Now and Forever (1978)

by Steel, Danielle

  Green hadn't even been able to come up with any dirt on her past. She had been married once, at the age of eighteen, and the marriage had been annulled a few months later. But he didn't know why, or who she had married. Nothing. And there was no record of it, which was probably why she hadn't admitted to it at the preliminary hearing. (What he knew he had learned from a woman Margaret Burton worked with.) What Jessie was paying for was a clean bill of health on the woman.

  Jessie sat at her desk, staring at Green's bill, and opened the rest of her mail. A statement from Martin for the five thousand they still owed, and nine statements from New York for her purchases for the spring line. Ian's bill for his physical two months before, still due, for two hundred and forty-two dollars, and her own chest X ray for forty, as well as a seventy-four-dollar bill from a record store where she'd splurged before she'd gone to New York. As she sat there, she wondered what had ever made her think that seventy-four dollars for records wasn't so awful. She could still remember saying that to Ian at the time. Yeah ... not so awful if you haven't found yourself with ten thousand dollars in legal bills in the meantime ... and the florist ... and the cleaner's ... and the drugstore ... she could feel her stomach constrict as she tried not to add up the amounts. She reached for the phone, looked at the card in her address book, and called.

  She phoned the bank before going to the appointment, and she was lucky, more or less. Based on the previous performance of her account, the bank was willing to leave her loan uncovered by collateral. She could sell it. She had been secretly hoping that they wouldn't let her. But now she had no choice.

  She sold the Morgan at two in the afternoon. For fifty-two hundred dollars. The guy gave her "a deal." She deposited the check in the bank before closing, and sent a check of her own to Martin Schwartz for five thousand dollars. He was paid. It was taken care of. She could breathe now. For weeks she had had nightmares about something happening to her and nobody being able to help Ian with the bills ... horrible fantasies of Ian begging Katsuko for the money, and being refused because she wanted the money to buy kimonos for the shop, while Barry York threatened to drag Ian back to jail. Now they were saved. The legal fees were paid. If something happened to her, Ian had his attorney.

  She then borrowed eighteen hundred dollars from Lady J's business account to pay Green his fee. She was back at her desk at three-thirty--with a splitting headache. Astrid showed up at four-thirty.

  "You're not looking too happy, Lady J. Anything wrong?" Astrid was the only one who called her that, and it made her smile tiredly.

  "Would you believe everything's wrong?"

  "No, I wouldn't. But--anything special you want to tell me?" Astrid sipped the coffee Zina had poured for her and Jessie sighed and shook her head.

  "Nothing much to tell. Not unless you have about six hundred spare hours to listen, and I don't have that much spare time to tell you anyway. How was your day?"

  "Better than yours. But I didn't take any chances. I got up at eleven and spent the afternoon having my hair done." Jesus. How could she tell her? How could Astrid possibly understand?

  "Maybe that's where I went wrong. I washed my hair myself last night." She grinned lopsidedly at her friend, but Astrid didn't smile. She was worried. Jessie had been looking tired and troubled for weeks, and there was nothing she could say.

  "Why don't you call it a day, and go home to your gorgeous young husband? Hell, Jessica, if I had him around, wild horses couldn't keep me here."

  "You know something? I think you're right." It was the first real smile Jessica had produced all day. "Are you heading home? I could use a ride."

  "Where's your baby?"

  "The Morgan?" She tried to stall. She didn't want to lie, but ... Astrid nodded, and Jessie felt a pain in her heart.

  "I ... it's in the shop."

  "No problem. I'll give you a ride."

  Ian watched Astrid drop her off from the window in his studio, and he looked puzzled. It was time to take a break anyway--he'd been working straight through since seven that morning. He opened the door for Jessie before she got out her key.

  "What's with the car? Did you leave it at the boutique?"

  "Yes ... I ..." She looked up and she could almost feel the color draining from her face. She had to tell him. "Ian, I ... I sold it." She winced at the look on his face. Everything stopped.

  "You did what!" It was worse than she had feared.

  "I sold it. Darling, I had to. Everything else is tied up. And we needed almost seven thousand bucks in the next two weeks for Martin's fee, and the first half of Green's bill, and Green is going to hit us with another one in two weeks. There was nothing else I could do." She reached out to touch him and he brushed her hand away.

  "You could have asked me, at least! Asked me, said something--for God's sake, Jessica, don't you consult me on anything anymore? I gave you that car as a gift. It meant something to me!" He strode across the room and grabbed for the Scotch. He poured some into a glass while she watched.

  "Don't you think it meant something to me?" Her voice was trembling, but he didn't hear, and she watched while he swallowed the half glass of Scotch neat. "Darling, I'm so ... I just couldn't see any other ..." She fell silent, with tears in her eyes. She remembered so well the day he had driven it home for her. Now ...

  He swallowed the last of his drink and pulled on his jacket.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Out." His face looked like gray marble.

  "Ian, please, don't do anything crazy." She was frightened at the look in his eyes, but he only stood there and shook his head.

  "I don't have to do anything crazy. I already did." The door slammed behind him a moment later.

  He came back at midnight, silent and subdued, and Jessica didn't ask him where he'd been. She was afraid to: maybe Inspector Houghton would be paying them another visit. But she hated herself for the thought when she watched Ian take off his shoes. Two small hills of sand poured out of them, and she looked at his face. He looked better. They had always done that together--gone to the beach at night to talk things out, or think, or just walk quietly together. He had taken her there when Jake had died. To their beach. Always together. Now she was afraid even to reach out and touch him, but she wanted to, needed to. He looked at her silently and walked into the bathroom and closed the door. Jessie turned out the lights and wiped two tears from her face. She felt the funny gold lima bean at her throat and tried to make herself smile, but she couldn't. They were past laughing at lima beans now, past laughing at anything, and who knew--one day she might sell the lima bean too. She hated herself as she lay in the dark.

  She heard the bathroom door open, then Ian's soft footsteps, and then she felt the bed dip on the far side. He sat there for what seemed like a long time, smoking a cigarette. He leaned against the headboard and stretched his legs. She knew all his movements without looking, and she lay very still, wanting him to think she was sleeping. She didn't know what to say to him.

  "I have something for you, Jess." His voice was gruff and low in the stillness of the room.

  "Like a punch in the mouth?"

  He laughed and put a hand on her hip as she lay on her side with her back to him.

  "No, dummy. Turn around." She shook her head like a child, and then peeked over her shoulder.

  "You're not mad at me, Ian?"

  "No, I'm mad at me. There was nothing else you could do. I know that. I just hate myself for getting us in this spot, and I'd rather have sold a lot of things than the Morgan."

  She nodded, still at a loss for words. "I'm so sorry."

  "Me too." He leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth and then put something light and sandy in her hand. "Here. I found it in the dark." It was a perfect sand dollar, a milky white shell with a tiny fossil imprint at its heart.

  "Oh, darling, it's beautiful." She smiled up at him, holding it in the flattened palm of her hand.

  "I love you." And then with a slow, gentle smile he pulled
her into his arms and let his lips follow an exquisite path to her thighs.

  The next two weeks spun past them crazily. Hours at the shop, long lunches at home, violent arguments about who wasn't watering the plants, and then passionate making up and making love and making out, and insomnia, and oversleeping, and forgetting to eat and then eating too much, and constant indigestion, and terror about the bills followed by spending huge amounts of money on a Gucci wallet for Ian or a suede skirt from another store for Jessie, when she could have gotten it at cost from her own, and baubles and junk and garbage, and all of it charged, of course, as though the day of reckoning would never come. Utter madness. None of it made any sense. Jessie felt for weeks as though she were ricocheting off walls, never to be stationary again. Ian had the impression he was drowning.

  It was the day before the trial when everything finally stopped. Jessie had made arrangements at the shop to take a week off, two if things turned out that way. She left the boutique early and went for a long walk before going home to Ian. She found him sitting pensively in a chair, staring at the view. It was the first time she had seen him not working furiously on the new novel. That was all he seemed to do now, when he wasn't spending money, or silently and urgently taking her body. They talked less than they ever had. Even meals were either silent disasters or frantic and frenzied--never normal.

  But that night they lit a fire together, and talked until dark. She felt as though she hadn't seen him in months. At last she was talking to Ian again, the man she loved, her husband, her lover, her friend. She had missed his friendship most of all in these endless lonely weeks. It was the first time they really hadn't been able to reach out to each other and help. Now they shared a quiet dinner, sitting on the floor in front of the fire. Their peacefulness made the trial seem less terrifying. And the reality of it had worn off in the weeks since Ian had been released from jail. Jail had been reality. Fighting her way upstream to bail had been reality. Leaving her mother's emerald ring had been reality. But what was the trial? Merely a formality. A verbal exchange between two paid performers, theirs and the State's, with a black-robed umpire looking on, and somewhere in the background a woman no one knew named Margaret Burton. A week, maybe two weeks, and then it would be over. That was the only reality.

  She rolled over on her back on the rug in front of the fire and smiled up at him sleepily as he bent to kiss her. It was a long, haunting kiss that brought back the gentleness they had lost and made her body beg to respond, and in a few minutes they were hungrily making love. It was one of those rare nights when souls and bodies blended and ignited and burned on for hours. They said little, but they made love again and again. It was almost dawn when Ian deposited Jessica sleepily in their bed.

  "I love you, Jessie. Get some sleep now. Tomorrow will be a long day." He whispered the words, and she smiled at his voice as she drifted off to sleep. A long day? Oh ... that's right ... the fashion show ... or was it that they were going back to the beach? ... She couldn't remember ... a picnic? Was that it?

  "I love you too ..." Her voice drifted off as she fell asleep at his side, her arms wrapped around him like a small child's. He stroked her arm gently as he lay beside her, smoking a cigarette, and then he looked down into her face, but he wasn't smiling. Nor was he sleepy. He loved Jessica more than ever, but there were too many other things crowding his mind.

  He spent the rest of the night in a lonely vigil. Watching his wife, thinking his own thoughts, listening to her breathe and murmur, wondering what would come next.

  The next morning he was going on trial for rape.

  Chapter 15

  The courtroom at City Hall was a far cry from the small room where the preliminary hearing had been held. This one looked like a courtroom in the movies. Gold leaf, wood paneling, long rows of chairs, the judge's bench set up high on a platform, and the American flag in plain view of all. The room was full of people, and a woman was calling names one by one. She stopped when she had twelve. They were selecting the jury.

  Ian sat with Martin at the front of the room, at the desk assigned to the defense. A few feet away sat a different assistant district attorney, with Inspector Houghton at his side. Margaret Burton was nowhere in sight.

  The twelve jurors took their seats, and the judge explained the nature of the trial. A few of the women looked surprised and cast glances at Ian, and one man shook his head. Martin made rapid notes and watched the prospective jurors closely. He had the right to excuse ten people from the jury, and the assistant D.A. could do the same. The faces looked innocuous, like those of people you'd see on a bus.

  Martin had told Ian and Jessie earlier that morning about the nature of the jury he wanted. No "old maids" who would be shocked at the accusation of rape, or who might identify with the victim; yet perhaps they might try to hang on to some staunch middle-class housewives who might condemn Burton for allowing Ian to pick her up. Young people might be in sympathy with Ian, yet they might resent the way the couple looked, too comfortable for their age. They were walking a delicate line.

  Jessie watched the twelve men and women from her seat in the front row, searching their faces and that of the judge. But just as Martin stood up to question the first prospective juror, the judge called a recess for lunch.

  It was a slow process; it was the end of the second day before the jury had been picked. They had been interrogated by both attorneys as to their feelings about rape, had been questioned about their jobs and their mates, their habits and the number of children they had Martin had explained that fathers of women Miss Burton's age would not be a good idea either; they'd feel too protective of the victim. One had to consider so many things, and some base was inevitably left uncovered. There were a couple of people on the jury even now who did not meet with Martin's full approval, but he had used up his challenges, and now they had to hope for the best Martin had set up an easy bantering style with the jurors, and now and then someone had laughed at a foolish answer or a joke.

  Finally the jury was set. Five men, three retired and two young, and seven women, five in their middle years and comfortably married, two young and single. That had been a stroke of good fortune. They hoped it would counterbalance two of the retired men Martin did not like. But on the whole, he was reasonably satisfied, and Ian and Jessie assumed he was right.

  As they all left the courtroom at the end of the second day, Jessie felt as though she could have recited the jurors' life stories in her sleep, listed their occupations and those of their mates. She would have known their faces in a crowd of thousands, and would remember them for a lifetime if she never saw them again after that day.

  Their first shock came on the third day. The quiet male assistant district attorney who had replaced the irritating female D.A. of the preliminary hearing did not appear in court. He had developed acute appendicitis during the night, it was reported to the court, and had been operated on early that morning for a perforated appendix. He was resting comfortably at Mt. Zion Hospital, which Jessica found to be small consolation. This news was reported to the judge by one of the sick man's colleagues, who happened to be trying a case in the adjoining courtroom. But His Honor was assured that a replacement had been chosen and would arrive at any moment. Jessie's and Ian's hearts sank. The woman from the preliminary hearing would be back on the case. It had seemed immeasurable good luck when she hadn't appeared at the opening of the trial, and now ...

  Martin bent to whisper something in Ian's ear as the judge called a short recess while they waited for the new assistant D.A. to arrive. Everyone stood up, the judge left the courtroom, and there was a stretching and shuffling toward the halls. It was still early, and even a cup of coffee from one of the machines in the hall would taste good. It was something to do. Jessica could feel depression weighing on her shoulders as she held her small Styrofoam cup of steaming, malevolent-looking coffee. All she could think of was that damned D.A. and how badly her presence might hurt their case. She glanced at Ian, but he said nothing. An
d Martin had vanished somewhere.

  He had told them not to discuss the case in the hall during recesses or lunch, and suddenly it was difficult to find banalities with which to break the silence. So they kept silent, standing close together with the look of refugees waiting for a train to arrive, but not really understanding what was happening to them.

  "More coffee?"

  "Hm?" her thoughts had been in limbo.

  "Coffee. Do you want more coffee?" Ian tried it again. But she only shook her head with a vague attempt at a smile. "Don't worry so much, Jess. It'll be okay."

  "I know." Words. All words. With no meaning behind them. Nothing had any meaning anymore. Everything was confusing, impossible to understand. What were they doing there? Why were they standing around like awkward mourners at a funeral? Jessica crushed out a cigarette on the marble floor and looked up at the ceiling. It was ornate and beautiful and she hated it. It was too fancy. Too elaborate. It reminded her of where she was. City Hall. The trial. She lit another cigarette.