“Had he spent a few days in Europe during the war, perhaps the trash man coming two hours late would not seem like the end of the world,” he said, extending his hand to introduce himself to Eleanor.

  She stopped, tilting her head to take in his accent, assess his background.

  “I lived in Italy in the war,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I could not agree with you more.”

  After the meeting, they brought Talbot into their new little circle, realizing only then they were neighbors on either side of a shared wall. Within a few weeks, the four met for cocktails after work and spent a Saturday morning at the Rosslyn bakery for coffee and croissants. Dinners together at Georgetown’s trendier places followed, evenings when they lingered so long at the table that several times, the waitstaff turned off the lights before the diners got the hint. So began their four-way love affair, all of them grateful to abide in this warm company. The women connected immediately, Eleanor impressed with Caroline’s resolve to earn a degree in something other than teaching, her independence in staying in DC to make her life. Caroline found Eleanor sophisticated and worldly in a manner unlike any American woman she knew. That she had followed her love of sculpture across the ocean, ignoring the peril, seemed a singular, astounding thing. Caroline savored the guided tours Eleanor laid out for them in the city’s museums, and most especially the coffee breaks they shared as they went. Both were buoyed to have found a friend in Washington who valued them apart from their husbands’ accomplishments.

  Talbot recognized in Rémy a grateful Frenchman who was aware his survival was due in part to the work of Allied intelligence units that had provided money, radios, resources, and personnel to support the Resistance in the war. The men did not speak of this directly, or of Tal’s role in it, but seemed to understand each other, the life-and-death situations each had confronted and survived. It made the humdrum of their post-war lives especially sweet. When either man had a leaky pipe, shelves to install, or shrubs to prune, they called each other for help. That soon expanded to taking in Senators’ games at Griffith Stadium and later, golf and fishing weekends with a few guys from Rémy’s office.

  On warm weekend evenings, they enjoyed steaks or burgers that Tal prepared on his patio grill, Eleanor overseeing the salad and potatoes, the Auclairs contributing an apple tart, chocolate soufflé, or perhaps macarons, depending on what Remy deemed best from the bakery. After the plates were cleared, it was usually Eleanor and Rémy who sat outside in the fading light, their heads together, loose-limbed and slightly drunk, retelling anecdotes from the war years the other already knew well, raising a glass to missed chances, to lives lost. Rémy, Caroline knew, had relished living life on a taut string, each decision pivotal to his very survival. He’d felt fully alive and essential, he admitted, when life was dangerously unpredictable.

  While their spouses commiserated, Tal and Caroline held their own colloquies, comparing how each continued to navigate marriage to a partner still coping with psychic wounds from the war.

  “Will she ever get over this?” Talbot mused aloud one late spring night just a few years into their friendship, as he and Caroline stood over a sink of dirty dishes, watching through the window as Eleanor and Rémy smoked his Gauloises on the patio.

  “This? Meaning losing those years, losing her family, her education? I don’t believe you ‘get over’ it, Talbot. You incorporate it. Or maybe medicate it. Try to eradicate it.” Caroline smiled, looking up at Tal and taking a wet plate from his hand. “Irradiate it, maybe?”

  He laughed. “Eradicate might be the best option. Just seems like she’s missing something, like our life together isn’t enough to keep her interested, let alone happy. I wish I could ‘eradicate’ whatever this unmet need is.”

  “I know what you mean. The pedestrian things Rémy spends his time on—should this little plot of land be zoned low-density? Medium? Sometimes he comes home practically enraged at the stupid things people get so worked up over. Outwardly, he seems so calm and settled. I think that’s the French in him, wanting to appear relaxed and patient. But it’s a ruse. He’s still kind of restless, as if he wished he could use his talents on more significant things.”

  “You seem pretty significant to me,” Tal said, drawing a surprised look from Caroline. He reached for her face, twisted a flyaway strand in his fingers. “He’d better watch it, Carrie, that someone else doesn’t move in while he’s distracted by his memories.”

  Caroline gave a nervous laugh and turned her attention to drying the flatware still on drainboard.

  . . .

  So began a brief, if intense interlude between them, Talbot reaching for her whenever they found themselves alone, planting a quick kiss on her cheek and later, her neck, his actions growing bolder, and eventually sexual, over the months. Given the bond between Eleanor and Rémy, it had not seemed wrong to Caroline at first—more like parity—that she and Talbot should have their own intimacies to balance the emotional attachment of their spouses. But over time, she found Talbot so adept, so smooth in the way he approached her, that Caroline realized this had nothing to do with balancing things out or Talbot’s attraction to her, specifically. He simply liked attention from women and had a sexual appetite to satisfy. That made what they were doing a different sort of thing, more tawdry and embarrassing, from the way it had first seemed to her. When she questioned him, he tried to say that Eleanor was vaguely aware of his needs and what he did to meet them—that she was a reasonable, modern woman who understood him. Caroline wasn’t so sure. Was there a wife anywhere who didn’t mind her husband straying?

  So she did her own fact-finding, bringing it up, obliquely, when Eleanor remarked that Talbot was getting yet another new secretary—his third in five years. Caroline asked if the churn was typical at CIA. Eleanor had laughed.

  “Caroline. Of course not.” Eleanor fixed her bright blue eyes on Caroline’s, head at a tilt, holding there until Caroline blinked.

  “So what’s going on?” Caroline asked.

  “You’ve met him. He’s a skirt-chaser. And he’s caught a few, I think, and once he does, their days are numbered.”

  “And you’re okay with this, Eleanor?”

  Eleanor shrugged as if it was of no consequence, but her eyes betrayed her sadness. “I do wonder how he can sit there in church every Sunday and not have at least some pang of conscience. But I can’t do a thing about it, Carrie. I don’t know anything for sure and I sort of wall off my doubts, ignore clues. Look, when I lived in Italy, this was just a feature of the culture. Italian men say ‘I do,’ then choose a mistress and then another and it’s simply a fact of life. And transient. Nothing to upend your marriage over. So I look at it that way. If he’s doing something with these girls, they are no threat to me if they come and go. I’m still here.”

  Caroline didn’t want to be shuffled off if this thing with Talbot ended badly, pushed out of the vibrant circle around which her life now revolved. His read of things wasn’t accurate: Eleanor put up with his extracurriculars, but they hurt her. That was enough for Caroline to end it, to reconstruct a boundary with Tal. Without explicitly saying that she’d talked to Eleanor, she began to put herself out of his easy reach. She didn’t venture into the house during their cookouts when Tal was inside milling around for the condiments or some other invented must-have. She no longer volunteered to help him shop for Eleanor’s birthday, or drop his car at the mechanic’s, or pick him up from the airport—things they’d done to help one another out over the course of their friendship, opportunities for them to be alone. And she consciously turned her attention back to Rémy, reminding herself how fortunate she was to be married to him and not some guy from back home. Soon after, on a little getaway to the mountains, they conceived Colette, with Oliver and Elise coming along soon after.

  Unaccustomed to paramours spurning him, it took Tal a number of weeks, a handful of declined invitations, to realize what Caroline was doing, that their private chapter had ended. Once he did, he marked the occasion by sending her flowers, with a card that read, “That was fun.” When Rémy asked her what “fun” might Talbot be referring to, she mentioned she’d lent him Bowle’s The Sheltering Sky and he’d liked it immensely.

  “Surprising,” Rémy responded, “considering what a bleak story it tells. I mean, I appreciated it, but it’s not exactly fun.”

  “I think he meant it was fun trading books we liked,” Caroline said. “That’s what it was.”

  “What book did he lend you?”

  “The Stranger,” Caroline said.

  . . .

  When their third baby—Elise—was on the way, Rémy announced that as much as he loved his neighbors, the townhouse just didn’t work for them anymore. They moved a few miles deeper into Virginia, to McLean and a home big enough to accommodate them all. They kept the townhouse to rent out—there were plenty of young staffers on Capitol Hill in need of housing—and stashed the rental income into college accounts for the children. Once she settled in her new house in the tree-lined suburbs, it was to Caroline like the affair with Talbot had never happened. Preoccupied with her growing family, the pantry-groping and sweaty sessions in the back seat of her car in the National Airport parking lot seemed like bad dreams, things that had happened to an entirely different person.

  Eight years on, their little foursome had survived, still close and intact. Talbot observed the resurrected boundary without complaint, deepening her fondness for him, as if he were a little boy who’d made a bad choice but was now fully reformed. She had grown closer to Eleanor, accelerated by her guilt, perhaps, the two taking girls’ weekends in New York where they drank and talked and smoked and groused together. While Tal had the impression there was some kind of gang of girlfriends they got together with, Caroline had only met two of Eleanor’s friends on these trips; sometimes only one came. She and Eleanor would typically meet these friends for brunch on Saturday morning, followed by a long afternoon of shopping at Macy’s, then Bloomingdale’s. Next came drinks, then a show if they’d managed to get tickets. And after the curtain fell, about the time Caroline thought she had just enough left in her to crawl back to the hotel and collapse, Eleanor inevitably insisted they take a cab to Little Italy in the Bronx for a late-night bite.

  “I surrender!” Caroline had cried the first time Eleanor had pressed the idea. “I clearly don’t have your stamina! You all go on. Have fun. I’m out.” And so they did, Eleanor laughing the next morning that the outfit she’d worn—and by extension, everything in her suitcase—now smelled like a bulb of garlic.

  While the women were away, Tal sometimes drove out to Rémy’s, bottle of bourbon in tow, arriving after the kids were settled in bed. But sometimes, Caroline knew, Rémy called over to the Bentleys’ on Friday to set up plans and didn’t hear from Tal all weekend. Caroline wondered what, exactly, absorbed his time. She had some ideas.

  . . .

  The Auclair children raced down the pebbled paths of the park energized by the warming weather, winding their way among the cherry trees, darting to pick fallen blossoms or pluck from the bed of daffodils. Caroline slowed, turning to her husband and laying a hand on his arm, allowing the children run ahead, out of earshot. “I worry about them, Tal and Eleanor. He can be reckless sometimes.”

  Rémy turned to her, his face fixed and still. “Probably what makes him good at his job.”

  “Yeah, but you and I know he skates very close to the edge and I wonder, based on how rattled he seemed on the phone, if something’s caught up with him.”

  “Something he mishandled? Or something he let slip to the wrong person? Or maybe…something he did with the wrong woman?” He held her gaze as he spoke. This was nothing they’d acknowledged before, Talbot’s extramarital habits.

  “I meant work. Operationally. Maybe a risk he took that caught up with him,” Caroline stammered, resuming their walk, fearing her face would give her away.

  “I always thought, and I think you know it too, my love, that it’s his indiscretions—and they are legion—that could trip him up.”

  Caroline offered a silent nod.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Monday, May 2, 1960

  Washington, DC

  Helen arrived at her desk an hour early Monday, determined to force Talbot to deal with her, at the very least to find a private window for them to discuss their situation. She had stewed the entire weekend, thinking about Eleanor’s party, mad at herself for supplying the spectacular cake that she was sure contributed to its success.

  Her life, she realized, her every thought and action throughout every day, had become centered on making Talbot’s life easier. She handled everything for him now—arranging their trysts, prepping his files before a meeting, booking time with the director at critical points in his projects before he even asked, calling down to his barber shop to find a window to ensure he could get right in and not have to wait, picking up a bottle of bourbon to take on his little golf trips. It just went on and on. With her sites set on taking over such duties permanently in his life, she felt she’d had to bail him out and order the birthday cake for his cold fish of a wife. But what had infuriated her—sent her spiraling into the weekend—was his failure to respond to her invitation Friday afternoon. She’d been in the ladies room, touching up her lipstick, neatening her hair, expecting he’d respond, that he would understand her need to see him. She returned to find the tissue in her trash can. Flattened out without a ripple. No note. No coded apology. No meeting, damn him. He had some nerve.

  Rather than recognize his rebuff as a restatement of their difficult conversation in the townhouse weeks earlier, Helen—plucky, determined as ever—decided to redouble her efforts. She would be prepared for him when he arrived at the office, notify him she’d already blocked off time on his calendar this week for them to meet privately. It was past time they sorted through important issues.

  She heard the door open and steeled herself to address him. But it was the personnel liaison, not Talbot, who arrived in front of her desk.

  “Congratulations, Helen!” the woman chirped. “Deborah Mitchell, Personnel. I’ve got news about what’s next for you.”

  “Next?” Helen repeated stupidly, unable to process why this woman was here now, with Talbot due any minute. “What do you mean ‘next’?”

  “You’ve been promoted. I’ve got your transfer papers right here,” said Mitchell. “The chief sent me to let you know.” She dropped her eyes and read from her clipboard. “You’re being elevated from executive assistant to Supervisor, GS-6, commensurate with your excellent work record here at CIA, your language skills, and your background. So, again, congratulations.” The liaison looked up and smiled.

  Helen paused, mind racing. A foreign posting—it had to be. She’d skipped an entire pay grade and a GS-6 had to mean $4800 a year—maybe $5000. That meant the agent ranks, which she’d made clear to Personnel was her goal, her dream. If she were deployed overseas, she could rendezvous and travel with Talbot. He’d feel more like hers—a “geographic bachelor” as the term went in CIA. They could resolve the Eleanor issue later. Tal had a hand in this, she thought. He’s moving the ball for me.

  “I’m speechless,” she said finally, feeling a need to stand to absorb the news of her apparent good fortune. “And I’m so happy because I’ve been waiting and hoping and I know openings are scarce right now. But I’m thrilled. Thrilled.” she nodded, hands clasped at her waist, shoulders thrown back in a “reporting for duty” kind of way. “So! Tell me where I’m going.”

  The liaison pulled out a manilla folder from beneath the clipboard.

  “Well, as I said, this is a supervisory position. You are moving to the third floor, to run the secretarial pool. The entire group.”

  Helen leaned into the desk to steady herself. She felt hot, suddenly, as she grasped what was really going on. This was no opportunity. This was sidelining. Talbot was clearing the decks, cleaning things up. Had he even considered how this could sabotage her career—her future—to take this detour into purely clerical work? Clerical work! As she opened her mouth to protest, she saw a warning in Mitchell’s eyes: should Helen react to this promotion in the wrong way—emotionally, uncooperatively, or fling an accusation—she could very well be escorted not to the third floor but out of the building by a security guard. Who knew what Talbot had inserted into the file folder Deborah Mitchell clasped in her hands? Helen knew she must keep her own counsel for now.

  “Oh my. Well. Wow. I’m so surprised. The whole pool? Gee. When?” Helen saw relief in the liaison’s eyes.

  “Right away. They’re waiting for you. This officer is getting a new girl so I’m here to move you to your new spot.”

  “Now? Well. So efficient. And exciting! Okay, then. I guess I need a few boxes to move my things.”

  “Left them right outside the door,” said Mitchell. “I’ll get them.” She retrieved the boxes and re-entered the office just as Helen plucked a tissue from the box with particular vigor, gave her forehead a stab, then savagely balled the thing up and dropped it in the trash can.

  “Ink,” said Helen. “There was a blob of ink on that one so I threw it out.”

  “Ah,” said Mitchell, “then I’d be careful wiping your face with it.”

  Helen gave a nervous laugh and they began placing her things into the boxes. She palavered as she packed—making little comments about the items she was boxing up, asking about the vending machine options on the third floor, the number of secretaries she’d be overseeing, saying again and again how lucky she felt to be making this move. Mitchell observed Helen’s skittish chatter with a wrinkled brow, placing a hand on Helen’s arm to reassure her this was a good move for her, a step forward in her career. Helen sighed deeply, allowing her shoulders to sag for a quick minute, absorbing her circumstance but not admitting to what she was feeling.

  “Well,” said Helen as she placed her coffee mug into the box. “That’s about it. I’m just going to leave a note for my boss—you know, tell him where I’ll be if he needs me—to make the transition smooth for the new girl… for my replacement.”