bottle firmly, compressing the cold glass in his fist, and watches the interior light go off as he slowly closes the refrigerator door.
“I did something really stupid today,” he says, standing in the doorway holding the unopened bottle. “Really, really, really inexcusably stupid.”
Pat twists to face him. He becomes suddenly aware of the unopened bottle in his hand, returns to the kitchen. “What happened?”
He opens the bottle and, unsure, takes a long sip before returning to the sofa. “It was absurd. Plain fucking dumb. No other way to put it.”
“Would you just tell me what happened?”
He takes another long sip, then says, “I was nearly arrested on the G.W Parkway.”
“What?”
He holds the bottle on his knee and releases himself to a mild alcoholic euphoria and the fuller world that he carries in his head.
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing, really. Taking in the view.”
“For that you were nearly arrested?”
He turns to look at her squarely. “I was hitting drives.”
“Golf balls?”
“At one of the overlooks. Right out over the river. In the snow.” He traces an arc in the air with his hand. Innocent boyhood prank-ishness. Involuntarily, his eyes begin to tear and his stomach does a little roll. He lifts the bottle to his lips.
“And the police caught you?”
He nods, then chokes, sipping, as the wells of his eyes spill over.
Pat moves closer. “Want to tell me what’s the matter?” She reaches up, but he turns away, wipes his cheek in the crook of an elbow, then stares dumbly at the television screen while Pat watches him intently. Weird. He hadn’t. He didn’t. It wasn’t. In a minute it’s over, and giddiness creeps in. “I really don’t know what happened.” He shakes his head with a mild chuckle. “It was just a prank. Totally spontaneous.”
“You sure?”
He can only shrug. A blank look. The fuller world.
“You said he was going to arrest you?”
“No. He just told me to stop. I stopped. It was over, and I left. That was it.”
“What on earth possessed you?”
He shrugs.
She continues staring. “Is everything all right at work?”
He shrugs.
“Maybe the bean-counting is starting to get to you.”
He turns to her and smiles. “Not the counting. The beans.”
On television, Charlie Rose coaxes and prods his evening guest as if each is satisfying a natural appetite for being fascinated. The ingenuous vigor of talk-show routine is difficult for him to watch. Is it that they know so much of so little? Or so little of so much? One day he will tell Pat everything. When the time comes. But what will he tell her? How will he begin? With the little white grubs? Beans? The dead schoolchildren?
NGA
38°56’53.86”N
77°7’15.07”W
My mother lives in a condominium complex next to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. She bought the apartment when we returned from Germany and the house was sold as part of her divorce settlement with my father. The neighborhood was familiar, just behind the Little Falls shopping center where she’d always done her grocery shopping and also near Little Flower, the Catholic church she goes to, and the school of which I attended between the India and Germany phases of our Foreign Service life. In those days, the NGA complex was referred to as “Army Map.” I had a friend, Bobby, whose father worked there. Bobby liked to brag that his dad put satellites into orbit. I remember thinking that Bobby’s bragging was compensation for the disappointment of having a dad who merely put satellites up rather than get shot into orbit himself. My dad was in Vietnam. I may have boasted about it. If so, I’m sure Bobby understood it was to mask how much I missed him. It wasn’t all that clear to us who had the cooler father.
Over the years, as Army Map became the Defense Mapping Agency and then the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and finally the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, it has become an imposing and somewhat incongruous presence in the neighborhood, protected by high fences and an elaborate security gate at the main entrance. Soon it will disappear from public view entirely and move to Fort Belvoir, where a new and vastly enlarged headquarters is being built.
My mother’s apartment is a roomy two-bedroom with a balcony that looks out over the woods surrounding the Dalecarlia Reservoir. She’s become more and more reclusive over the years. When I arrive, she is usually either reading or knitting or in the kitchen, preparing a meal she will consume over the next several days, usually a soup or stew from the cookbook she brought back from a Trappist monastery in the ShenandoahValley where she does a yearly retreat. She no longer plays the piano. Next to the Catholic Church and her divorce, music was once the biggest thing in her life. She used to say that Oberlin drove the music out of her, but it was marrying my father and becoming a Foreign Service wife that diverted her from the musical career she had aspired to at the conservatory. The Steinway she bought after the divorce is more personal totem than musical instrument. I can’t remember the last time I heard her play it.
I let myself in, surprised to hear rock music coming from the television. She was knitting, glanced up when I came into the room, then returned her attention to the television.
“What are you watching, Mom?”
“A concert.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Since when do you watch rock concerts on TV?”
She glanced up at me again, fingers working the needles, then over the top of her reading glasses at the television screen. “Is Roy Orbison rock?”
“One of the grandfathers.”
“You wouldn’t call it country?”
“Roy Orbison? I don’t think so.”
The song continued. I was too amused to know what to think. We listened for a few minutes. The stage was a who’s who of rock ‘n’ roll luminaries. When Bruce Springsteen came into view, my mother put down her knitting and said, “I don’t like that fellow.”
“Bruce Springsteen?”
“Look at him. All preening and vain.”
“Rock and vanity sort of go together, Mom.”
She frowned and went on knitting. “Roy Orbison is the only artist up there. Look at him. He isn’t jumping around.”
She was right. Springsteen did seem a little stupidly overeager. I sat back and listened. “When did you become a Roy Orbison fan?”
“I like this concert. I’ve watched it several times.”
She didn’t elaborate and went on knitting. The concert continued. I settled back on the sofa, pleased by this little tremor in an otherwise unvarying routine. She was right about Orbison. The more the other idols pranced and preened around, the deeper Orbison seemed sunk into an autistic aloneness, which, I realized, was precisely what my mother most identified with. I wasn’t so amused anymore and stood up. “Shall I make coffee?”
“I’ll do it.” She put her knitting aside.
We went into the kitchen together. I glanced through the newspaper while she put the kettle on. It was hard to tell which of us was more reluctant to talk. Her decision not to go to the funeral had come as a relief. Dad, which is how she still refers to him, is always an uneasy topic of conversation. After nearly thirty years, all I want is for her to put the divorce behind her