The Coming of the Quantum Cats

24 August 1983

4:20 P.M. Mrs. Nyla Christophe Bowquist

I should have been on my way to Rochester for preconcert publicity spots. I couldn't leave Washington. The whole crazy day zipped past flick-blur, and my flight time came and passed, and Amy rebooked me on an evening flight, and I told her to cancel that one too. I did what I always did when hopelessly confused and shaken up and worried. I practiced. I propped up the piano reduction of the Tchaikovsky orchestra part in front of the television set, and I played the concert. Over and over; and all the while my eyes kept getting pulled to the screen, where every twenty minutes or so they repeated that insane broadcast from the night before and Dom— dear Dom, my love, my bedmate, my coadulterer Dom—was sitting up there with that greasy smile on his face, introducing that imitation President of the United States, saying those incredible things. Normal programming was abandoned, but there was no real news, either. The alien troops in New Mexico held inside their occupied areas, ours did not attack them, no one in Washington would say anything tangible.

I was not the only person wholly confused and disoriented in Washington that day. Even the weather was miserable; there was some kind of a hurricane working its way up the coast, and what we were getting out of it was muggy heat with spats of soapy rain.

The phone kept ringing. Jackie called twice. Both of the Rostropoviches called; so did Slavi's concertmaster, so did old Mrs. Javits—so did everybody who had any suspicion that I had a personal interest in Senator Dom DeSota, and none of them said anything embarrassing, and they were all very kind. Ten minutes after I hung up on each conversation I couldn't remember anything that had been said. The good thing was that the newspapers didn't call. That much of our secret was safe, Dom's and mine.

I spared a moment to be sorry for poor Marilyn DeSota, sitting in her penthouse with her phones going every minute, and wondering what the hell was going on with the man she was married to.

Yes, I spared a moment to be sorry for my lover's wife. It wasn't the first time. It was only the first time that I'd let myself dwell on it for more than maybe half a second—for as long as it took me to tell myself that Dom's infidelity was, after all, his responsibility and not mine.

I made myself believe that, usually.

And Amy kept coming in . . . with tea; with made-up questions about what dress I wanted to wear in Rochester, and did I remember I had a Newsweek interview scheduled for tomorrow morning in Rochester, and what the concert manager from Rochester had said when he called and I wouldn't talk to him.

I hadn't forgotten the concert, of course.

In a way, I was working at it harder than I would have been if I'd been on the scene. They were bringing in Riccardo Muti to conduct, and we had a difference of opinion. I wanted to do the Tchaikovsky, and he had agreed to that, but I wanted to play it without the usual cuts. Muti was resisting. That's a conductor for you. Get the damn concerto out of the way so you can get back to having the whole orchestra under your personal thumb, instead of sharing it with some damn instrumentalist. I'd had the same squabble every time I played the Tchaikovsky for a long time, and usually I gave in. This time I didn't want to.

So I played it all the way through, twice, and drank a couple of cups of cooling tea, and then I played it some more.

The trouble with that was that my fingers thought about the music, but my mind was flying in all directions. What was Dom doing? Couldn't he at least telephone me? Was it possible that this crazy Cathouse project he'd joked with me about was somehow real? And what was I doing with my own life? Every now and then it would occur to me that if I wanted to start having a baby, it was none too soon to get on with it. . .

But whose baby did I want?

I tried to make myself think about the music, while those sweet, lush, gut-stirring Romantic themes came floating out of the Guarnerius. Tchaikovsky had had his own troubles. With the concerto, for instance. "For the first time one must believe in the possibility of music that stinks in the ear," one critic had said at the premiere. How could you live after a review like that? (But now it was one of the best-loved concerti in the repertoire.) And his own life had been screwed up worse than mine, in the nonmusical ways—politics aside—maybe politics aside, because certainly there was a Byzantine flavor to the jockeying around the czar's court. He'd done worse with marriage than I had: tried it once, and had a nervous breakdown as a result. He'd had his twenty-year love-letter torrid romance with Nadejda von Meck without even once meeting the poor woman, running out of the back door of a house when she unexpectedly showed up at the front. Crazy Peter Ilyich! They said that he first intended to become a conductor. But it didn't work out, because he began leading the orchestra with the baton in his right hand and his chin held tightly in his left, because somehow he'd developed the conviction that if he let go of his chin, his head would fall off.

Crazy Peter Ilyich . . .

Sping went my E-string, the second one I'd broken that morning. I grinned in spite of myself, thinking of something Ruggiero Ricci had said to me once: "A Strad you have to seduce, but you can rape a Guarnerius." Only I'd raped it a little too roughly.

At once, Amy popped in the door. I didn't ask if she'd been eavesdropping. Of course she had. I handed the fiddle over to her, and she examined it carefully before beginning to take the broken string off. "Might as well put a whole new set on," I suggested, and she nodded. I went on daydreaming while she opened a fresh packet. Crazy old Peter Ilyich, I thought again—only what it turned into was, "Crazy Nyla Bowquist, what are you doing with your life?"

I sucked on my fingertips, thinking. They were sore. They weren't bloody—you can't cut my left hand's fingertips with anything much less than a chisel any more—but they hurt. I was hurting in a lot of places.

I said, "Amy, where do you suppose my husband is now?"

She looked at her watch. "It's pushing five here-going on four back home-I suppose he's still in his office. Do you want me to get him for you?"

"Please." Even when somebody else was paying for it, Ferdie didn't like me running up huge long-distance bills, so we had this special line to use-only Amy was better at remembering all the numbers you had to dial than I was. It took her a minute or two.

"He was on his way to his club," she explained, handing me the phone. "I got him on the car phone for you."

I looked at her in a way that she immediately interpreted correctly. "I'll finish this outside," she said, taking the Guarnerius and the strings and the polishing material, and I said into the phone:

"Honey? It's Nyla."

"Thanks for calling, dear," came the warm, soft old voice. "I've been worried about you, with all that's going on—"

"Oh, I'm fine," I said, lying. "Ferdie?"

"Yes, dear?"

"I—uh—it's pretty wild around here today."

"I know it. I've been thinking you might have trouble getting a flight to Rochester. I suppose the airlines are all messed up. Do you want me to send the company jet?"

"Oh, no," I said quickly. What I wanted was not very clear to me, but I knew that wasn't it. "No, Amy's got all that sort of thing under control. The thing is, Ferdie dear, there's something I want to tell you." I took a deep breath, getting ready for the next words.

They wouldn't come out.

"Yes, dear?" said Ferdie politely.

I took another deep breath and tried a different way. "Ferdie, you remember Dom DeSota?"

"Of course, dear." He sounded almost amused. Well, that was a dumb question! There wasn't anybody in the country who didn't know who Dom DeSota was this day, besides which Ferdie had always made it his business to know everybody with any kind of power in Illinois. "It's awful about him," he offered. "I know it must upset you to think about what he's involved in."

I swallowed. Of course he hadn't intended anything—when you've got a bad conscience, even "hello" is a double entendre. I tried to imagine what Ferdie was hearing, from what I was saying. It seemed to me that I was giving an excellent performance of the wife who has something to confess but can't quite get the words out of her mouth, and maybe down inside my head somewhere that was what I was trying to do-to make Ferdie at last so suspicious that he would come right out and ask the questions that I would have to answer.

Only Ferdie wasn't getting suspicious. He was, if anything, getting tenderly, forgivingly amused at his flutter-brained wife who couldn't seem to remember what it was she was talking about. "Ferdie," I said, "there's something I wanted to talk to you about.

You see, I've been—oh, what is it, Amy?" I asked, irritated, as she appeared in the doorway.

"Mrs. Kennedy is here to see you," she said.

"Oh, hell," I said. On the phone I could hear Ferdie's fond chuckle.

"I heard that," he said. "You've got company. Well, dear, at the moment we're double-parked in front of the club, and maybe you can hear the horns blowing. Let's talk later, all right?"

"That will be fine, darling," I said, frustrated, scared . . . and mostly relieved. Some day I would have to say it all to him, every word, every truth . . . but, praise God, that day was not yet. And when Jackie came in to tell me that she was going to carry me off to dinner—"Just family, really, but we want you to join us"—I accepted with gratitude.

It wasn't really a family dinner—none of the children were there-not even in the sense of political family, although Jack Kennedy's principal aide and his wife were at the table, because the only other guest was our old friend Lavrenti Djugashvili. Good host and gracious guest, sure, but I was surprised to see him, all the same. That made my presence a little easier to understand, because Lavi was a single man that evening and Jackie didn't like an unbalanced table. "No, dear Nyla," he said, kissing my hand, "tonight I am bachelor, because Xenia has gone back to Moscow to make sure our daughter is taking proper vitamin pills at boarding school."

"So what we are going to have," the senator said, "is just a normal informal dinner, because we've all had all the excitement we need today. Albert! See what Mrs. Bowquist would like to drink."

It isn't just wealth. Ferdie is just about as rich as Jack Kennedy, but when we have a normal, informal family dinner we don't usually have it in the dining room with a butler handing the dishes around. We have it in the breakfast room, and Hannah the cook usually puts the dishes on the table in front of us. The Kennedys were never that informal. We had our cocktails in the drawing room, with the portraits of the senator's three deceased brothers looking down at us, and when we went into the dining hall there were old Joe and Rose looking down at us in oil from that wall. The wines were all estatebottled, and the silver wasn't silver. It was gold.

And, actually, the whole thing did just what Jack Kennedy said he wanted it to do. It made the world real again. It was exactly the kind of small dinner party that marked a hundred nights of every year for me, even to the talk about the weather (hurricane on its way, rain expected to get worse) and Lavi's daughter's school grades, and how truly beautifully (Jackie told me again) I had played the Gershwin, and what a pity it was that the audience had been distracted.

The ambassador took me in, handsome blocky Russian face cheerful and admiring of my dress, the flowers on the table, the wine, the food. I'd always liked Lavrenti, partly because he really enjoyed music. It wasn't always the kind of music I understood. I'd gone once with him to hear some traveling troupe from Soviet Georgia, fifty squat, dark, handsome men bellowing out a-capella songs that seemed to be made up mostly of roaring, with interjecdons of Hai! and Hey! every few seconds. They were not my cup of tea, but Lavi's eyes were misting when we left; and I'd seen him affected just as much from the stage, while I was doing the Prokofiev Second. Which says something; because there's marvelous musicianship in that concerto, but the fraction of any audience that finds it touching its heart is minute.

And for nearly an hour we stayed off the subject of the other United States of America's invasion, and especially the subject of my Dom.

Jackie kept it going. She and Mrs. Hart were helping with a fund raiser for Constitution Hall, and the two of them had amusing stories about how Pat Nixon wanted to bring in a country-and-western group, and Mrs. Helms had a pet tenor from Southern Methodist University she wanted to give exposure to. As we were starting on the guinea hen and wild rice Jackie looked over at me and said, "Shall we really rock them, Nyla? Would you like to come and do something like the Berg?"

The senator shifted position uncomfortably—his back was obviously bothering him again—and complained, "The Berg? That's that squeaky-squawky one, isn't it? Do you really like that, Nyla?"

Well, nobody really "likes" the Berg concerto-I mean, it's like "liking" a rogue elephant. You have to pay attention to it, whether you like it or not. But it's a show-off piece, so I need to do it once in a while to keep the other guys impressed. And I can't do it very well at home, because Chicago's Orchestra Hall isn't up to it. It's fine for, say, the Beethoven or one of the Bruchs, which are so melodic and rhythmic that the orchestra doesn't really have to hear itself. But they need to for something like the Berg, and Orchestra Hall's acoustics aren't good that way.

While I was explaining all this to Jack Kennedy, I could see that

I didn't have his attention. His eyes were on me, but they were looking right through me, and he was stirring the wild rice around with his fork instead of eating. I assumed it was his back. So did Lavi. "Ah, Senator," he cut in, with that Russian-bear good humor that he used for sympathy, "why not come to Moscow to see doctors? Our Djugashvili Medical Institute, named for grandfather, not me, has best surgeons in world, no question!"

"Will they give me a new back?" Kennedy growled.

"Spinal transplant, why not? Have Dr. Azimof, best transplant man in world. Has done three hundred eighty-five hearts alone, not counting livers, testicles, I don't know what all. Have saying in Moscow, when world's first successful hemorrhoid transplant is done, Itzhak will do it!"

I laughed. Jackie laughed. Everybody around the table laughed, except the senator. He smiled, but the smile didn't last. "Sorry, Lavi," he said. "I'm afraid my sense of huma isn't working very well tonight." He put down his fork and leaned across the table. "Gary? Did you say they were flying Jerry Brown in—I mean, our Jerry?"

"That's right, Senator. They located him in Maine, but his flight was delayed on account of the weather."

The senator grimaced, rubbing his back. "Tell me about the weather," he said, waving to the butler to take his plate away. "God knows what use Brown will be," he commented, "but I guess he can at least give us some background on his opposite number, over there."

Hart chimed in, "I wish we had a better line on those other guys. Maybe we could find some more of their doubles here and get them in on this."

Neither of them were looking at me, but Jackie was. "Nyla," she said, "you know Dom DeSota, of course." And I figured out why I had been invited. Without ever saying an overt word, Jackie was giving me honorary status as a wife-anyway, a what-you-might-call fiancee. She could not have treated me better if Dom and I had been married. She might not have treated me as well, if Dom and I had been married, because Dom's reputation was thoroughly beclouded— Or maybe not, because she went on, "I think you spoke to him not long before he left for Mexico." Tactful! But Dom's chief aide must have been talking. "I wonder if he said anything about the reason?"

I hesitated. "I don't know if you all know what was going on at Sandia—"

Lavrenti said, "Oh, yes, I think so, dear Mrs. Bowquist. Even I had heard something."

"You can speak freely," said the senator. "If it ever was a secret, it isn't now."

"Well—the senator said something about a double of himself. Exact. I mean, even with the same fingerprints. They wanted him to confront this other man."

"Exactly," said Gary Hart triumphantly. "It's just what we thought, Senator. That man on television wasn't our own Dom DeSota at all."

The Senator nodded. Then he gestured to the butler. "We'll take our coffee in my study, Albert," he said, and then to us, "Let's take another look at this guy on TV."

Even so, it took me a long time to understand what they were saying. We were in the study—not what I would have called a study; it was bigger than my own living room in Chicago, big enough for war councils and off-the-record meetings of a dozen or more. It had four television monitors plus the big screen; it had news-wire CRT's for INS and AP; most of all, it had a videotape machine. Jack Kennedy sat in the corner of the room nearest the air-conditioning exhaust with his cigar, gnawing on his knuckle as he watched the replay of Dom's face, speaking in Dom's voice the words that I could not believe Dom would ever say.

And neither could Jack Kennedy. "What do you think?" he asked the room at large. No one spoke, and I realized the Harts were looking at me.

For a moment I wondered if, after all, they were blaming me for Dom's incredible turnabout. The guilty conscience again, of course.

Then I had a second thought.

"Run it again, will you?" I asked, my voice beginning to shake, and fumbled in my bag for the glasses that I never wore in public. I looked harder at my love's face, studying every line, listening to every tone, watching every gesture.

I said doubtfully, "He looks very thin, doesn't he? As though he were under some kind of strain-or else-"

"Or else," said Hart, "we were right about that, too, Senator. That isn't our Dom DeSota. It's theirs."

"I knew it," piped Jackie, who had moved over to the arm of my

chair. I felt her hand on my shoulder, mothering me. I could have kissed her. A constriction I hadn't known was there fell away from my chest. Oh, Dom! You might be an adulterer, but at least you weren't a traitor! .

"I think," announced the senator, "that we might just take a look at that CIA summary now, Gary." He took a folded sheaf of paper from his aide, put his own glasses on, and glanced at the top page.

I wasn't listening. I was too filled with relief. It didn't make everything all right, quite. There was still Ferdie. Not to mention Marilyn DeSota. But at least one sharp, shocking pain had eased.

I wondered what time it was. If I could excuse myself soon and get back to my hotel—if I could call Ferdie still tonight, before he went to sleep—maybe now I could go through with it and tell him what I was so frightened to say. Of course, there was still Marilyn— Of course there was still Marilyn! What was I thinking of? How could I tell my secret without telling Dom's too? And how could I do that without at least warning Dom first?

Dissolved again in doubt, I tried to pay attention to what Jack Kennedy was saying. ". . . two people," he said. "One was a smart Albuquerque cop. The other was a smart FBI woman they put in shorts on a bicycle, out on the mountain where the other guys had occupied a television transmitter. Neither one had any difficulty getting the enemy soldiers to talk."

"Lousy security," said Hart, frowning.

"Lousy for them. Good for us," said jack. "Anyway, they didn't say anything—at least they didn't say much—about military matters. But the cop and the FBI woman did get them talking about the differences between their world and ours. I think we have a pretty good idea now of where their history and ours are different."

I tried to listen with comprehension to the rest of what Jack Kennedy was saying. It wasn't easy. What I know about is music; there weren't very many history courses when I went to Juilliard. For that matter, it was hard for me to grasp what was meant by "parallel times," though Dom had explained it to me. As a theory. As reality it was a whole lot harder to accept.

"Their enemies," Jack said, "seem to be the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China."

He paused, glancing at the ambassador, who sank down in his chair, frowning, without comment. "Which China?" I asked, as anyone would—did they mean the Korean Mandate, or Han Peking, or the Hong Kong Suzerainty, or Manchukuo or the Taiwanese Empire or any of the other twelve or fifteen pieces China had splintered into after the Cultural Revolution?

"Just one China," said jack. "They managed to hang together, and now—for them—they're the biggest nation on Earth."

We all looked at each other. That was hard enough to swallow. The idea of the Soviet Union threatening anybody any more was even crazier. I tried to read Lavi's expression, but he had none. He was just listening, and after a moment he stretched out a hand and took one of the senator's cigars, though I knew that normally he didn't smoke. He kept his eyes down on it, slowly unwrapping the foil, not speaking at all.

I could see why he was having as much trouble with all this as I was, although for different reasons. It was, after all, the nuclear exchange with the U.S.S.R. that had sparked the Cultural Revolution in China. What it had done to the Soviet Union was even worse. Moscow gone, Leningrad gone, basically the whole country decapitated.

I tried to remember Russian history. There'd been the czars. Then Lenin, who got assassinated or something. Then Trotsky, who got them into a series of border wars with places like Finland and Estonia, most of which he lost. Then Lavrenti's own grandfather for a while—with all kinds of internal famines and insurrections—who started the nuclear project, which got us into the atom-bomb race, which only ended when the Chinese zapped Moscow and the nuclear project, all at once. .

But in their time, it seemed, Trotsky never did take over the U.S.S.R., though Lavrenti's grandfather did. There wasn't a series of border wars. There was one big one. They called it World War II, and it was with a man named Hitler, a German, out to conquer the world, and very nearly making it before the rest of the world united against him.

That was a stunner. Germany was just one country! I'd played there! It wasn't anywhere nearly big enough to threaten the whole world!

And besides—there was Lavrenti, sitting across the room from me, slowly igniting his Cuban Claro. Of course, he was nominally a Communist. But the Russians were nowhere near as militant as, say, the English Bolsheviks, with their centers of aggression in all their so-called commonwealth federated republics. Thank heaven Canada and Australia had split off. . . . I shook my head. It didn't make much sense to me.

It did, unfortunately, to Lavrenti Djugashvili. He had smoked the first half-inch of his cigar by the time Kennedy finished with the CIA report, and expected it when the senator stopped and looked inquiringly directly at him. "I take your point," said Lavi. "This is a matter of concern. If this invasion of your country is in the final analysis directed at mine-"

"Not at yours exactly, I think," Jack said quickly. "At the Soviet Union that exists in their time, I would suppose."

"Whose people," Lavi said heavily, "are still my own, are they not?"

Kennedy didn't say anything. He only gave a fraction of a nod.

Lavi stood up. "With your permission, dear Mrs. Kennedy," he said somberly, "I think I must visit my embassy now. I thank you for this information, Senator. Perhaps something should be done, although I do not now see just what."

We all stood up, even us women. It wasn't a mark of respect so much as a sort of declaration of sympathy. When he was gone, Senator Kennedy rang for the butler to serve us nightcaps. "Poor Lavrenti," he said. And then, "Poor us, too, for that matter, because I don't see just what to do, either."

Bad back or not, the senator decided to drive me back to my hotel himself. Jackie came along for the ride. It wasn't a pleasure jaunt. The rain was coming in sheets and the streets were slippery with emulsified oil. -

All three of us fit easily in the big front seat. We didn't talk much, not even Jackie, who was helping her husband scan the road nervously—since both his younger brothers had died in car accidents, one drowned, one burned, she was uneasy about cars. I had my own thoughts. It was not much past ten o'clock. Nine in Chicago. Ferdie would surely still be awake. Should I call him? Did I have the right to, for Dom's sake? Did I have the right not to, for Ferdie's sake?

So I hardly noticed when we slowed down with an unexpected traffic jam ahead of us, until the senator leaned forward irritably. "What the hell?" he muttered, trying to peer past the cars stalled right in front of us.

"What is it?" asked Jackie. "An accident?"

It was no accident.

Kennedy swore. Through the windows of the car ahead I saw something coming toward us in the other lane. It was fast and big, but it didn't have the flashing lights of a police car or ambulance. It had no proper lights at all, just a single bright spotlight that flick-flick'd back and forth across the road, like the blade of a windshield wiper, and the light illuminated something that stuck out of the vehicle itself.

It looked almost like a cannon.

"My Jesus God Almatty," said the senator, "it's a fucking tank."

Jackie cried out—so did I, I'm sure. The senator didn't wait. He backed the big Chrysler around in a quarter-circle high-speed turn, banging the muffler against the curb on the far side of the street, cramped the wheel as far as it would go, and floored it. He skidded out onto the highway maybe thirty yards ahead of the tank, accelerating all the way up to ninety miles an hour on that meandering river road, and I kept seeing that huge cannon sticking out in front of the tank. Aiming now straight at us. The senator felt it, too, because at the first cross street he stood on the brake. We fishtailed to a stop— almost a stop; oh, say, about forty miles an hour—and he manhandled that car around the corner.

A taxi was coming the other way.

I have never felt closer to death. We stopped. So did the other car, but not with anything to spare. Our front bumper was almost touching the taxi driver's door, and the man inside was already rolling his window down to sob and scream at jack.

Who paid him no attention.

We had stalled the engine. jack didn't even try to start it again. He opened his door and leaned out, grunting at the twisting he was giving his back, to stare as the tank went past, fast and serious, followed by half a dozen troop-carrying trucks. I could see the gleam of helmets in the street lights as they passed, and behind them was another tank.

"Remarkable," said Jack Kennedy.

"Why are we putting tanks like that on the Street?" I demanded. He turned to look at me. jack is an elderly man, but I had never seen him look quite that old before. He put one arm around Jackie protectively.

"We ain't," he said. "Those are not ours. We don't have any tanks that look like that."