The first time it happened was unexpected. Lila had come to New York to collect her nieces for the night, something she tried to do at least once a month in the immediate aftermath. It had taken Billy less than a month to vacate Hannah’s dream of a Harlem counter-life, and he and the girls moved into a classic eight on the top floor of a formerly elegant building on Central Park West. By chance, the rooftop ballroom was empty and basically abandoned and Billy bought that too, since it lay directly above his apartment. He said one day he would build a staircase.
When the elevator opened at his apartment that night, Lila called for the girls but there was no response. The lights were all out, which was not terribly odd since the sun had just set. Lila went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door because she could not find the light switch. She laughed out loud—his refrigerator was empty except for mustard, champagne, and a fruit basket still in cellophane. Billy had come in silently, and turned on the light behind her. Lila was so startled that she dropped her scarf.
They’re upstairs in the ballroom, Billy had said.
They both knelt to retrieve her scarf, and then his head was within a few inches of her exposed neck. Everything had just exploded. As a sexual experience, that time was unremarkable. As a form of insurgency or reconstruction, however, it was perfect. Afterward, Lila fetched her nieces from the old ballroom and they all laughed about their abject refrigerator.
It happened another time, and then again, each time with diminishing pretense. When she went up to New York, her friends all called her selfless and praised her devotion to her nieces. She began to remember what it had been like to be Lila.
It turned out that, over short periods, the clarity of Billy’s pain had the power to turn Lila’s former dislike into an erotic force. It had not been joyless, but then Lila was not in search of joy. Her own mourning was shallow, fleeting, intermittent, and after the initial shock, she told him, she forgot about Hannah for hours and even days at a time. She could not get closer to it. That distance made her very, very afraid.
Be glad, he said.
That, she said, would be monstrous.
You didn’t love her, Billy said. You can’t mourn a ghost.
Lila did not argue that day, which was March 18, nor did she announce or discuss. She reached for her compact. She took the girls to the Plaza one last time, where they ordered too much room service. From then on, the girls took the train to Washington instead of Lila coming to New York. She informed him of the new arrangement through his doorman. Jim disliked Billy, which made for a useful catharsis, and their common loathing had actually made their marriage stronger. At that point, it was not even lying.
38
Lila’s afternoon was dismal. Billy’s friends the Templetons were up from New York, and since Lila knew the wife’s older sister from college, she invited them for tea while Jim was out with Catta on the boat. Catherine Templeton, however, was less charming than Lila remembered, and Christopher, the husband, defeated the wisdom of philosophers by seeming stupid without saying anything at all. To complete the farce, Diana invited herself to join them and then fell asleep in her chair. When all the tea was drunk, Jim came in looking windblown and asked Lila if she would like to take a walk over the hill. Lila had said yes, she absolutely would, and she would meet him on the lawn in thirty seconds—assuming that everyone present would take the hint. But the Templetons had lingered aggressively, and then Diana wanted to borrow a dress from Lila for the Migration dinner tonight. They tried several on, but nothing of hers would fit.
And then, at last, Lila was out in the open air again. Jim was waiting for her, and they walked away from the harbor, up over the hill to the back fields, where the landscape was earthier, greener, less obviously dramatic. Here, the beauty lay more in the everyday warmth of the farm: cows, fencing, bales of hay, a stone wall reaching deep into the woods. On this side of the hill, one no longer had the monumental sense of effortlessness. Some literalist had put bells on the cattle, and as the herd wandered into the trees, they sounded farther off than they really were, like a procession in a valley in the mountains. After a while, Jim stopped. Lila stopped beside him, and they stood together for a long time, looking at the sea.
“Tell me about Billy,” Jim said.
He knew. In her mind, there was no doubt. She could deny, could answer literally; she could ignore the obvious depth of his question. All of it led to the same impasse.
“It was less than nothing,” Lila said.
“Before or after Hannah died?”
“After. Because of.”
“Were there others?”
“No. Never.”
There was a pause, which lost its shape amid the evening sounds, the crickets and hidden frogs, and became a troubled silence.
“What now?”
“Nothing. It’s done.”
“And last night?”
“I didn’t see Billy. I went to the chapel and then straight to Hannah’s room.”
For Lila there was no real secret here—no burden of hidden ecstasy. She was not in love with Billy.
“Someone saw you,” he said. “Cyrus told me about it this morning.”
“I don’t know how.”
If he were honest, Hillsinger thought, his own mistakes were equally bad. First and most dangerously, he had mishandled the Subotin affair. He had walked into Angleton’s trap and then compounded the error by not telling Lila about it right away. They were both guilty of keeping the wrong secrets, but that was over now.
“I need some information,” he said.
“Anything.”
“Tell me about Hans Kallenbach.”
Kallenbach! she thought. He wasn’t even a footnote.
Lila described the two occasions in her life when she had spoken to Hans Kallenbach: at Billy’s house, in passing, this past January, and then the evening not too long after that when Kallenbach called their home by accident. When she picked up the phone, Kallenbach had at first been confused, she said, and then he apologized, saying he’d meant to dial the number above theirs in his book. Including that exchange, she said, in her life she had spoken to the man for a total of less than five minutes.
“How did you know that I’d met him?” Lila said.
“Hans Kallenbach handles American money for the KGB. When he called our house you thought it was an ordinary wrong number, but in fact he was speaking directly to the FBI, who at the time was tapping our phone.”
“Oh no,” Lila said. “No no no.”
“He was planting the seed with them that you and I were a husband-and-wife team spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. Somehow he knew the FBI was listening and he hoped they would flag the ‘wrong number’ as a coded communication—i.e., that some combination of his words was a prearranged cue for a meeting. Which they did.”