An Imperfect Spy Read online

  “But you feel compelled to fan them,” Reed said. It wasn’t quite a question.

  “Oh, who the hell knows?” Kate had peevishly responded, and she felt equally peevish now, recalling the conversation. She had not kept up with any of her classmates from the Theban; time and the pressures of life had taken care of that. What she lacked, unlike those who haunted reunions and exchanged Christmas newsletters, was much curiosity about what had become of her classmates, or how they now looked; certainly she had no wish to learn how many children (grandchildren? Surely not!) they all had. Like all those who had neither borne nor adopted children, Kate found the constant emphasis on progeny tedious and irritating, the more so in that one was not expected to confess such unwomanly indifference.

  As the bus entered the transverse Kate tried to divert her thoughts with contemplation of Central Park. Like the Theban, Central Park offered nostalgia, had Kate been inclined that way, which she was not. Some English writer had commented that nostalgia was a “disabling pressure which signifies retreat,” and Kate concurred with that wisdom. The park had changed: well, why not? All life changes, but only fools think it has reached its ideal at the exact point where they entered. She stared at the stone walls of the transverse, blackened with soot, at the litter, at the stalled car pulled ineffectually to the side, for the road, serving two-way traffic, consisted of only two lanes with little shoulder room. Above the blackened walls, she could see the Fifty-ninth Street skyline, and the sun glinting off the buildings. Then she was upon the children’s zoo. She had never taken a child there, but she had from time to time visited the Central Park Zoo to browse among the seals and the polar bears, and the king penguins, whose parenting habits were described on the signs with frank amazement: the male alone looked after the hatching egg. And then there were the snow monkeys, who had had, one cold winter, to be removed to warmer quarters: they were, it seemed, less suited to American than Japanese urban cold.

  Central Park has hills I used to sled on, Kate thought, surrendering to memory and its inevitable resentments, hills now flattened for endless expansion of the Metropolitan Museum, providing them with more galleries than they can guard, therefore more than they can open. And where in Central Park was the Shakespeare garden? Farther uptown, she seemed to remember. She had not visited it since being conducted through it as a child. It was said that every plant mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays grew there. Kate, who could scarcely tell a narcissus from a hyacinth, a primrose from a pansy, and had not the faintest idea what chamomile looked like, though she remembered well enough Falstaff’s words about it—oh, the hell with Central Park, though in fact Kate loved it still. She did, however, remind herself that Central Park contained only two statues of famous women: Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland. She supposed one would have to include the new mammoth bear at the playground on East Seventy-ninth Street, female, one supposed, since it sported on each side a cub. Male bears, one understood, went their solitary unencumbered way. And then the bus had come to the end of its route, and the driver opened the doors with a finality that demanded the immediate departure of all within. Kate began the familiar trudge along the avenue to the Theban.

  “I must begin,” Kate said into the microphone, facing the parents, some alumnae of the faithful sort and, she noted with dismay, what appeared to be the greater part of the upper-school faculty, “by frankly stating that although I shall try fairly to present the arguments on both sides of today’s academic debates, I am myself on one side, and do not believe that someone on the other side would speak to you as fairly as I shall try to do, or would deny his or her conviction that that side alone spoke for the good and the true. I hope this makes my impartiality clear.”

  That said, Kate proceeded with her speech. It was not long, and was greeted with more than polite applause and enthusiasm. Many came to speak to her afterward, including members of the faculty, all in Kate’s saturnine view astonishingly young. Kate refused the punch offered at the reception following and, when asked if she would like anything else, requested a glass of soda water. Kate was handed this by the headmistress, and was only at the last minute able to prevent herself from exclaiming as she tasted it. For the drink was vodka and tonic, complete with a slice of lime, visually quite indistinguishable from plain soda water. Kate discreetly smiled her gratitude, and bent herself to the mannerly parent waiting to talk to her.

  It was only when the event appeared to be drawing to a close, and those at the reception were dispersing, that Kate was confronted by a woman older than most of the audience. She had that air, common to a small percent of Theban graduates, of having since the age of ten thought fashion and beauty aids too boring for words and of having found no reason, in the intervening years, to change her mind. Only the woman’s speech betrayed her highly educated status.

  Kate and the woman withdrew into an uninhabited corner, and Kate prepared herself for the usual memories of an earlier and, by definition, better time, an agreement that often oddly accompanied praise for Kate’s remarks, as though the listener had altogether failed to take in their hardly conservative import. But this woman, it became immediately clear, agreed with what Kate had said because she had heard it.

  “Might we talk somewhere away from the madding crowd?” the woman said. Oh, God, Kate thought, but fortified with her vodka, she felt generous enough to spare a little time. “Let’s try to find a spare classroom,” she said.

  They mounted the stairs and Kate walked purposefully into the first classroom they came to; it was designed for younger children. Never inclined to perch on tiny chairs, Kate sat on a desk, put her drink and bag down beside her, and tried to look simultaneously interested and without much time to spare.

  “Just to prove to you how attentive I am,” the woman said, “I observe that what you are drinking is probably vodka, or maybe gin, and tonic. Could you spare a sip?”

  Grinning, Kate handed over her drink. The woman tasted it, smacked her lips in a comical and approving manner, grinned back, and returned the glass.

  “Your secret is safe with me,” she said. “And,” she added, looking around, “I can certainly understand the need for alcoholic resuscitation in this place.”

  “Did you go to the Theban?” Kate asked.

  “Alas, no. Fine education, no doubt, but a little too ladylike for my tastes, or so I guess.”

  Kate glanced around at the room, at the childish drawings and the admonitions on the blackboard, and found both deeply uninteresting. Probably she should have settled for the corner downstairs; still, one could always claim discomfort and depart.

  “If you didn’t go to the Theban,” Kate remarked, “may I ask what you were doing here? You have a daughter or granddaughter who attended the school?”

  “Alas, not even that excuse. I am quite without child dependents, quite fancy-free, another definition of widowhood and advancing age. I came for the express purpose of meeting you.”

  “And what purpose had you in meeting me?” Kate asked, putting down her now empty glass.

  “Shall I get you another?” the older woman asked. “I could manage, you know, no doubt about that.”

  “No, thank you. Your purpose?”

  “We are about to be colleagues, in a manner of speaking.”

  Kate hoped she did not look as astonished as she felt. Her department’s hiring a woman of that age and, well, nonconformity and frankness, hardly seemed possible.

  The woman seemed to read her mind. “Not at your exalted institution,” she said. “At the Schuyler Law School. You are teaching there next semester, are you not?”

  Kate stared. “I’ve only just decided,” she said. “Not two days ago. I haven’t even yet met the man I’m teaching with. How did you know?”

  “Because I’m head of the secretarial room at the Schuyler and I know everything. Your husband’s running a clinic. Damn good idea. Schuyler’s never had a real clinic before, only simulated ones. Not without their uses, but they don’t really help people,
do they? Well, I thought I’d say hello, greetings, and good luck at putting some life into that antediluvian institution.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said faintly, no other response occurring to her.

  “I’ve learned a certain amount about you,” the woman said, stretching her legs before her as she perched comfortably on a tiny chair. “You’re less a lady than your mother, or her mother, and so on back through the generations. I’ve no doubt of that. You haven’t got children, you don’t indulge in social rituals, and you take personal and professional risks. But the risks are all within the confines of the acceptable. Just outside those confines are a lot of folks who don’t play by any rules you would recognize, let alone condone. You have a job with tenure; there’s no way they can take it away from you, however much they would like to. Sure, they can make your life unpleasant, I suppose, but financially you’re safe, and if my investigation is even approximate, you’d be safe financially if the whole university went up in smoke. Don’t get me wrong. You use your money in the best possible ways, you fight for the right things. You didn’t take your husband’s name. You try to help the innocent and those in trouble. But you have, I suspect, never dealt for any length of time either with the dispossessed or the desperately frightened. Not that you’re worse than anyone else from the same background. In fact, you’re much better, which is why I seek your acquaintance.”

  Kate looked at the woman as though she feared her drink had contained not vodka but some hallucinogenic drug that the woman had been willing to share because she had developed a tolerance for it. Pull yourself together, Kate, she admonished herself. Her back was already signaling less than absolute delight with its position on the child-sized desk, and if she wasn’t drugged, she was certainly cornered by a fanatic.

  “I hope I haven’t offended you. I do admire you; I hope that’s clear.”

  “You haven’t offended me,” Kate said, “though I can’t guess”—she was suddenly overcome with irritation and pushed herself from the desk onto her feet—“why we’re having this conversation, even if you do work in the secretarial room of the Schuyler Law School. I’m sure you’re right about me, though I can’t imagine how you found all that out, let alone why you wanted to. As to my life, I console myself with the thought that we must all work where we are, do what we can. I don’t cross over the edge, but I stay as close to it as I can without falling apart and doing no good whatever. Perhaps,” she added, “that’s all just self-justification.” But why do I keep answering her? Kate wondered.

  “Thank you for that,” the woman said. “I’ve crossed over the edge, and nothing learned at the Theban or afterward would have enabled anyone to do that. If you understand that, you understand a good deal.”

  “I understand nothing,” Kate said. “I’ve finished my drink, and these damn desks are in no way appropriate to the mature physique.” She rubbed her back. “Might we get to the point of how I can help you?”

  “I don’t need your help,” the woman said. “I just thought we might meet. I wanted to get a line on you, if truth be told. Well, bye-bye.”

  And with a comically girlish wave, she walked out of the room, leaving Kate staring after her in wonder.

  “I don’t get it,” was Reed’s comment after Kate had arrived home demanding that he listen to her day’s adventures rather more urgently than usual. He hardly commented on her lecture at the Theban, on which she had not, in any case, lingered, but had followed with rather more attention her conversation with the nameless woman. “I can’t imagine what she wanted from you, or why you even listened to her,” he said, somewhat testily, and they went on to talk of other things.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Reed said later that night when he was undressing. He paused with his hands on his belt. “Nobody ever wanders into my office or my lectures the way they do with you, demanding acquaintance and conversation in the most amazing circumstances.”

  “That’s because I, unlike you, am an amateur detective with a reputation to be envied,” Kate answered. They were both feeling much better.

  On the following Sunday morning, Reed was cooking bacon in a frying pan when Kate joined him. She stood in the kitchen doorway regarding him: tall, frowning, his glasses fogging slightly as he concentrated on turning the pieces of bacon and separating them in the pan. She found him, at that moment, utterly endearing. She chuckled.

  “I know, I know,” he said, smiling. “I ought to do them in the broiler, but there are some ways in which I prefer to stick to the simpler, more primitive methods.”

  Kate perched on a high stool they kept in the kitchen for just such moments. It was a large kitchen, and she had often thought of furnishing it with an easy chair, but somehow had never got around to it.

  “It’s not the way you cook bacon, of which I highly approve,” she said. “I was thinking about descriptions of rooms in books I’ve read, current novels. No one can enter a room anymore, even to murder or interrogate the occupant, without first describing every detail. I think it’s a new form of literary madness. Imagine me in a novel entering this room to find you cooking bacon.”

  “Okay,” Reed said. “Do you want just bacon and toast, by the way, or bacon and eggs? How uncommitted to a health regimen are you feeling?”

  “Utterly uncommitted,” Kate said.

  “Good. Go on with your description.”

  Kate wriggled herself more firmly onto the stool and sipped the Bloody Mary he had made for each of them. Their Sunday brunch libation, they called it. “Here goes,” she said. “First of all, I would describe you. ‘She saw a distinguished face, with warm brown eyes gazing behind his glasses from a height which suggested he did not have to strain to see and understand it all’—that sort of thing. ‘Strong brows, an air of sexuality’—you know. Having described you, I go on to the kitchen. ‘A room of generous dimensions, perhaps twenty feet square, obviously the scene of many intimate conversations and meals.’ ”

  “If you’re describing this kitchen,” Reed said, “you’re bonkers. It’s nowhere near twenty feet square—closer to fifteen, and not square by a long shot. I shall overlook,” he added, turning bacon strips, “my strong brows and sexual exudations.”

  “Is there such a word as exudations? I’ve scarcely begun. Remember, there is a plot here, for which we are supposedly reading. ‘The north side of the room was the utility side, equipped with a superior range, a board on which hung many gleaming copper pots, a large sink with a drain board—’ ”

  “Kate,” Reed said, “I get the picture. Is there a plot?”

  “I don’t know; it is probably a quite awful plot. Shall I go on?”

  “No. I am frowning with my strong brows and exuding irritation. Do you want your eggs turned over?”

  “Definitely. But let me describe the old-fashioned stove at which you are working, with a look of gentle concentration on your manly features.… ”

  Reed, who was frying eggs in butter, picked up the pan and made throwing gestures. He had placed his bacon slices on a plate covered with paper towels.

  “All right, all right,” Kate said. “I’m starved, as a matter of fact. No toast?” she added, looking around.

  “Damn,” Reed said. “You and your descriptions.” He got up to fetch the toast.

  Kate threw him a kiss as they began eating.

  “All right,” he said when they had finished. “What is it; what the hell is it, Kate?”

  “I’m going through a phase.”

  “What?”

  “My mother used to say that when I was being difficult. ‘Kate’s going through a phase.’ ”

  “And were you? Are you?”

  “I rather think I am.”

  Reed snorted. “This is beginning to sound like the dialogue in a Robert Parker novel. Not as clever, of course, but short and snappy.”

  “He certainly doesn’t go in for descriptions, except of what the male characters are wearing. He always tells you what he’s wearing, Spenser that is—”

&
nbsp; “What phase?”

  “Let’s call it a midlife crisis.”

  “Let’s not,” Reed said. “I’ve always scorned that phrase. Of course people have crises all through life, people who think, that is, but those that happen in midlife, which is most of life, cannot be identified by so simple a phrase.” He smiled at her. “I know one can get tired of teaching Middlemarch for the hundredth time. I’m not sure I could manage to read it for the second time with any equanimity. That’s one of the costs of teaching, isn’t it? One has to listen over and over again to one’s students discovering what one has long ago mastered. But if one doesn’t want to do that, why teach? There are other ways to pass a life.”

  “It’s not exactly Middlemarch,” Kate said. “It’s not the literature, really. It’s not even the students, although that comes closer to the problem. I mean, was ever a generation, even a generation of those interested enough to enter graduate school, so abysmally unprepared, uninformed, unknowledgeable? And don’t tell me I sound like a right-wing defender of the canon or I’ll kill you. The students know many things I don’t; I’d like to learn what they know. But it comes over me in waves that sitting around discussing Middlemarch—which Virginia Woolf called the last novel written for adults—is not going to lead them or me to any common ground. And I will not join the right wing, whose views I was attacking only the other afternoon at the Theban, because between them and the ignorant, improperly motivated kids, I’ll take the kids hands down.”

  “Finished?” Reed asked.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Sorry to be boring you; sorry to be ranting at you. We used to understand each other. Now the best we can achieve is a rather attenuated tolerance. Do you know what Adrienne Rich said to a friend? ‘We’re unable to write love, as we so much wish to do, without writing politics.’ The same is true of talking, I suspect. Let’s face it, Reed, you used to find my animadversions entertaining, if not persuasive. Whatever we’ve had, we’ve lost it, just the way my classes have.”