A Minor Fall

by Price Ainsworth

  “I’ll bet it’s not as bad as you think it is,” he said reassuringly. “Tell me what’s up.”

  My voice started to crack. I couldn’t help it. “I’m going to lose Michelle,” I said. “I’m going to lose my job. I don’t know where I’m going to live. I won’t have any money to live on.” I wondered if Eileen could hear me on the other side of the closed door to my office.

  “Davy, slow down. I can’t understand what you are saying. What do you mean: you are going to lose Michelle? You can always find another job. You’re not going to starve. What do you mean you’re going to lose Michelle? Is she okay?” he asked.

  “She’s fine. I guess. I know I asked you to listen, Dad. I’m suddenly not sure I can talk to you about this right now.”

  “It is not long until dove season opens. Why don’t you come up here on September first? I know it won’t be like that time we went to Argentina after you finished at Tech, but I’ll bet we can find a limit or two of birds. We could talk then. And you know, your mom and I are coming down there as soon as Michelle goes into labor.”

  “Yeah. That trip to Argentina was perfect. I wish we were back there right now. We have to go again some time, Dad. I don’t imagine that I will make it to dove hunting this year. I’ll just see you when the baby comes,” I said. “I’m sorry to worry you, Dad. Everything will be okay.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Davy. I am worried, but I’m sure you’ve made more out of this than there is. You’ve always just tried to handle things on your own, and never would let anybody help you. If you need our help, you only have to ask for it.”

  He paused, but I didn’t respond.

  “Davy, having a baby can be stressful on the best marriage. Has something happened between you and Michelle? Are you worried about the delivery process? Does your call have something to do with work? I was concerned when you went to work for that firm . . . that there could be problems with you being married to your boss’s daughter. I can’t help you unless you tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “I know, Dad,” I said.

  “You and Michelle can always come live in Abilene. I don’t know what the personal injury practice is like here, but there would be built-in babysitting.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Dad.”

  “Keep it on your list of options. It looks to me like as long as you have a law license, you’re never really unemployed. Maybe you could even take a little time and put together a short story or two, or maybe something longer.”

  “That’s true about the employment,” I said, ignoring the comment about writing fiction. “Of course, you’ve got to have cases to work on. And, you’ve got to have some money to work the cases up. Typically, the plaintiff’s attorney fronts the expenses. And the attorney eats them if he or she loses.”

  “So you’d want to be careful about which cases you took at first. If you were going off on your own, you’d want to avoid anything too risky, it seems to me. But you know better than I do. You’re the lawyer, after all,” he said, trying hard to avoid sounding condescending after giving me advice.

  “Yes, though I’ve never actually ventured my own money. The truth is that I don’t have any money, Dad.”

  “Where do those two salaries go?” he asked.

  “Most of it goes to the house. My car is leased. Our debts, including my student loans, pretty much eat up everything we bring home. Whatever happens, I doubt that Michelle is going to want to continue working after the baby is born.”

  “What do you mean by ‘whatever happens?’” he asked.

  Again, I didn’t respond.

  “Davy, I don’t really know what it is we’re talking about because you won’t tell me. It does seem to me that if you’re living on borrowed money and leases, it’s really just a matter of time until you have to rein in your lifestyle and make a concerted effort to eliminate the debt so you can build something for yourself and your family.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t say anything.

  “If you made partner at that firm someday, who would benefit the most, you, or the name partners? While you haven’t asked for my advice, I must admit it looks kind of like a grey-suited pyramid scheme to me.”

  “You sound like a liberal college professor,” I said.

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t call this a liberal college.”

  “The experience is good,” I said. “I’ve gotten to try some cases. Most guys my age are still just drafting motions or reviewing documents to see if they are privileged.”

  “I suspect that’s true,” he said. “But you don’t want to look up in five years and still be helping to clear out the firm’s meritless cases under the guise of gaining experience.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Davy, it’s unlike you to call for help or advice. Your mother would say it’s unlike you to call at all. It sounds to me like you might be having problems at home or at work, or maybe both. Apparently, you’re not going to tell me any specifics right now. But I can tell you this. It’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to be broken. Sometimes it takes having the façade lowered so that we can see what it is that was important to us in the first place. The theology guys around here give long lectures about the necessity for a vessel to be broken in order to let anything inside.”

  “I need to go, Dad.” I said, cutting him off. I was familiar with the idea. What was the line from the Cohen song about things having to be cracked to let the light in? Now the thought occurred to me that the vessel lecture assumed that whatever force broke the seal didn’t destroy the vessel entirely. What if the force obliterated the object? And what exactly was it that was being permitted to enter?

  My mind wandered to the herpes literature I had read that suggested that having had the herpes sores on the sex organ, one would always be more susceptible to contracting AIDS. The virus could more easily enter the broken vesicle than it could the intact skin. I started to ask Dad a question, but I just sat there silently on the phone.

  “Yeah,” he said after a long pause. He was frustrated, but he tried his best to sound reassuring. “Be careful driving my convertible.”

  21

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I left for Kentucky to attend the hearing regarding the experts, I spent a considerable amount of time laying out my clothes for the trip. The effort was largely ceremonial, because I inevitably would wear a navy blazer, grey slacks, a starched white shirt, and some form of a red-and-blue striped tie. While I laid the clothes out on my side of the bed and compared the tie options, Michelle got ready for bed and crawled in on her side.

  I don’t know if anybody will ever read this. I seriously doubt that if anybody ever does read it that they would be inclined to accept marital advice from me. Nevertheless, I would recommend that when you get married you buy the smallest bed in which you can both sleep comfortably. We, of course, bought the biggest king-size bed available, even though before we were married we would often fall asleep curled up in each other’s arms on that worn-out gold couch Michelle had in the den of her apartment. Now, when Michelle was on her edge of the bed and I was on mine, I wouldn’t have been able to hug her even if I had Yao Ming’s arms.

  “Have you come up with any new arguments?” Michelle asked, genuinely concerned, but masking her anger that I was even going to the hearing with our baby due any day.

  “No. Well, I may have a trick or two up my sleeve. The defendant’s lawyer will cross-examine our expert, and then we’ll reverse the process and I will cross-examine their expert witnesses. Maybe I can get away with just cross-examining one of Boyd’s witnesses. I’ve got a few things for one of their witnesses. Most of the arguments are already set out in the briefs. I hope the commissioner has bothered to read them.”

  “How do you feel about your chances?” Michelle asked.

  I told her that I thought it was a foregone conclusion that we would lose, that our expert would be struck, and that a summary judgment motion would follow shortly. I assumed that was
why her dad was sending me to argue the motion rather than doing it himself. She pointed out that Riza was also going, and I responded that I thought Riza’s attendance was merely to provide Sullivan a report on my performance.

  “You’ll be fine,” Michelle said, in a way that indicated that she loved me, whether I won or lost the motion, the way your dad told you to be careful when he gave you the keys to his car for a date when you were sixteen.

  “Will you be okay?” I asked.

  “I hope so,” she said trying not to sound worried.

  “We get to Lexington about noon tomorrow. I have a meeting on another case, the new Henderson case, tomorrow afternoon, and the hearing will be the next morning. It will probably last a couple of hours, and then I’ll fly back that afternoon.”

  “At least Dad is sending the plane.” She said.

  “Yeah. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

  “Mom’s here,” she said. “And Jonathan, I’ll be okay.”

  “Would you ever forgive me if I missed the birth of our child?”

  “I want you here,” she said.

  “I want to be here.”

  “Do you?” she asked. “You’ve been pretty distant the past few weeks. It seems like we never talk about anything. It seems like there is something you want to tell me, but won’t. We haven’t really even decided on a name for the little guy.”

  I recognized the opportunity to disclose what was really bothering me. She was calmly asking me to explain what was going on with me. I would be leaving town in a few hours. However painful the discussion might be, I had a built-in exit ramp. Michelle was lying there in our bed, miserable with discomfort from her pregnancy. She didn’t deserve my deceitfulness or infidelities or secretiveness. She deserved an honest, frank discussion about what was going on with me and our marriage.

  “Just talk to me,” she said.

  I paused from my packing and looked at her lying there under the covers, both vulnerable because of her condition and vibrant with the role that would be hers for the next few days. I was nothing like the person she thought she married: confident, secure, and honest. If I was ever going to tell her about the affair, and the herpes, I had to do it now. What if something happened on the trip? What if she had the baby tomorrow? Dr. Nathan would be there, but I would have failed again to live up to my promise to him to tell Michelle the truth.

  “We’re married,” she said. “What is there that could be going on with you that you couldn’t talk to me about?”

  I had practiced the speech a thousand times in my head. I knew what had to be said, and I knew how I was going to say it. I had considered leading off with the story of the affair, waiting for a reaction, and then continuing with, “There’s more.”

  “More?” she would ask, and then I would tell her about the virus and my concern that she might be infected, and I’d conclude with my discussion with Dr. Nathan, presented as a heroic effort on my part to try and make things right. But that scenario risked the conversation being cut off before I ever told her about the venereal disease. She might leave, lock herself in the bathroom, or insist that I leave.

  The better presentation, it appeared to me, would be to start out with the admission that I had herpes. “Establish primacy,” is what the instructors always said back in trial advocacy class. The medical condition was, of course, at this point the most important fact. We could discuss the details of the affair at some hopefully much later date.

  I could tell her now, and she could talk to Dr. Nathan tomorrow. They could work out the details of the delivery in a way that would be the least risky to her and the baby. Probably I would be in Kentucky when the baby was born, and it would be a month or two before I was allowed to hold him.

  Telling her now would clear up so many questions that Michelle must have asked herself in the last few months about what I was keeping from her—why I seemed so closed-off and distant—and why we never had sex anymore. In a way, telling her might be almost as much a relief for her as for me.

  Either way, telling about the affair first or the herpes, I knew the moment at hand presented a clear opportunity to begin the inevitable discussion. I just couldn’t let myself start.

  “I thought we decided on ‘Paul,’” I said.

  Michelle sighed. “Right,” she said, and rolled over to her edge of the bed to face away from me. “But he has to have a middle name.”

  I finished packing my overnight bag and put it by the door to the bedroom. I turned out the bedroom light at the door, walked across the room, and got into bed on my side. We lay there, facing away from each other, without either of us saying anything.

  I had been surprised to learn that Riza had left the night before on a commercial flight to Lexington, but her absence from Sullivan’s plane had made it easier for me to take the rental car to Dr. Mock’s office without having to make up reasons for my needing to go there. I was carrying the tissue slides in the Henderson case for Dr. Mock to review. I had already mailed him the pertinent records, including the MD Anderson path report performed after the mastectomy. I wanted to hand deliver the slides.

  The time alone on the plane allowed me to start working on a short story idea that had been churning around in my brain for the last few months. While I didn’t know how the story would end, I knew how it started, and I wrote out the first part on the flight to Lexington without anybody looking over my shoulder. It may not have been any good, but I thought it was better than the poem.

  My cell phone started ringing as I went up the steps to the hospital where Dr. Mock worked. Worried that it might be Michelle calling about the baby, I fumbled through my brief case and almost dropped the Henderson slides in the process. I was not entirely relieved to see that it was Eileen on the caller ID. Michelle could have called Eileen and asked her to find me, but when I answered I found out that the Methodist Hospital adjustor had called, and Eileen wanted me to call him back. I jotted down his phone number and told Eileen that I would call him back when I got to my hotel. I didn’t tell her where I was.

  Dr. Mock and I met in a tiled conference room in a hospital in Lexington. His secretary took me to the room and brought me a cup of coffee. In a few minutes, Dr. Mock appeared in a white coat with a manila folder under his left arm. I presumed the file contained the records I had sent. He smoothed his white hair back, and extended his hand. He had a warm smile and pale blue eyes.

  “Mr. Jessie,” he said, “so nice to see you. Tell me, how is everything in Houston?” Dr. Mock spoke with just the hint of an Austrian accent. He explained to me that he had done a residency with the legendary Dr. Debakey in Houston before focusing on pathology. Though it had been entirely fortuitous that I had met him that day in a law office in Lexington, Dr. Mock was preeminent in his field. I knew his report in the Henderson case, if favorable, would go a long way toward settling the case. And, if the case didn’t settle, he would be a terrific witness. He had told me on the phone when I first consulted him about working on the case that he looked forward to coming to Houston and calling upon old friends.

  As we sat at the veneer table, he said, still smiling, “I guess I won’t be coming to Houston anytime soon.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, concerned for a moment that his report might be harmful to the case.

  “This is going to be an easy one, Mr. Jessie. I’ll bet the pathologist just blew it. I know he saw the slides, and I have not had a chance to myself. However, I bet that the cellular changes he observed and diagnosed as cancerous are instead the result of the radiation therapy Mrs. Henderson previously underwent for her cancerous tumor. That is, of course, the conclusion of the pathologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center when he looked at the slides after the double mastectomy and determined that she did not have a recurrence of breast cancer, but I think my report will be worded in a fashion that will be better understood by a lay person. You will never get to the deposition stage, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Well, that would
be good news for the case. I’ve brought the slides with me for you to see.” I said and handed the mailer containing the slides to Dr. Mock.

  “And, in a sense, good news for Mrs. Henderson,” he said opening the envelope that I had handed him and taking out slides. “I expect that she didn’t have a recurrence of the disease. Unfortunately, for her, she probably did undergo a completely unnecessary procedure.

  “I always have a hesitance about testifying against a fellow physician, but mistakes are mistakes. It doesn’t appear from his original report that the pathologist, Dr. Valdez, bothered to consult with the oncologist that sent him the tissue for review prior to his examining the slides. Dr. Valdez probably just saw that the tissue was from a local oncologist and presumed he was looking for cancer. Dr. Valdez saw cellular changes on the slides, didn’t bother to learn that the patient had undergone radiation, and mistakenly diagnosed cancer. Of course, if the pathologist had questions about what he was looking for, he should have consulted with a member of his group or perhaps another group altogether.

  “I’m very sorry that Mrs. Henderson has been through all of this. After I look at the slides, I should have the report prepared this evening or tomorrow, and I will over-night it to you. Should I send it to the address on the cover letter that accompanies these slides?”

  “No,” I said. “Let me give you another address. This one is in Abilene, Texas.”

  I gave him my parents’ address. He shook my hand and stood up from the table.

  “I don’t mean to interfere in business that is not mine, Mr. Jessie.” Dr. Mock said as he walked to the door. “But you look a little tired today. Was your flight okay?”

  “The flight was fine.” I said. “I may be a little tired. I probably just need to get something to eat.”

  Dr. Mock, with the envelope and file under one arm, put his hands in the pockets of his white coat and smiled. “I remember those early days myself. Late nights. No time to eat. Trying to impress superiors. Don’t forget to set aside a little time for yourself. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll be putting your own health at risk. And it will hit you when you least expect it. Again, I don’t mean to interfere. Experience can be a rather unforgiving instructor, I’ve learned.” He said still smiling.