An Imperfect Spy Read online

  “We seem to have gone from higher education to our marriage with amazing haste.”

  “We did,” Kate said, “and it’s no good looking all innocence. If you hadn’t said finished? in that supercilious way, I wouldn’t have gone on to marriage. After all, we are married, and you did say it.”

  “I apologize. Abjectly. What I meant to observe was that you were using your usual decoy methods, running on about one problem when it is, really, only part of the whole. I meant: can’t we go on to what’s really bothering you?”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you, honest. Any suggestions?”

  “You’re acting, if you want to know, like someone who’s having an affair.”

  Kate stared at him. “What you mean,” she said, “is that I’m acting like someone who no longer feels quite as happily—no, let’s say naturally—married. Furthermore,” she added, before he could say anything, “the problem’s probably mine. I’m restless and feeling at an end but not at a beginning. It hasn’t really to do with us at all.”

  Which was a brave speech, Kate thought to herself. The truth was, she was a lot closer to having an affair than she liked to admit, even to herself. She was, in fact, having a pleasant and somehow reassuring dalliance with a younger colleague; they began by having lunch, then afternoon drinks, and then, ultimately, a more passionate if unconsummated interlude in his apartment while his wife was away. Kate, who had met the wife, felt lousy about the whole thing and did not go again to his apartment: there had been some talk of a hotel. No doubt it would go on like that indefinitely. Kate had “wandered” on a few other occasions, and found little significance in those actions. She had never discussed it with Reed, and did not intend to do so now. Like a character in a story by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kate thought constancy the important element in a relationship, fidelity less so. Kate had been fond of many men; from time to time these friendships had led to an “affair.” Always, the sex had flavored but had not embodied the friendship, which in almost all cases continued beyond passion. That was, Kate understood, and suspected Reed understood, the way she was.

  What troubled her now was not the possibility of an affair, or even Reed’s reference to it. His remark was most uncharacteristic of their alliance, and boded no good, but that was not really the problem either. The problem was that something had gone oddly wrong with their marriage, and this possible affair, accomplished or not, was, unlike any other, overdetermined by causes more serious than restlessness, opportunity, or mutual affection.

  “Let’s call it a period of dryness,” Kate offered for something to say. “I seem to get it the way others get hay fever.”

  “In what way has it to do with us, with me?” Reed asked. And suddenly Kate felt a surge of love for him, his honesty, his reasonableness: the fact that he cared rather than wanted to argue about it. Oddly, though not that oddly in a marriage essentially strong, she suddenly recognized something of the problem and could name it.

  “When I met you, and learned to love you,” Kate said, “you were a district attorney. Of course you complained constantly about the job, the lack of resources, incompetent young lawyers, the police and the constraints upon them, everything. But you were involved, you seemed excited about some cases.”

  “And now I’m just a professor of law.”

  Kate nodded. “It sounds foolish, I know, and outrageous coming from a professor of English literature. But you don’t seem as alive to me as you used to. Something’s gone out of you, Reed. You’re just as dear, but the electricity’s gone.”

  “But I’m starting a clinic at a law school that’s never had one, not a nonsimulated one, at least,” Reed said. “And you’re going to teach there, so we’ll have the experience of discovering a new institution together. Do you want more than that? I’ll quit teaching law altogether if you want. I’ll take extra-early retirement. I’ll stay on leave an extra year. What can I do to make the electricity come back?” He took off his glasses and wiped them. Kate was shocked to realize how moved he was. She reached her hand out to him, across the table.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said. “I haven’t wanted to face it. Everyone keeps complaining about what’s wrong with higher education in this country, though I admit they don’t tend to concentrate on law schools. But the trouble is, professors can tire of teaching; they need adventure. I suppose that’s why they get sabbaticals, and not just to write books, as is supposed. That’s why they keep wandering off to conferences in strange cities. You want adventure. I want it, too, which is why I’ve agreed to do this clinic. But the truth is, my dear Kate, marrying you and living with you was, or so it seemed to me, all the adventure that I needed.”

  “That is the most generous and the kindest statement I have ever heard from man or beast,” Kate said. She suddenly felt better. “Of course you mustn’t think of doing anything rash. We have to work out, and you have especially to work out, what change, if any, you want. Meanwhile, there’s the Schuyler Law School. I may even discover how one teaches law and literature at the same time. And you’ll be doing something important. Let’s be glad of that.”

  Reed came over to her side of the table and pulled her to her feet. He held her as though they were about to begin ballroom dancing. “I don’t think it’s just my job, or even just our marriage,” he said. “But, after all, what do you know about law schools, anyway? You need an informed consultant, and one in addition to your teaching companion; we shall have a new adventure together. Kate, my love, everyone intelligent and sensitive, and you’re those as much as anyone on earth, has times when the old is worthless and the new unimaginable. Anyway, you are inclined to periods of downness and a sense of futility; as you said, it’s happened before. Please, let’s try to get through this. There may be casual excitements available, and you may feel inclined to them, but let’s not lose what we have.”

  “Someone once told me you’re too good to be believed.”

  “I’m not good; in fact, at the moment I’m angry and close to madness, if you want to know. I just happen to love you, so I’m trying to be reasonable when I don’t feel the least fucking bit reasonable. If you want to know, I feel like hell.”

  “So do I,” Kate said. “So do I. But much better for the bacon and eggs. We shall grow old together, Reed, our arteries hardening at an equally rapid pace.”

  “But not our ideas, our minds, our hearts, or so I hope,” Reed said. “Or so I hope.”

  1 The Theban Mysteries

  “If I regret anything at all, it’s the way we wasted our time and skills. All the false alleys, and bogus friends, the misapplication of our energies. All the delusions we had about who we were.”

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  THE SECRET PILGRIM

  Two

  SEVERAL evenings later a rather frightening thing happened. They had gone out to dinner, during which they again had one of their desultory conversations. Kate had observed: “I think we overestimate the importance of sex.” Reed had looked at her warily. She had been given lately to such pronouncements, and this time, as usual, his face had reflected his unsureness of how to respond.

  “I don’t really mean sex,” Kate had not too clearly continued. “I mean sex as a substitute for whatever else is wrong; and, I suspect, in the case when something else is wrong, only friendship counts. And the only reason friendship counts is because we can use conversation to discover our lives.”

  “Pretend I’m a friend. Pretend we’ve only just met, and you’ve decided to consult me because I have an understanding face.”

  “You do have an understanding face, and I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about, so your understanding face will get us nowhere. I guess I mean I don’t really care about sex or what comes of it, I don’t even think about it. It’s just a way to stop thinking about other things. The general sense of discontent. You know.”

  Reed smiled. “My students always say you know, when it’s perfectly clear that I don’t know and am doubtful whether the
y do either.”

  “In this case,” Kate said, “you know. I’m saying it isn’t about you, and there isn’t really anything else. It’s just me. The hell with me. Tell me about law clinics, about the one you’re starting at Schuyler Law.”

  Reed looked at her for a long moment and then complied. “Well, as we were saying the other day, the chance to do a clinic at Schuyler Law came at just the right time. Blair Whitson, a young law professor there, the one whom you’re going to teach the law and literature course with, seems to have become something of a minor revolutionary, which he wasn’t when we first met. Anyway, when he suggested that I start a clinic at the school, it seemed a welcome change. I’d recently gone to my dean and others, people at my law school in charge of such things, to try to start a clinic, a prison project, perhaps connected to a project for battered women, but they were a bit too Ivy League to be willing to support it, or maybe they just didn’t want another clinic, or maybe they didn’t want a regular faculty, nonclinic person, starting a clinic. Anyway, they turned me down. So this Schuyler offer was doubly welcome: help a friend and have a new adventure; sounds like an ad.”

  Kate smiled encouragingly.

  “I’ve thus decided,” Reed continued, “that Schuyler Law School shall have a clinic, helping those once convicted but who have some real reason to believe that their convictions were improperly obtained or that their sentences are illegal in some way, or who have stories of mistreatment by prison staff. There are even those who are improperly in prison, or at least believe they are.”

  “Why improperly?” Kate asked.

  “Many reasons. Sometimes it’s a case of noncitizens having served their term and being held because they are illegal immigrants who can’t be deported because their home countries won’t take them. Then there are all the women who need help, some of whom have killed battering husbands, either before the battered woman syndrome became accepted, or whose lawyers had never heard of it.”

  “It certainly sounds nobler than teaching law and literature together. Whatever made your friend Blair think that might be a good idea?”

  “First, I persuaded him, because when you’re on leave you do much better, I’ve noticed, if you have some regular, not too demanding, commitment. And persuading him wasn’t too hard. Many schools have taken up law and literature courses, and besides, you’ll find it interesting. Different points of view. When are you going to talk to Blair about it?”

  “Any day now,” Kate said. “I’ve left a message on his machine and he’s left one on mine. Reed, not to put too fine a point on it, do you think there’s something odd in the fact that we are both going to spend our sabbaticals working at the worst law school in New York and perhaps the whole United States?”

  “It isn’t the worst law school in the United States, even if it isn’t the sort we admire. Many of the students in law schools like Schuyler are older students, returnees, men and women, mostly women, who have decided they don’t want to continue the life they’re leading and want to become lawyers. Often the students are very interested, very earnest, and very motivated. Don’t be a bloody snob, my dear.”

  When, later, they returned to their apartment, well fed and considerably more cheerful than they had been, separately or together, for quite a while, still chatting as Reed unlocked the door, they were both flabbergasted into immobility at the sight of an old woman calmly sitting in their foyer, knitting away on a long, woolly creation.

  Reed instinctively (as Kate accused him later) moved cautiously forward so that Kate was directly behind him. But Kate had recovered from the adrenaline surge which, having inspired neither fright nor flight, as was its wont, left as suddenly as it had come.

  “It’s the woman at the Theban I told you about,” Kate said.

  “How in hell did you get in here?” Reed asked, abandoning his usual civility; she had given him a bad shock.

  “Easy,” the woman said. “I like to prove that I can rob apartment buildings.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want to prove that?”

  “To demonstrate that I’m invisible, of course. That’s the whole point, you see. As an oldish woman, I’m invisible and can go anywhere, like someone in a fairy story.”

  “Ah,” Reed said. “So tonight you became invisible and melted through the door like ghosts in movies. You’re not a ghost, are you?”

  “Almost. This time I didn’t play on invisibility, but on conventionality. I simultaneously convinced your doorman that I was harmless, in need of rest, and your aunt.” This last was directed at Reed.

  “You aren’t old enough to be my aunt,” Reed said inconsequentially. Kate had already noted after one meeting that one tended to be inconsequential when conversing with this woman.

  “Ours was a large family of which I was the youngest, your father the oldest. I didn’t, as I explained to him, get to New York often, and perhaps you hadn’t got the message I left on your machine about my altered time of arrival. I was also feeling faint.”

  “My father?” Reed asked.

  “Well, I said my name was Amhearst, so it had to be your father. I shan’t presume upon the relationship; please don’t be concerned. I just wanted to demonstrate my thesis and my ability. I was counting, of course, on the fact that you were unlikely to have discussed your extended family with the doorman. That took a certain amount of perspicacity also; give me credit.”

  Reed pulled himself together. “Do come in,” he said. “But please, don’t do that to me again. It won’t be a trick, for one thing, now that the doorman considers you my aunt.”

  “Point taken,” the woman said.

  They moved into the living room, where Kate offered the woman a drink. She chose a single-malt scotch, in which they joined her, and settled herself into a chair.

  “I had another reason for wanting to see you,” the woman said, “apart from proving my skills. This is really excellent whisky,” she added, gently smacking her lips as she had done after her sip of Kate’s drink at the Theban. “I thought the time had come to admit to you that I wasn’t altogether honest about my position at Schuyler.”

  Reed and Kate continued to regard her steadily, as though she might vanish if not held constantly in their gaze.

  “I have the job illegally. That is, I can do what I told them I can do, and I do it very well, but I’m not who they think I am. I borrowed the credentials from someone else, Social Security number, résumé, the lot. She’s retreated to Nova Scotia and couldn’t care less. If they find out, I’ll say I stole everything. If they don’t—and I shall take jolly good care that they won’t—she’ll have a bit more Social Security than she might otherwise have had. Her name’s Harriet Furst, and that’s the name I use. Please call me Harriet.”

  “But you do run the secretarial room at Schuyler Law School?” Kate spoke as one peering through a fog.

  “Oh, dear, yes, and very well, too, if I may say so. If you have a little more of that excellent whisky, and don’t mind staying up awhile, I’ll tell you the truth about myself. Not all the truth, but as much as I dare, and I dare the more as I grow older. Montaigne.”

  Reed poured her more single-malt scotch, and sat back as though, like the wedding guest, he had been stopped and mesmerized by the Ancient Mariner.

  Harriet sipped her drink appreciatively. “Have you ever seen a catalpa tree drop its leaves?” she asked.

  Kate shook her head, while Reed continued in his mesmerized state. “I don’t even think I’ve seen a catalpa tree with its leaves,” Kate added, for something to say. The question was unusual, but then, everything about Harriet was unusual.

  “They drop them all at once—boom, like that—while you’re watching. People have often talked about seeing the last leaf fall from a tree, but that’s nothing, believe me, to the sight of a catalpa tree deciding winter has come.

  “Well, that’s how it was with me. Boom. All the leaves fell off, and so instead of bowing out gracef
ully and slowly, as one is supposed to do, I just decided to disappear. Like the catalpa leaves—all at once. No backward glances, no regrets, and no chance to hear from anyone. It was John le Carré who gave me the idea. One simply decides to become a spy. We’re all spies, of course, but some more than others.

  “By the way,” she said to Kate, “I know more about you than I let on at the Theban. I know you smoke—at least from time to time, though you’re trying to give it up—which is good news, because so do I. Do you mind if I smoke now; would you like one?” she said to Kate. Kate shook her head. “Too bad,” Harriet said. “I’m at the age where pleasure counts for more than safety; I’m only interested in a few more intense years anyway. I heard you also drink, imbibe caffeine, and consider animal fat essential to human endurance. That’s why I decided I’d be glad to meet you, even though I’d decided I’d have to meet you even if I wasn’t glad; but I’m glad I was glad.”

  Kate nodded. She thought of saying “I’m glad, too,” and then decided she wasn’t sure she was.

  “I’ve disappeared,” Harriet continued. “Vanished, unable to be found, gone. Registered as a missing person, but not likely to make it off the back list. I figured if le Carré’s characters could just disappear, melt into the scene, remain unnoticed, so could I. Did you read The Russia House? The Smiley books are the best, but once Alec Guinness played Smiley, he didn’t seem to belong to le Carré anymore. Understandable, of course. In le Carré’s books chaps just disappear, sometimes twice. I decided to disappear, too. I’m a big le Carré fan; I know he’s a lost cause when it comes to women, but at least he’s not Norman Mailer. Anyway, I decided to become a spy. Oh, not for government; crooks and bastards, the lot of them. But a modern spy. And I decided to spy at the Schuyler Law School.”