“It all sounds so damn inspiring,” I say. “Rags to riches.”
“Yes, I’m the American dream.”
“How did you meet Guy?”
“At a seminar on proving and defending the medical malpractice case.”
“I always knew CLE had to be good for something.”
“That’s what I get for trying to improve my mind.”
“You think you deserve better?”
“I think I’m getting exactly what I deserve. Another martini, please.”
“When do you have to get home?”
“After this drink.”
“Then make it a double.”
I SENSE in her the grand design of some awesome inevitability. I don’t know from where it emanates, maybe it comes from having your father crushed beneath a load of pine, but its symptom is a weary resignation.
“Why don’t you just end it?” I ask.
“But I like seeing you.”
“I mean with Guy.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”
“Because you love him?”
“Why else?”
“I don’t know.”
“See. It’s so simple, isn’t it?”
She is committed to Guy, absolutely, she tells me so all the time, there is no other option. But still, when I call, she picks a place.
“I am so tired,” she says. “Do you ever get so tired?”
“No,” I say. “I’m too frightened all the time to be tired.”
“Frightened of what?”
“Of learning that the best is behind me.”
“Sometimes I have this urge to just start over,” she says. “Be something new.”
“Don’t talk about it, do it. Guy has, apparently. You can, too.”
“But I already have. This is it.”
“You thought you’d change your life with Guy?”
“No, Guy was something else.”
“And what am I?”
“You are an indulgence. Something not good for me, like a cigarette or a drink.”
“Hazardous to your health.”
“If only you knew.”
WHAT SHE sees in me, I can only guess. What I see in her, besides the obvious beauty, is a sadness, palpable but elusive, a sadness that reaches into my heart like a claw.
I’m not struggling to understand why her sadness touches me as it does, why I feel about her what I feel; it doesn’t take Jung to dredge up the suspects. My mother drinking gin late nights in the kitchen, drumming her fingers on the Formica, wondering how she ended up married to this man, living in this tattered house in this decaying suburb, shackled to this brat with his whine like a siren. Or my father, in his chair in front of the television with a can of Iron City in his hand, sitting in the chair in the dark after his wife left him alone with his son, on his face the dazed expression of a car-crash victim staggering out of his wrecked vehicle. Why is it that children of alcoholics find themselves mysteriously attracted to the alcoholic personality? Answer that and you might understand why I found myself, many years before, engaged to a sad, sweet girl named Janice, who fulfilled all my greatest fears by breaking the engagement and running off with a forty-seven-year-old urologist named Wren. Or why, a few years after that, I prostrated my heart and my career on the altar of Veronica Ashland, a sad drug-addled woman whose betrayal was as inevitable as the thunderstorm at the end of a brutally sweltering day. Or why I find myself obsessively attracted to the sadness in Hailey Prouix. Is it that I see in her sadness a chance to ease my soul, to do for her what I could never do for my parents as they tore their lives apart? Or is it just that she is with my dear friend Guy and so hot my blood is boiling at the wanting?
IT IS usually me who calls, who tells the receptionist it is Victor Carl to talk about the Sylvester matter. That is our code case, the Sylvester matter, in honor of her silver-screen hero. It is usually me who calls, so I am surprised when I return from a court appearance to see a message in my box pertaining to the Sylvester matter. When I phone, she speaks to me in a whisper.
“Are you free for lunch?”
“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”
“When can you shake loose?”
“Now. Where do you want to meet? What are you hungry for?”
“Oh, pick a place, Victor. Any place, any place at all.”
She is waiting for me at the sandwich joint. There are little tables crowded into a long, narrow room, and the tables are filled with men and women talking loudly and stuffing corned beef specials into their mouths, strands of coleslaw hanging from their teeth. She is leaning back in her chair, arms crossed.
“What looks good?” I say as I sit.
“Everything,” she says.
“The corned beef seems to be it.”
“Nothing for me, thank you.”
“Are you okay? What happened?”
“The most wonderful thing,” but her voice is anything but gladdened. “What are we going to do, Victor, you and I?”
“Have lunch?”
“Is that all? Because lately that seems like all.”
“I’ve been following your lead.”
“Well, I’m a lousy dancer.”
“Did something happen between you and Guy?”
“Yes. Something happened.”
Just then the waitress comes to our table, her pad out. “Are you ready?”
“Victor, are you ready?” asks Hailey.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you give us a minute,” says Hailey. The waitress rolls her eyes before rushing off to grab an order in the kitchen.
“I’m not hungry,” she says. “Are you hungry?”
“Not anymore.”
“Then let’s go for a walk.”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere you want.”
Outside, it is damp and chill and the temperature brings a rouge to her cheeks. She wears a gray overcoat atop her lawyer’s garb, her hands tucked into the pockets.
“Do you want a drink? You look like you could use a drink. I have some beers in my apartment.”
“Yes,” she says. “Let’s do that.”
“Is it about work?” I ask. “Is it about Guy?”
“Yes.”
“Which?”
“Aren’t you sick of talking? Aren’t you sick to death of talking? The more I talk, the less I know. The words are so fuzzy they turn everything into a lie, and then the lie becomes the new truth and I don’t know anything for certain anymore.”
I begin to say something, some comforting inanity, but the hungry look of tragedy in her eyes stops me midword, and so we walk in quiet through the noontime crowds toward my apartment.
It is a mess, like it is always a mess. I leave her standing in the living room as I gather up the clothes on the coach, the towel on the door, gather them up and dump them all into the hamper in my bathroom. She stands motionless as I work, still in her coat, hands still in her pockets. When it is almost presentable, I stop and look at her standing still in her coat, and the sadness that is always there is pouring out of her. I can see it, a dark blue pouring out of her. She looks at me, and her eyes beneath her glasses are moist, and the blue is pouring out of her, and I am helpless to stop myself from going to her and wrapping my arms about her and squeezing, as if I could squeeze out the sadness.
She feels thin beneath my arms, bones and nothing more. She smells of jasmine and smoke. I tell her it will be all right, even though I don’t know what is troubling her and I suspect it will turn out badly. I tell her it will be all right, and I touch my lips to the top of her head in a brotherly kiss.
“I’m so bad.”
“No you’re not.”
A brotherly kiss to the soft of her temple.
“I am. You don’t know.”
“I know what I need to know.”
A brotherly kiss to the soft ridge beneath her eye, and I taste the salt of a tear.
I pull away. She lifts her face to me. Her eyes are wet, h
er nose red, her mouth quivering. She is the picture of desolation, and I can’t help myself. I don’t want to help myself. Something has happened between her and Guy and that now is enough for me. I take her biceps in my hands and squeeze, even as I kiss her gently. Even as our lips barely touch. There is no mashing, no gnashing, just the gentlest touch. The gentlest touch. A saving touch, I think, I hope. Our mouths open slightly, the touch of our lips staying just as gentle, and nothing slips between them, no tongue, no moisture, nothing, but not nothing, because there is a commingling of spaces, a creation of something new, and in the enclosure formed between our gently touching mouths I feel an emptiness flowing and growing, hers, mine, ours.
I WANT it to be slow.
I had fantasized about the two of us together, often, incessantly, it had been my nighttime preoccupation since our first meeting, and it had always been hard, rough, full of laughter and grabbing, she seemed that kind of lover, but in the presence of her overwhelming sadness I want this now to be slow, as gentle as our first kiss.
I brush my lips again upon her temple, upon her cheek, take her lips gently in my teeth. We are naked now, kneeling on the bed, our hands gently brushing each other’s arms, sides, backs, thighs.
She is thinner than ever I thought, so thin and fragile and, without her glasses, so seemingly vulnerable, so in need of protection. And that is what I want to do, to protect her.
The afternoon light slices in through the blinds, her smell of smoke and jasmine is charged by the sharp edge of musk.
I slide closer. I am pressed up against the flat of her belly.
I glide my hand around the contour of her breast. I lift its weight in my palm.
I kiss her shoulder, I kiss the line of jaw, her neck. A tremor rises from her throat and with it a sound soft as a spring drizzle. I kiss the bone of her clavicle, I kiss the hollow beneath the bone, the first swell of her chest, the soft skin, the excited pink areola. The sound rises, stretches, widens to fill every inch of space.
I want it to be slow, but suddenly there is a presence in the room other than the two of us. A hunger, a need. Something foreign and relentless, primordial, with a rhythm of its own, a breath hot and dank, a power, and I don’t know from whence it came. Is it mine, hers, is it an entity of its own invading our lives? I don’t recognize it, I don’t understand it, I’ve never felt anything like it before, this hunger, this need. It is brutal and violent and immortal, and before I know what has happened, it has taken control.
I want it to be slow, but what I want no longer matters.
And when it is over, she lies on her side, covered in sweat and sheets and I lie behind her, in a shocked silence, sore and uncertain, my arms wrapping her like a stole.
“That was insane,” I say.
“It always is.” There is a twang in her voice, a slight shift west and south into the hillocks of her West Virginia home, as if whatever it was that roared through us took her back into her past.
“No, it was a like freight train was in the room with us.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“So you felt it, too?”
“Shhhhhh.”
“What was it?”
“A vestige.”
My chest is pressed into her back, my hips are pressed into her thighs. She doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t understand what has happened. I hold her tight and feel the sadness and hold her tighter, but with the shift in her accent for a moment I am not certain anymore whom I am holding.
“What was the thing?” I say. “The thing you wanted to tell me about.”
“Nothing important.”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing you should worry about. Nothing that affects you.”
I don’t say anything. I hold tight and wait. She wanted to tell me before, she wants to tell me now, so I wait.
“It was last night,” she says. “Guy. We were together in the Jacuzzi. There were candles, rose petals.”
“I don’t want to hear the details.”
“He thought it was romantic. The candles. Like a commercial or something.”
“Really, I don’t want to hear.”
“Then he asked me to marry him as soon as the divorce goes through. To marry him.”
She says nothing more, and I say nothing, and the silence swells and stretches until it is as taut as an overinflated balloon that I can’t help but prick with my words:
“And what did you say?”
“What could I say? I said yes.”
Part Two
With Prejudice
7
I COULD barely look at Guy as he sat next to me at the defense table, still in the clothes of the night before, the clothes, like Guy, now rumpled and stinking. I could barely look at his puffy face, his red eyes, the way his hands trembled. I could barely look at the fear that overwhelmed him as he began to understand the abject consequences of his single moment of uncontrollable rage. Whenever I looked at him, I wanted to strangle him, so instead I looked around the courtroom, at the bailiff, the guards, at the bored reporters scattered in the otherwise empty seats, at the detectives sitting in the front row behind the prosecution table, Stone leaning back, arms stretched out, Breger hunched forward in weariness. It was still early, the judge was not scheduled to arrive for another quarter of an hour, but it pays to be prompt when they are arraigning your client for murder.
The Montgomery County Courthouse was an old Greek Revival building with porticoes and pediments and a great green dome, all set in the county seat of Norristown. They had put us in Courtroom A, the building’s largest room, with its high ceilings and wood paneling and big leather chairs at the counsel tables that squeaked with righteousness. The courtrooms in Philadelphia are fresh and spanking new, modern and streamlined, with a sense of the assembly line about them, and so it felt good to be in a place with heavy wooden benches and red carpeting, a place that exuded harsh justice of the old sort. That’s the kind of justice I was hoping to find.
I let my partner, Beth Derringer, coach Guy through the procedure so I could stew blissfully in my own emotions. “This is just a formality, Guy, you know all this,” she said quietly. “We’ll waive the reading of the indictment, plead you not guilty, and get started building your defense.”
Beth was not just my partner, she was my best friend. Sharp, faithful, absolutely trustworthy. So of course I couldn’t trust her with all that had happened between Hailey and me and what had been decided the night before.
And what exactly had been decided? Justice, vengeance, take your pick, they both felt the same to me.
It all would have been simpler had I been able to go it alone, but this would be a trying case, I would need assistance, and so I had asked Beth to assist. And having Beth on my side had another distinct advantage. She could be my canary in the mine shaft. If I could keep her in the dark about what had happened and what I had decided to do about it, I believed I could keep everyone else there, too.
“What about bail?” said Guy. “I’ve got to get out of here. Do you have any idea of what it’s like in prison? Do you have any idea of the way those animals inside look at me?”
“No,” said Beth. “I don’t. We’ll try to get you out, Guy, but it’s a murder charge, and you were trying to run. The judge will grant either no bail or one absurdly high. But how much could you put up if bail is set?”
“I don’t know. There’s money in the account, there’s Hailey’s life insurance, there’s the house. It’s worth a mil or so.”
“Whose house?” I said while still looking away.
“Mine. Leila’s. Our house.”
“That’s not your house,” I said.
As soon as I said it, Guy understood. We sat side by side in Property Law, I cribbed off of his notes for my outline. In Pennsylvania, when any real estate is owned by a married couple, neither spouse has any individual property interest, it is owned by the couple itself, and any disposition of the property must be agreed to by both spouses.
“Will Leila agree to put it up for bail?” asked Beth.
“Yes, of course. To get me out of jail, of course. Let me talk to her.”
“Do you think she’d put up your children’s house to give you a chance to run and leave them homeless?” I said without looking at him so he couldn’t see the expression twisting my features. “Do you really think her father would let her?”
“Talk to her, Victor. You can get her to sign.”
“I’m not that persuasive.”
“Talk to her for me.”
“All right.”
“And tell her I want to see the kids. I need to see the kids.”
Before I could respond, Beth continued. “You mentioned an account. What kind of account?”
“A brokerage account.”
“In whose name?”
“In my name. And Hailey’s.”
I turned suddenly and stared at him, his pleading eyes, his mouth, jerked now and then by a twitch that had never marred his features before his arrest. Not so handsome anymore. “How much?”
“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “Depending on the markets, maybe half a million.”
“Where the hell did you get half a million dollars?”
Fatal Flaw Page 6