Early Warning

WHEN DID LILLIAN HAVE TIME to read the papers, or to watch the news on TV? And yet things filtered through — Hungary in November, the Suez crisis at the same time, both of them crushing. Even so, though Arthur came home a little late, he did come home in the usual way, full of fun and with a big appetite, two helpings of everything, though you couldn’t tell that to look at him. He didn’t lose his sex drive until February, which Lillian thought, secretly, was a bit of a relief. Then, one night, she got up to go to the bathroom, and when she got back to bed, in the moonlight the tears were glistening on his cheeks and his eyes were wide open, even though he was lying still and not saying a word. It was like getting in bed with a stranger. She said, “Arthur?”

He rolled onto his side, his back to her, and she slipped under the covers. She put her hand on his head and scratched, just very lightly, and it put her right to sleep. Sometime after that, he slipped his arms around her sleeping body and woke her up, sobbing on her shoulder. He hadn’t been like this for years, not since Timmy was born alive and healthy. Even when his father died, his eyes had remained dry and his back straight.

She did what she did with Debbie and Deanie, just let him sob, patting him lightly on the leg. She could see the phosphorescent hands of the clock glowing from where she lay — a quarter after three, marching on to a quarter to four. Finally, he heaved a big sigh, pulled his one arm from underneath her, and sat up. She said, “You okay?”

He wiped his face with the corner of the sheet and sighed again. He said, “Well, if this room is bugged, I’m probably out of a job.”

“Is this room bugged?”

“I’ve checked. I don’t think so.”

Lillian said, “You’re kidding me.”

“I hope I am.”

He stood up and went down the hall to the bathroom. She heard him open and close doors — peeping in on the boys and the girls. Then he sat down in the armchair and said, “Did we say Dean could sleep on the floor?”

“For now.”

“Okay. I just wanted to make sure Timmy is not imposing some cruel and unusual punishment.”

“No, Deanie’s agitating for a tent. He wants me to tack one side of his blanket to the wall.”

Arthur said, “Please tell me that we’ve been married less than a hundred years.”

“We’ve been married eleven years and three months.”

Arthur let his head drop onto the back of the chair and inhaled deeply. Lillian was sure right then that he had found another woman — someone who had no children, or whose figure was holding up better. She, who had once worn a 4, now wore an 8. What had ever made her think that such a dashing man as Arthur would be satisfied with her? Georgetown was a hotbed of infidelity — the women who didn’t talk about it all the time were those who sleeping with their friends’ husbands, and so you could always tell who had just commenced an affair.

He said, “I don’t know how I’m going to take it anymore, and now—”

“Now what, Arthur?”

He leaned forward and put his face in his hands, and mumbled something. Lillian realized that he was not talking about their marriage. She knelt down in front of him, took his hands away from his face, and said quietly, “Say that again, Arthur.”

“Eighty percent of our budget goes for absolute crap.”

She waited.

“I hate Frank Wisner. I hate every stupid idea that he ever had, starting with parachuting blockheads into Poland at the end of the war. Direct action! Sabotage! Subversion! His operations are the definition of ‘half cocked’! And I like Ike. I do like Ike! But thirty thousand got killed in Budapest, just mowed down, and it was because Ike wouldn’t lift a finger, and the Russians just rolled over them. Wisner hated Nagy, he’d once been a commiebastard — that’s how he talks — there is no redemption for commiebastards. We had two guys translating from the Hungarian — two, just two — but everything they translated indicated that Nagy was going to go our way, and everything we broadcasted said, ‘Go, go, go, we’re right behind you,’ but they didn’t actually look around, because if they had they would have seen us running the other direction, because Ike has some other plan, God knows what it is.”

“The Hungarians knew it was risky, Arthur….”

He took her hands and peered into her face. He said, “You know what I do every day, Lillian? I exaggerate the Soviet threat. I say they have a hundred new bombers when they only have ten. I say that there are twenty divisions when there are ten divisions. I say that they are thirty percent closer to thermonuclear-tipped ICBMs than they are.”

“Why do you do that, darling?”

“Because maybe the Soviets are lying and our sources are wrong and we have to be on the safe side, and eighty percent of the budget that goes to doing crap is taken away from finding out crap. Because I’ve become a jerk. Because that’s what they want to hear. I do feel like I’ve been doing this for a hundred years and that I can’t do it anymore.”