Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  “Those bastards… I was afraid of this.”

  “I know,” she says. “It’s the worst. He told me your phones were clear at least.”

  “Yeah, well, all they needed was one. What’d he do with the bugs?”

  “He disabled the one in my office phone and put it back in.”

  “Put it back?”

  “He explained that if it stopped working and someone got sent in to check on it and the bug was gone, they’d know for sure they’d been caught. In the meantime, he showed me how I can check to see if there’s a new one.”

  “Smart, very smart. What about the ones at home?”

  “He left them still working. If bugs at both places suddenly stopped working on the same day, he said they’d know something was up.”

  I had not thought that far. I am glad Mr. Van Scoy has—the man knows his business. “All right. Since Bobby already thinks your phone might be tapped anyway, I guess there’s no harm.” He already won’t talk about anything sensitive from home.

  I begin to think of Laura’s and my phone call, the one we had while she was at work. My face grows hot at the thought of anyone hearing what we said.

  “What now?” she asks.

  “Good question,” I say. I stare at the date on my calendar. There are less than three weeks to the election, eleven days to the last debate. “I still think the best choice is to tell him.”

  “I d-don’t know,” Laura says. “His temper is as short as I’ve ever seen it. He snaps at the littlest things. It would upset him tremendously.”

  “I think you might be underestimating him.”

  “Maybe so. But I think you might be underestimating what the impact of this might be.”

  “Telling him would be upsetting, but it’d also be reassuring. The idea that you and Annie are there for him is important. Extremely important. In an invisible way, he depends on you.”

  She is silent for a while. “If I felt that,” she says in a soft voice, “I’m not sure I’d have gotten us into this trouble.”

  But here we are anyway, and it took two of us to get here. “We haven’t talked about this, Laura, but I think it’s time we did.”

  “What?”

  “Whether you want him to win or not.”

  There is a long pause before she finally answers. “I feel what I always feel. Divided. I want him to get what he wants. I want to see Wheatley lose. But I don’t want him to vanish into work.” Her voice grows clear and passionate. “But what I couldn’t bear is if he lost the election because of me. Because of something I did.”

  “Yes,” I say, knowing only too well what she means.

  “So what do we do?” Laura asks.

  I take in a breath and let it out. One of us has to make a decision, and I can tell it won’t be Laura. “If we do nothing, we’ll be playing into Wheatley’s hands. So not only should we not tell Bobby about our phone conversation—at least not until after the last debate—but we have got to do everything we can to make sure in the meantime no one gives him an audiotape to listen to.”

  “You mean keep anyone from handing him something?” she says. “Good God, that won’t be easy.”

  “Hardest of all is making sure no one calls him on the phone and simply starts to play a tape. I think they’re going to try to stick it to him, enrage him, demoralize him, and probably do it as close to the debate as they can. I think we should try to prevent it.”

  “How exactly?”

  We discuss some possibilities. Screening his mail would not be so difficult. Most of it goes through others’ hands before it gets to him, anyway. But all Clive Sanford (whose handiwork I’m convinced this is) would have to do is reach a place where Bobby is, say he’s Scott Bayer or me or Governor Roberts, and when Bobby gets on, Clive plays a recording. And then we’re finished. Through.

  I confirm that there are exactly eleven days left until the last debate. After a lot of discussion, we finally agree that protection won’t be possible without the help of someone else, someone who is around Bobby during his campaign day. I suggest Cindy Tucker. I volunteer to talk to her and explain that she’s got to keep an eye peeled for mischief. Laura agrees and decides to try to take some time off from the hospital to spend with Bobby on the trail, an extra pair of eyes and ears. I will arrange to do the same during periods when she cannot.

  This seems workable, but I wonder if we are not compounding one mistake with another by trying to control events. If a tape gets through, I expect Bobby will take it a lot worse than if we told him ourselves. It’s a high-stakes gamble.

  Less than ten minutes after I get off the phone with Laura, Ross Hacker calls to tell me that the Wheatley campaign has been calling him in a panic.

  “They say they hear the police association’s gonna endorse Robert Parrish—‘Is it true? Is it true?’ I tell you, pal, you really lit their fire.”

  “Don’t deny it,” I tell him. “Don’t confirm it, either. Just put ’em off for a little while. Let ’em stew. If the governor’s office isn’t in touch with you within twenty-four hours, strike any deal you want with Wheatley.”

  “Gotcha. Say, how’d my father-in-law work out?”

  “Excellent. He’s a real professional.”

  “He is, isn’t he? Glad he could help. Glad you could help. Call you later.”

  I call Laura back and cannot reach her. I take a deep breath, think about having her paged, and decide just to leave a message with her nurse. The bad news about Karen’s great and good friend Hank will have to wait.

  I ask Margie to call Cindy and track down Bobby.

  I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. No home movie is pushing to present itself, nor has one for weeks, something I take as a good sign. But the impulse for me to lie these days rests uncomfortably close to the surface. All these deceptions and counter-deceptions. Jeannie. Freddie McMasters. Kurt and I agree to lie to keep Allan Bernstein from maliciously telling a truth that is nobody else’s business. Then there’s Wheatley’s appalling campaign. And my having Karen Gillian—who herself has violated her profession’s ethics by speaking about Laura to her lover—lie to him in order to see if he is betraying her. I am weary of this, and, worst of all, I am not done.

  Now Laura and I must protect Bobby from getting the truth of our almost betraying him with each other, itself knowledge discovered through illegal wiretaps. The old saying, “If you lie down with pigs, you get up dirty,” pops into my head. At the moment I no longer know if I am the person, one of the pigs, or perhaps part of the mud they are all wallowing in.

  The only person walking a straight path is Bobby. Everyone else around him has a project: trying to assist, manipulate, defend, or deceive him. Laura and I will be different in only one regard. We will be trying to assist, manipulate, defend, and deceive him.

  I start to feel guilty toward my old friend, then am annoyed at him. If he had been more emotionally available, Laura would not have been so vulnerable. I didn’t make him a workaholic. I didn’t make him neglectful. I didn’t give him tunnel vision. It took not just Laura and me to get to this point. It took three of us. So maybe the path Bobby is walking is, if not too straight, then too narrow.

  Still, I am convinced what he’s doing is something worth doing, reaching out beyond the confines of himself and trying to be of use. I tried to do that, too, once, but my busyness and distraction came at an incalculable price. It occurs to me that all the adjustments I have made since—leaving the county prosecutor’s office, losing my marriage, isolating myself—have served to make me of less and less use to anyone. Whether all this is a form of self-punishment or of survivor’s guilt or of some other syndrome for which there is a fancy name, I have no idea. But it does seem to me a sad legacy to Becky’s life. Surely it would have been better to have found a more constructive penance. But it’s also clear to me now that my old self, which became so depend
ent on going from success to success, was too flimsy to withstand the terrible weight of my failing to look after my daughter.

  And so what I would find hard to live with now would be if somebody breaks through our cordon sanitaire with the contents of Laura’s and my conversation, and the revelation of our “affair” upsets Bobby so much that he loses the debate and, as a result, the election. This strikes me as not only a plausible but even a likely sequence should the news get through to him. There are some men who go out into the world of work in order to provide for their family, and some who go to get away from their family. Bobby, I suspect, is in a third group and is one of those whose family provides him with the sense of stability, of home, of meaning, finally, that makes him able to bear the world’s buffets, however hard they are and no matter where they land, believing all the while he has a point of refuge and succor. Unfortunately, this belief can be made to vanish in a few short minutes, leaving him all alone out there in the Out There.

  My phone buzzes. I sit upright. Bobby is on the line.

  I gather my scattered thoughts. “Okay,” I tell him. “Now you get to see what kind of friend of yours Governor Roberts really is.” I give him Ross Hacker’s name and telephone number.

  ✳

  It is almost seven o’clock in the evening, though it seems later with October’s early dark. Margie has gone home and I am arranging the cases I have to work on tomorrow. I am very tired. It has been a long two days, and I have begun to fall behind in my work. I have urgent negotiations to complete with Erickson Bruce about Jeannie’s case before the news of it in the papers gets really ugly, I will be taking still more time off to join Bobby on the campaign trail, and I have cases to review and filing deadlines to meet, some of which I have already rescheduled once. The phone has rung a few times in the last hour or so, but I have just let it ring and tried to concentrate on what lies before me on my desk.

  There is a knock on my outer office door. My light is visible from the street. It is probably the building security patrol, a nice young woman who, a few hours from now, does her patrolling with a not-so-nice German shepherd. I go to the door. I pull it open to find it is Jeremy Taylor, the enterprising young journalist, someone I find more difficult to categorize than the security guard or the German shepherd. Because we haven’t formally met, he introduces himself.

  “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?” he asks. “Saw your light, and I haven’t been able to catch you on the phone.”

  “I’m pretty bushed. Is this on the record? For a story?” He nods. “Can it wait?”

  “I only have a few questions.”

  I wave him into my office, offer him some coffee. What the hell, I think. I’ll be tired tomorrow, too. Besides, it would probably be useful for the campaign to know what Mr. Taylor is working on. Despite the day’s end, he looks freshly shaved and dressed and combed, more like a television reporter ready to go live than an ink-stained wretch. He refuses the coffee. I decide to take some, though it has sat heating for most of the day and feels chewy and tastes burned.

  “What’s the story?”

  “Sorry to bother you,” he says, “but every time this guy Howard Oates or Wheatley’s press people puke up another rumor, my editor insists I look into it. This one’s—”

  “What rumors?” I ask.

  He opens his notepad and leafs through a few pages. “Well, there was one that Mr. Parrish’s thyroid cancer had recurred and he is getting radiation treatments…” He turns the page. “That he is having an affair with his communications director Cindy Tucker…” He turns the page again. “That he is hooked on painkillers because his old war injuries still bother him.” He looks at several more pages. “They go on like that.”

  “Jesus. When is your editor going to blow the whistle on this shit? It’s outrageous.”

  “He’s blown the whistle already. He told Oates that if one more story like that floats our way, he’s going to run a front-page story on the libels his people have been trying to peddle, complete with names of the peddlers. It’s been a little quieter since then.”

  “Well, I think the public ought to know what Wheatley is trying to do.”

  “There are rumors from the Parrish camp, too. Less personal, I suppose, and probably with more belief in their factual basis. But Scott Bayer knows how to play the game, too.”

  “You’ll forgive me for saying this, but aren’t you sort of new to be that cynical? Or is this just a cover to prove you haven’t taken sides? Bobby Parrish’s campaign has been nothing like Wheatley’s. As your own excellent article made clear.”

  He looks down at his notepad for a moment, and I think for a moment that he’s feeling chastened. But he looks up at me and asks, “Do you know an Allan Bernstein?”

  My heart begins to race. I expect I am about to have to contend with Allan’s countermove. “Yes,” I say. “He was a roommate of mine in college.”

  “He says that he and you and Mr. Parrish and another man named”—he looks at his notes—“Kurt Swanson took a hallucinogenic drug your senior year in college. Any comment?”

  “He’s lying.”

  “About what, exactly?”

  “Bobby Parrish did not take a hallucinogenic drug.”

  “Did you?”

  “Is this story about me or about Bobby?”

  “I’d like to know what part or parts of Mr. Bernstein’s story are inaccurate.”

  “It’s nobody’s business what I did or didn’t do in college. I can tell you that Bobby Parrish did not take a hallucinogenic drug. Not while I was around.”

  He writes something down. “Did you fly to New York last month?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And to Los Angeles?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “On business.” I can see what’s coming, but like a huge pursuer in a dream whom I’m helpless to outrun, there is nothing I can do except watch.

  “Mr. Bernstein claims you flew out to see him in order to get him to agree to keep silent about the drug incident, and that you flew to Los Angeles to see Mr. Swanson for the same purpose.”

  “I saw Allan Bernstein because he was an old college friend and roommate. I was his guest at one of his lectures and joined him at his apartment for lunch. Period.”

  “What business were you on?”

  “Legal business.”

  “Who was your client?”

  “That’s between me and my client.”

  Taylor looks at me levelly for a moment and says nothing. It is a look I have used countless times in court with balky or perjuring witnesses. I return his gaze and take regular, even breaths. “Mr. Bernstein plans to make this accusation in an editorial he is writing,” Taylor says at last.

  “He is, is he? Then why doesn’t he just do it? Why has he decided to alert you to this plan of his?”

  My question catches him off-balance. “Well, I suppose he must be worried about his credibility.”

  “You’re damned right he is, and he damned well ought to be. He’s thought up this bullshit story and is using you to try and prop him up and increase his publicity. Let me tell you a little about Allan Bernstein, Mr. Taylor. He’s a former college radical leftist who’s become a radical right-winger, and he wants to see Bobby Parrish defeated by any means possible. He’s probably an instrument of Howard Oates or Clive Sanford. Allan believed the means justified the ends twenty years ago, and he obviously believes it now. He’s prepared to tell this scurrilous lie in order to hurt Bobby’s candidacy. And he wants your help. Give it to him if you want to, but I’m telling you that Bobby Parrish did not take a hallucinogenic drug. And this crackpot conspiracy theory Allan Bernstein dreamed up is a product of malice and fantasy. And you can quote me.”

  He writes some more, then closes his notepad. “All right. That’s all I came for. You kno
w, if you could just tell me the name of your client, my life would be a lot simpler. I wouldn’t have to bother Mr. Swanson or even Mr. Parrish. The story could keep until after Mr. Bernstein’s editorial appears.”

  “Fine. But I’ll have to talk to my client first. If he or she gives me permission, I’ll get back to you right away.”

  “Very good. Thank you for your time.”

  “Glad to help. Can I have your home number? I’ll try to reach you tonight if I can.”

  He gives it to me, says to call anytime before midnight.

  He leaves. I rub my eyes and face. Well, that wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be—the lying, that is. Once I got used to the idea and worked up a head of steam, I have the sense I did an adequate job. Though I was a bit too stiff and defensive at first… I begin to review what he said and I said, how he looked and how I might have looked, around and around and around, until finally I think, enough: the train has left the station, the die is cast, the milk is spilled, the toothpaste has left the tube, each of these clichés working like a cooling unguent on the blisters of my uncertainty. This is doubtless the reason clichés survive so long. They soothe.

  I call Kurt at the studio and tell him the situation. He immediately agrees to say, if he’s asked, that I was working on some legal matters for him—no problem. I breathe a little easier for the first time since Jeremy Taylor appeared. Kurt and I talk for a while. He says money is still coming in from Bobby’s appearance out there—at least another $150,000—and he asks how the campaign is going. I say it’s going to go down to the wire. He volunteers, as if the two topics were directly related, that he and his actress friend have begun to talk about getting married. I congratulate him, thank him for all his help, wish him luck on his series, and hang up the phone, every cell drained of the ability to deal with another human being.

  I need to tell Bobby about Jeremy Taylor and the Allan Bernstein maneuver. I need to talk to Cindy Tucker to tell her to watch out for tapes and suspicious phone calls. I need to call Jeremy Taylor and tell him the name of my client. I need some sleep.