“Is everything okay?” Grace asked. “You seem distracted.”
Charlie, who had been glancing over his shoulder to see whether that was in fact his agency colleague at a nearby table (it wasn’t), startled at the question. For sweet, shy, soft-spoken Grace to have gotten up the nerve to ask this question meant that he was doing a truly terrible job of concealing his anxiety.
“Oh, fine,” he said heartily. “Just thought I recognized someone. Anyway! What did you think of that last movement?”
On this Saturday evening in October, after a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, they were having a late dinner at an Italian restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately, the finer qualities of both the music and the meal were lost on Charlie. He was distracted. Sometimes the anxiety was manageable, and sometimes it was impossible, and tonight was one of the impossible nights. Earlier that day, Amanda had texted to say she wouldn’t be able to keep their phone date because she was getting on a plane the next day. In normal times he would think nothing of this. But now, that tiny seed gave rise to a terrifying bloom of questions. A plane to where? For what? What is she working on?
And this whole complicated mess, this insane and unconsidered plan, it was a problem entirely of his own making! Truly, he was the stupidest man who had ever lived.
His half of dessert remained untouched, which, given his sweet tooth, was a sign of just how bad things were. Grace took a bite of tiramisu, unperturbed. It seemed like she might have believed Charlie’s earlier denial. She had a remarkable capacity for trust. Obsession wasn’t her style, nor was conflict. It was what made her so wonderful to be with, so deserving of her name.
Watching this lovely woman take another bite of dessert, Charlie had a painful vision of the months to come. Amanda’s work would keep torturing Charlie. Charlie would keep lying to Grace. Grace would keep tolerating his evasions. That last part was the kicker. It wasn’t fair to Grace. She hadn’t signed up for this mess.
After the waiter cleared the half-eaten tiramisu, Charlie said: “You were right, before. I am distracted. It’s been a strange time at work.”
“Strange in what way?”
“I can’t really… I can’t explain. But there’s something, it’s sort of complicated, it’s going to be taking up quite a lot of my time.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
“A lot of my time. I won’t have much of a life beyond the office.”
“Oh,” she repeated. “How long do you think it will last?”
“That’s the thing. It could be a while.” Charlie looked down at the tablecloth, unable to meet her gaze. “A long while.”
After several beats of silence, Grace said: “You’ll be too busy, then.”
He nodded at the tablecloth, his cheeks on fire.
“Well,” she said slowly. “Okay. I see.”
He finally looked up. “I’m so sorry, Grace. I’m really sorry.”
They said goodbye outside the restaurant. As he watched Grace walk away, her ash-blond bob, her sensible low heels, her navy blue dress, he found his eyes filling with tears. He really liked her. He maybe even (a word he hadn’t let himself use since Helen) loved her. Her presence in his life had been a reprieve, but she was too good for him. This, he knew, was the restoration of the natural order.
A Sunday in Helsinki. November 1985, about a year after that holiday party at the embassy. A supermarket in the Ullanlinna neighborhood, a few blocks away from Charlie and Helen’s apartment. It began as these things always begin. The simplest contact: one hand brushing against another.
“Oh dear,” she said, stepping back. “I’m so sorry. Please. You take them.”
One bunch of bananas remained on the shelf. They had both reached for it at the same time. “Of course not.” Charlie stepped back, too. “They’re all yours.”
The woman smiled. The symmetry of her oval face was marred only by a small scar on her chin. This tiny irregularity brought her prettiness into focus. “I couldn’t possibly. You might starve to death.”
He smiled, too. “How do you figure that?”
“Perhaps you were only here for the bananas.” She nodded at his empty cart. “If I deprive you of these, what else will you eat?”
“Your accent. You’re British?”
“And you’re American, I take it.”
“Always nice to meet another expat.” He extended his hand. “I’m Charlie.”
She blushed. “I’m Mary.” She was even prettier when she blushed.
He encountered her again the following week. Same time, same place. This time, she was perusing the citrus. “How were those bananas?” he said.
“Oh! Not very good. I’m afraid, Charlie, that my guilt kept me from enjoying them.”
“You poor Brits. That’s the difference between us. We Americans don’t get hung up on these things. To the victor the spoils, right?”
It happened again the following week, and the week after that. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Charlie laughed. Apparently he and Mary were on the same schedule. Sunday evenings were his time to grocery shop, when Helen gave him the list of what she needed for the week ahead. It was one of his rare domestic contributions. He liked the feeling of returning to the apartment, arms laden with groceries for his wife and child. It was a small but concrete sense of accomplishment on the home front.
Where, unfortunately, it wasn’t going well. Things were improving at work, but there appeared to be a directly inverse relationship between the health of his career and the health of his marriage. Jack, the new station chief, liked him. Then again, Jack liked everyone, so how much did it really count for? Charlie’s attack of insecurity had subsided, but it hadn’t quite disappeared. Now it was like he was on a perpetual treadmill, every breakthrough yielding more questions to answer, every achievement creating the need for the next achievement. After work took its share, little remained by the end of the day. When he got home late and slipped into bed, Helen was obviously awake—she was a light sleeper—and yet she never murmured a hello, never asked where he had been. Whenever Charlie apologized for how busy things were, she shook her head and said: “That’s not the issue.”
“It’s not?” He blinked. “Then what is the issue?”
Charlie was still dazzled by the fact of being married to Helen. Her gifts, quietly alluring when she was twenty, now shone strong and bright as the sun. She was beautiful and smart and opinionated; she was good with strangers; she was a fantastic cook; she was an even better mother. But as the years went on, she didn’t seem to need much from him. She was self-sufficient, almost to a fault. Charlie would have liked more tasks like the Sunday evening grocery shopping, but when he asked for these assignments, she always said, with a slight edge of aggrievement: “It’s fine, Charlie. I know how busy you are.”
So Charlie began to look forward to Sunday evenings for reasons that had nothing to do with husbandly hunting-and-gathering. After a few months, he and Mary had reached an unspoken agreement. They lingered in the produce section, waiting for the other person. From there they would wend slowly through the aisles, stopping along the way, stretching the shopping to an hour or longer. Talking to her was easy. They clicked. He told himself he wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was new to Helsinki; she needed a friend. Charlie was just being a nice guy. It was just a little friendly conversation in the dairy aisle.
Mary admitted to being lonely in this new city. Not all the time. It was okay when she was at work, when she was distracted, but when she was alone in her attic apartment, she felt invisible. No one in this city knows who I am. Standing by the bakery case, blinking back tears. If I died in my sleep, no one would even notice. Her upper lip trembling with emotion. It was just a little sympathy. Just a little honesty between a man and a woman. I’m so glad I met you. I can actually talk to you, Charlie. But it wasn’t like he was taking her to bed.
Until, in February 1986, he took her to bed.
It just… happened. There was no external catalyst. No argument with Helen, no screaming baby, no overpowering surge of lust. Mary had mentioned where she lived. On the evening in question, on his way back from a meeting with a source, Charlie was walking near the harbor. He looked up and realized he was outside her building. She had described her attic apartment so vividly, the gabled windows and slanted ceilings, the hot plate, the futon, the clawfoot tub. Impulsively, he pressed the buzzer. Upstairs, when she opened the door, she broke into a radiant smile. (The purity of it! The unabashed joy, the total lack of disharmony!) He felt his heart skip. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said.
They had sex on the futon, the kind of fast, hard, clothes-ripping sex he hadn’t had in years. After, Mary started crying. “I didn’t mean it,” she said. Her lip trembling, her body fetal-curled in guilt. “You have a wife. You have a child. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want this to happen.” And Charlie held her, stroking her hair, murmuring that it was okay; it was only this one time. “We made a mistake,” he said. “People make mistakes.”
He saw her again the next week at the supermarket. At first it was a little tentative, a little awkward, but then it wasn’t. They walked the aisles, they talked and laughed. Their old routine and nothing more. Time went by, and the pleasing glow of virtue returned. Charlie was proving something to himself. No more sex. No more mistakes. Obviously he had screwed up. The memory of that episode would forever fill him with guilt. But it really was just that one time. He had escaped this thing by the skin of his teeth.
And then, a couple of months later, in April, he had a hard day. For the past ten months, Charlie had been cultivating a visiting physics professor at the University of Helsinki, a highly regarded Soviet scientist. The professor was loath to return to the Soviet Union at the end of the term, which was where Charlie came in. The defection would be a career-making prize. But that April day, the professor told Charlie that he had changed his mind. He couldn’t do it, after all. His wife and children were homesick. For the sake of his family, they were going back to Russia.
Ten months of work for nothing. Charlie felt like shit. He was a shitty officer. Then he would go home and Helen would look at him and he would remember he was a shitty husband and a shitty father, too. Why couldn’t anything be easy? He was walking home, but the thought of home was suddenly unbearable. So he turned around. He pointed himself toward the harbor, toward the consolations he knew would greet him in that attic apartment. As he pressed Mary’s buzzer, he was no longer kidding himself. He knew that a second time would mean a third time, and a fourth and a fifth. But he told himself he needed this. Whatever resolve he once possessed was gone.
Mary had moved to Finland for work. She was a secretary at a British telecom firm in London. When there was an opening in their Helsinki office, she had put in for a transfer. It was her first time abroad. She showed Charlie her passport, blank but for the single stamp admitting her to Finland. “Someday I’d like to travel,” she mused, flipping through the empty pages. “See the world. Like you, Charlie. You’ve been everywhere.”
Even more than the sex, this was the best part of being with Mary. The glamour of his career had long since worn off. The cinematic moments, the dead drops and brush passes, paled in comparison to the endless demands of bureaucracy. The cables, the contact reports, the memos from their cousins in MI6. At the CIA, everything had to be recorded on paper. Charlie spent most of his time typing. It wasn’t helped by the fact that he was a lousy typist, hunting and pecking his way through those interminable reports. He had been doing this job for over a decade now, but at the end of the day, he was basically a glorified paper pusher.
But Mary saw him in a different light. Even if he was, to her, just an ordinary diplomat named Charlie Franklin, that cover story was enough to dazzle her. Charlie shared the sanitized version of his stories, descriptions of life in Algeria and Switzerland and Germany, the parties he’d been to, the powerful people he’d wined and dined. After they had sex, she rested her head on his chest and said: “Tell me more about that funny man in Algiers.” In her eyes, he was finally the kind of person he had always wanted to be: brave, and interesting, and admired.
One night in the attic apartment, while Mary was making toast and boiling an egg for a postcoital supper, she said: “You know, darling, how my boss is determined to set me up? She knows this man at the British embassy, and she told me the most interesting thing. Apparently he actually works as a spy. I’m not supposed to tell anyone. She showed me his picture. Not terribly attractive, but I’m tempted to say yes, just for the thrill of it. Can you imagine? To say that I’ve been on a date with a spy?”
A wiser man would have seen this for what it was. But as Charlie lay there, watching Mary tap a spoon against the egg, he thought with annoyance: But I’m meant to be the most interesting person in her life. So this other guy had upped the ante? He would respond in kind.
It started small. Telling her his stories, he let slip the sort of minor details that caused her eyebrow to arch with curiosity. Then he would pause, almost as if he regretted it.
“What?” she would urge. “Darling, what? Tell me!” It was a delicious high, this seizure of her interest. He feigned a kind of noble reluctance, a fig leaf of propriety, making her ask the questions, making her work for it. But the high was addictive, too. Once he started, he found he couldn’t stop. It was stupid, obviously. But, then again, who was Mary going to tell?