A Minor Fall

by Price Ainsworth

  Stepping inside the house was like stepping into a winery in Burgundy or Bordeaux. Everywhere one looked were fleur-de-lis and acanthus leaf patterns, inlaid furniture with scrolled feet and gilt corners, richly upholstered Bergère chairs with big ottomans, and tufted leather sofas with just the right amount of wear. Large fireplaces with split white oak logs waited in corners of the family room, living room, and master bedroom for the few days of the year when fires could be lit, and Impressionist paintings by various French, Spanish, and Portuguese artists adorned the walls.

  The night I got back from Kentucky, we ate in the large dining room at the distressed oak wine-tasting table. When Michelle and I arrived, only Michelle’s brother Jonathan and their mom, Amy, were there. Jonathan never brought a date to his parents’ house. Jonathan was very good-looking and I knew from college and law school that women enjoyed being around him, but he kept his personal life separate from his family, and me, for that matter. He had black hair that, like his parents, was turning prematurely grey, and he was usually dressed in casual clothes that suggested an outdoorsy, hunting motif. Michelle relied on him for advice that ranged from her career to what to buy for our house. I imagine that it was partly the fact that Jonathan and I were friends that had caused Michelle to take an interest in me. It was obvious to me that keeping a secret from Michelle would necessarily involve keeping a secret from Jonathan.

  A place was set for Tim, but he had not yet arrived. While it was not unusual for Tim to be late, I wondered for a moment if his absence was an indication that he didn’t want to confront me about Beth with his family around.

  We sat around the table in our usual places, and Amy began passing around Chinese food that she had ordered from Dong Ting’s, which Jonathan had picked up on his way over. She had put the food into large bone-china serving dishes. Amy used her good china and crystal every day and just put them in the dishwasher. She must have had every serving piece available in the Spode Stafford Flower china pattern. Interestingly, Michelle had almost every serving piece in the Portmeirion Botanic Garden design, which is like a casual cousin of the more ornate Spode. There was a covered vegetable bowl containing steamed dumplings in red chili oil and another one with Birds in a Jade Nest, minced squab sautéed with duck liver and mushrooms spooned onto iceberg lettuce leaves, an oval platter of crispy fried green beans, an open vegetable bowl full of cabbage-wrapped meatballs of pork and crabmeat cooked in a clay pot that Dong Ting called “lion head,” a large oval platter of spicy squid with garlic and ginger, and a big bowl of shrimp-fried rice. The conversation amounted to little more than chitchat and nobody asked about the case in Kentucky.

  “I almost forgot the wine,” Amy said, and she got up to go back into the kitchen. She was taller than Michelle and good-looking in her own right. She had soft grey hair that she kept cut short and refused to dye. I can’t remember very many occasions when I saw Amy that she was not wearing a skirt.

  Amy hollered back over her shoulder, “Go ahead and start eating. I imagine that Tim will be late.” No doubt Amy had made that statement many times in her married life, and Michelle and Jonathan didn’t seem concerned about their father’s absence. Maybe Tim’s habitual tardiness and absence were two of the reasons that Jonathan and Michelle were so close.

  When Amy returned with an opened bottle of Wan Fu, she stopped at each place to fill a wine glass. When she got to Michelle’s glass, Michelle put her hand over the top of her glass and looked up at her mother. Amy paused and looked knowingly at her daughter.

  “You’re pregnant,” Amy said.

  Michelle smiled. “We weren’t going to say anything until Dad got here,” but before she could finish, her mother was excitedly hugging her.

  Jonathan got up from his place, hugged his sister, shook my hand, and told me congratulations. We spent most of the meal discussing funny family names and laughing about what we should name the baby if it was a boy or a girl. After we finished eating, Amy brought out a plate of fortune cookies, and we each selected one. As each person opened a cookie and read the fortune aloud, Jonathan would add the phrase “between the sheets,” and we would all laugh. For instance when Michelle read, “You have the ability to excel at untried areas,” Jonathan added, “between the sheets,” and we all laughed as if we had never played this game before. We got to my cookie last and the fortune in it read, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” Rather than continuing the game, Jonathan just looked at me, shook his head, and said while raising his hands palms up, “What have you ever been afraid of?”

  I didn’t answer.

  We were carrying the dishes into the kitchen when Tim came home with his friend William Drummond. They had obviously been playing golf. They wore sport shirts and were sunburned. They had been drinking, but they didn’t seem drunk.

  It was not strange to see William at the Sullivan’s house. He practically lived there. He had been a relief pitcher for the Astros as a young man, but now he seemed to make a living playing golf and betting on sporting events. He was always trying to get me to bet on the Texas Tech Red Raiders or the Texas Longhorns. The line always seemed a bit skewed to me, and the minimum bet was always out of my league. The next time I saw William, he would remind me of the bet he had offered and tell me how much money I had lost by failing to make the bet.

  It was William who first recognized that we appeared to be celebrating some event. When he asked what the occasion was, everyone, including Tim, looked at Michelle.

  “Dad,” she said opening her hands and extending her arms with a flourish of presentment, “you’re going to be a granddad.”

  “That is fantastic!” Sullivan said. “We couldn’t be happier.” He crossed the room and hugged his daughter who threw her outstretched arms around him. While he was hugging her, Sullivan looked at me, and I remember thinking that his smile seemed to dissipate. There was something about his facial expression that made me think about Beth, and I wondered what he knew.

  After dinner, Sullivan, Jonathan, William, and I sat outside drinking scotch under the giant oak tree in the backyard. The circular bed around the tree was planted with begonias that were already beginning to bloom in neat rows of pink, red, and white. The huge oak was illuminated by lights concealed among the begonias and shadows from the trees limbs dappled the veranda of octagonal clay tiles and swayed with the breeze across the cream stucco walls on the back of the house. Jonathan was excited about the baby, and he and William began suggesting names again. William thought that “William” was a perfect name because it gave a boy so many options like “Will,” “Bill,” or “Willie” depending on his personality. “Well Willie,” Jonathan chided him, “What if it’s a girl? Did you ever think of that, Podzy?” They eventually wandered off into the house.

  Sullivan waited until Jonathan was beyond earshot and said to me under his breath, “That boy may die hungry but he won’t die tired.” I don’t know that Sullivan really thought that Jonathan was lazy. There was a tension, almost a competition, between them. Sullivan may have felt that his son lacked some entrepreneurial spark, but I assumed that Sullivan’s comments were meant for me as much as being directed at Jonathan. At some level Sullivan may have been disappointed that he didn’t have Jonathan at the firm to teach him the personal injury and trial lawyer business, but he had me. As he turned his attention to me, I could tell by the serious look on his face that we were about to discuss business. At least I hoped that is all we were going to discuss.

  Sullivan asked about the defendant’s motion to strike the plaintiffs’ expert. I told him that I expected to have a draft response to the motion for him to read by Monday. I told him that I liked Mr. Walton, but that I thought the defendant had done a better job than the plaintiffs of securing experts with superior credentials. I also told him about what Mr. Walton had said about the “new” judge on the case. Sullivan was clearly concerned, and I don’t think he had known about the judge until I told him. He said he would check out the judge�
��s history. He found it interesting that the referral lawyers had failed to mention that a judge from Boyd County, Kentucky, was sitting on a case that involved the Boyd Oil Company.

  As we got up from the ornate wrought-iron table and chairs to go back into the house to freshen our drinks, Sullivan asked why Beth had come back to Houston without finishing her work on the discovery responses. I told him that I didn’t know. I wondered if he was asking why Beth had come back, or if he was asking whether I knew why Beth had come back.

  “She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would disappear in the middle of a project,” Sullivan said.

  “I’m guessing it is some kind of personal problem,” I said, realizing that my attempt at vagueness would be interpreted as my knowing more than I had let on.

  Sullivan just nodded and chewed the ice from his glass. I worried that he might feel compelled to ask Beth about what was going on since he wasn’t getting much information from me, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that would get him off the topic. I followed him back into the house, and nothing more was said about the case in front of the others.

  At the office on Monday there was a steady stream of people coming into my office to discuss the baby news. Michelle and I had discussed not telling anybody about the baby until we were farther along in the pregnancy, but apparently Tim hadn’t felt constrained by our wishes in that regard. Beth didn’t come by, and I don’t think she came in to work that day. I don’t know if Michelle got any work done that Monday. She called me at least a half-dozen times from her cell phone as she went from baby store to baby store. There is no telling how many times she called Jonathan that day. I don’t remember her buying any furniture at that point because we didn’t know the sex of the baby yet. But she was getting ideas for decorating the little nursery next to our bedroom, and she did come home with an armload of books about pregnancy. I would not have to worry about her getting caught up in the research on the Kentucky case any longer. She was researching pregnancy and babies.

  Between the well-wishers’ visits, Eileen and I worked on our response to the motion. In essence, the response tracked the language in the Goodyear case, which I thought suggested that methodologies that form the basis of government regulations are “generally accepted.” I talked to Mr. Walton several times that day, working with him on preparing an affidavit establishing that the linear no-threshold theory formed the basis of government regulations for exposure to radiation workers, and that the threshold theory, while debated among scientists, was not relied upon for drafting government safety regulations. I intended to attach the affidavit to the pleading that I was drafting. The response concluded by asking the court to strike the defendant’s experts.

  Most of the people in the office had left by the time we finished, and it was dark in Sullivan’s office when I left a copy in the seat of his desk chair.

  I went back to my office and waited for Eileen to pack up her stuff and leave before I tried to call Beth on her cell phone. There was no answer. I thought to myself that maybe she had quit the job, and for all I knew, was out of my life as quickly as she had come into it. I was proud of the response to the motion, and thought we had a good chance of at least defeating the defendant’s motion and possibly even getting the defendant’s experts struck. Maybe things were getting back on track.

  By the time I got home, I had convinced myself that the case was in good shape and that if I kept my mouth shut about Beth, nobody would ever have to know about my indiscretion. I promised myself that if I could get away without anybody knowing about the brief affair, I would never let anything like it happen again. Still, thinking about Beth, I replayed in my mind the events of that evening in the Paintsville Inn.

  After dinner, Michelle and I made love.

  I woke up during the night and realized that Michelle was not in the bed with me. I slipped on my boxer shorts that I had dropped beside the bed and went into the bathroom to check on her but she was not in there.

  When I went into the small room adjacent to our bedroom, Michelle was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. She was wearing panties and her Biggio jersey and reading a magazine. Other magazines were open all around her. On the floor were masking tape outlines of what I presumed would eventually be furniture, either that or the Houston police had just finished marking off a crime scene.

  “How do you feel about Beatrix Potter?” Michelle asked not sounding the least bit tired.

  “Fine,” I said. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s late. You fell asleep, but I couldn’t sleep. I’m thinking ‘Peter Rabbit’ if it’s a boy and Dorothy from the ‘Wizard of Oz’ if it’s a girl. What do you think?” She asked looking up at me and holding a couple of magazine pages of pictures for me to consider.

  “Can we pick a story without a villain?” I asked. “Mr. McGregor has always scared me and those flying monkeys give me nightmares.”

  “That settles it,” she said resolutely and closed the magazines. “Noah’s Ark. It works for either a boy or a girl. I wonder if we could get a baby bed shaped like an ark.” She pulled out a pencil and sketchpad from beneath the pile of magazines and began drawing a mural that would go on the wall behind the baby’s bed.

  I laughed. “I’m going back to bed. Are you coming?”

  “In a minute,” she said, and I left her planning the nursery.

  The next morning, I got up before Michelle and made a pot of coffee. I read the sports page while I waited for the coffee to brew. I poured myself a cup and took it back upstairs to the shower. Our shower in the master bath was a large glass enclosure with a bench seat on one end. I was in the habit of taking a cup of coffee with me into the shower in the morning. I would turn the shower to as hot as I could stand it, and sit on the bench in the steam and drink coffee. It was a good time to sit in solitude and think about cases and about what needed to be done that day. Michelle would always kid me about the length of time I would spend in the shower. She told me she thought I was returning to the womb. The shower was my favorite part of the house, and taking a shower was my favorite part of the day.

  That morning, I remember sitting on the bench in the shower with the steam billowing up, drinking my coffee, when the cup slipped in my hand and some of the coffee sloshed onto my lap.

  At first, as I looked down at my penis, I thought I might have burned myself. Small blisters had formed on the shaft of my penis. They were very painful to touch. I abandoned the steam, showered quickly, dressed, and left before Michelle awoke.

  I was sitting at my desk, staring off into space, when the phone rang that morning. Normally, the phone rang at Eileen’s desk, and she would screen the calls and send them into me. If the phone rang at my desk, it was somebody calling me on my private line. Michelle had that number, my parents had that number, and the people in the office used that line.

  It was Beth calling. She was in her office. She sounded nervous and distraught. She attempted the usual pleasantries, but I could tell that there was something she was getting around to telling me. I asked her why she hadn’t called before and why she had left Paintsville in such a rush.

  “Davy,” she said in a hushed tone as if she were worried that somebody near her might be trying to listen in on her conversation. “There is something I have to tell you. I have herpes. I got it from my husband, I think. I’m afraid that you may have been exposed.” She spoke very softly into the receiver. “I’m so sorry. I never would have done anything to hurt you. I went to the doctor yesterday. I have to take these pills. I just heard that Michelle is pregnant. You have to be careful. I thought that I would be past all of this when I got married.”

  She continued talking, but I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying because she was talking so softly into the phone and because I couldn’t focus on what she was saying. Immediately, I felt isolated and disconnected from everyone around me. I didn’t tell her what I had found in the shower that morning. I would eventually tell her
, but it would be a while before I ever told anyone other than the person who gave it to me.

  I sat at my desk and thought for a moment about calling my dad. While it would be nice to hear his voice, I couldn’t see how he would have any advice to offer for this particular situation. Surely, nothing like this had ever happened in his life, and I really didn’t want him to know what I had done.

  Growing up, I had the opportunity to talk to my dad almost every day at breakfast and every evening at dinner. Dad cooked breakfast, and Mom cooked dinner. Invariably, Dad left the college where he taught English and Shakespeare in time to be home by five o’clock, and we would sit down as a family to eat. Usually, the conversation started off with him asking about what happened in school that day, or if I had heard about some event that occurred in the world of sports. Occasionally, there would be a question about how hard a test had been or if I had received a grade back on a paper; but, for the most part, my parents didn’t concern themselves with my grades. They knew that I was harder on myself than they would have ever been, and good grades just weren’t an issue at our house.

  The only scholastic discussions we had were when my dad asked me about what we were reading in English class. My mom had been the one who had taught me to read. We would take a nap every day after lunch before I started school, and she would read to me from picture books. Eventually I would memorize the rhyming lines, and I began to recognize what lines went with the pictures on a certain page. The first book I remember “reading” on my own was Captain Kitty. I can’t remember now if the first line was “Captain Kitty sailed to sea in a beautiful ‘pea-green’ boat” or “in a beautiful ‘sea-green’ boat,” but I remember to this day that the last line was “We’ve been away, but I must say, Home looks good to me!” At age three or at thirty, coming home has an emotional resolution. Mom may have started me reading, but it was Dad who monitored my progress in school.