Fatal Flaw

by William Lashner

  Once he had been a handsome man, he had played minor league baseball, he had raised a family by the strength of his hands. Now I looked at him lying near lifeless in the bed, and in a way I envied him. For him, at least, it was over, the maneuvering, the arguing, the rushing here and there for results that meant nothing. That was how far I had fallen—I envied the man in the coma—when Mrs. Gonzalez walked into the room.

  She was a nice lady, sweet and terrified, devoted to her husband, worried about his future, her ability to continue his care. Her insurance had a limit, it would run out, it would run out, and then what would she do? I commiserated. In my job I had become excellent at commiseration. I was wearing a dark suit, an overcoat, polished black shoes. I must have seemed the bearer of very bad tidings, but I was there to help, I told her. In any way I could.

  There was an order to things. You couldn’t just presume, you couldn’t just go in waving dollar bills. You needed to follow the order of things. If you showed any eagerness, they would want a lawyer of their own, and once they found a lawyer of their own, it became a whole different game. I learned that from my clever father-in-law, Jonah Peale himself. So I moved in slowly.

  “Are you happy with the room?” I asked. “Are you happy with the care, the nursing? Anything we can do to help in this most difficult time, we will do. Just ask. Please. Anything. You shouldn’t worry about the limit on your medical insurance, Mrs. Gonzalez. I will personally make sure that no transfer takes place until you are satisfied that his care in the new facility will be as good as the care here. We want to take care of you. How are things at home without Mr. Gonzalez’s salary? Are you managing? If you need anything, I want you to call me. There are people who can help. I’m on your side. Tell me what I can do to help. Anything. Anything.”

  It was going well, so well that I opened the briefcase and took out the long piece of paper. It was always the crucial moment, the opening of the briefcase. You didn’t open the briefcase unless you felt the deal, and once it was open you didn’t leave the room until the deal was closed. The briefcase was open, the papers were out, Mrs. Gonzalez was on the verge of signing. Pushing her would have been as easy as pushing aside a curtain, I could feel it, but I didn’t push. That was not the way it was done. It had to be her choice, and she was choosing to sign. The pen was in her hand, and she was choosing to sign.

  When a voice from outside the room said,”Stop.”

  I turned to see a pair of bright crimson lips set upon a pale face, a flash of color so vivid it cut like a Technicolor knife through the gray scale of my world. They were smirking at me, those bright red lips, and yet I couldn’t look away, I couldn’t help myself from staring, soaking in the color. There was the body, too, of course, small, frail, even in the black suit, even with the briefcase and in the heels, but it was the crimson of the lips that caught me off guard, a flash of color so vivid it startled me.

  “This is a private room,” I stammered, “and this is a private meeting.”

  “Not anymore,” said the woman.

  The lips widened, showing now teeth, white and even, and between the bright teeth the pink tip of her tongue. She was sticking her tongue out at me.

  “Your daughter asked me to come, Mrs. Gonzalez,” she said. “I’m a lawyer.” When she said that she adjusted her serious, dark-framed glasses as if to emphasize the point. “Your daughter asked me to speak to you before you signed anything.” She looked at me. “It appears I’ve come just in time.”

  I tried to get rid of her, get the meeting back on track, but in that flash of a moment it was over. The woman explained to Mrs. Gonzalez the consequences of the contract, and it was over. I put the paper back in the briefcase, snapped it shut. The closing of the briefcase. I stared impassively for a moment at the lawyer’s bright red lips as they unsuccessfully fought a smile, and then I turned to Mrs. Gonzalez.

  “I hope everything turns out well for you and your family,” I said, and then I started out of the room.

  “I’ll be in touch,” said the woman lawyer to my back.

  I hesitated for a moment, fought the urge to turn around, and then I continued out the door, and what I was seeing as I walked down the hall was not the failure of my meeting but shades of red, the crimson of her lips, the pink of her tongue. She had said she’d be in touch, and I was hoping then that she would keep to her word.

  She did.

  Hailey Prouix.

  IT WAS Hailey who placed the calls, at least at the start. She asked questions about the case. She made demands for settlement even before she filed, ridiculous demands. And then there were other calls, not strictly necessary for the business at hand. And all the conversations ended on a note light and flirty.

  I began thinking of her in odd moments, those lips, those cheekbones, the intonations of her soft laughter over the phone. In the grays that had become my life, she was a splash of color. Her calls became the highlight of my day. It was inevitable that we would meet for lunch. Inevitable that after a few lunches we would meet for drinks after work. It happened slowly. It wasn’t something I didn’t want, but it wasn’t anything I pursued either. I knew the costs, I knew the dangers, and still it happened.

  She filed her lawsuit on behalf of Juan Gonzalez and his family. I responded. In our offices the litigation moved apace, but in addition to the business calls we left each other more personal messages about the Willis case, named for her favorite movie star at the time. After work almost every other day we met somewhere and sopped up martinis and avoided talking about what both of us were thinking. We sat close while we drank, we shared cigarettes, our knees bumped. We never talked about anything too personal, but we talked. Every day I found her more lovely, every day I found the sadness that enveloped her like an exotic perfume more intoxicating. I stared at the red of her lips, the blue of her eyes. Starved as I was for color, I couldn’t help myself from gorging. I came home later each evening, my family life dimmed. But in the middle of the night, for the first time since I’d entered the law, I began to dream again in more than black and white.

  It was after work one evening, at the bar of the Brasserie Perrier, when, in the middle of a conversation about something meaningless, like the weather or the Supreme Court, she said simply, “What are we going to do?”

  I knew what she meant, but I didn’t want to answer, so I said, “Have another drink.”

  “I don’t want another drink.”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I want to not want anything. I want to pretend we are simply two lawyers on opposite sides of a case.”

  “That’s all we are,” I said.

  “I’m glad. It makes everything easier.” She picked up her purse, gathered up her things. “It’s time we both go home.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” I said, and I didn’t. I didn’t.

  “Go home to your children.”

  “They’re already in bed.”

  “Kiss them gently while they sleep,” she said. “Go home to your wife, on whom, as you’ve told me over and over, you’ve never cheated.”

  “She’s waiting up for me,” I said. “She always does.”

  “Then make love to her.”

  “When I do, I think of you.”

  “How satisfying for me.” She downed the last of her drink, stood from her stool.

  “I kiss her breast,” I said without looking at her, “and I think of the swelling flesh beneath your blouse. I kiss her thigh and I think of the softness beneath your skirt. I kiss her neck and smell the jasmine of your skin and my heart leaps.”

  “Then hurry home.”

  I grabbed her wrist. “I want you so badly my kidneys ache.”

  She shook her arm free.

  “Go home, Guy,” she said. “Go home to your family and your life. Just go home.”

  When she left the bar, I had the urge to chase her, but I didn’t. I let her leave, I let her leave, and instead I caught the train, dark and dreary, to the station, to my car, to
my house. The children were asleep. I kissed them each, gently. Leila was reading in bed. I slipped beneath the covers. She closed her book. I responded to her questions. She reached a hand to me, and I felt a chill. It was like the hand of death. It touched me and I felt all the color in my body bleed out through the touch. I had the urge to jump out of bed, to run from the house, but I didn’t. I stayed in the bed, frozen from the touch. I stayed with my wife for that night and the next and the next. I stayed with my wife and let her hold me as she slept, let her nuzzle my neck with her cold chin, let her reach beneath my tee shirt with her cold hands. Those nights I dreamed again in black and white.

  A few days later, after being able to hold off no longer, I left Hailey a message about the Willis matter. When I met her that afternoon for lunch, there was no lunch.

  IT WAS Paris after the liberation.

  It was champagne and abandon, laughter, twisting tongues, drunken revelry, teeth-clattering sex. Oh, don’t make a face, Victor, don’t be such a prude. It was amazing, amazing, like some strange brute force was running through as we pounded away. And it was like she didn’t merely want it, she needed it, more and more of it. Thus the Viagra. But it was more than just great sex. She freed a part of me that had been imprisoned for ten years, the part that Pepito had sent fleeing off to law school.

  I tend to rocket too far in any direction I head off in, that was what happened after college and again when I went on to law school, and this was no different. I wanted, that first afternoon, to give over everything to my lover, to end it with Leila, to flee parenthood, to quit the firm and the law, to move in and start it all again with Hailey. I wanted the new sense of freedom to be instantaneous and irrevocable, right then and there, but she wouldn’t have it. Not until some things were settled, not until the Gonzalez case was over, not until my family situation had sorted itself out and we had some money to make a go of it. And I understood. I would lose my job for sure, as soon as it all became public, I couldn’t wait to lose my job, but then what would happen to us? What would happen to my family, my children whom I would still need to support? She was the one who brought me back to my responsibilities. We had to move slowly, she said, surely, and I loved her all the more for her sensible sensibility in the midst of our hard passion.

  So instead of embracing an earth-shifting freedom, I fell into the patterns of simple adultery. I left my messages about the Willis case, I snuck out for long lunches, I led a double life. It was so much easier this way that I didn’t fight it, no need to tell Leila, confront my children, no need to deal with my father-in-law. My unthinking love for Hailey was just as strong, maybe even stronger, for all the wanting, but it hadn’t transformed my life as I believed it would, it had only complicated it.

  Still, there was the future. It would happen in the future, she assured me. As soon as we had some money, as soon as the Gonzalez case was over. She joked that we would live off her share of the Gonzalez settlement, and I laughed. But it was a big case with a high potential value for the plaintiffs; I had been involved in cases just like it that had settled for millions and saw no reason why this one would not. So the next time she made the joke, I didn’t laugh. We stared at each other, and without the passing of a word it became understood that once the Gonzalez case was settled we would make the move, take the fee, go off together somewhere and start over. “Costa Rica,” she said one late afternoon as she lay in my arms. “I’ve been thinking about Costa Rica.” I knew what she meant, the two of us living the expatriate life in Costa Rica, sun, sand, excursions deep into the verdant forest, or, hand in hand, scuba diving beneath the perfect turquoise surface of the sea. I couldn’t think of anything sweeter. Juan Gonzalez would be our ticket out.

  It was shortly thereafter that the file came.

  AT THE start of the Gonzalez case I had made all the routine inquiries and received the routine answers. Gonzalez had lived for a time in Denver, so I contacted his old employer for his insurance records and used those to track down possible hospitals where he might have been treated. From those hospitals I requested any medical records they might have had on the man. I had sent out my requests, backed by threat of subpoena, before the thing with Hailey turned into what it became. And then, after everything had changed, out of the blue a package came from Denver. I closed the door and, with shaking hands, I opened it. It was Juan Gonzalez’s medical file with a copy of my request inside. He’d had pains in his head, there was a scan taken, they had found an aneurysm, ready to burst at any moment. There was nothing to be done, no operation that was not too risky. The advice was to leave it alone and pray, and that is what he had done.

  Juan Gonzalez had a preexisting medical condition that he had not disclosed to his doctor and that had caused his grievous injury. Bad things happen, and some bad things that happen are nobody’s fault, and this time I could prove it.

  Before I showed the file to anyone else, I took it to Hailey. She didn’t seem terribly surprised. She took off her glasses, read it through, shrugged her shoulders, smiled sadly. “I suppose Costa Rica will have to wait,” she said.

  To her credit, she didn’t push. She didn’t even so much as suggest. She could have, and I would have gone along. Pushing me would have been as easy as pushing aside a curtain, I could feel the weakness in myself, but she didn’t push. That would have changed everything, and she knew enough not to change anything. So it was my idea to tell no one, to bury the file, to continue moving the case toward settlement. My idea, my choice. And it wasn’t even that hard a choice.

  In my mind I was already free of my family, my career. I had broken every rule for the love I felt for Hailey, why should one more transgression make any difference? Leaving my wife, my children, that would be hard. But in my mind I had already fled my career, ditched the law, to which I discovered I was constitutionally ill suited. To ditch my fiduciary responsibilities and work it so that Red Book Insurance compensated the Gonzaleses for the bad result visited upon their patriarch, and to finance my freedom in the process, seemed nothing in comparison to what I had already decided to abandon.

  I handed her the file.

  She said she would destroy it, and then she kissed me, she kissed me, and whatever feeling of dread I felt washed out of me with that kiss, along with something else.

  What would I call it? Innocence? No, not innocence, something else. Hope maybe. I had held the hope, foolish certainly, but still the hope that everything would work out perfectly, that my wife would serenely accept my defection and move on with her life, my children would adjust without any damage, that Hailey and I would sail off into the pure waters of unadulterated happiness. Can there be unadulterated happiness in adultery? Yes, there can. I felt it in those moments when, naked, we pressed against each other, when I hugged her so tight it hurt, because I wanted us to be as close as two could possibly be. I felt it then, and I held true every hour to the fantasy that such would comprise our future. I suppose my final hope had been that Hailey would tell me to not to hide the file, to give it to the insurance company, to start our lives clean. Maybe that was the most foolish hope of all.

  When she said not a word as I handed it to her and then gave me her kiss, the hope bled out of me, all my hope, and I saw with utter clarity what lay ahead: disillusion, bitterness, separation, devastation. I saw it so clearly, and yet there was nothing I could do to stop it. Because I loved her, Victor, and I had no option but her. I was ready to lose everything for a hope I now knew was false. I now knew it was false, impossible, ruined already by my own hand, and still I had no choice.

  What does a degenerate gambler do when the luck dies and he loses everything, when he knows the tide has turned and he has no chance at all? He doubles the wager and bets his life.

  IT WAS never the same after that. Never.

  I convinced Red Book to settle, and once the papers were signed and the check cleared, I went about the grim task of extricating myself from my grim legal life. Leila took it badly, melodramatically, played it ou
t in a series of ugly scenes; the children took it better than I expected, which was somehow even worse. My father-in-law went stone cold with rage. He knew enough to suspect something about the Gonzalez case but did nothing, except send Skink after me looking for any files I might still have. The one he wanted, though, I had already given to Hailey. To Hailey. And I decided, as a cover for the money we had stolen, to stay in the law, at least for a time. I started my own practice, forged anew my old chains. I figured I would find my great transformation not in a new profession but solely in Hailey.

  But even before I moved in, she had changed, grown mysterious. I still loved her so much it ached, but she had changed. I tried to step out a bit, start a new life with her. I introduced her to you even before the move and to some other of my former friends after, but something was wrong. We stopped making love, she came up with excuses every night. She would take pills to go to sleep and drift off into something closer to a coma than a doze. It drove me crazy, her denying me and slipping away from me like that, and strangely it made me want her even more. As she lay drugged beside me, I fantasized about her and grew painfully overheated. I forced her once, and she was too drowsy to stop me, telling me in that drugged girlish voice to be quiet, be quiet, they might hear. I hated myself after that and didn’t again, ever, but that didn’t stop the wanting.