Criminals (8 page)

In Frost's poem, the lovely woman is punished. When he wrote “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,” Frost was living in a world in which there was an audience presumed to believe, however mistakenly, that beauty conquered all. It may be the Kennedys didn't know the poem and really thought the lovely were choosers and that was that. We'll never know. Maybe they were not concerned with Frost's zeal to show them the bitter lot of beauty, or with anything except “The Gift Outright,” in which there is the line about “many deeds of war” being the deed to the country.

The three of us, Holly and Alex and I, were traveling the outer ring of the Pentagon on our lunch hour, talking about Alex's future. He was going to run for office as a Democrat. He would start locally. The Secretary of Defense was coming toward us, surrounded by men with cameras on their shoulders and strings of spiral cord looped around them, and he was laughing, not exactly heartily but not with the craven note, either, of a man who would live to write a book about
how bitterly mistaken he was in this period. He was not much further along than the interns, it turned out. He, too, had a lot to learn. “Hello, Alex,” he said.

“Is that somebody?” said Holly.

“That was the Secretary of Defense,” said Alex in despair.

“No, really?” Holly said. “Why don't we have one of those chocolate milkshakes instead of coffee.” In the Center Court she sat down on a bench while Alex went to buy the famous double-chocolate milkshakes of the Pentagon concessionaire. Pressing my hand Holly said, “I have something I want to tell you. It'll surprise you, I bet. It's a little bit bad, now.” I said, “Tell me.” But Alex was already handing her milkshake over her shoulder from behind us. “Well, we'll talk later, hear? I
need
to. Alex, now you brought me—this can't be double chocolate, is it? Well! I remember it as so very delicious the last time.”

A few days after she told me, I knocked on Mr. Orlenko's door. After a second he said harshly, “Come in.” None of us sat down in that office, but Holly was sitting in the chair in which Mr. Orlenko seated his superiors, with their strange deference to him. She sat with legs crossed, in her lilac shift and the rope sandals she had started wearing to make her less tall, frowning, as if she had not been fervently talking to me in the bathroom half an hour before while she ran cold water on her wrists. Ordinarily Mr. Orlenko liked me; he explained my tasks to me with that exaggerated foreign intentness and then stood back satisfied to see me read what he had written. But he looked at me now as if I could be loathed as thoroughly as Khrushchev. I thought in surprise, almost in fear: Holly told him. She told him she told me. And I looked back at him as innocently as I could.

They both lit cigarettes as I recited my message and held out my document. “Put it with the rest!” he said with a jerk of his arm, hitting his t's hard and striking his knuckles with the cigarette on the side of the safe. He tore off his glasses and massaged the black eyebrows.

Then I saw them in the hall of war paintings. This was a still, wide gallery of a corridor, with tall doors bearing teak plaques. Hundreds of paintings. Cannon, trenches, foot soldiers of the Spanish-American War, the Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. Torn sketches
taken from the pockets of the dead. Orlenko was stiff-armed and wore his sinister look, Holly was the one leaning and pleading. I saw her put her hand out and hook her long fingers with their oval nails in his belt, and then rudely, no longer pleading but with force, pull him against her.

That was what I saw. But a secretary who dared to open Orlenko's door when he didn't answer her knock saw more, and the story raced out, a spark along a fuse. The thing that lit it was this particular secretary's choice of the word “astride.” Astride. Without that word the story might have died away. Somebody else repeated it. “She was right there, astride him in the chair.” “Astride of him” were the actual words. Of course that was something you could not help picturing. Her long legs, her blond, hanging hair, his arrogant face thrown back, the chair.

No longer did Holly pause outside Alex's office and lead him off alone under the eyes of his supervisor. “Come
with
me,” she would say to me. “Alex will chase after me if you don't.” She no longer liked to be sent around the miles of corridor with documents, she liked to stay in our hallway, smoking dreamily in the ladies' room, drifting to Orlenko's door. She would knock a music of three knocks and then one, soft yet urgent, and lead him away. She concealed nothing; she liked to smile into everybody's eyes in a blinded way.

Orlenko began to take a lunch hour. His phone would ring, and at the nearby desks we could hear his chair scrape back, his terrible sighs, his scrabbling in the drawer for his Camels. Then he would come out, close his door, and go.

Alex would come up out of his chair and be at the door of his tiny office—he had been given an office—if he saw me walking with Holly. He would start right in signaling me to leave him alone with her, but Holly always said to me, “Come on, you promised.” Holly walked ahead of him while he whipped his thigh with the manila folder. Then he began to hiss at her. “Why, Holly? Why?”

Late in the summer we were sitting in the Center Court, where the paved walks wound in and out of tended rosebushes. There were traveling clouds, an intense four o'clock sun in the hedges of arborvitae
planted in half-circles around the stone benches. Someone tended them. Someone worked to keep aphids off the roses, as had been decreed by the landscape designers for this building, the Pentagon.

None of this was mystery, to me. “Leave something to learn later.” That's what Frost said.

Holly was not sitting up straight. Her hair was tied back with a scarf as if to expose her two pimples and the darkened skin under her eyes. The scarf went halfway down her back, a relic of her stylishness. Alex couldn't take his eyes off it. Finally he took between his fingers the tiny rolled hem of silk he had been touching on the back of the bench.

“I don't know,” Holly said, bending her head down so that the scarf puffed off in his hand, “Oh, God, I don't know. Nobody does!” and she jumped up, scattering the pigeons. “They don't know where he went!” With a sob, she covered her face. Because she was beautiful, everyone out on the sidewalk turned and looked at her.

I was sad for Alex, too, as he went after her with her scarf in his hand. Myself I see crossing the little garden, looking up at the inner walls of the building and seeing movement in the windows, a uniformed back, a flash of light off glasses, and half-thinking to myself that this love triangle—all at once it was one, now that it was over—was more important than what the people in those offices were doing behind the windows. It was this that the books we carried around were about. Even if they pretended to be about war.

That was what I thought at eighteen, in the Center Court of the Pentagon, ready for some passion to overtake me as it had Holly, steeped in my right to it. I am haunted now by the thought that some page in that sheaf of papers, that endless list we ridiculed as we typed it, figured in the death of a little boy like my own, the one I would have in ten years when the war that did not even have a name that summer was dragging toward its end. I can't remember. I can't remember a line I typed. There we all sat, typing. There we all stood, drinking our coffee and falling in love. What was I dreaming of as I typed so fast, the Selectric ball whirling the letters off my fingers? Did they land in someone's flesh?

At the center of that week was the safe: the failure of someone—Orlenko—to drop the rod down through the drawer handles and padlock it, his failure, one night, even to twirl the combination lock on the top drawer. Only by coincidence had the oversight been discovered and reported, by someone who stayed in the office even later than he.

“We are always at war,” one of the National Security speakers told us. “Only sometimes we allow ourselves to forget that we are at war.” Even so, the precautions were often forgotten; it happened to the summer interns all the time. In the morning you could hear the cry, “Oh no, here's my ribbon still in the machine.”

All Mr. Orlenko had to do was make an appearance before a security board and be reprimanded. But instead he vanished. Within a week it was given out that his departure was a breakdown of a private sort. In other corridors the talk was of a college girl, a beauty, who had lured the head of a division away from his immigrant family that had lived on potatoes for three years in a camp on an unpronounceable border. And then she wouldn't have him, of course. Her family stepped in. The father an officer. That was what was said.

Strangely enough, though for days Holly was away from her desk all day being interrogated somewhere in the building, along with her father who had been called in from his base, in our corridor everyone shielded her. We pretended that it was all a matter of wild rumors having their origin in some other corridor.
People from—where he was from. They're paranoid. They'll bolt.
The secretaries even included Holly in the talk, bringing her coffee and aspirin, soothing and pampering her.

“I got a letter.” She drew me into the auditorium and pulled the doors shut. She felt for the switch of the blue light, so that I could read it. There was Orlenko's crested, beautiful script. “He's gone, he's hiding. No address. Even if I could write him a letter I couldn't make him see it's
nothing
.” She was biting her broken thumbnail. “Where can he go? He doesn't even have his family with him. He thinks he's running for his life, he doesn't know what
country
this is.”

And what country is this?
I could have said, but neither of us would have known.

“Terrible things happened to him in the war, you know.
Terrible
things.” Her violet eyes went black. “But he never gave in. He drew pictures. His hero was a poet, a famous poet from there—oh, I'll get you the name—who drew pictures with a lump of coal when he was starving.” That war was only twenty years in the past, but they were our years—we were eighteen and twenty-one—and we were both gazing into a history as uninvestigated as calculus. We knew the Allies and the Axis. We were majoring in literature.

“What else does he say?”

She looked away. “My ‘beauty,' is what he says, made him careless.” She held the envelope against her chest. I remember the crooked stamp and the elaborate capitals of her name: “Miss Hollis Baird.” It had been mailed right there in Washington. “He's not here any more, though. I know it. He doesn't trust anybody. Everybody over there hurt him, Russians, Germans, everybody. And
this
place, oh, God, I hate this place. These
people
in here. They're the ones did it, up in Security, they're the ones
scared
him.”

All the rest of the summer Alex comforted her, listened, took her coffee, walked her up and down the corridors, stood with her while she cried in the hot parking lot, until we all went back to school. “I just told poor Alex good-bye,” she said on the last day. “She's going to marry him,” the secretaries predicted. But she did not.

She sees him now and then, just as she writes sometimes to me. She is the mother of three grown sons who attended the same private school as his two. I have read that she is a Washington hostess, though she has nothing to say in her letters about that.

For some reason she got back in touch with me, years after this. For a while, she said, she went a little wild. “God, I went through the whole thing. In San Francisco I tripped, I marched, I hung around the Dead. I told my Daddy off.” Looking back, she was glad of it all, except for what she had done that one summer, might have done, might have caused to happen—because we never knew what happened—to Nazar Orlenko. “Do you think there's a love of your life?” she wrote.

In the last picture I have, you can see she is heavier, though she stands behind the three tall sons. The arms are plump, the blond hair short. We have all changed, and any of us may change again, although Orlenko, strange sacrifice, will never come to her again in her beauty, nor a secret list extract itself from a torso, nor the Pentagon wheel back up into the sky.

kisses

O
ne of the residents kissed Shannon. No one had done that for some time; her husband Garth did not kiss. A staff manual for the retirement village was already in print and it had a paragraph for moments like the one in the Kralls' living room: inappropriate situation arises, staff member reacts with calm, makes a report. But Shannon was her own supervisor, so there was no one to report it to. And she had returned the kiss, which began in sympathy but held for a beat. When Shannon stepped back Mr. Krall's eyes were still closed, lids dark as his wife's eye shadow. He did not look like an old man, he looked like a young man exhausted.

She had met him days ago but on this day he entered the room with his hand outstretched, so she turned off the vacuum cleaner and shook hands with him. “Not Mr. Krall, no. Ivan.” And did she, with her high cheeks—he swiped his own cheekbone with his thumb, admiringly, she thought—come from central Europe? No? Where did her family originate? How many in the family? So small, no brothers, no sisters! No matter, what did she study in school? And no mathematics? And her parents? Ah, divorce, divorce. And her husband, the young man digging and planting, who was not here in the early weeks? A soldier. And was he from some other country, that he worked so hard?

And when she was on the porch next door—yesterday morning, was it not?—had she been crying? In the early morning, with the dog. Yet this was not, of course, for him to ask. And yet, her face. . . . For tears swell the lips.

The Kralls, Ivan and DuÅ¡ka, were the poster couple for a magazine piece about the village and its green ethos, though Shannon had to clean hard before anybody got in there to photograph their lifestyle. She had warned the founders, Mark and Dane. Mark said, “They've been here a month, how bad can it be?” About a house once the roof was on, Shannon saw, Mark knew nothing. He might be learning the ropes of construction but he was still a computer guy.

“‘Green ethos,'” Garth said when he was first home and Mark was showing him around, telling him about the job. “Sounds like an MRE.”

“Mark doesn't know what that is,” Shannon said.

“I do happen to know what that is,” Mark said. “Meals Ready to Eat.”

In the old days Garth would have made friends with somebody like Mark. With anybody. He would have grinned and said, “Ever eat one?”

The counters, of a composite Mark said would outsell granite one day, were already hidden under dead plants, egg cartons, books held open with potatoes, cutting boards stacked wet, but the Kralls themselves looked good: a tall, lean, white-haired pair in turtlenecks, Duška with silver rings on her thumbs, Ivan with a voice as deep as Garth's smoker's voice and blue eyes wasted on an old man.

Duška was older than he and had something that affected her motor skills but not her mind. Her name had a little
v
over the s that made it a “sh.” “You pronounced it wrong,” Shannon told Mark and Dane. “Say
Dooshka
.” At home she said to Garth, “I get to boss those guys around. Mark and Dane. They like it. Employee input. How you get to, like, consensus.”

She was supposed to act out showing Duška the cupboards hung so low there was no need for reaching, but first she had to use the
sink sprayer to run the dirt of plant roots off DuÅ¡ka's hands. “This child is an angel,” DuÅ¡ka told the photographer. “Do you see her washing me? Take a picture! My dear, angels are often given this plain beauty that you have. You see? She does not hear. That is the mark of an angel.”

The photographers kept wanting Shannon in the pictures. When the sun came out they stood her in front of the old truck with its painted sign, “Neat & Green.” They wanted her plaid shirt and the soft broom from the Asian grocery store where she bought Garth's beer cheap. Her blond ponytail.

DuÅ¡ka laughed at her apology. “It is you, my child, who will sell the houses for them. Before our eyes, you prepare the home. To Ivan—ah, what a good thing you don't cook for him, he would be lost. I see you understand this. You understand men.”

“I do,” said Shannon without surprise. “Some of them.”

House, barn, silos were gone. You crossed a bridge over a wide stream where the cows would have drunk, and arrived at the farm's original driveway, where a cow-sized boulder had been set, engraved with the name of the place, “Greenholm.” The stream was waist deep in places, with currents tugging at the willow roots. Here the trees had all been left standing, their limbs brushing the water and already, to the photographers' satisfaction, littering it with yellow leaves. Sometimes Shannon took her sandwich and sat on the bank with the dog. The first week Garth was back from Afghanistan she had waded in with her shoes on and stood where it was deep and cold, to wash her eyes, but that had disturbed the dog, who splashed in and swam to her and back, and in and back again, and then ran in circles on the bank until she came out.

Eventually a pool and fitness center would go in, along with an assisted-living compound and a low cedar building devoted to continuing care, with wheelchair paths through the vegetable gardens, but for now the people moving in would be retirees roughly like the Kralls, still active and driving, the founders said.

Everybody working on the site met regularly with Mark and Dane—guys had to come down off the backhoes and sit with investors—to have their say about the village, or the first two paved circles of what would be a village in a year or two. Only three houses were occupied while the heavy construction was going on: the Kralls, a younger couple who had already driven away in their camper—the guy so frail Shannon didn't see how he would get the gas cap off—and now two old sisters, the Newells. But if one of them asked a question, or a visitor did, anybody working on the site was expected to know the brochure and answer.

Green Retirement, the website said. “A way to keep your footprint small when you're packing it in.” That was Dane, at one of the early meetings. Mark said, “And for saying ‘packing it in,' there will be a fine.” They were two nice guys who had made a lot of money in software. More than a lot. They rode to work on the bike trail, and one or both of them would make a face when a backhoe fired up, even though Garth said it was all hybrid machinery they had out there, the new diesel electrics.

While they talked, sitting down, tipping back in their chairs, Shannon thought, the whole thing was going right past them on its own. Mark said, “We're offering our residents a way they can stay in the fight. They've been progressive people.”

Dane raised his hand. “‘Have been?'”

He and Mark would admit it was themselves they were thinking of, down the road. They had that quirk of rich people, agreeing ahead of time with whatever you might accuse them of. Shannon knew this from working in a good restaurant, where a woman would say, “I just take forever to make up my mind,” and her husband would say with some pride, “I can attest to that.”

When Garth first got home she showed him the brochure. “So these guys have no clue. They're like, ‘Knees bad? Widowed? Here, have an ice cream sandwich!'” His squint made her add, “But they're OK guys. You'll like them, I bet.”

A minute later he jumped up. “My jacket,” he said, because he couldn't think of where anything was.

“On the hook,” she said. “Pretty hot out, though.”

“Ice cream. I'll go get some.” He was back in fifteen minutes with beer. She didn't know whether he forgot things or never meant to do them.

Sod waited on pallets for Garth to unroll it in the main square for the only grass that would require mowing. Solar panels were up, on bungalows sited low so rooflines wouldn't mar the hills running up to woods they owned as well, said to cover hundreds of acres. Deer wandered out in the evenings to eat the grass, and tore out the surveyor's flags or chewed the salt from a cap left on the seat of a backhoe. They picked their way down into the excavations, where something would spook them back up the sides in sprays of dirt. “Deer will come to fresh dirt,” Mark said.

Shannon said, “Ha ha, it says so on the deer website?”

The backhoes started so easily—Garth had shown her—that she said she wondered if a deer could hit something and start one, getting up on the track the way a little buck with antler nubs had done. Or activate the bucket, propped ready to start mouthing lump after lump like an animal that couldn't actually eat. She was always looking for a subject, now. She didn't really wonder, she knew about the dead man's switch so you couldn't jump off and run over yourself, and Garth didn't answer anyway, he slapped his cigarette pocket. “Left 'em in the truck.” He went at a run-walk, straight downhill like the deer into and out of the pit instead of around it. When she got to the parking lot there was no one, but the air had the smell of his lighter fluid.

Going over her business plan with the bank, Shannon had lied. Or not an outright lie, but a certain picture of herself and Garth. The bank guy had a brass paperweight of that dollar-bill eagle with arrows in its claws, so she mentioned the war. “My husband would be at this meeting but he's still over there because you know, stop-loss.” She could see the guy did not know. She told him how Garth had built a hand-cranked generator in shop, and rebuilt a vintage Sears bike—he would have laughed at the word “vintage”—instead of driving a car.
She didn't say nobody who knew Garth Moran in high school had ever heard him say the word “environment,” and that the bike was to get around on because his dad wouldn't let him drive the car. To get a car, his brother had quit school and gone to work in a body shop. After hours he worked on a totaled van until he had the money for it, and then he got in and drove away. At first Garth thought it was just a trip. But although he would send Garth money, and call him every week from LA where their mother was, and listen to his despairing arguments for an hour at a time, he would not come back.

Shannon didn't say that right after they got married the boss in Lawn and Garden broke a promise to switch Garth to full time, and he walked off the job and enlisted. Walked into the army. Things went fast after that. Before he had his orders his father got him a T-shirt that said “Born to Fight Trained to Kill.” At the pre-deployment picnic his father said, “Guess he's on his way.”

“Sure is,” Shannon said.

“Nothing to stop him,” his father said. He looked like Garth but mean. She had the grill in front of her and she could have messed up his sleeve accidentally with the tongs but she stood there clicking them until he walked away.

Garth was coming, carrying a tray of bratwurst that he set down on the ground so he could get his arms around her while the smoke stung tears out of her eyes.

Garth looked good to the bank. The military, the jobs in high school. Knowing how to lay sod and bed stone looked good, she could tell, despite the fact that the man behind the desk spent the whole time studying her, up and down. When she finished talking about Garth he sat back and gave her a grin she recognized. “I'm hearing high-school sweethearts. Kids! But hey, you got married.” She didn't answer because she knew they weren't supposed to ask about anything like that. He knew, too, because he wiped the grin off his face and said, “Sounds like a well-put-together plan.”

“Some old guy,” she told her friends. “Thought you got married so you could have sex.” She still had all her high school friends and they got a laugh out of that.

A
boy born to kiss finds that out the way you might realize you can draw, or do math. His ways come naturally to him. He will not smile first. Sometimes he'll kiss you without putting his arms around you at all, just holding you at the mouth. You always know he's not just kissing, he's kissing you. His face will have a concentration like they get when they're playing Counter-Strike. She was explaining this to her friends, who were a few steps behind her at that time.

It was when the new shooter games were first in stores and she complained to her friends at sleepovers because Garth and his brother didn't own any games, so the two of them were always at some kid's house when she was looking for Garth. But this look she was describing was his, when they were alone. Think of the movies, where they're about to kiss and the man looks like he's ready to dive off a building. Her friends shivered. They all wanted Garth Moran or somebody like him. In the halls his teammates called him The Lover and shoved him against the lockers. He shoved back but not hard. He was easy on everybody and everybody was easy on him. “How did you get like this?” she said.