“Oh, you poor thing, her hair would be as gray as yours and mine if she didn’t dye it. She looked cheap, cheap and whorish, which is something I couldn’t have honestly said before. You were smart not to allow yourself a look up close.”

“You bitch. I know Maggie’s hair better than you do.” Ann froze, not certain from his expression whether or not he would come forward and strike her; but she was safe, he was not even seeing her. The woman he did see, stepping naked toward him across a sun-striped carpet, was the one who, as long as he loved her, he must hate.

LICKS OF LOVE IN THE HEART OF THE COLD WAR

Khrushchev was in power, or we thought he was, that month I spent as cultural ambassador and banjo-picking bridge between the superpowers, helping stave off nuclear holocaust. It was September into October of 1964. We had a cultural-exchange program with the Soviets at the time. Our State Department’s theory was that almost any American, paraded before the oppressed Soviet masses, would be, just in his easy manner of walking and talking, such an advertisement for the free way of life that cells of subversion would pop up in his wake like dandelions on an April lawn. So my mission wasn’t as innocent as it seemed. Still, I was game to undertake it.

My happy home lies in western Virginia, which isn’t the same as West Virginia, though it’s getting close, on the far side of the Blue Ridge. Washington, D.C., to me spells Big City, and when the official franked letters began to come through it never occurred to me to resist something as big and beautiful as the pre-Vietnam U.S. government. As to Russia, it’s just one more mess of a free-enterprise country now, but then it was the dark side of the moon. The Aeroflot plane from Paris smelled of boiled potatoes, as I recall, and the stewardesses were as hefty as packed suitcases. When we landed at midnight we might have been descending over the ocean, there were so few lights under us.