Ariel was going to object that she didn’t want people to think she’d named a dog after whiskey, but reminded herself that she didn’t give a damn.
“You’re a good boy, Mallomar.” She says this dozens of times a day. George had named the chocolate-haired mutt too, earlier, back before he had the encyclopedia—back before he could read—when cookies occupied an outsized portion of his consciousness.
“You too, Scotch, though perhaps less good. But you are an exceedingly handsome personage.” Scotch’s facial hair evokes the mustaches of a nineteenth-century Austrian nobleman. “And a fine gentleman.”
The dog just looks at her, neither understanding nor not understanding any of the words. What Scotch understands is the tone of Ariel’s voice. He wags his tail when she says nonsense like this; he loves everything about her, so much.
Ariel accepts that people might think she’s a crazy lady, talking to dogs this way. But years ago she’d stopped caring if people thought she was crazy; she stopped making any attempt to hide it.
Now that she felt the need to explain this part of her personality to this new man, she was reconsidering the wisdom of this deep level of I-don’t-give-a-fuck. But it’s who she is—who she’d become—and she didn’t want to hide it. She’d spent too much of her life pretending the opposite.
“Actually, it’s not just sometimes. I talk to the dogs more or less constantly.”
John gave her a gentle smile, mostly with his eyes. “I should hope so,” he said. This wasn’t the same as his high-watt smile, but it was, maybe, better. “Otherwise they get lonely.”
Ariel examined John closely, in the soft glow of the dashboard lights, and she could see it there in his smile, the amused recognition of a joke that isn’t really a joke but instead a fundamental truth: It wouldn’t be the dogs who’d be lonely without the talking.
That was the first time it occurred to her, just a fleeting thought that scampered across her mind: I could love this man. But she pushed the idea aside.
*
It had been so long since she’d had a regular sexual partner, or even an irregular one. Back when she’d first fled the city, that was because she was traumatized, and pregnant. Then she was the single mother of a newborn, then of a toddler, her life filled with diapers and vomit and breastfeeding and sleeplessness, none of it conducive to eroticism. Furthermore she was someone who’d receded from social life, from intimacy. Someone who wanted nothing to do with men.
This new life of hers was populated almost exclusively by women. She’d meet other mothers for lunch, or a glass of wine; she’d go to other families’ houses for potlucks in open-plan kitchens, where she’d shake hands with the husbands, or kiss some of them demurely on the cheek, but she didn’t really talk to them beyond superficial chitchat. The men would stand off to the side, holding bottles of beer by the necks, discussing fishing and football, taxes and trucks. Ariel suspected that they all thought she was gay. She was the only one of the moms who wore her hair this sort of short, plus she was attractive but unmarried, and they’d heard that half her son’s DNA had come from a sperm bank. What other explanation could there be?
The few men she interacted with fell into two categories: her friends’ husbands, or people she paid—plumber, mechanic, electrician. Ariel wasn’t going to have sex with anyone in either category. So for years she didn’t have sex with anyone. She was barely able to drum up interest in self-satisfaction, just once every now and then while watching a movie with some carefully choreographed scene with two of the most attractive human beings in the world, with the perfect lighting and music and editing, gasping and moaning and crying out in ecstasy; this type of idealized artistic sex still had the capacity to arouse her. But this cinematic entertainment was a completely different category of activity, utterly divorced from real-life intercourse, the same way that professional ballet has nothing do with falling down a staircase and breaking your neck. Because that’s what had happened to Ariel, sexually: She’d fallen down the steps, and broken her fucking neck.
It had taken her such a long time to recover, during which her life had been overwhelmingly defined by no. It was such a huge relief to be able to say yes again. And it wasn’t merely the physical act of sex that had been absent, it was the entirety of intimacy that you expect from a romantic partner. She missed it, she needed it, we all do, even if we sometimes pretend otherwise. Ariel had been pretending so many things for so long.
*
Pete Wagstaff checks the time: It’s barely ten o’clock in the morning. Wagstaff knows—everyone knows—that Saxby Barnes is a heavy drinker on a nightly basis; it’s never productive to talk to him until he has managed to get himself together. The ideal time is early afternoon, when Barnes’s tongue has been loosened by a lunchtime drink or two, but Pete can’t wait for that.
“Good morning,” Barnes answers. “What can I do you for you today, Mr. Wagstaff?”
“I’m working on that story.”
“Mmm.”
“I have a few follow-up questions.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Can the embassy comment on yesterday’s altercation between Ms. Pryce and one of your staff?”
“Excuse me?”
Wagstaff doesn’t elaborate.
“I’m sorry,” Barnes says. “I simply haven’t the foggiest clue what you’re talking about.”
“Is this really what you want me to write, Barnes?”
Silence, then a sigh. “Off the record?”
“Sure. Off the record.”
“I’ve been ordered to keep quiet. Just now, in fact. A few minutes ago.”
“Ordered? By?”
Barnes doesn’t answer, of course.
“By the CIA?”
Again Barnes hesitates before not answering. “You have yourself a pleasant day, Mr. Wagstaff.”
*
“What about his family?” Moniz asks. “Can they help?”
“No. John’s parents died when he was young, six or seven years old. He and his older sister went to live with an uncle who wasn’t very nice; they’re no longer in touch.”
“You are not meeting this uncle?”
“No.”
“The sister?”
“I met her just once, at our wedding. She lives very far away.”
“Where?”
This question sounds like a whisper of fear in Ariel’s ear. “Morocco.”
Moniz’s eyebrows raise. Morocco is very far from America, though not from Portugal. It is very near.
“This is when? Your wedding?”
“A few months ago.”
Moniz and Santos share a look, but neither says anything further.
“Why are you asking about his family?”
“Maybe it is important.”
“How?”
“What type of man is your husband?” This is Santos asking.
“I don’t really know how to answer that. John is a good man.”
“What does that mean?”