by Susan Isaacs
“Shhhhhhh!” Leonard was nearly crazed with embarrassment.
“Don’t bother,” Lee said to Robin.
Robin gave a coy smile. “How about ‘congratulations’ to me?”
The Whites stood together in the comfort of not-knowing for a moment. Then Leonard, the head of the family, was forced to speak. “Congratulations”—his deep breath was almost a gasp—“for what?”
Robin rubbed up against the dirty elbow of the man by her side. “Congratulations on my marriage,” she said, her voice sluggish and coquettish at the same time. “Mom, Daddy … oh, and Lee. This is my husband.” She lifted the man’s arm and put it around her shoulder. Then, leaning forward, she grabbed his other hand in hers. The man slid it out of her grip and placed his hand—his hirsute yet disturbingly delicate hand—in proprietary fashion on Robin’s naked stomach. Sylvia clapped her own hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. But the scream did not come because she started to faint. Leonard might have keeled over, too, but he leaned against his wife to keep her from flopping sideways onto the grass, which would, of course, have underscored their utter humiliation in front of hundreds of Protestants. The Whites, tilting against each other like two tent poles, were unable to move without humiliating themselves.
Maybe it was the glaring midday sun, but Lee’s eyes were drawn to the man’s arm that was wrapped around her sister. In the crook, on the pallid, vulnerable skin, she could see a scattering of dark dots. Birthmarks? she wondered. No. Blackheads. Blackheads on the inner arm? she had to ask herself. With this slobbo, why not? Still, she knew, even as she tried other, hopefully better explanations—spattered paint, bites from a small but spiteful insect—that the dots were the tiny scabs of intravenous injections.
Robin laughed an insolent barbiturate laugh. “Isn’t he cute?” Her parents remained tipped and dumbstruck. Lee felt the man’s eyes upon her. She gazed back into his face; it had absolutely no expression. Her fury at Robin was momentarily replaced by a shiver of dread. Despite his counterculture getup, this man was no aging hippie. He was … Lee’s heart began to flutter erratically under her gown. He was bad. She knew if she averted her glance he would discern her fear, so she kept staring into his empty eyes. “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Ira Kleinberg. Ira, say something.” Ira said nothing but at last turned his gaze from Lee to Sylvia. Robin laughed again. Then, with a seductive roll of her hips, she sauntered over to her father. “Daddy,” she said. Leonard did not move or speak. “Daddy.”
Leonard’s mouth formed “What?”
Robin whispered loud enough for all of them to hear: “We need money for a honeymoon.”
In later years, Lee would laughingly refer to it as the Summer from Hell. Too bad: She had been counting on that summer between college and law school. First of all, she was going to defeat Richard Nixon. Then, in her spare time, she would read The Magic Mountain, listen to Corelli’s concerti grossi, visit every museum in Manhattan, and, in short, get the liberal education she would have gotten at Cornell had she not been protesting the war, challenging racism, and cooking pasta for radicals. Admittedly, in the back of her mind, she also knew that she would drive by Jazz Taylor’s house a few times a day. Not that she was obsessed anymore, but the memory of him—his well-muscled thighs, the sunlight on his hair, his niceness—remained, her valentine, her most romantic memory.
But by the time Lee said goodbye to her friends after graduation, loaded her clothes and books and stereo in her car, and drove back to Long Island, she discovered that Robin and Ira were already there, having moved into Robin’s room. Not that they had asked if Sylvia and Leonard minded. They had simply bumped upstairs the two plastic garbage bags that contained Ira’s worldly possessions, pushed together the twin beds with their wicker headboards, and locked the door.
Then the summer began.
“Ask Robin what the hell happened to the thousand dollars I gave them for their honeymoon,” Leonard ordered Lee.
“Go tell Robin they have to get out of the room so Greta can change the linens,” Sylvia instructed her.
“Please inform your sister that I am doing a white wash today,” Greta commanded, “and that if she wants clean underwear, to leave a pile outside her door.”
No one mentioned Ira, but they all knew he was there. They all seemed to fear him. Leonard and Sylvia would rush past Robin’s room on tiptoes, as if trying not to disturb the fiend within, who, if angered, would come crashing through the door and rip their limbs from their bodies. Even Greta’s equanimity deserted her. She began making three or four desserts at night, offerings to placate the demon Ira, who appeared to feed only between the hours of midnight and dawn, leaving crumbs and crusts on the floor and dirty dishes on the kitchen table.
“Lee, ask Robin if she needs to renew the prescription for her asthma inhaler.”
“Find out if it’s okay if Jerry from Gold Coast Carpets comes in to clean her rug.”
“Would you please remind Robin that we have a septic tank system here and she cannot run the shower for a half hour.”
“I want you to tell her that playing that music at three in the morning is unacceptable! Do you hear me? Un-ac-ceptable!”
The Summer from Hell. Sylvia could no longer be relied upon to take to her bed for weeks on end and stay out of the way. Her usual melancholia gave way to agitation. She sat all day and into the night at the kitchen table, sucking on Parliaments, drinking endless cups of black coffee and hyperventilating, her exhalations coming out as mewling sounds.
Leonard was drawn back to his house with the reluctant fascination of a driver passing a bloody crash on the highway. Some workweeks, he came home every single night. None of Dolly Young’s considerable tricks could keep him in the city. “Anything happen today?” he would demand of Sylvia, his voice croaking, choking with emotion. Sylvia would shake her head back and forth very fast and fill her lungs with more smoke. “Nothing,” she would rasp, clutching her bathrobe tighter against her chest. Her hand was a claw, her neck bones made a pitiful V. She was getting thinner and thinner but could only bring herself to eat a bite of the carrot muffins Greta baked fresh every morning to tempt her. “They didn’t come down at all.”
“They never come down until we’re asleep.”
“What are they doing up there?”
Lee would get home from her summer job, working on the petitions drive at McGovern headquarters in Manhattan, and find her parents standing by the door, awaiting her, as she came into the kitchen from the garage.
“Is Robin taking drugs? What do you think?”
“Go upstairs, knock on her door, and see if she wants to talk to somebody. You know, a doctor.”
“Speak to your sister!” they ordered Lee. Tell her: The third overdue notice for Steppenwolf; a funny smell, like bad cheese, coming through the door of her bedroom; that girl who’s in that Last Tango movie with Marlon Brando is on Johnny Carson tonight and she might want to see her; Grandma Eva is in the hospital; Grandma Eva is in a coma; does she know where my bone Ferragamo flats are; Grandma Eva died and the funeral is tomorrow at eleven o’clock at Schwartz Brothers.
During June, Lee, dutifully, would knock on Robin’s door. Her sister would open it a crack. The room was always dark and stank of pot and body odor; Ira was never in sight. “Yeah?” Robin would demand. Lee would deliver the message. Robin would invariably respond with “Fuck you, fuck them,” and shut the door.
Then, for the first two weeks of July, Lee simply jotted down her parents’ entreaties and slipped pieces of paper under Robin’s door.
After that she began a lackadaisical affair with one of McGovern’s advisers on fiscal reform, a forty-eight-year-old corporate lawyer from the second-biggest Wall Street law firm, who had a wife and four children in New Canaan, Connecticut, and a pied-à-terre facing Gramercy Park.
Lee did not return home for the rest of the summer.
You would think, since at least a quarter of the fibers of Lee’s being were dedicated solely to Jazz Taylor, that she might hav
e found something familiar about the finely built young man with the square jaw and cascading brown hair—gorgeous, sun-kissed hair—who sat, in New York University Law School’s alphabetic tradition, five seats before her. At least, his smile—broad, his high cheeks pushing up his eyes into twin crescents—might have reminded her of someone she had spied upon while hiding behind a spreading juniper. Barring that, you would think, surely, that in the second week of classes, when that mad genius of torts, Professor Myron Blumenthal, actually bellowed “Jasper Taylor!” she would gasp in recognition, or that her heart would leap or her head would spin. But no: nothing, zero, no reaction at all.
Lee was too frightened to notice. The summer had drained her: not being able to go home for fear of either being grabbed by her frenzied parents or, if she could steal upstairs unhassled, having to listen to the bumping of a headboard against the wall as Robin and Ira engaged in one seemingly endless honeymoon hump; the doomed McGovern campaign; the dreary love affair of convenience, made even more burdensome when the corporate lawyer proposed to leave his wife and children and begin life anew with Lee in what he referred to as “a Village pad.”
And law school! Could there have been some terrible mistake when they mailed out the scores of the LSATs? Could she have been given some legal genius’s number, while some other White—the legal genius—got hers and gave up hopes of a seat on the Supreme Court and was now a junior buyer in the notions and trimmings department at Ohrbach’s? The more Lee studied, the more she did not know. She was awed by the penetrating intelligence of her teachers, frightened by the aggressive cleverness of her classmates. No matter how much work she did that first terrible week, she could not make sense of anything that had to do with the law. She searched the faces of the students in her section, hoping to discover fear in their eyes, but more disquieting still, she saw none.
She noticed the young man only because of the manner in which he failed to answer Professor Blumenthal’s question: “Can the same act be both a tort and a crime?”
“I really don’t know,” the young man said. What made her look down the row at him was his air of casual regret. It said: Gee, that’s an awfully good question. I wish I knew the answer. He was sitting back comfortably in his seat, looking Blumenthal straight in the eye. He displayed neither the white-lipped, dry-mouthed fear nor the bogus sangfroid that never hid a student’s mortification at being caught not knowing.
“You don’t know?” Blumenthal boomed. He was a massive man, with a bald head so huge he looked like a monstrous, hydrocephalic baby. “You do not know?”
The young man shook his head, and his shoulder-length hair moved with soft grace. “No, I don’t.” Now everyone was looking at the young man. They were riveted. Lee could see why: He was simply not terrified. What was wrong with him? Did he lack a nervous system?
“May I ask why you do not know?”
“I guess I didn’t comprehend the reading.”
“You did read it?” Blumenthal snorted a cruel laugh that implied doubt and derision.
“Yes, I did.” Not even a hint of panic. Mild regret, and perhaps the onset of the most trifling irritation that Blumenthal was carrying on so.
Blumenthal, poised at the bottom of the amphitheater of a lecture hall, began to vibrate like a tuning fork, unable to decide whether to attack or merely to dismiss the young man disdainfully. To do the latter might be construed as retreat, even cowardice. Blumenthal filled his large chest with air. Lee felt sick for the young man. But then Blumenthal did not strike. Instead he was lowering his enormous head. He was scrutinizing his seating chart. Now he was looking up, ready to attack anew. His voice rang out: “Mr. White!” She looked around, hoping. No Mr. White. “Lee White!” Her guts liquefied.
“What?” was all she could say, because she could not for the life of her remember the question.
“Answer, please, Miss White.”
She stared at Blumenthal, but there was not a hint on his mask of a face. Torts, she told herself. This is my Torts class, so the question has to be … “The same act can be both a tort and a crime,” she heard herself saying.
The professor began to shake his head, as if in utter weariness with the human condition. But her answer was right! She remembered reading … Oh, right. He wanted the details. “Take the case of an assault,” she went on. “It’s a tort because it is an offense against an individual.” She swallowed. Her throat hurt so much she didn’t know if she could go on. And she felt feverish. And her stomach! Any second, she could get diarrhea standing there, and no matter what she did with the rest of her life, anyone at NYU Law School would remember her as the Girl Who Had Diarrhea in Blumenthal’s Section. “But it’s a crime too, because it’s an offense against society.”
Blumenthal nodded, but his expression was bitter, as if what she’d said was not merely inadequate but vile. “Can a tort arise out of contractual relations?” he asked, as if not expecting an answer.
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Like if a person is induced by fraudulent representations to purchase stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Merchandise,” Lee clarified. Then she saw Blumenthal had begun to breathe another weary sigh. Her words shot out like bullets. “An act can actually be three things: a breach of contract, a tort, and a crime. For instance, the misappropriation of funds by a trustee is a breach of the contract of trust, the tort of conversion, and the crime of embezzlement.”
Blumenthal looked away from her, back at the man with the glorious brown hair. “Did you hear that, Mr. …” He consulted his seating chart. “Taylor?”
“Yes,” the young man said. He leaned forward and looked down the row at Lee. “Thanks,” he said, and gave her a grin that was not merely genuine, not merely good-natured, but heartfelt. It filled her with warmth. She smiled back, more girlishly than in all the years since she had become a student revolutionary and stopped shaving under her arms. And in that second, when at last she was able to avert her eyes from his, his name rang out in her head: Taylor. Taylor? Trembling inside, wishing she were numb, she turned back. Taylor! He was still smiling at her.
“Jazz Taylor,” he said, after class.
“Lee White.” Shit! she chided herself. She should have said “Jazz?” Why hadn’t she sounded at least mildly curious about such a singular name? “Jazz? Are you a musician?” she could have asked. No, too contrived. How about: “Is Jazz short for something?” Now, of course, he’d figure out that somehow she knew him. Not just knew him: He’d put two and two together and realize that she was the girl in the Dodge Dart who kept obsessively driving by Hart’s Hill throughout his senior year and even during college vacations. Very likely he knew exactly who she was! She was probably the laughingstock of his whole family. Jazz’s girlfriend in that dreadful Dart, ho-ho-ho.
“God, you were cool in there,” he said. Up close, his skin was fair but weathered, with the sandy texture and rich red undertone of a born outdoorsman.
“Cool?” she asked. She heard her own voice coming out cold, snotty: like her mother talking to a salesgirl who was wearing cheap shoes. But the words kept coming, and she was powerless to stop them. “Cool like ‘Hey, that’s cool’? Or cool as in unruffled?”
And now what was she doing? Flirting with him! Shit-ass-rat-fuck! If she were a bystander, watching herself, she would puke. Looking up at him with a starlet’s you-great-big-hunk-of-man gaze. Surely in half a second he’d check out his watch and make some pathetic excuse and rush off. Or maybe he was too polite to cut and run, but he definitely had to want to scream with laughter at the sight of her combing back her hair slowly, erotically, with her fingers. Quickly, she stuffed her hand deep into the pocket of her bell-bottom jeans.
“Cool as in unruffled,” he replied. “I was so damned ruffled I couldn’t remember whether I read that part and forgot it—or just didn’t read it.”
“You had to have read it,” Lee said. “It was assigned—” She stopped because now he w
as laughing—at her earnestness. Maybe he was one of those Learned Hand-type prodigies who merely had to sit in a classroom in which a few legal notions were bandied about and—Bingo!—all matters juristical became clearer than crystal. She was annoyed at not being able to repress the fast, follow-up realization that if Torts had been clearer than crystal, then Jazz Taylor would not have been caught short by Myron Blumenthal. “Doesn’t it scare you not to read it?” she asked him. “I mean, every night when I start getting tired, I think: What if Blumenthal calls on me?”
“And so you keep studying?”
“Till I drop,” Lee said, now laughing with him. She realized they had walked through the halls of the law school and out the front door only when a gust of hot-dog-scented wind from Washington Square Park hit her in the face. “There’s so much intellectual rigor here,” she told him. “I’m not just afraid of not doing well. I’m afraid of not …” She paused. He was waiting, and doing what no one else in law school had the time to do: listen.
“Afraid of not what?” he urged.
“I’m afraid of not getting it. I mean, even if I could memorize each individual case, I may not comprehend what the cases mean in relation to each other, in relation to the law.”
“In relation to God too?” He was smiling, but not in fun. In compassion. “For someone in her first month of law school, you’re aiming kind of high. Do you really think you have to comprehend the entire history and meaning of jurisprudence? Couldn’t you settle for a B in Torts?”
“But it could be an F!” she exclaimed.
“Come on,” Jazz said, shaking his head. “You’re incapable of getting an F in anything.”
She was about to demand: How do you know? But as she strolled alongside him across the park on this bracing gray day—somehow he had led her across the street without her even knowing it—he seemed so certain. For the first time since she began law school, her jaw unclenched. She would pass Torts. In fact, as she stood beside Jazz Taylor on line at the hot dog cart, she suddenly knew she would get at least a B from the bully Blumenthal.