Past Perfect by Susan Isaacs

SAT vocabulary words, mastery of film history, and stealth humor you suddenly comprehended three sentences after you’d heard it—the best conclusion he could have come to about my show was It’slively-but-irremediably-trivial.
    The good news was, Dix liked or loved me enough to watch every new episode of Spy Guys. In lieu of reviews, he would e-mail me sprightly congratulatory notes: Good show! Liked how His Highness’s indecision over whether to order the Iranian caviar at the restaurant reflected his doubts about renewing his contract with the Agency. It delighted me to learn I’d intended something so subtle.
    Dix and I no longer shared my sister, but after their divorce we’d held on to each other, mostly out of affection, but also because of our mutual awe at Dix’s cleverness. Both of us had wound up earning our livings from TV, a circumstance we each would have laughed at (with a single, condescending New York hah!) had anyone suggested it way back then. After getting his master’s in film at NYU, Dix became one of the faceless film critics for Variety. A year of that and he’d jumped at a stint as number-three reviewer at the Times. As he was working his way up to number two on the long trek to the top spot on the paper, he’d gotten his own PBS show, Sitting in the Dark.
    “I need your advice,” I told him. “So go ahead. Tell me how I can be more analytical.”
    Maybe I was acting a little too wide-eyed because he snapped, “Oh, for God’s sake! What is that face? Leslie Caron innocent? You’re too big-boned for that.” I laughed, though his casual big-boned made me feel like Horton the elephant in my seersucker pants suit, which I’d realized was a mistake two seconds after I walked into the restaurant and realized every other woman there was in white silk or black gauze.
    “Dixon, what’s wrong with asking for help? You just told me I wasn’t winning any awards in the higher cognitive department.”
    “That’s because you’re not allowing yourself to think, Katherine.” He twisted off the tip of an elliptically shaped roll and dunked it into a dish of olive oil, then popped it into his mouth. For an instant, I feared a droplet might fall onto the front of his pale brown silk sport shirt and get sucked up by capillary action into a disgusting amoeba-shaped splotch—the sort of thing that routinely happened to me. But of course it missed the shirt entirely and wound up on the napkin he’d adroitly draped on his lap. Dix continued, “You’re getting swept off your feet by your own need for —I’m actually going to utter the word—closure. Oh, this Lisa person will give me the answer I’ve been praying for all these years! I’ll know why they fired me and it will turn out to be an idiotic keyboarding error and not a grave misjudgment on my part that led to thousands of deaths in some obscure Baltic republic. I’ll bring it to the CIA’s attention and they’ll be devastated that such an injustice occurred. Naturally, the head of the Agency, the one with the strange lips, will call a major news conference and apologize to me.”
    “Don’t make a joke of it,” I snapped. “You of all people know what it’s been like for me all these years. Every damn time I say to myself, Hey, I’m over it, the next thought that instantly pops into my head is, But seriously, what the hell did I do that was so wrong it made them get rid of me like that? It hurts as much now as it did then. Kicking me out with no explanation. Even if I made some stupid error, that Comrade X in Czechoslovakia sold a few MIGs under the table to Qaddafi and then stashed thirty million in a bank account in Geneva—except it turned out to be twenty-nine million in a bank in
    Bern—someone was always checking my work. A huge mistake wouldn’t have gotten by.”
    Dix’s eyes widened. As they were green flecked with twinkles of gold, this was a very pretty sight. “Did something like that really happen? With