Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “So? Where does that leave me?”

  “It leaves you as a practicing lawyer who represents people.”

  “Ah,” said Lee. “I’m going to law school to be a lawyer.” She felt as if Jazz had removed a great weight. Her shoulders relaxed. She rotated her head from side to side and had to marvel at the sudden easing of the muscles in her neck. But with that burden gone, she was able to feel something else: desolation. Alone not only in Washington but in life.

  She had no man, and—just as bad, she thought, or maybe worse—no purpose. Sure, she would graduate law school in the top ten percent of her class, but then what? Join a law firm and get the job women lawyers always got: trusts and estates, or matrimonial work? Do something meaningful for society, like researching amicus curiae briefs for redwoods? She could, but those prospects shriveled her soul. With nothing she cared to do, she would probably wind up on the legal staff of some dreadful person who called himself the Ralph Nader of Brooklyn and who picked at his ingrown beard hairs. And she would read in the Cornell Magazine about all her friends’ wonderful lives: “Philip ‘Flip’ Mullen and his wife, Astor ‘Pooky’ Gibson, ’71, are thrilled that their twins, Albert and Max, will be freshmen at Cornell next September. Flip, who admits to being a former ‘peacenik,’ is a fellow in physics at the Institute for Advanced Science in Princeton and is renowned for his work in fluid dynamics. Besides being a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Pooky assists emerging nations in drafting their constitutions.”

  “Jazz,” Lee said.

  “Hey, you sound gruesome. I thought I cheered you up.”

  “I miss …” She imagined him slung over a chair in his apartment, his jacket off, his tie loosened, sipping some Wall Street law firm beverage: a martini, a Dewar’s straight up. Then she changed him into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and stuck a joint between his thumb and index finger.

  “What do you miss?” Jazz asked.

  “I miss”—Lee’s voice broke—“New York.”

  By the end of the third month of the second year of law school, Lee decided she was not cut out to be a victim of love. She longed to be like the other women in her class, waking up to thoughts of Property, jogging around the park while musing about the impact of the Warren Court on criminal procedure, sleeping with dreams of Clifford Trusts swirling about her head. Jazz Taylor was a perpetual presence and a constant intrusion and she resolved, sitting in Tax, to get him out of her life, or at least out of her heart. If a thought of him entered her mind, she was going to heed the advice she had read in Glamour or Mademoiselle years earlier. Tell yourself “Stop it!” and immediately think of something else. Just as the article had suggested, she lined up her replacement topics: school, of course; getting a wok and a cookbook and learning to cook Chinese food on the illegal hot plate she had in her dorm room; recollecting her grandmother Bella; calling Dorie Adler and asking her high school friend to arrange a blind date with one of her brother’s friends at Columbia Medical School.

  So the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Lee sat on the Long Island Rail Road with something approaching relief. Not that she was anticipating any pleasure in the holiday. Greta would make her traditional twenty-pound turkey, but this year, Leonard had told Sylvia not to pad the guest list. Forget your cousins from Rockland County, he told her. And no lonely new neighbors. Just us. And Sylvia agreed. God only knew in what state Robin and Ira would come to the table, and now they had their friends Bonnie and Nikki with them, sharing the bedroom, eating the Whites out of house and home, and showing no signs of leaving. Company might ask: What are those girls with dirty hair doing there? Who are they?

  But Lee felt good, because she had not thought about Jazz in three or four days … Stop it! Lee made herself think about a guy in Tax class, Rob Reynolds. Short, which was okay. But awfully small-boned. A mini-man. Would she look like a balloon in the Macy’s parade beside him? Was he interested in her? Well, he kept finding a reason to come up after class and—

  At which point, Jazz Taylor took the seat beside hers, squeezed her nose, and made a loud honking sound. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Lee said, not quite knowing how to behave. Part of her resolve to evict Jazz from her consciousness was to let the friendship cool. Having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with him, even in the company of their growing circle of friends, was not the way to get rid of him. Sitting carrel-to-carrel in the library was not a help either, nor was sharing a Coke and a popcorn every Sunday night at the Waverly.

  “Where have you been?” Jazz inquired.

  Lee pulled out her exclusionary, elitist card. “Hanging at the Law Review office,” she said, heaving her book bag onto her lap and rummaging through it, as if driven to find a particular book crucial to her legal education. Her hands raced through notebooks and casebooks, pushed aside a small bottle of aspirin, a plastic case for tampons, a Chap Stick, a disintegrating recipe for Mongolian lamb she’d torn out from a magazine in the dentist’s office months before.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jazz asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.” She shook her head, denying anything was amiss, and pulled out a monograph on Crummey Trusts that her Tax professor had suggested she would find scintillating. “Did I do something?” he persisted.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then …?”

  “Then nothing,” Lee said, realizing that instead of the proper playful inflection she wanted, her intonation was funereal. She had to sound cheerier. Jazz’s greatest gift was his understanding. Already he knew she was avoiding company—specifically, his. If she did not start sounding blithe right away, he would figure out exactly what was bothering her; he was that empathetic. “Listen,” she said, her voice almost manic with ersatz merriment. “I’m being driven mad by Law Review. I mean, I’m barely managing all my course work and then this article on executive clemency in capital cases. It’s so. … vast! And then on top of that, having to go home and face what passes in our house for family life …”

  Lee stopped only because he put his hand on hers as if to say: Cut it out. That’s not the cause of your ignoring me. She tried to go on but could not think of a thing to say. She wasn’t used to Jazz’s touch. Sure, he would routinely give her a preadolescent greeting: honking her nose, poking her arm. Once, when they were standing on line for Soylent Green and it had been bitter cold, he had hugged her, but it was a jock’s bear hug, insulated by the six layers of wool between them. Now, though, it was skin to skin, and the rough warmth of his palm heated the back of her hand. Oh, God, she had to come up with something to say, fast, and she couldn’t. A lawyer is supposed to be able to think on her feet, but all she could think of was how hot his hand was. Should she pull her hand away? Give him a fast, chummy poke with her elbow? And what was wrong with him, anyway? Why didn’t he take his goddamn hand away?

  In truth, Jazz was considering doing precisely that, but at that very instant, the train’s electrical system went through a routine malfunction just as the train was accelerating into the tunnel under the East River, and their car was plunged into blackness. Before either of them had another thought, his hand began to caress hers and somehow, despite the absolute lack of light, their lips managed to find each other and Jazz said: “I love you, Lee.”

  And the lights blazed back on as Lee was saying: “I love you too.”

  Thirteen

  I’m letting Norman Torkelson stew in his own juices,” I announced to the man in my life.

  “Not a bad idea.”

  Since he was the best litigator on Long Island, and probably in the world, I was more than pleased with his concurrence. “Thanks,” I replied, debating whether to simply pat myself on the back or open a bottle from the case of Dom Perignon I’d received as a bonus after getting a mob guy off on a charge of criminal possession of a machine gun with intent to use same unlawfully against the person of another. “In fact, thanks a lot.”

  “Except you seem to have jumped into
the same pot.”

  “What pot?”

  “The one Norman’s in. You’re really stewing.” As usual, he was right.

  As a criminal defense lawyer, life was simple: Most of my clients were guilty. Especially, and obviously, Norman Torkelson. But suddenly I was not only having doubts but experiencing every clichéd symptom of twentieth-century angst—clenched teeth, roiling stomach, lower back pain (with sciatica, naturally), and aching head. Those symptoms then set off my first hot flash. So I figured if I was miserable, why should Norman get a free ride? Since he had threatened to fire me for doing my job—trying to find a way to beat the murder rap that was facing him—I decided to let him stew in stir for three days.

  However, considering my aptitude for anxiety, this current distress could not be called one of my major stews. During those three days I managed to work on my transportation-of-stolen-property-in-interstate-commerce case. I also pushed around some papers for a sentencing memo, interviewed witnesses for a vehicular homicide trial I had coming up, edited a court of appeals brief Chuckie had written, met with a new client—a college kid who had knocked down a security guard and torn out of Tower Records with twenty-two CDs shoved under her denim skirt—and bought a seven-hundred-pound cast-iron birdbath at an antique store’s going-out-of-garden-ornaments-and-into-art-moderne-furniture sale.

  If you’re going to defend people on criminal charges, you’re going to stew. Period. You make your living dealing with people who commit dreadful crimes, or at least wreak havoc for very cheap thrills. As their lawyer, you learn to put your own morality in a bag and stick it on a high shelf. Yes, the suffering that the person you represent causes to their victims, their own families, and themselves ought to break your heart. But after the first twenty or thirty sleepless nights, you begin to realize how little you can do. You comprehend that many of your clients need their problems. They live mainly to bring chaos out of order. And you, their lawyer, cannot change their lives. Also, you can’t repair the damage they do and you cannot obtain Justice, at least not the highfalutin kind with a capital J. All you can do is work your ass off to see that they get the best deal the system will allow.

  So I kept myself busy, which was easy. Since Chuckie was a god-awful writer, I got so involved with editing his brief that I decided to give Norman still another day to stew. But then Norman called the office, pleading with Sandi to have me come to see him. He told her he was “conscious stricken” and “full of remorse” over his “shoddy behavior.” So I left Chuckie’s “Defendant-Appellant seeks this Court’s review of his unconscionable conviction for illegal and unlawful possession (with intent to sell) of a certain quantity of a controlled substance” and drove over to the Nassau County Correctional Center.

  “How can I tell you how sorry I am?” Norman said from his side of the partition.

  “Forget it. This place is a hellhole. It gets to people.”

  “That it does. Let me explain about Mary. Please. You may view her as a tough little cookie”—I started to make a pro forma objection but Norman cut me off—“but get past her facade. She’s terribly fragile.”

  “I understand.”

  “I know by your standards I’m no bargain,” Norman went on, “but it so happens I’m the best thing that ever happened to Mary.” With its calculated lack of expression, a poker face would have given me away even more than the guffaw I felt coming on. So I just nodded stiffly and concentrated on studying the crumbs on the side of his mouth. There were also a few trapped in the chest hair that peeked out of the V of his prison uniform. Yellow-brown crumbs, which meant the correctional center had served its culinary masterpiece for dessert: chocolate-chip cookies—without the chips, as mandated by the latest round of Republican budget cuts. “She’s a magnificent creature,” he went on. “I know: You might be thinking that thousands of men would want her. And you’d be right. But they would want her merely as an ornament.”

  Now that he’d gone and apologized, I couldn’t be rude and cut him off. But it was like sitting in a lecture hall for some awful required course: Mary Dean 201: The Postpubescent Years. As he kept on, I felt I was coming close to telling him to stuff it.

  “In practical terms, Mary cannot sustain a relationship with any of these men. You may ask why. It is because they need her only in a libidinous way. They do not need her, so to speak, as a human being or as a conventional wife. Mary has little utilitarian value.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked before I could stop myself, thereby dooming myself to another hit of Norman’s verbiage.

  “It means she cannot cook. She is too flighty to be able to care for children. She cannot be trusted to take a simple phone message. She cannot do anything, really. Except be a good person.”

  “A good person,” I echoed, thinking about the almost sexual pleasure she’d taken in aiding and abetting Norman in the con, playing the Repo Lady, his matrimonial lawyer, and his ex-wife and thus helping destroy the lives of all the women he preyed on.

  “I know I’m not good,” Norman conceded. “I know that I’ve lured Mary—very skillfully, I might add—into being complicitous in my work … in my crimes. But at least I care about her goodness, which other men don’t. And I sincerely want to make her happy—if only for the egocentric reason that she makes me happy. I mean, I don’t need someone to cook me dinner. Any one of the marks would have been delighted to be, as it were, my willing slave, but Mary—”

  If I waited for him to finish talking about her, Norman and I would be celebrating my Diamond Jubilee together in the visitors room. So I asked: “How come you got so upset when I suggested Mary might have had something to do with Bobette’s death?”

  “Because she didn’t do it!” Norman spit out. He was losing it again, leaning toward me, his eyes bulging with rage.

  I looked straight at him till he abandoned his hostile posture and, after another few seconds, averted his eyes. Then I let him have a minute to get back to himself. Meanwhile, I checked out the visitors room. A colleague, Louie Pacheco, a guy I’d been in the D.A.’s Office with, was strolling my way in the row ahead, getting ready to meet with a client. I noticed Louie was sporting a fancy new suit, with gargantuan shoulder pads tailored to fool the eye into thinking his middle-age pear shape was a young, athletic inverted triangle. Louie, normally the color of boiled chicken, now had a tan one shade darker than a Brown & Serve sausage. A new hairstyle too: a ponytail. Clearly, he had a new, young girlfriend. From the look of him, she had taken charge. From the completeness of his transformation, it looked as if she would be his second wife—although from the fact of his wedding band I concluded that Louie hadn’t informed his first about his change of plans. And he probably hadn’t mentioned it to any of his four children—none of whom could be over twelve years old.

  “Take it easy,” I said, turning back to Norman. “I understand you love Mary. I understand your wanting to protect her. But you seem to be overprotective, and that leads me to believe you’re fearful for her. As your lawyer, it would help me to know why.” He clasped his hands together and rested his chin on the tops of his knuckles. His eyes closed. I understood this was a Meditative Moment, so I looked back at Louie and regarded his ponytail. Gray, limp, it hung dejectedly down the broad back of his dark-blue suit. I offered what might have been—had I been the praying type—a little prayer that the second wife would give him a major myocardial infarction on their honeymoon. “Norman, when I told you about the fingerprints at the crime scene being Mary’s: That seemed to scare you.”

  “I suppose,” he said, addressing the ceiling.

  “Let’s forget for a minute what she did or did not do at Bobette Frisch’s house. Does Mary have a record? Is that why you were afraid?” He seemed to be taking a count of the acoustical tile overhead. “The truth would be of interest, Norman.”

  Norman looked back at me. “A couple of arrests for shoplifting. One conviction. Suspended sentence. No big deal. She likes pretty things and sometimes … You know, when
someone like Mary is raised in an environment devoid of nurturance, she needs … objects. Talismans, if you will, to ward off privation. But if the police were to find out, they’d be all over her in a minute. They’d trump up some charge and arrest her. And let me tell you, one night in a place like this … It would destroy her. I can’t let that happen! I love her. But even more, I’m …” He swallowed hard. Just when I was thinking he was a lousy actor, his eyes squeezed shut. Tears began to leak out of the corners. “I’m a flawed human being,” he managed to whisper. I waited the moment it took him to begin speaking again. “I need Mary to make me whole, or as close to whole as someone like me can get. Dear God, I’m so terrified of life without her. That’s why I have to protect her. No matter what the cost.”

  In the movies, private detectives always have offices with linoleum floors (on which click the spike heels of sexy clients), milky glass partitions, and overflowing ashtrays. Terry Salazar’s had ivory wall-to-wall carpeting, an ivory sectional sofa, and two ivory pull-up chairs beside an ivory Art Deco-style desk. He had taken over the lease of a skin-care products company that had sunk all its assets into a slickly expensive infomercial featuring a porcelain-skinned soap-opera star who was supposed to appear genteel; instead she came across as so snooty that almost all the calls to the 800 number were not orders but denunciations of the bitch. For an additional five thousand bucks, Terry had purchased the furniture, a Packard Bell computer and, it turned out, a closetful of SatinSkin Exfoliating Granules.

  In Terry’s mind, he was simply buying a white office. It was not until one of his cop buddies started ribbing him about how he must know an interior decorator that he realized his office was—what a nightmare!—feminine. For a time, he tried to nullify the place’s atmosphere by rolling up his sleeves to display his arm hair and puffing offensive cigars, but in the end he did most of his business in Plumpie’s or another extravagantly dirty bar, Big Nick’s, and kept clients away from his office.