Libra - Don Delillo [61]
“People think we’re the strangest marriage,” Beryl said.
“Why should they? Who? What’s strange about us?”
“Only everything.”
“People think we’re interesting. That’s my impression.”
“They think we’re strange. We have nothing in common. We have no practical reason for being. We never even talk about practical things.”
“We have no children. We’re not parents. Parents talk about practical things. They have reasons to be practical.”
“With or without children. Believe me. We’re considered strange.”
“I don’t think we’re strange. I think we’re interesting.”
“We’re interesting in a way. But we’re also strange. I’m the one they focus on. I’m the stranger of the two.”
“I don’t like conversations like this. I don’t know how to have these conversations.”
“They’re probably not a good idea.”
“So let’s change the subject,” he said.
“Although the fact of the matter is you’re far stranger, love, than I could ever think of being.”
“Strange how? I’m not strange. I don’t like this at all.”
“Strange like a man. Strange like someone I could never know the heart of, the truth of.”
“This is thankfully outside my range.”
“I don’t think I could ever begin to imagine in years and years of living intimately with a man what it is like to be him.”
“Funny. I thought women were the secret.”
“No no no no no,” she said softly, as if correcting a touchy child. “That’s the wisdom handed down from man to boy, through the ages, a hundred generations of knowledge and experience. But it is just another Agency lie.”
From the moment the CIA monitored a rebel broadcast on January 1, 1959, announcing that the tyrant Batista had fled the country at 2:00 A.M. and that Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz was the supreme leader of the Cuban revolution, from that moment to this, four and a half years later, as he stood in his striped robe mixing a drink for his wife, Larry Parmenter had been involved in one or another plot to get Cuba back. Soldiering on, Beryl said. She liked to remind him that he was not vindictive, had no strong political convictions, did not hate Castro or wish to see physical harm come to him. Larry was famous in fact for going to a costume party as Fidel Castro, with beard, cigar, khaki fatigues, about a month before the invasion. Seemed funny at the time.
One thing Larry didn’t like at all. This was the kind of fellow he’d occasionally had to deal with in joint efforts to recover investments in Cuba. The gambling interests, the casinos and hotels, the men who bought off officials routinely, who sent a steady traffic of couriers with hefty satchels moving through the Bahamas to the International Credit Bank in Geneva—men who thought longingly of the millions they’d once skimmed from the gaming tables in Havana. He wanted nothing to do with those roly-poly wops.
Earlier that day a young man walked into the outer office at Guy Banister Associates in New Orleans. Delphine Roberts was at her desk typing a revised list of civil-rights organizations for Banister’s files. The young man stood patiently waiting, in jeans with rolled cuffs, two days’ stubble on his chin. Delphine stopped typing long enough to pat her teased hair, a nervous habit she was determined to overcome. Then she resumed her work, aware that the young man was studying a calendar on the wall in order to kid himself into thinking he was not being made to wait. She knew all the styles. She could type a complicated text and scrutinize a visitor at the same time. This visitor had a little smile that seemed to say, Here I am—just the fellow you’ve been waiting for.
“I would like to fill out an application for a position with the firm. ”
Delphine kept on typing.
“You have people who do undercover work, I believe,