“It’s like a funhouse mirror,” he said, feeling weirder and more desperate by the minute.
“Only not so fun,” Amelia said. “Why don’t you go downstairs and have a drink? I don’t feel like talking right now. I want to read my stupid magazine.”
“I guess I will,” said Burling. He’d been standing in her doorway and he turned to go, forgetting the narrowness of the landing and nearly falling down the stairs. The house was an empty-feeling ship of a place, with hidden porches and deep, damp verandas, and yet it seemed too small. The stairway turned at two landings, each set with a leaded glass window of craftsman design. At the back of the dark, narrow kitchen between high oak cabinets, he was startled to find Simon Bell, lately tenant of the renovated story of their carriage house, furtively pouring himself a straight scotch from the dresser that served as a bar.
“Join me?”
The reddish hair on Simon’s fat, freckled forearms and the several large rings on his fingers were reflected in the flaking, beveled mirror behind the bottles. Bell had once been a brilliant China hand with MI-6, but in the middle 1970s his superiors had pulled him away from the desk and sent him to Burma. SLORC, the onomatopoeically monikered secret police, had caught him up near the border with China and subjected him to a brutal interrogation, during which a gun had been discharged, grazing his forehead. The groove it left gave him a perpetually thoughtful expression that drew you to his sad-dog eyes, sagging, stippled cheeks and sunburned neck. The purpose of his mission had been disinformation, but in order for Bell to be convincing this fact had been withheld from him. As the interrogation went forward, certain things had not made sense; Bell understood what had happened, and he told his captors so. To show they weren’t stupid, the Burmese let him go, but not before beating him again rather badly, on principle, which had made him, as Simon liked to say, “a bit mental.” After Burma he’d been posted to a Washington desk job, his wife in London awaiting divorce. That’s when Burling had taken him in, to watch over his house. Since Amelia’s return from Afghanistan, Bell had begun to feel he was needed, a slightly dangerous condition for him.
“Is there ice?”
“I don’t use it,” Bell said, carefully shutting the glass door above the bar. He was wearing only boxer shorts and flip-flops. A tiny silver ball suspended by bearings in the jamb snicked shut, and the glassware inside trembled musically. There was already another glass beside his, and next to that, on the gray marble top, a Pelican edition of Shakespeare. “Foreign office chap shouldn’t take ice in his drink. You never know what’s in it.”
“I like ice,” Burling told him. “Besides, we’re in the nation’s capital. You think the water’s poisoned?”
“Absofuckinggoddamlutely. I fancy the water here is drawn from the cesspool that flows directly from the bowels of our, I should say your, elected officials. Nothing but undigested fat from stale red-baiting leftovers and the roughage of lefty post-Vietnam paranoia. Did you see what those jesters had to say about you in the Post?”
“I didn’t read it,” Burling said from inside the freezer door. The ice in his mother’s old, nickel-plated trays, imported from Philadelphia, was covered with fuzzy crystals and specks of food, as if they hadn’t been emptied for years. He wondered what had happened in his house in the months while Amelia had lived there alone with his children.
“How could you resist?”
Burling slammed a tray against the refrigerator door, dislodging shards of schist-like ice that skittered away across the linoleum. “I don’t give a damn what they think.”
“Bravo,” said Bell, raising his glass. Burling retrieved a piece from the ice tray and dropped it into the tumbler, taking a layer of skin from his finger with it.
“Ouch,” he said, tasting blood as he sucked at the tip.
“Honestly, Lucius, I felt a bit sorry. The kids must really have caught it today at school.”
Burling reached for the edge of the kitchen table and collapsed in a straight wooden chair. Betsy and Luke had already been in their bedrooms, asleep according to Amelia, when he got home from the Agency at ten. They were at awkward ages, and since he’d gotten home he’d found their appearances slightly alarming. Elizabeth’s hair was lank and greasy, her eyes unable to focus on him from behind her big pale glasses. Luke’s clothes looked worn out and half a size too small. The possibility that his mistakes would touch them deflated him completely.
“I brought this in for Luke,” Bell explained, sliding the paperback onto the glass-topped table in front of him. “I thought it might take his mind off things.”
Burling opened the book. Henry IV, Part 2. “Enter RUMOUR painted full of tongues.”
“Oh, glory be,” Burling said, putting his head in his hands.
years later, when he had sold the house on macomb and moved to his present apartment, Burling found a story Luke had written for the Sidwell Friends literary journal, about those months before his father came home. Thinly veiled autobiography, it told how Bell and Luke and Elizabeth acted Lear and The Tempest in the living room for Amelia’s entertainment that spring. When the weather turned warmer and Betsy was shipped off to camp, where she would spend eight miserable weeks falling out of canoes, dropping balls, and being tormented by thinner girls, mosquitoes, and poison ivy, Bell and Luke moved the repertory company to the deep porch that curled around the front of the house. In the damp mornings, Bell’s paperbacks were still on the little wicker table beside Amelia’s chaise longue, curling with dew and the dried rings of sweat from her highballs. Sometimes after Luke had gone to bed, his mother and Simon talked on, of Paris where Amelia had gone to the Sorbonne, and the Comédie Française, of which she had been a fan. Simon’s voice rose slowly and distantly, like an old-time announcer on the radio, vaguely corny but filling with a timbre that seemed like a wave from another, more confident world: Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea.
In June, they started the Henry plays, with Bell playing Falstaff. This production Burling saw in the flesh, having returned from Kabul at one of the lowest points of his life. He had done something careless, taken a chance with April; in turn, chance, or fate—thought of now in the upper case, ontological sense of the word, a condition of life on which he’d expended a lot of thought—turned bad and collected a terrible debt. Or maybe the mujahedin just didn’t give a fiddler’s fuck what he or Joseph Conrad thought, a possibility that expelled him from the comfort of his thinking, put him outside of himself.
It was a strange place to be, and yet stranger still was how much the scene he discovered in his house on Macomb, after he had a few weeks to get used to it, seemed to match his internal condition of exile: Amelia cueing the corpulent Simon and the thin, shaggy Luke in the scented summer night, her pale hand flitting up and down like a moth within the baggy silk cuff of her dressing gown. She was vaguely alluring, in a fey sort of way.
“Peace, good pint pot,” Bell declaimed, leaving his Ballantine ale on the windowsill beside her. Bugs popped against the frosted milk-glass globe of the porch light. “Harry!”
Luke, draped in the pose of a dissolute scion on the railing, put one white Adidas sneaker on the floor of the porch and turned to face the beer-bellied Sir John. Since returning to the States he had adopted a punk affect, fraying Izods and olive fatigues, a safety pin stuck through the alligator’s jagged red mouth. The part of Prince Hal—Harry—who drank with John Falstaff and the other braggart soldiers, only to take up his heroic place at their lead, appealed to him.
“That thou art my son,” Simon began.
The wicker of the chaise made a crackling sound, and Amelia whispered, “Chamomile,” and giggled, tipping the ash from her French