because I’m not writing without you thinking—”
“Swear you won’t pull a Sylvia Plath?” I’d always been so sure she wouldn’t. But what if I was wrong?
“I swear,” she said in a louder voice than she’d used since I’d got there. “I swear! Don’t give me your skeptical face. I told you I won’t do anything and I won’t. I’ve been a lot worse than this.”
“How about calling me every morning just to let me know—”
“‘Good morning, sis! No carbon monoxide for me today!’”
“Something like that,” I said. Great, Laughing Girl seven days a week as my first call in the morning. “It couldn’t kill you to make a thirty-second call every day.”
“Stop it!” Maddy snapped. “If I do start feeling ... not right, I swear to God I’ll call you.”
“You’re an atheist.”
“I swear I’ll call you. Now shut up about me. What’s new with you?”
Of course I wasn’t going to tell her. Yet somewhere in every younger sister’s head is the notion that it is the older sister’s duty, if not natural inclination, to take care of her. So what came out was, “Well, actually, a lot is new.”
For an instant, Maddy stopped wriggling. “Tell me.”
“It’s a lot of narrative,” I said.
“I can take it.”
So I told her what had been happening since Lisa’s call, except I left out dinner with Dix, less out of protectiveness than selfishness, because I wanted her to concentrate on me. She only clapped her hand over her mouth once, when I told her how I faked my way into Dick Schroeder’s house. “Are you crazy? What if they’d had a guard dog?”
“I thought of that, but I was more worried about getting shot.”
“By him?”
“It’s too embarrassing. Okay, I’ll say it. I kind of pictured an Agency security detail pulling out Berettas and drilling me.”
“That makes no sense,” Maddy said. “Why would the CIA give him a security detail from 1990 until now?”
“It makes as much sense as slavering Dobermans ripping off my flesh.”
“Why are you doing this, Katie? What can you hope to get?”
“Justice.”
“Justice?” The sound she made would be noted in scripts as “[HUMORLESS LAUGH].” Then she added, “From the Central Intelligence Agency?” I could have written that response before she gave it. Maddy was so damn predictable.
But I chose not to make a cutting remark in case she decided to do a Sylvia Plath and needed one final hurt. Anyway, at that moment, my lunch of yogurt and plum stopped working. I was hungry. My sister, however, made a point not to be, as she put it, fetishistic with regard to food the way my father was. He wasn’t, though admittedly he did whip up plates of sandwiches for the random plumber or the Time Warner cable-repair guy who passed through the apartment. He had to feed people. To me that was a lot better than not offering your own sister even a cup of tea.
