* * *

  He did get back to Hawthorne before Anna came home. It helped him less than he’d thought it would. When she walked through the door, the first thing she did was toss the Times’s front page on the couch so the story about trying to raise the Russian submarine was face up.

  She pointed at the photo of the Glomar Explorer. “That’s the ship you were on, isn’t it? One of the guys in sales with me noticed it and gave it to me.”

  “Yeah, that’s the ship,” he said—denying it would be worse. “I saw the story, too, up on campus. All I can tell you is, it wasn’t going after subs while I was on it.” That was true: just barely, but it was.

  And Anna, of course, didn’t believe it. “Don’t bullshit me. I hate when people do that. I especially hate it when somebody I think I can trust does it.” She pointed at the paper again. “Are you gonna try and tell me that story’s a lie?”

  A lot of it was, or at least wrong. Jerry could see, though, that insisting on that would only get him in deeper. So he said, “Babe, they built the Glomar Explorer in Philadelphia. They sailed it all the way down around South America, ’cause it’s too wide to fit through the Panama Canal. Then they brought it up again, to Long Beach. Whatever the hell they did out in the Atlantic, nobody said word one about it to me.” He blessed the Times reporters for screwing up the ocean where they thought the Glomar Explorer did its dirty work.

  “Really?” The way his wife studied him made John P. seem like a rank beginner. But Jerry thought her voice held a little uncertainty. He sure hoped so.

  “Really.” He went over to a bookcase and plucked the manganese nodule from it. “This no-shit came up from seventeen thousand feet in the middle of the Pacific.” The nodule no-shit came from half that depth off the California coast, but he was into it now. He went on, “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition as soon as you came in.”

  “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Anna exclaimed, and some of the tightness eased from his spine. If she was doing Monty Python shtick with him, she couldn’t be too mad or too sure he was lying. They’d both fallen crazy in love with the Flying Circus when KCET, the L.A. PBS station, started running it, about the time Jerry got back to the mainland.

  “The soft chair! The comfy cushions!” Jerry said. Yeah, he’d got away with it.

  Unless he hadn’t. At dinner, Anna said, “If that ship did that kind of stuff, probably half the people on it worked for the CIA.”

  All the people on it worked for the CIA. Including me, Jerry thought. Aloud, he answered, “Nobody said so. Nobody tried to recruit me. Nobody had horns or kept tucking a spiked tail down his pants leg or anything. They were just … guys. You met that Steve Dole.”

  “Who knows what he does when I’m not meeting him?” Anna said darkly. Jerry told himself to put Habitable Planets for Man someplace where she wouldn’t see it. If she noticed Steve’s name on the spine, she was liable to wonder why a guy who wrote about life on other planets was out in the middle of the Pacific scouring the seafloor for manganese nodules.

  After he did the dishes, he started nuzzling her neck and nibbling at her ear. “Cut that out!” she said, brushing him away like an annoying bug.

  “What? You don’t think it’s an ear-ogenous zone?”

  She made a horrible face. “Cut that out, too! Seriously, wait till morning. I’m tired. If you’re not tired, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

  He didn’t feel like waiting till morning; he felt like it right then. But fighting about sex could get even uglier than fighting about in-laws. He nodded and said, “Okay.” There was a certain luxury in slowly and lazily fooling around on a Saturday morning. And if he felt he compromised more often than she did, he would have bet she thought the opposite.

  What he mostly did that night was wonder how the CIA would handle the leak. He knew it hadn’t come from him. They might not be so sure. If they’d ever noticed that their run of photos didn’t exactly match their run of negatives … So far, they didn’t seem to have. He had to hope seeming matched reality.

  Or he had to do something. As long as those photos sat in an envelope with no one studying them, they didn’t mean much. Of course, taking them out and showing them to somebody, to anybody, was the quickest way he could think of to finish the story of his own life while it was still only a novella.

  To keep from thinking about that, he took another stab at working on his diss. He even got into it, more than he had for a while. He was sitting at the Smith-Corona and making some sense of frequency patterns when Anna kissed him on the back of the neck.

  Caught by surprise, he jumped. Then he tried to grab her. Laughing, she skipped away. “No fair,” he said. “You were the one who said, Wait till tomorrow.”

  “You looked so cute, though,” she answered, laughing still. “Like everything was a million miles away. I thought I’d give you a wake-up call.”

  This had happened before. If he pushed it, she might go on saying no. Or she might give in and show she resented giving in. She didn’t get that, once she pulled him out of writing, he had trouble getting back to where he’d been. The other possibility was that she got it but didn’t care. Jerry preferred not to think about that.

  He looked down at the sheet in the typewriter again. For all he could remember about where he’d been going, it might as well have been written in Cherokee. Sometimes he could start it up by putting one word after another till the whole thing got rolling again; a critic he admired called that method “shitting rocks.” Sometimes even shitting rocks didn’t help. This was one of those nights.

  “Fuck,” he said softly, and gave up. Maybe tomorrow would be a better day. He hoped like hell tomorrow would have a better morning, anyhow.

  He headed for the bedroom. Before he got there, the King of Siam did a flop-and-roll at his feet. After a couple of months living there, he’d become an acceptable human being. He squatted down, rubbed the cat’s stomach, and scratched the sides of his mouth. The King of Siam condescended to purr to show that his loyal subject was doing something right.

  “What kind of drugs are you feeding him? I can hear that in here,” Anna called. She was what she was, the same way the King of Siam was what he was. Jerry was, too, though at the moment what he felt like was a dog in a cats’ world.

  * * *

  Sunday morning, Jerry and Tim went to a park off El Segundo to play catch and hit fungoes, and goof around. Alex often joined them, but he was down with a cold.

  “Spring training,” Jerry said when Tim picked him up. The Angels were working out in Palm Springs. The Dodgers, whom Tim liked more, got ready in Florida, the way they had since they played in Brooklyn.

  “I wish!” Tim said. Jerry laughed ruefully. They were both klutzes; that was part of why they were friends. Alex made a better athlete than either of them. His glasses were even thicker than Jerry’s, though, so it didn’t matter much.

  Nobody else was at the park when they got there. It didn’t seem to get used a whole lot. Jerry wondered why. It was a perfectly good park, with a couple of diamonds, basketball and handball courts, and a sandbox with a jungle gym. Whether anyone else was or not, he was glad it was there.

  Any scout who watched the two of them work out would have gone off shaking his head, and probably toward the closest bar. Jerry had a good time throwing and hitting and running around anyway. He hated dropping balls, but he knew too well that that came with the territory for him. He admired the guys who made baseball look easy all the more because he knew too well it wasn’t.

  “That was exciting,” he said, after they’d both had enough. “Not good, but exciting.”

  “No shit.” Tim looked up at the sky.

  Jerry’s gaze followed his friend’s. A gull glided by; they weren’t very far inland. It made Jerry think of the gooney birds he’d seen while he was on the Glomar Explorer: a smaller model, but the same basic design.

  Then Tim said, “My security clearance came up for renewal this past week.”

  “Yeah?” Jerry nodded. He was one of Tim’s references. A couple of years earlier, somebody’d phoned him and asked how long he’d known his friend and whether he was sure Tim was loyal to the United States.

  “Yeah. At my interview, they were asking questions about you.”

  “Were they?” Ice walked up Jerry’s back. “Like what?”

  “Like how reliable I thought you were. That was what they said, reliable. Like whether you could be counted on to keep your commitments.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said of course you were. You’re my buddy. What am I going to say to the spooks?” Tim Ishihara sounded offended he’d asked.

  “Thanks, man.” A friend in need is a friend indeed ran through Jerry’s head. “Did they … ask about the envelope?”

  “I don’t know what’s in it, so I can’t say for sure, but I think so.” Tim chuckled harshly. “Which is funny, ’cause when they were sitting there grilling me they were no more than ten feet from it. They wanted to know if you were a careful custodian of government property. Sounds pretty weird, doesn’t it?”

  “Sounds like what happens when people who don’t know how to write do it anyway.”

  “Yeah.” His friend eyed him. “That ship you were on, it wasn’t just out there mining the ocean, huh?”

  So he’d seen Friday’s Times, too. Jerry stuck to as much of his story as he could: “It didn’t do anything else while I was on it. What happened in the Atlantic before it got to Long Beach, I can’t tell you.”

  “Okay.” Tim left it right there.

  Jerry realized he could have put that better. Or maybe he couldn’t. Did Tim think he meant I don’t know what it did in the Atlantic or I can’t talk about what it did in the Atlantic? Tim respected secrets—respected them more than Jerry did, for sure. Jerry said, “I think before real long I may need that envelope back.”

  “Let me know so I can get it out and bring it straight to you. I don’t want to leave it at my place. I’ve got the feeling that’d be dumb,” Tim said.

  “Will do. Um … don’t mention it on the phone, y’know?”

  “I won’t. I already thought of that. How much trouble did you get yourself into?”

  “More than I wanted to, that’s for sure.”

  “I believe it.” Tim hesitated. “Would knowing what it is do me any good?”

  “No. Christ, no!” Jerry was a halfhearted Jew. Tim was an equally halfhearted Buddhist. Most of the Japanese-Americans Jerry knew were Baptists, but Tim’s dad hadn’t bothered to convert. Both of them said Christ! and Jesus! all the time anyway, because they lived in a Christian country. Jerry went on, “For one thing, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. For another, what you don’t know, nobody else can make you tell him.”

  “That doesn’t sound real good.”

  “It isn’t. It’s liable to get worse, too.” Jerry wondered how much worse. They still weren’t sure about him. They wouldn’t be sniffing around the edges of what he’d done if they were sure. They’d stick him in a soundproofed room somewhere and work on him with hot things and sharp things and pointy things.

  “All right. Thanks for playing straight with me, anyway. Whatever happens to me, I don’t want anything bad coming down on Cheryl, know what I mean?”

  “Afraid I do. I haven’t said a word to Anna, either, and I’m not going to. The less she knows, the better off she is.”

  Tim digested that. Then he said, “Maybe we should head on home.”

  “Maybe we should. I’m sorry I got you into this to begin with.”

  “Fuck that. We’re friends.” Time sounded sure and serene. Jerry feared he wouldn’t have done nearly so well with their roles reversed. The old riff on the Kipling poem also crossed his mind: If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs, chances are you don’t understand the situation.

  When he walked into the apartment, he set down his bat and glove and threw his Angels cap onto the couch like a Frisbee. The King of Siam plainly didn’t know whether to attack it or run away. Anna wrinkled her nose and pointed toward the bathroom. “To the showers, Pete Rose!”

  “You think I stink now, you should have seen me chasing fly balls,” he replied with dignity. Anna laughed, so he supposed he broke even, anyhow.

  * * *

  The quarter dragged on. During the last week of instruction, students in Jerry’s sections who’d spent the time since January doing nothing swarmed to his office to find out how to get As just the same. He did what he could for them, knowing what he’d probably do to them when he read their finals. That had saddened him in his first quarter TAing. He was hardened to it now.

  And, one morning when he didn’t have to be on campus, he visited the Bank of America on Gardena Boulevard. He took out $8,500 in cash. If he had to disappear in a hurry, he wouldn’t be paying for things with a check or his credit card, not unless he wanted to yell Here I am! at the top of his lungs.

  It was funny, in a black way. The CIA had dropped a small fortune on him to make sure he kept his mouth shut. He might end up using a chunk of it to fly under their radar. Or he might put it back later if he was worrying about nothing.

  He wished he thought he was.

  He wondered whether the bank would hassle him for taking out so much cash. But, by luck, he dealt with the same teller he’d had when he wondered about the money to begin with. “Hello again!” she said and didn’t ask him anything except what kind of bills he wanted and, after she gave him the fat envelope, “Would you like our guard to go out to your car with you?”

  “That’d be terrific. Thanks!” he said.

  The guard’s name badge said he was Paul. He was a black man in his forties; he wore a Stetson and a pistol on his hip. He walked with a limp. “Sorry I’m not quicker,” he said, his voice deep and also slow. “Stopped somethin’ in Korea a long time ago.”

  “It’s okay. Take it easy. I’m not in a hurry,” Jerry said.

  When Paul got a look at the Rambler, he said, “You oughta buy yourself some better wheels with that there money.”

  “Maybe I will.” Jerry tried to give the guard five dollars. Walking had to hurt him.

  But Paul waved the money aside. “Bank pays me good enough. This, it’s just part of my job.”

  Tuesday morning at eight o’clock the following week, Jerry sat with the other TAs to proctor the final and to gather up his sections’ bluebooks. He did some of them in his office. The pile he didn’t finish there, he took home. Grades were due back forty-eight hours after the exam ended, so he had till Thursday at eleven.

  He worked on the finals till Anna came home. One of the Bobbsey Twins flunked; the other got a D+. They were cute, but they were stupid. Or, if you looked at it another way, they were stupid, but they were cute.

  “Did the prettier one get the D?” his wife asked when he told her.

  “As a matter of fact, no. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t even suspect anything,” Jerry said.

  “What a shame.” Anna sounded as brokenhearted as Jerry thought she would.

  Perhaps as a reward for his not cutting pretty girls any slack, she fixed dinner herself: ground beef, taco seasoning, and rice. Homemade Hamburger Helper. Anything but exciting, but pretty much harmless. Jerry washed the dishes, though. That had hardened into routine.

  Then he settled down at the table and started grading more finals. More than half of him hoped Anna would come by and kiss him on the back of the neck again. It made him mad when he was working on his dissertation. Now he would have welcomed any excuse to stop for a while.

  Anna stayed away. She and the King of Siam were doing whatever they were doing in the back of the apartment. Jerry yawned. A few minutes later, he yawned again, wider this time. If he drank coffee now, he wouldn’t sleep at all tonight. He turned the radio on to KNX. Listening to the news station might keep him alert. He’d done that a lot as revelation followed revelation during Watergate.

  He didn’t pay much attention to the stock market report or the sports news. The local car crashes and shootings didn’t interest him, either. But KNX was a CBS affiliate, and hooked in with the network’s national and foreign correspondents. They did that stuff better than anyone else in town.

  On a 5–4 vote, the Supreme Court had decided plays enjoyed the same First Amendment protection against obscenity charges as books, newspapers, and movies did. That seemed reasonable to Jerry. So did the British government’s recommendation of a Yes vote on joining the Common Market.

  But Vietnam was gurgling down the drain. Refugees were fleeing from the highlands to the coast, hoping to escape oncoming North Vietnamese forces. The latest North Vietnamese drive seemed aimed at splitting South Vietnam in half. Jerry shook his head. Too many people he knew had done and suffered too much for too little.

  Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers Party claimed the FBI was harassing it, which the FBI probably was. And Henry Kissinger and Andrei Gromyko were talking about the Middle East again.

  Jerry set another exam on the pile of ones he’d finished. He was more than halfway through them now. He hoped he’d get done by one in the morning, though two seemed more likely. As he reached for the next bluebook, part of him wished Kissinger and Gromyko were meeting to discuss Humpty Dumpty. Kissinger knew about it, of course. But he wouldn’t say anything. Not a chance in the world.

  Then the KNX newsman said, “As long as we’re talking about American-Soviet relations, some of you may have heard Jack Anderson’s show on another radio network earlier tonight. Anderson expanded on and corrected reporting in the Los Angeles Times from last month. The Hughes Glomar Explorer, he says, was indeed trying to raise a Russian submarine last summer, but in the North Pacific, not the Atlantic. No submarine was raised. He calls it a ‘boondoggle,’ and says the secrecy surrounding the project was ‘simply the cover-up of a failure—three hundred and fifty million dollars literally went down into the ocean.’”

  The newsman coughed and said, “Excuse me”: live radio. He went on, “Anderson added that some rumors about the Hughes Glomar Explorer’s mission were ‘absolutely unbelievable, and had to be intended to deceive.’” He paused. “We’ll be right back, with traffic on the ones, after these messages.”