The Body in Question

by Jill Ciment

  “You don’t have to be such a cocktease,” says the alternate.

  “I want him removed from our table. I won’t sit with him,” the schoolteacher tells the deputy.

  “Watch yourself,” the deputy warns the alternate.

  “Fuck yourself,” says the alternate.

  “The judge is going to hold you in contempt if you don’t shut your pie hole,” says the deputy.

  “I’m already in jail, what the fuck worse can happen?”

  “Can we please eat in peace,” says the church lady.

  “I’m not sitting with him,” the schoolteacher reiterates to the deputy.

  “Me neither,” says Cornrows.

  “Nic,” the deputy calls to the older West Indian man at the fryer. “Could you set up another table and chair?”

  “You putting me in the corner?” says the alternate.

  “I want to return to the courthouse,” says the church lady, rising.

  “Me, too,” says Cornrows.

  “Go ahead and wait in the van,” says the alternate. “I haven’t finished eating.”

  “Nic,” the deputy says, “bag up all the leftovers, they can finish eating in the jury room.”

  “Mind if we go outside for a cigarette?” F-17 asks, rising from his chair along with C-2.

  “Not today,” the deputy says.

  Back in the jury room, no one finishes their lunch except the alternate. The schoolteacher sits by herself on the sofa, in tears. C-2 walks over. Despite the saucy outfits, the schoolteacher is a sweet, modest young woman. She must have gotten her courtroom dress code from TV, where female attorneys always show cleavage.

  “When is this going to be over?” the schoolteacher asks C-2.

  “As soon as the prosecutor rests, we’ll be at the halfway point,” C-2 says.

  “We’re not even halfway?”

  C-2 can only think of platitudes. She tests one. “Is it really so bad?”

  “Maybe not for you. You seem to be having a good time.”

  C-2 is struck mute.

  The schoolteacher knows.

  Who else knows?

  As the jurors file into the courtroom to take their seats, C-2 assesses each one. The church lady suppresses a yawn. The chemical engineer slips off her flats and slides them neatly under her chair with her bare feet. Cornrows turns around to shoot the alternate a contemptuous glare. The alternate glares back, then shifts his eyes to C-2 and winks.

  They all know.

  * * *

  · · ·

  “Tim painted the nursery, so I guess he knew where my dad kept the turpentine,” Stephana answers a question that C-2, still shaken by the wink, didn’t catch.

  “How long was Tim a volunteer fireman?”

  “Three years.”

  “He must know an awful lot about fires.”

  “I don’t hear a question,” objects the prosecutor.

  “Did you purchase a bottle of hydrogen peroxide a week before the dogs got sick?” asks the defense counsel.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Let me show you the receipt.”

  Stephana studies the receipt sealed inside an evidence bag.

  “If I bought it, it was for Anca. She always kept a bottle in the kennel’s first-aid kit. Last summer, her dachshund ate a sago nut and died.”

  For the first time since the trial started, Anca reacts to what is being said. At the mention of her dachshund, she covers her face.

  C-2 writes:

  Anca is capable of love

  That evening, when they meet outside the restrooms at Olive Garden, C-2 tells F-17, “They all know.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did someone say something?”

  “He winked at me in court. They know.”

  In the pool after dinner, she tells him about her exchange with the schoolteacher. The mosquitoes have chased the ex-military back into the lobby. “I said, ‘It’s not so bad,’ and she said, ‘Not for you. You seem to be having a good time.’ ”

  “That little shit told her,” he says, dogpaddling beside her.

  “He told everyone,” she says, remembering the alternate’s wink.

  “All he saw was you reaching for the wrong door.”

  “By the time he’s done embellishing, he’ll have seen me giving you a blowjob by the ice machine.”

  They reach the deep-end wall and turn around. His face is lit from below by the pool lamp. In this watery, playful light, his skin looks unblemished. He is handsomer with smooth skin, but not as sexy.

  “Do you think someone will tell the judge?” she asks.

  “Tell her what? That the alternate, who draws dirty pictures all day, claims he saw you going into my room? I’m more worried someone will gossip with the deputy and he’ll make it his job to watch us more closely.”

  “Can we be thrown off the jury?” she asks.

  “We didn’t take an oath of celibacy.”

  “Still,” she says, “this judge said she threw someone off a jury for just looking up a word. Do you remember the word?”

  “ ‘Prudent.’ ”

  They reach the shallow-end steps and turn around, only to see the deputy standing by the deep end, swatting at his ear.

  “Time to call it a night,” he tells them. “You’re not getting bitten up?” he asks.

  “Mosquitoes don’t like chlorine,” F-17 says.

  As they towel off, she whispers, “Is it true mosquitoes don’t like chlorine?”

  “I made it up. I’m being eaten alive,” he says.

  “Don’t come tonight,” she whispers, as they mount the stairs up to their rooms. “It’s too risky.”

  Around two a.m., after they make love in his bed, she says, “One of them is going to tell the judge for the same reason children always tattle to the teacher. For attention and a gold star.”

  “We can’t be the first sequestered jurors to have a love affair,” he says.

  His choice of the words “love affair” startles her. She would characterize what they are having as a fling. Or would she?

  She says, “At the very least, the judge will order us to stop.”

  “Am I going to see you after the trial is over?” he asks.

  “After the trial is over, C-2 won’t exist,” she says.

  Stephana has prepared herself for her cross-examination this morning by wearing no makeup except a dusting of pancake over a smear of antiperspirant, a trick C-2 learned during her portraiture days. The antiperspirant discourages the brow from sweating, and the pancake blots up any overflow.

  C-2 wonders if the “natural” look was the prosecutor’s idea or that of Stephana’s mother, who has been sitting in the courtroom every day in a fresh coat of makeup. Her skin is so pallid around the edges of her sun-beige foundation, and her eyes are so dry and dead beneath her blue-shadowed lids, the makeup looks applied by an undertaker. She slips a chocolate bar to Anca before the gavel is hammered. C-2 plans to spend a portion of the cross-examination studying Mrs. Butler to see which of her daughters she believes.

  The flat-screen monitor is wheeled back into the courtroom. The defense counsel has her own movie to share. As the lights dim, she explains to the jury that the video they are about to watch was shot on Stephana’s iPhone six days after the fire.

  In jeans and boots, Tim combs through the charred rubble of the Butler home. Only the screened-in pool and the free-standing three-car garage are intact.

  Stephana’s voice is the soundtrack. “You’re standing where his office was.”

  Tim looks around, lifts the remains of a chair.

  “You see Dad’s safe?”

  “No, but I found this,” says Tim, holding up something large and black and egg-shaped.


  “It’s your dad’s smoker,” Tim says.

  “Maybe we should make BBQ tonight,” Stephana says.

  Tim laughs, but Stephana’s laughter is closer to the microphone and drowns him out.

  The courtroom lights come back on. Mrs. Butler’s face has paled to such a colorless pallor that her sun-beige foundation now looks like mud.

  “Did you shoot this video?” the defense counsel asks Stephana.

  “Yes.”

  “On your iPhone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that your voice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was Tim looking for your father’s safe?”

  “Because Dad asked him to. The safe was fireproof.”

  “What was in the safe?”

  “Dad’s important papers.”

  “Anything else.”

  “Mom’s jewelry.”

  “Was the safe ever recovered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was your mother’s jewelry inside?”

  “No.”

  Mrs. Butler’s dead eyes fill with water. The inflamed red rims can’t hold back the overflow. It rains down her cheeks, forming creeks in the mud.

  She doesn’t know which of her daughters to believe any more than C-2 does.

  * * *

  · · ·

  “Can’t we have lunch someplace other than Nic and Gladys?” asks Cornrows as the van pulls out of the underground parking lot. “It’s always so fattening.”

  “You don’t need to lose weight,” says the church lady.

  “I like their fried chicken,” says the alternate.

  “Nic’s got a contract with the court,” the deputy explains, pulling up to Nic & Gladys.

  While the jury finishes their lunch of fried tilapia with rice and canned corn, C-2 and F-17 step outside for a smoke.

  “Should we keep meeting like this? In front of everyone?” she asks.

  “If we stop now, they’ll know that we know they know,” he says.

  She knows she shouldn’t ask the next question. It’s one thing to have sex with another juror, another to discuss impressions of a witness, but she is so curious to have his take on what she just heard she can’t resist. She asks, “Didn’t Stephana’s laughter sound demonic to you?”

  “Her laughter sounded like a release to me,” he says. “I hear that kind of dark humor all the time with my students.”

  “That wasn’t dark humor,” she says. “That was morbid.”

  “Laughter is a defense mechanism. It helps us cope with the idea of our own mortality.”

  “I don’t think Stephana believes she’s mortal,” she says.

  Cornrows pushes open the restaurant door, an unlit cigarette between her lips. She opens a fresh book of matches, strikes, and exhales into the sun. “Thank you guys for refusing to finish your lunches,” she says. “Maybe Nic will take the hint and stop with the prison food.”

  Does she know? C-2 wonders.

  Late that afternoon, the prosecution rests his case, surprising everyone. His last witness, a pontificating police officer who wasn’t even at the crime scene, is only there to refute the defense’s innuendo that Stephana stole her mother’s jewelry. There were two other burglaries in the neighborhood around the time of the fire.

  C-2 was expecting the prosecution to close with a motive. Some explanation, no matter how preposterous or simple-minded, as to why the affectless teenager who loved her dachshund set her eighteen-month-old brother on fire. C-2 is always skeptical about the role of causality in human impulses, the way Hollywood reduces a serial killer’s motives to a flashback of a psychotic mother putting out her cigarette on the serial killer’s eight-year-old palm. But to offer no theory? No dénouement?

  “To the midway point,” toasts the schoolteacher, holding up a glass of chardonnay. The jury is celebrating at Applebee’s. It’s Friday night. The trial is half over. Tomorrow their loved ones are visiting again.

  “Isn’t it also called the point of no return?” asks the church lady, ordering a hamburger that the menu promises is “slammed with flavor.”

  “I thought the point of no return meant it was too late to pull out,” says the alternate, ordering the twelve-ounce sirloin with peppercorn sauce.

  “I warned you about being vulgar in front of the ladies,” says the ex-military, ordering the fiesta lime chicken.

  “The point of no return is the moment when continuing a journey becomes less dangerous than turning back,” says F-17.

  * * *

  · · ·

  That night, on the spare bed in her room, he asks her to describe one of her photographs for him.

  He wants to talk now before sex. That is her husband’s and her exclusive foreplay. But he is insistent.

  She chooses a picture from her portraiture days. A reclusive actress had agreed to be photographed for Interview magazine after fifty years of avoiding the camera. She was eighty-seven. C-2 had expected to find Gloria Swanson from Sunset Boulevard, but what she found instead was an unkempt old woman who had forgotten how much she hated the camera. She had also forgotten to comb the hair on the back of her head before she sprayed it in place. It flared out.

  “ ‘Could you make me look beautiful?’ she asked me,” C-2 tells him.

  “Did you make her look beautiful?”

  “I photographed her in profile, by a window, silhouetted against the sunlight, so that her features are more suggested than present. Let people remember how beautiful she was. In the photograph, her white hair flies backward, as if she is traveling at great speed.”

  She realizes that they are crossing the point of no return, though not in the way he defined it earlier, as the moment when continuing a journey is safer than going back, but in the way the alternate defined it, as unstoppable.

  After he leaves, she strips the spare bed, puts the sheets outside the door, then pulls them back inside lest the alternate make another trip to the ice machine.

  She takes a shower and lies down. Her husband will be here in less than six hours.

  * * *

  · · ·

  The Prius pulls into the parking lot. The door swings open and her husband exits the car without a gift bag this time. C-2 remains in her room, concealed behind the drapes, watching. A strong wind is blowing and a dust devil chases him across the parking lot. He walks as quickly as he can. Something about him in motion, with his cane, seems cantilevered. Wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees, all snap to as if operated mechanically, with great economy. He has objectives. He heads to the office to sign himself in, climbs the stairs, passes the ice machine and F-17’s door.

  Last night, F-17 told her he preferred to be alone today.

  Her husband has only two speeds—full throttle and low gear. At parties or out to dinner with friends, people only see him in full throttle and marvel at his energy. But she knows his low gear, after all that exertion has drained the battery. He sleeps during the drive home. He can barely undress himself before bed.

  The plan this morning, which they discussed on one of their twice-weekly Skype sessions, is that she will wait for him in bed, naked.

  Touch me, remind me who I am, wrote Stanley Kunitz, in her husband’s favorite poem, not just because of the language, but because Kunitz wrote it at ninety.

  Her husband slips into her room. He doesn’t speak, as they had agreed. She pretends to be asleep, as they had agreed. He undresses, slides under the new sheets he brought last week, holds her tightly, spoon-fashion. He kisses and fondles her, but he doesn’t get hard.

  He sits up, baffled as to why an eighty-six-year-old man doesn’t get an erection at the snap of his fingers. That intrepid bafflement, the lunacy and the hope of it, is the essence of who he is. He says, “I don’t understand. I took a pill. I think it’s because we
can’t lock the door. Anyone could just walk in. This room gives me the creeps.”

  He props himself up on an elbow. She rolls onto her back.

  “How much longer will you have to be here?” he says.

  “The prosecution rested yesterday,” she tells him. “Maybe another ten days?”

  “You made CNN, Nancy Grace.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t watch news about the trial.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have information the jury isn’t supposed to hear.”

  “So? I won’t tell you.”

  “But it drives me crazy that you won’t tell me. Is there something the jury should know?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Then why bring it up?”

  He tries to touch her, but she jerks back.

  “Watching news about the trial makes me feel close to you,” he says.

  “Nancy Grace inspires closeness?”

  “It’s so dark in here with the blackout drapes shut,” he says. “I can’t see you.”

  “You want me to open them?”

  “No.”

  The conjugal part of the visit is ruined. They might as well nap together. As she nestles against him, and feels her husband’s lap against her buttocks, his chest against her back, all the bones and bumps couple together in practiced, comforting compression, like an old mattress whose imprint you naturally fill.

  “Are you lonely?” she says in her full voice. He won’t be able to hear her if she whispers.

  “Of course I’m lonely.”

  “Any more dizzy spells?”

  “I don’t want you to worry.”

  “Are you wearing the Lifeline?”

  She can feel by his deadened weight against her back that he has fallen asleep. She closes her eyes. The nap is more intimate than sex.

  She waves goodbye to him, the tiny starfish in the window of the Prius under the enormous sky. Only today, there are no thunderheads. The sky is sunny and blue and ridiculously hopeful.

  Sunday brunch at Cracker Barrel. The weekend deputy, the state-fair beauty queen, reads a text from the judge offering the jury two possible diversions for the afternoon: a field trip to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum or bowling.