Troubled Waters

by Carolyn Wheat

  There were two little button-lights on the podium. The first one, the white light, went on at the two-minute warning mark. I’d missed that light completely; now the red one lit up. It was over. My time was up. I’d said everything I’d be allowed to say.

  I hoped to God it would be enough.

  I sat down, my knees shaking and my body bathed in sweat. I felt as if I’d run five miles and then been doused with a bucketful of ice-cold water.

  Water. I picked up the pitcher and poured some into the paper cup on the table. My hand shook; the water spilled on the shiny surface. I was only half-listening to the D.A.’s argument. I felt faint; if I didn’t get some water, I might fold up.

  I lifted the cup. Some joker had punched holes in the bottom with a pencil. Water streamed out of the holes as if from a fountain, splashing on my skirt. I put it down and smiled weakly at the bench.

  I had violated the first rule of appellate argument; I’d tried to drink the water.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I was wet from head to toe, wearing a shroud of clammy sweat and water from the leaky glass.

  Why call it a glass when it was made of waxed cardboard?

  And why think about cardboard glasses when the district attorney was trying to convince the judges to let Keith rot in jail?

  Mainly because there was nothing I could do about it. I had no right to rebut the D.A.’s argument, and I knew what he was saying based on the brief he’d submitted. According to him, the identification procedure was perfectly fine, and even if it wasn’t, no defendant was entitled to a perfect trial, just a fair one.

  I tuned in to the fact that Lieberman was hammering the guy, hitting him hard on the issue of the single photograph.

  Hope leapt in my breast. Was there a chance I hadn’t blown it with what I was sure the judges would see as an emotional rather than a legal argument?

  When it was over, the D.A. picked up his file and I followed suit, making my way on wobbly legs down the long aisle to the doors in the rear of the courtroom. I felt wired to the gills and exhausted at the same time; I had a quick fantasy of going into the men’s club lawyers’ room and sacking out on one of the red leather couches.

  Outside, the long low light of late afternoon filtered through the autumn leaves, creating a scene any painter would have loved. The Gothic church across the street added a sinister note, an Edgar Allan Poe heaviness to the Brooklyn Heights street scene. The cold wind went through my light jacket; my sweat-soaked clothes felt like an icy blanket as I walked the mile or so to the brownstone that contained my office and my home.

  A yellow cab pulled up in front of the building just as I reached the corner Nellis Cartwright stepped out and paid the driver. She started up the stairs, but stopped and waved when she saw me.

  She was a new divorcée, subletting the apartment above mine. Dorinda’s restaurant, the Morning Glory, occupied the ground floor, my office spanned the parlor floor, I lived on the third, and rented out the fourth. My prime tenant, Jerry Laboda, who taught at Brooklyn Law School, was doing a stint as a visiting professor in Indiana. So for the balance of the term, he’d sublet to this woman, who’d moved in three weeks earlier.

  “Cass,” she said, drawing out the name as if to add warmth to the single syllable. She was tall and slender with short platinum hair cut in an asymmetric style that only a truly beautiful face could carry off. I felt unusually clumsy and drab whenever I caught a glimpse of her.

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” She even stood like a model, leaning on one hip with the other leg thrust forward in a stance that should have looked artificial but somehow worked for her. She was a moving sculpture instead of a flesh-and-blood woman, and the long, smoke-gray Donna Karan dress emphasized her angles.

  “Can you ever,” I replied. “I have never in my life stood more in need of the healing brew than I do at this moment.” I pushed sopping wet hair off my brow and tried not to feel envious of her impeccable grooming; I suspected that blond, slender Nellis had never broken a sweat in her life.

  “If I know Dorinda,” I said, gesturing toward the Morning Glory, “she’s got a cup with my name on it ready and waiting.”

  This was the literal truth, although the cup said CASSIE, since Cassandra isn’t a name you can always find on coffee mugs.

  “Actually,” Nellis said, dropping her eyes in a shy gesture I recognized at once as the sign of an acquaintance about to become a client, “there’s something I need to talk to you about. Do you think we could take the coffee upstairs to your office?”

  A private practitioner never turns down the chance to acquire a new client. A lawyer whose entire income depends upon what she can earn by the sweat of her own brow is always ready to listen, always open to new business.

  But I was tired and drained and hyper and preoccupied with Keith Jernigan and it was late and I was in no mood to start a new case.

  “Listen,” I said, “ordinarily I’d say yes, but it’s been a long day. Do you think you could make an appointment and see me during office—”

  “Oh, God, yes, of course, I didn’t think.” She turned away, her face flaming. “I’ll go up and see your secretary right—” Nervous fingers twisted the ring on her left hand.

  A wedding ring. A divorcée still wearing her wedding ring.

  I sighed. Only one thing, in my considerable experience, had the power to transform a poised, mature woman like Nellis Cartwright into a basket case of self-conscious embarrassment.

  I was willing to lay odds that her ex-husband had been emotionally if not physically abusive.

  “Hey, no problem,” I said with forced cheerfulness. “I’ll get that coffee from Dorinda and be right up. You can tell Marvella—that’s my secretary—that we have an appointment. Do you want plain or flavored?”

  It took a good three minutes to convince her I was sincere. She finally agreed to decaf but insisted on waiting for me instead of going inside by herself.

  Dorinda wanted a blow-by-blow account of the oral argument, but I said it would have to wait and took two cups of coffee upstairs.

  My waiting room reflects my interest in photography. Posters from museum shows mingle with old political posters; a Louis Hines black-and-white shot of an immigrant boy in a cap three sizes too large is next to Shirley Chisolm’s Unbought and Unbossed poster from her presidential campaign. My Mailer-for-mayor poster faces the newest addition: press photogs with huge bulky flash cameras and oversized press passes in the bands of their jaunty fedoras.

  And then there were one or two little things of my own. Pictures of which I was inordinately proud, even if they did look amateurish next to the masters.

  As we stepped into the waiting room, Nellis pointed to a photograph I’d had mounted on wallboard. It showed a little girl swinging in the park; the swing chain had become a blur, as had her outstretched, sneakered feet, but her bright eyes in her dark face grabbed the camera and wouldn’t let go. I’d liked the picture a lot, and decided it cheered the place up to see a happy child on the wall.

  “Did you take this?” She walked over to it and stood before it in her model-stance.

  “Yes. I’m something of an amateur photographer.”

  “Me too,” she said. Then she looked at the carpeted floor and murmured, “Only I guess I’m not exactly an amateur.”

  “I’d like to see your work,” I said, and meant it. For one thing, I love photographs, and for another, it might help relax this tightly strung woman to talk about something other than her unhappy marriage before getting down to business.

  “I have a few things upstairs if you’d like to see them sometime.” Her voice was soft, tentative. As if there was a possibility I might decline, might decide seeing her photographs wasn’t worth the climb up one set of stairs.

  “How’s now?” I handed her the decaf, still with the cover on the Styrofoam cup. “We can talk just as well in your apartment as we can here.”

  Her smile wiped the tentative look from her face. She visibly r
elaxed, as if my ready acceptance of her offer dissolved a great fear. We climbed the stairs to the top floor apartment in silence.

  The place looked about the same as it did when Jerry Laboda occupied it. He’d left his mismatched furniture and oversized stereo, but he’d taken his books with him to Indiana. The main difference was the wall space. Nellis had taken down Jerry’s Miró and Kandinsky prints and replaced them with her own framed photographs.

  The first one hit me between the eyes. A skull. A skull hidden behind a model’s face. The skull beneath the skin. The face was perfectly made-up, vacant, a doll’s face. Only upon closer inspection could the shadows be seen as hollow spaces where the eyes used to be. Only at a certain angle did the sharply curved lips cover skeleton teeth.

  It hit me then. What she meant by saying she wasn’t exactly an amateur.

  “Oh, my God. I saw your show at the Witkin.” The Witkin Gallery was the most prestigious photography gallery in New York City, which made it the best in the world.

  I clapped my hand to my mouth. “I can’t believe this. I really loved your stuff. You want to know the truth, I had a pretty bad case of photo envy for a while. I kept thinking, Why am I even bothering to take pictures anymore? I’ll never do anything that good.”

  She didn’t simper. She didn’t even say thank you. She frowned a little and asked, “You don’t think it owes too much to Jerry Uelsmann?”

  I laughed. “The mark of a true artist. Never think your work is good enough. There’s always room for criticism.”

  “Yes, but you haven’t answered the question.”

  “Well, he does double exposure too, so I guess there’s a connection. But you added color to some of yours, which he never does. You also pushed the envelope of the grotesque. I liked that clown series a lot. Nothing more sinister than a clown.”

  Now she inclined her head in a gracious gesture and said, “Thank you. It means a lot when people who know what they’re talking about like my work.”

  People who know what they’re talking about. Nellis Cartwright had just called me “people who know what they’re talking about.” I felt a hot rush of pleasure and pride.

  “You really like double exposure.”

  “Yes. I’ve been experimenting with multiple exposures. Sometimes double, sometimes triple.”

  “How do you do a triple exposure?” My eyes traveled back to the skull-face. I wondered if the model had seen the finished image. If she had, she’d never view her profession the same way again; she’d always be aware that her beauty masked the bony truth of death.

  One more layer, one more detail, emerged upon that closer look. Out of one of the hollow eyes, a snake’s head peered with beady eyes.

  Creepy. Seriously creepy.

  “You double-expose in the camera,” she explained, the tiny smile at the corner of her mouth telling me she’d noticed that I’d noticed. “That gives you a double image on the negative. Then you expose a different negative on the paper, and before you print it, you expose the double negative over that. Triple exposure.”

  Now I turned toward her. “That must take an enormous amount of control. Preplanning. It doesn’t just happen by accident.”

  She smiled, revealing tiny, perfect teeth like grains of rice. “It did the first time,” she admitted. “But I found the result so provocative that I decided to play with it a little bit.”

  She pointed to a photo on the other side of the room, above one of Jerry’s giant speakers. I walked toward it, seeing only a marvelously intricate tree, all twisted and misshapen, the grain revealed by a bleaching wind. As I grew closer, I saw the naked female body in the tree’s trunk. What had seemed to be a knot was a breast; what had appeared to be a knothole was the woman’s vagina. Her arms were outstretched, merged with bare branches.

  It was a disturbing image. Was the woman one with the tree, a wood nymph dancing in the wind, her arm-branches swaying in ecstasy? Or was she trapped inside the wood, screaming for release?

  Then I reached the photo itself. The woman’s hair was on fire. Flames peered from the tangled branches, rising upward from the woman’s forehead, mingling with the long wavy hair that billowed upward into the tree.

  Now the truth was clear. Her undulating body was not writhing with pleasure, but with pain. Or did ecstasy and agony coexist, two sides of the same coin?

  The tree and the woman were in black-and-white, printed on soft, almost sepia-toned paper, but the fire was almost yellow, almost in color.

  “It’s a platinum print,” Nellis said. “On handmade Japanese paper. And the flames are hand-colored.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe something neutral, like Tree: Number Four.”

  “I always liked those surrealist names. You know, the ones that have nothing to do with the picture itself. The ones that raise more questions than they answer.”

  “I haven’t shown it yet. Maybe I never will.”

  “Too personal?”

  “Too self-indulgent. Work should be more disciplined. Less—oh, I don’t know.” Nellis ran her hands through her white-blond hair. “Less embarrassing, I suppose. I can just imagine what the critics would say if they saw this.”

  “You shouldn’t worry about critics. Just do what—”

  “That’s easy for you to say.” Her tentative tone was gone; she was shrill in her indignant protest. “You don’t know what it’s like to pour your whole soul into your work and have someone come along and dismiss it with a few patronizing words. And don’t tell me that doesn’t matter, because it does. It means the next gallery isn’t going to be as welcoming. It means the next time I apply for a grant, I might not get it. It means I can’t support myself without taking some other job that takes me away from my work. So don’t tell me to forget about the critics. They’re the people who make the difference between my being a working photographer and a—”

  “Look, I’m sorry.” I raised my hands in a gesture of concession. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about being a professional artist. It was the kind of cliché people say all the time, and I just didn’t think.”

  “Oh, God, I can’t believe I lashed out at you like that.” Her lower lip trembled. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth and covered her lips. She drew a ragged breath and said, “God, I can’t believe what’s happening to me. I’m so on edge all the time. So crazy.”

  “That didn’t sound crazy. It sounded like perfect sense. I just didn’t understand.” It seemed vital to reassure this fragile woman, who was so easily convinced she’d done something wrong.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked, although I had a pretty good idea of what was coming. “I warn you, I know nothing about copyrights or gallery contracts.”

  “It’s about my divorce.”

  Her words confirmed my suspicions. A divorcée taking the first, few, tentative steps toward a separate life outside the marriage. Living in a student-style sublet until she was able to establish herself. Still fragile and uncertain of her own creative abilities after years of put-downs by a supposedly loving spouse.

  I’d seen it all before.

  I’d seen it, but I’d done my level best not to represent it. In the past, I’d have slipped Nellis Cartwright one of Kate Avelard’s business cards.

  After talking to Kate in the Heights, that no longer seemed like a good idea.

  “Give me a general idea,” I said. I pulled out one of the director’s chair barstools and sat down.

  She took the other one, but she perched instead of sitting. As if she couldn’t let herself relax even in this space she considered home. “First of all, you have to know who my husband is. Was.”

  Something vague tickled the corner of my brain. I did know who Nellis Cartwright of the Witkin Gallery had been married to; I just couldn’t—

  “Grant Eddington.” She said the name as though it alone would tell me everything I needed to know.

  And it did.

  Gran
t Eddington was a critic. No—Grant Eddington was the critic. The one whose thumb up or down meant that multi-million-dollar musicals either ran for five years or closed in five days. The one whose scathing reviews sent seasoned actors running back to Hollywood in tears. The one who’d stated in print that his wife’s artistic ambitions were as pathetic as Zelda Fitzgerald’s.

  No wonder Nellis didn’t take praise easily. She wasn’t used to it.

  “You know how he is,” the cool blond said. “He either loves or hates—and he’s so much better at hating.”

  “So when he decided the marriage was over, it was over with a capital—”

  “Oh, yes. I came home one afternoon and found a note asking me to move out by midnight. And when I tried to talk about it, he refused and said if I wasn’t gone by then, I’d lose the right to any possible settlement.”

  Her perfect lips curled. “When I tried to pay for my room at the Plaza with a credit card, I found that none of them worked anymore. Grant made a preemptive strike against all our assets, leaving me with nothing. I had to go to court every month to beg for enough to live on. I—” Her voice choked. She raised a shaking hand to her mouth and said, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’ll try to pull myself—”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. But I have to ask—if the divorce is final, what do you think a lawyer can do for you at this stage?”

  “He screwed me out of what I should have had,” Nellis said, her tone hardening like nail polish. It hadn’t occurred to me that a woman who knew how to apply lip-liner could also swear.

  “But you did agree to some kind of settlement, right? I mean, this divorce is a done deal, not something that’s still pending in court, right?”

  She nodded. “But now I find out all kinds of things I didn’t know before. He’s got money he kept hidden from me.”

  “So you’re alleging fraud?”

  “I guess so,” she said, the uncertainty returning to her tone.

  “It’s a long shot,” I said. “You have to understand that courts don’t like overturning decrees they’ve already made. But,” I went on, “I could at least read the settlement decree, talk to an accountant, check the figures. Then we could talk some more about maybe reopening the settlement—if it looks as though you have a case.”