18
Marcus had never been particularly friendly with Alice’s sister and now, in the wake of her diagnosis, their relationship had entered a zone of borderline hostility. With Alice in his study and Janie and her husband in the guest bedroom, he felt like a stranger in his own house. After a restless night with a bottle of Scotch on his bedside table, Marcus found himself alone with Janie in the kitchen. Alice was sleeping late, Bill was off jogging around their Reston, Virginia, neighborhood.
“It’s not true, is it?” she asked as he installed a new coffee filter.
“What’s not true?”
“That you’re going back to France.”
“Just for a short while.”
“How long is a short while?”
“A month, tops.”
Her arms were folded across her chest so tightly, it looked like she was wearing a straitjacket. “She’s got terminal cancer, Marcus.”
“I’m acutely aware of that. I’ve got some urgent business to tidy up. When I’m done, I’ll be asking for an extended leave.”
“The chemo’s going to make her sick. Bill and I can only stay another week. We’ve got jobs.”
“I’m going to arrange for her to have a nurse who’ll stay with her if it’s necessary. She’s got a lot of friends in Reston who’ve been calling to help.”
The woman couldn’t contain her fury. “Your vows, Marcus. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.”
“I remember them.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, Janie, I do. I’m sure you mean well, but you’re an outside observer trying to figure out another couple’s marriage.”
“I’ve had a bird’s-eye view for over twenty years. Alice has told me everything. Everything. Your drinking. Your affairs. Your emotional abuse. Everything.”
He listened while watching the coffee drip into the pot. “Then you know about her affairs too, right?”
“What did you expect her to do? She was looking for some comfort in the face of a barren relationship.”
“I guess we were both looking for something.”
“Why didn’t you just bugger off? Go off and do whatever you do and let her find herself?”
“I don’t know, Janie, I just didn’t. You’d have to ask Alice that question too.”
“I have. She was in love with you, the poor thing. She still is.”
*
His study smelled like a sick room—a sick room with cigarettes. She stuck with her vow to keep smoking and he didn’t give her any grief about it. The night before his departure, he pulled his desk chair up to her bedside and sipped a Scotch. They shared a cigarette. The chemo was making her weak and she’d been puking her guts out. The first visiting nurse scolded her so much about the smoking that they had to get the agency to send a more tolerant one. Janie and Bill had left for Tennessee, timing their departure to a slot when Marcus was out shopping. He counted it as a win-win.
“This is important, right?” she asked. “What you’re doing.”
“It’s important.”
“Preventing the world from ending important? Or America’s going to kick Russia’s ass important?”
“The latter.”
“Do we still need to kick their ass?”
“Beats me,” he said. “I’m not a policy guy.”
She accidentally blew smoke toward him and used her hand to dissipate the cloud. “Maybe we should stop trying to kick each other’s asses,” she said.
“A damn fine idea.”
“If I survive this thing—”
“You’ll beat it.”
“I appreciate the sentiment. If I survive it, then I was thinking, maybe we can try to make a go of it. For the sake of the water under the bridge.”
There was a lot of water under the bridge. They had met at Georgetown when he was getting his master’s in political science. She was only a freshman, a literature major. He’d already been contacted by a recruiter when they met, so it was fair to say that their entire life together was overshadowed by the Agency. He did his training at Camp Peary, the infamous CIA Farm, while she was still an undergraduate. There, he took a fair bit of stick for his name. “So, what are you, born to the fucking job, Handler? Going to be a spy Handler? Good thing your name wasn’t Asswiper.”
His first assignment was to Langley as a counterintelligence analyst and he rode a desk until Alice graduated. As soon as she was relocatable, he got a transfer to the National Clandestine Service. His initial posting was to the US Embassy in Ankara where he got his feet wet in tradecraft and playing possum with the Soviets. Alice was fluent in Spanish and French and she got jobs in Turkey as a freelance translator for American publishers. Thus, they began their lives, shuttling back and forth between foreign and domestic appointments. During one extended stretch at Langley, they bought their house in Reston and Alice landed an editorial job at a publishing company based in Washington. She was well liked and they let her work remotely when she returned to foreign postings with Marcus—Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Bonn.
Three years earlier, she’d balked at Paris. She just couldn’t do another one, at least, not with him. They didn’t call it a separation. They didn’t call it anything. He went and she stayed. He started seeing a woman, a neighbor in his building. He assumed Alice was seeing someone at her company. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
“Yeah, for the sake of the water,” he said. “Definitely.”
“You’ll come back? Permanently?”
“Why not?” he said. “Time to let the younger guys save the world.”
“Will they let you?”
“I’m not a slave. I’ll leave if they don’t. Must be someone out there who’ll hire me to do something.”
“Promise?” she asked.
“Yeah, I promise. Can I ask you something?”
“That’s a silly question. I hope your real question is better.”
“Why’d you stay married to me?”
“I thought about it. You know I did. Every time I got close, I pulled back from the edge.”
“Why?”
“Because I remembered the way we were together in the early days. We were good. And I always said to myself, Alice, maybe we can be good again. Also, I didn’t have the energy to plan another wedding.”
He snorted half a laugh,
