Small Mercies

by Joyce, Eddie

  So what? What they had together was more important than sex. A true companionship strengthened by their run together through the daunting fire of parenthood. Whenever anything happened to him, the first person he wanted to tell was Lindsay. She helped him noodle through problems of every sort: with work, with his family, with the kids. He’d even been tempted to tell her about Gina, as bizarre as that sounded, because there was very little he didn’t share with Lindsay. It felt odd to be thinking about something so much and not telling her.

  Agreed. Very odd indeed. Like maybe a warning sign.

  He loved his children, Amanda, nine, and Henry, six. He didn’t see them as much as he wanted, but when he did, they brought him joy. Amanda was a whirlwind, a precocious, intelligent girl who never ran out of energy or questions. A daughter was a marvelous wonder for a father; she opened a different place in his heart. Henry was quiet and thoughtful; he seemed to be attuned to a different world entirely. He hadn’t yet shown much interest in sports, but that might come with age. Even if it didn’t, who cared? He was a good kid. He reminded Peter of Bobby. A quieter, brighter version of Bobby.

  He liked his life. He wasn’t going to throw it away in some predictable midlife crisis, wasn’t going to be one of those guys.

  Then don’t. Find another associate for this case, an obeisant, fastidious drone, preferably one who wears ties.

  How was that fair? Gina lost out on a good case—one that would have client contact, would involve witness prep and testimony, actual lawyering—because she was attractive? Because he had a temporary case of puppy love?

  You suspect that the feelings are mutual. You hope they are.

  He was fooling himself. She was twenty-six, beautiful, and engaged. He was forty, gone lumpy, and going gray. Married with two kids. Maybe she wasn’t flirting with him. Maybe she was a flirt, full stop. His ego was probably causing him to misinterpret her gestures.

  The waiter dropped a plate in front of Peter and refilled his coffee.

  “You need anything else?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Peter lifted his fork, creased opened the egg’s yolk, and watched the yellow run over the plate. He lifted a pepper shaker with his free hand and gently tapped the metallic top with his index finger, ushering tiny black flakes onto the eggs. He lowered the shaker and grabbed a piece of toast. He dabbed the butter-drenched toast into the flecked yellow and bit it. He’d watched Dominic do this a hundred times, savoring the small ritual of preparing his forbidden pleasure the way he liked it. He wondered what Dominic would advise him to do in this situation.

  Call him. Call him right now and lay it out for him. All of it. You know what he’ll say.

  “You’re wrong,” he said aloud. Two construction workers sitting at a table nearby turned their heads. Peter put a hand up in apology.

  “Sorry. Arguing with myself.”

  “Who’s winning?” said one of the guys, an enormous black man whose gut was trapped below the table. He laughed at his own joke and his stomach heaved, threatening to overturn the table. The other guy rolled his eyes for Peter’s benefit. They went back to their food. Peter picked up a piece of crisp bacon, snapped it in half, and put the two ends in his mouth.

  The voice was wrong. If he’d learned anything from Dominic, if his entire relationship with Dominic carried a lesson, it was this: look out for your own. Dominic had said as much, had said precisely that, in fact, in this very diner.

  “Look out for your own. No one else will. They’re too busy looking out for their own.”

  He didn’t mean it in an ethnic or racial sense. Dom had recruited another young associate, Michael Morton—a black kid from the Bronx, had gone to Dom’s old Catholic high school—to the firm. He’d ended up on the corporate side so Dom could help only so much, but the guy eventually landed an in-house position at one of Dom’s biggest clients. Dom had written a sterling recommendation for Dave Hwang—an Asian kid from Queens, the son of immigrants—and helped him secure a position as a U.S. A in the Eastern District.

  “Your own” meant something different to Dom: people who came from similar circumstances. Kindred spirits. A kid from the outer boroughs or a working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh or Chicago or St. Louis. Or Sydney, Australia, for that matter. Someone who’d worked to get to the firm. Someone who hadn’t been handed things.

  If Gina didn’t fit that definition, no one did. An Italian girl, the daughter of a firefighter, from Staten Island no less. A little rough around the edges, needed some mentoring, a little guidance. Who was gonna look out for Gina at Lonigan Brown? Him or no one. This was bigger than Peter and his petty lustfulness.

  He waited a tick for an objection from the killjoy voice. His temples pulsed with blood, but he heard nothing. He took a sip of his coffee, decided to lay out some guidelines.

  He would not cross any lines. He would keep everything professional. He would leave this all where it belonged: in his head.

  He finished his meal in haste, paid the bill, and walked back to the firm, satisfied by the thoroughness of his internal debate. Maureen was on her lunch break when he got back to his office, but he closed his door anyway before buzzing Gina and asking her to come see him. He did a quick inventory: teeth were clean, the hair combed, the tie straightened. The gut, well, he couldn’t do anything about that. Maybe show her a picture of him in college, in pads and cleats, two hundred and ten pounds of muscle. He slipped two Altoids into his mouth and waited.

  She knocked and he called her in, his open hand indicating where she should sit. He swiveled to the side and looked at the wall as he spoke. He gave her the details quickly and watched as she struggled to take proper notes. Her smile faded as she wrote, her mind struggling to do two things at once: accurately record what he was saying and comprehend what it meant. A skill every lawyer needed to learn.

  Good. She needed to know that if they were working together, it would be all business.

  He talked for fifteen minutes, culling Wilson Temple’s dissertation down to a brisk recitation of the salient facts. A few times, his peripheral vision caught the flip of yellow paper after Gina’s furious jotting had filled it with writing. When he finished, he swiveled back to face her and grabbed one of the black stress balls that littered his office. He flipped it idly between his hands as he waited for her to finish writing.

  She looked up at him when she was done.

  “Any questions?” he asked.

  She looked uncertain, like she had too many to admit or maybe none at all.

  “I think I need to digest this a little. I’m sure I’ll have questions down the line.”

  “Good, good. Questions are good. Never be afraid to ask questions.”

  She nodded, uncertain whether to respond. He squeezed the ball with his left hand, exhaled.

  “And look, Gina, I know we’ve had a few laughs the past few weeks and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you. I think you have a very bright future at the firm and I’d like it very much if we became friends and I was able to help your career here.”

  “Me too, Peter. Nothing . . .”

  “Let me finish.”

  He paused, let the room realign with the new vibe between them.

  “The thing is, I take my work very seriously, as you should. And while I don’t mind a little joke here or there, the work has to come first. If the work isn’t good, isn’t top rate in fact, it doesn’t matter that we’re friends or that we’re both from Staten Island. We won’t continue working together if the work isn’t professional.”

  She swallowed, nodding sheepishly.

  “Of course, Peter, I mean Mr. Amendola.”

  “You can still call me Peter.”

  “Okay, Peter. Of course, I will do the best I can. I’ll work as hard as I can on this case.”

  Her eyes welled up. Peter wondered whether he’d been a little too har
sh.

  “It’s okay, Gina. We can still have a laugh, but the work . . .”

  “Comes first. Got it,” she said and wiped away an incipient tear.

  “I’ll let you know when we get the documents,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Great. Thank you.”

  She stood and he noticed that she was wearing a shortish skirt and patterned black stockings. Someone needed to tell this girl what was and wasn’t appropriate to wear to work. Not him. Maybe he could enlist a female partner. He tried not to watch her rear as she walked to the door, but his eyes wouldn’t listen. She turned at the door, nearly caught him in a lecherous stare. She drummed the tip of her pen against pressed lips.

  “I’m sorry again, Peter.”

  “No worries, Gina. Looking forward to working with you.”

  Her face broke into a faint smile and she walked out of his office, her fingers waggling behind her in a coquettish good-bye.

  It had gone exactly as he’d planned. He’d reestablished a professional atmosphere, put the kibosh on the flirting. Now he could get back to work. He scrolled through his e-mail, opened one from a needy client, and started to read it. He read the e-mail twice, but he wasn’t absorbing anything; he suddenly couldn’t concentrate. He tried to banish her from his thoughts, but there she was, marching back into his office in those damn stockings, draping herself over his desk, hiking her skirt up, and begging him to take her from behind. He closed his eyes and tried to shake her out of his head, but that did nothing. She was right in front of him, slick and eager and not taking no for an answer

  His face felt warm. His heart was pounding and he felt blood course through his body and congregate in his groin. His penis stiffened against his leg, an erection that recalled his teenage years when the sight of Amy Landini in a bathing suit could produce a rigidity so complete that it seemed to shrink the rest of him, to literally reduce him behind his cock. But this hard-on was even more intense, fueled by a fantasy that he felt powerless to resist. This was something that needed to be addressed, here and now, never mind that he was at work and it was two o’clock in the afternoon. He needed to get to the bathroom.

  He stood too quickly and his erection hit the underside of his desk. He doubled over, gasping for breath, the pit of his groin in agony. The pain spread up to his stomach, sent tingling missives down his legs. He lowered himself onto the floor to let the pain pass. He breathed gingerly for a minute as the pain lessened. He was still hard, still needed release, but his agony had exiled the fantasy and instilled a wincing silence in his head.

  A familiar voice filled the void.

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  * * *

  Peter arrives at the bar before Wade, orders a Grey Goose martini. He takes a few hearty sips and feels his troubles start to recede. The bar—an oasis of calm below the madness of Grand Central—isn’t crowded. A few tourists, a few midtown traders who had a rough Monday. Peter traps an olive between his teeth and pulls the spear away, separating the orb from its two companions.

  He hasn’t seen Wade in months. They’ve been friends since college, though they weren’t particularly close at school. They belonged to the same large group of friends, one of those guys who was always around but you never really talked to. But when Peter and Lindsay moved back to New York after law school, they rented a place on the same block as Wade on the Upper East Side. They ran into him randomly on the day they moved in. Wade even helped them with the move. Lindsay liked him; he was quieter and more thoughtful than Peter’s other college friends, who were mostly football players still living like college kids, only with a bit of money to fuel their weekends. Male friendship is a product of the simplest things. Does he live nearby? Does my girlfriend or wife like him? It was easy to become friends with Wade, so it happened.

  He’d done well for himself in the past ten years. Worked at a small hedge fund, was one of the top guys now. The fund bet against the market in 2007 and ’08, made a small fortune. Wade told Peter that he’d done the same in his personal accounts. When Peter asked him what kind of money he was talking about, he was surprised to hear that the amount in question was seven figures, not six. Such catastrophic leaps in net worth were unavailable to lawyers, even big-firm partners. Still, he was happy for Wade. Ninety-five percent happy. Wade had laughed at Peter’s slack-jawed expression, said it was a little bit of smarts and a lot of luck. Peter raised a doubtful eyebrow. Wade had buried his wife in 2008, so it was tough to think of him as lucky.

  Peter takes another generous sip of booze, plucks another olive from the spear. He misses Morgan, Wade’s wife. She was a spitfire, gregarious and bighearted. Peals of laughter exploded from her. The type of girl who reached across tables to give high fives. Her joviality pulled Wade out of his shell, ever so slightly, exposed his quick-wittedness. They’d gotten engaged shortly after Peter made partner. The four of them had gone out for a raucous, celebratory dinner, a pregnant Lindsay playing nursemaid to three lushes. Lindsay didn’t like Morgan, they never grew close as Peter and Wade had hoped. She made up her mind after that drunken dinner.

  “She’s a bit much,” Lindsay said to Peter on the car ride home.

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “That’s because she’s beautiful. If she were ugly, you’d think she was obnoxious.”

  Peter let it go. Once Linds made up her mind, there was no talking her out of it.

  * * *

  Wade hustles into the stool next to Peter, all apologies. Ran into someone on the street, couldn’t get away. Peter doesn’t mind. He’s halfway through a second martini and starting to feel serene.

  “So, how are you?” Wade asks once he’s settled, a pint of dark ale in front of him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Really?”

  “No, of course not, but do you really want to hear about it?”

  “Of course I do. We’re friends.”

  Wade takes a sip of his beer. Peter looks him over. He’s gotten so used to false sincerity that the real item is tough to recognize.

  “I fucked up. I fucked up big time. I won’t go into the details, but you can probably guess. So, I’m living out of the house, I’m not sure whether my marriage is salvageable, I’ve seen my kids five times since Christmas, I’m a pariah at my firm, I may have to move to Chicago, and on top of it all, I get woken up every morning by the goddamn Staten Island ferry.”

  Wade laughs at the last bit. Peter takes another sip of his drink. It felt good to lay out all his problems. At least they were finite, could be listed. Fixing them would be considerably more difficult.

  “I know, fucking hilarious right? Goddamn ferry.”

  “I’m sorry, Pete. I really am.”

  “Not your fault.”

  He finishes his drink, orders another. When did he start drinking like this? His head feels light and airy, like a balloon that could float away if he loosens his grip.

  “So what are you gonna do?”

  “I haven’t a clue, honestly. Things are so fucked, I can’t see a way to make it right.”

  He takes a sip of his fresh drink. He should probably switch to beer or get something to eat. He’s having trouble giving Wade his full attention. His thoughts are drifting to Gina; he’s trying to remember the sensation of being with her. It seems like ages ago. This is what happens when he drinks. He gets to think of Gina without guilt, gets to pretend it all didn’t turn to shit. He pushes the martini away, grabs a handful of bar nuts.

  “Anyway, we didn’t come here to talk about me. What’s up?”

  “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, I’m dating Tina. Still dating Tina.”

  Peter’s brain stalls for a minute. He knows a Tina, but Wade can’t mean that Tina. But somehow he does.

  “Tina? Bobby’s wife?” />
  Wade looks crestfallen for a beat but recovers.

  “Yes, Tina Amendola. I called her after you gave me her number.”

  Peter puts a hand up.

  “Wait, what?”

  “You gave me her number last spring. You told her I was going to call her. You set us up.”

  Peter vaguely remembers doing something like what Wade is describing. He didn’t think it was a setup. He thought of it as introducing two grief-stricken souls, sort of a support group or something. But it didn’t happen. Wade never called, he remembers Tina saying that.

  “But you didn’t call her. I remember Tina giving me shit about it.”

  “I didn’t call her initially. Work was crazy. I was in Asia for half the summer. Besides, I thought it was too soon. Two years sounds like a long time, but it’s not. I went on one date about a year ago and it felt disrespectful. I couldn’t get Morgan’s face out of my head.”

  He takes a long pull from his pint, wipes his lips.

  “Anyway, I’m sitting home by myself on Halloween—you know how Morgan loved Halloween, all the elaborate costumes she dreamed up—anyway, I’m sucking back Amstels and wallowing, looking at old pictures: the year she went as Kenny from South Park, the year she dressed like Velma from Scooby-Doo. So I go to the fridge to get another beer and I see Tina’s number, which I must have pinned there months ago. And I know this sounds silly, but it’s like I could hear Morgan in my head saying, ‘Go for it!’ I called Tina the next day.”

  Wade takes another sip of beer.

  “Anyway, we went out and we really hit it off. I mean, she’s a fantastic woman. I can’t even imagine the courage it took to raise those kids alone. And the kids are great. I mean, Alyssa’s at a tough age, you know, those awkward years, but Bobby Jr.’s wonderful. What spirit.”