Heartbalm

by Malachi Stone

  Heart took the forty-five mile per hour ramp in a controlled drift of about eighty-five. Minutes later we were pulling into the visitors’ lot at Dwight. The entrance was a respectable walk. One of us drew catcalls from some of the ladies in the yard. I don’t think they were looking at me.

  In the guardhouse I signed us in under attorneys. But before we were allowed past the first security perimeter we hit a snag. A big-boned matron with a passing resemblance to Kendra Martin stopped Heart at the door.

  “You can’t go in dressed like that, Honey,” she said.

  “Dressed like what?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I protested, “She’s my paralegal. I need her to assist me and take notes.”

  “Take your own notes, Counselor. We have rules against indecent attire.”

  “What do the rules consider indecent?”

  “What she’s got on. Or more to the point, what she doesn’t have on.”

  “We’ve driven four hours to get here.”

  “Not my problem. You go in, she stays right here. Or you both turn around and head on back home; don’t make a bit of difference to me.”

  I looked at Heart. She said, “Go on without me, Johnny; I’ll keep a candle burning for you in the window.”

  “Why’s she calling you Johnny? Says here your name’s Ricky.”

  “Nickname,” I said. Maybe she didn’t like my attitude, but Kendra’s clone put me through a closer search than the one I’d stood for visiting Kevin in the psych ward, even making me take my belt off and bending it back and forth to make sure I wasn’t bringing in a shank, then repeating the same procedure with my shoes. Good thing I didn’t tell her my real name is Vercingetorix. Finally she led me back to a conference room and locked me in. I took out a blank yellow legal pad and wrote the date on it. Fifteen minutes went by according to my watch before I heard muffled footsteps approaching down the corridor.

  The door opened and in walked the beauty from the Russell R. Russell video. You know how they always say movie stars appear smaller in person? The same could not be said for Beattie’s breasts, barely restrained in a blue denim state-issue work shirt.

  I stood and offered her my left hand as the guard slammed the door locked and lurked just outside listening like a sentry. “Ms. Russell?” I said. “Ricky Galeer, your attorney.”

  Her hand was incredibly soft and warm to the touch. She had too much class to comment at all on my apparent injuries. “Mr. Galeer. How good of you to come. I’m pleased to have the opportunity of making your acquaintance at last.” Her delivery was pure schoolteacher, welcoming me to a parent-teacher conference where all the news promised to be good.

  I struggled mightily to maintain eye contact as I invited her to sit opposite me. She said, “I understood my sister was to be accompanying you here today. Has there been a last-minute change of plans?”

  “You could say that. They stopped Heart at the door. Something they found objectionable in her choice of wardrobe.”

  “How unfortunate. I see my family so seldom these days. And how is Little Eve?” She choked up at that last, eyes reddening and welling up with tears as she continued to regard me.

  “Happily playing with her little cousins, I’m told. I’ve never met her myself.”

  Beattie sniffled and delicately dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the cuff of her shirtsleeve, gradually regaining her composure. “You must visit my mother’s home and tell me all you observe, Mr. Galeer. Tell me everything. I want you to be my eyes and ears. There are reasons for my request.”

  “I’m sure there are, but the reason for this visit today is to interview you with regard to your case and my representation of you in the appeal.”

  “First promise me that you will definitely visit my mother at her home in the immediate future, Mr. Galeer.”

  “Ricky.”

  “Very well then. Ricky. Promise me you will pay a visit to my mother, preferably unannounced, preferably in the morning, during which time you will conduct thorough yet surreptitious observations of her, shall we say, living conditions and those of little Eve. I understand from my online research that you are an attorney specializing in child advocacy. In that capacity promise me that you will investigate and that you will report back to me confidentially whatever you may find. Do I have your promise?”

  I swallowed. “Is there any cause for concern?”

  “You reviewed my file. You are well aware of my history.”

  “And?”

  “And, certain things have a way of being passed on from generation to generation.”

  “What sorts of things, Ms. Russell?”

  “Beattie, Ricky. Tell me, do you happen to speak French, by any chance?”

  “Un peu,” I replied, holding thumb and forefinger together in a pinch.

  “Les murs ont des oreilles ici,” she whispered. She had to repeat it twice before I got it: the walls have ears in here. “May I have the use of your pad and pen for a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  Beattie looked over her shoulder, then hunched forward to shield her writing from the guard outside peeking through the reinforced glass. She wrote something and slid the pad back to me, her hand cupped over what she had written. Following her lead, I cupped mine over hers, which slipped away in what might easily have been mistaken for a caress. I tore the sheet off the pad, ripped away the strip of writing and held it in my lap to read it.

  She had written one line in perfect Palmer method: “Get me out of here and there’s a blow job in it for you.”

  “Beattie—”

  “I’m dead serious, Ricky. But first promise me.”

  “All right; I promise.”

  “And hand me back the note, please.” I felt like a second-grade child caught passing love notes in class, but I handed it to her. She crumpled it into a spitwad, popped it in her mouth and swallowed it.

  “Now what may I tell you about my case?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE - I CAN’T GET NO

  Nana Bobble-head lived in an unassuming bungalow on a quiet street. The house had probably been built in the twenties. Somebody with a thing for privacy had enclosed the front porch with those heavy screens meant to keep prying eyes out. You could sit there at night with the porch lights off and no one would ever see you or be able to tell what you were doing.

  The screen door to the porch was unlocked. A small child curled in a wicker chair with paper and crayons, drawing. She looked up momentarily before going back to her coloring.

  “Is Nana home?” I asked, figuring it for a stupid question.

  She looked up again and said, “I’m not s’posed to talk to strangers.”

  The child continued coloring, eyeing me critically as though drawing an unflattering caricature. The soap bubble of snot inflating from her left nostril captured the sunlight in a rainbow.

  “You must be Little Eve. My name is Ricky. I know your mother.”

  At the word mother the bubble burst. The child flinched but said nothing. She had the round face and pale hazel eyes of Heart and Beattie.

  “May I see what you’re coloring?”

  She defiantly clutched the paper to her chest. Crayons spilled from her lap and rolled across the porch floor.

  “That’s okay, if it’s a secret. You go ahead and work on it some more. I won’t bother you. It’s your Nana I’m here to visit.”

  Eve gathered up her crayons, ran to the screen door, down the front steps and circled behind the house, looking back only when she had made it a safe distance. She was wearing flip-flops and no coat. It was thirty-eight degrees outside.

  There was an old-fashioned doorbell, the kind you turn, built into the front door. I twisted it once and waited. Here I was, impotent, and still the fantasy of furtive sex with Ruth Holstein weighed on me like too much change in my pockets.

  Heart had made the trip back from Dwight at Nascar speed, dropping me off at the office before sunset and taking her own car home. If I didn’t know
better I would have suspected her of hurrying to avoid the prospect of spending the night in a motel with me.

  Diane had been gone as usual. When she finally returned home, still in her workout suit hours after the health club’s closing time, she seemed sullen and disagreeable. I had grown to expect that mood in her, starting from the time she and I had shared the three-way with Heart.

  Diane had seemed like a stranger to me since the watershed experience of the three-way. Her appearance had transformed for me, every flaw suddenly exposed and magnified; I noticed every physical imperfection and every unpleasant smell, real or imagined. A tiny patch of dry skin would repel me like leprosy. A whiff of morning breath would leave me nauseated.

  Even her voice had begun sounding harsh and unpleasant. We barely spoke a word to each other all evening. She went to bed early. When I tried our bedroom door I found it locked. I spent the night on the couch in the study. The couch where Heart had unsuccessfully tried to blow me. Although how does one define success or failure when speaking of a blow job?

  Still no sign of Ruth. I turned the ringer a second time. As I did, the door opened and she squinted out at me through smudged trifocal lenses, fumbling with her large-framed glasses. Although it was eleven o’clock in the morning, Ruth was still in a terrycloth robe that had worn and faded to the color and texture of oatmeal. She had her hair up in tight pink curlers like you’d see on your grandmother, and her puffy, seamed face was greasy with some kind of night cream.

  “Ricky,” she said, head bobbling as her eyes tried to focus. “What do you want?”

  I imagined smearing the head of my penis against her cheeks, making big finger-paint swirls in her Oil of Olay. “I thought you’d want to hear a status report right away on your daughter’s appeal,” I said. “I visited her yesterday like you’d asked.”

  “I would have expected you to do so as a matter of course, as a professional. Not simply because I had asked you to.”

  “If it’s a bad time—”

  “Not at all. Do come in. You must tell me all about it.” Ruth opened the door, clutching the lapels of her robe together at throat level. She wore old fuzzy slippers the color of dust bunnies.

  “People our age need their beauty sleep,” she said. People our age?

  “Judging from appearances, you must be well-rested, Ruth.”

  Ignoring what I hoped would be taken as a prodigal compliment, she asked, “And how is Beattie behaving herself?”

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances,” I said, remembering the spitwad. Beattie’s interview had been, as the appellate defender and I both had anticipated, a complete waste of time, an exercise in hand-holding and consolation. An appeal never hinges on the subjective recollections or personal complaints of the defendant, but rather on serious mistakes, called reversible errors, that oftentimes become apparent only after meticulous legal research and a careful review of the record.

  Hanging from a gilded pole in one corner of Ruth’s front room was the Christian Flag, as in, “I pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag.” Noticing me eyeing it she said, “I taught VBS for many years. Still do, in fact.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Vacation bible school,” she added by way of explanation.

  “Onward Christian soldiers, and all that. Good for you, Ruth.”

  “The solarium should be rather pleasant at this time of the morning.” Ruth led me through the shotgun layout of the cluttered house and into a spacious, greenhouse-like room at the far end overlooking the back yard where there was a treehouse in an old oak with a rope ladder attached. I barely noticed the outdoor view.

  The solarium was filled with plants of all sizes and varieties, from fireplug cacti to luxuriant ferns. There was even a potted orange tree. The humidity mixed with smells of turpentine and oil paint. But it was the nearly-completed painting proudly displayed on an easel that confronted me and challenged all my facile assumptions about Ruth Holstein.

  A self-portrait of Ruth as a nude Valkyrie astride a huge stud horse, bearing the lifeless form of a man to Valhalla. The twin focal points of her titanic breasts dominated the painting and redefined every perspective. The horse’s cock made it an Orion’s triangle. My pocket change suddenly weighed five pounds heavier.

  A full-length mirror stood nearby, as well as a rough table littered with a palette, brushes and half-empty tubes of pigment.

  “The morning haze provides ideal light for portrait work,” Ruth said. “You must allow me to paint you one day.”

  “Ruth, I don’t know what to say,” I began. “Who’s the dead guy supposed to be?”

  “The dead guy is supposed to be my late husband, father of Beattie and Heart. Emerson passed away quite suddenly at the age of forty-eight, lo these many years ago.”

  “That’s much too young, Ruth. How did he come to die, a man in his prime?”

  “If you must know, Em died during coitus.”

  The words were out before I could stop myself. “With you?”

  “Of course with me. What a thoroughly insensitive and impertinent remark!”

  “Please accept my apology. Your own disarming candor must have made me forget my manners.”

  Her voice took on a trancelike quality; there was a faraway look in her eyes. “The painting scarcely does him justice. Emerson in life was a portly man. Stout. During marital relations one night he startled me by belching. I was about to chastise him for his connubial discourtesy when I realized that his body had become completely still. The expression frozen on his face looked as though someone had snapped his picture before he was ready.”

  “What a tragedy.”

  “Indeed. I am convinced it was due to that harrowing experience that my neck spasticity was first set in motion. A thorn in my flesh, adding a new dimension to my grief. For years the symptoms were so subtle that, however certain I was that everyone could see, apparently I was the only one who noticed. As the years passed, of course, the tremors became progressively more distinct and pronounced. To the point where, when the time and opportunity presented themselves, I chose early retirement.”

  “How long ago did your late husband pass, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Ruth drew up a squat footstool next to her painting, stepped up and stood on it, regarding her handiwork. “Come closer, Ricky. If I may say so, one can scarcely discern the brush strokes.”

  I obliged, standing so close to her we might have been facing one another on a crowded elevator. “Very nice work, Ruth,” I said. “Beautiful lines.”

  “Pay particular attention to the breasts.”

  “I am. Believe me, I am.”

  “Emerson died over twenty years ago,” she said. “For more than two decades this old house has been free from the stink of any man.”

  “I’d hate to ruin a perfect record.”

  “Emerson, rest his soul, was a sex fiend,” Ruth said. “Just as you are, Ricky. Precisely as you are. The merest glimpse of a woman’s exposed breasts would invariably cause him to break out in trembling convulsive fits more noticeable than an attack of St. Vitus’ dance. You’re doing the very same thing right this moment. Your entire body is shaking.”

  She was right. “Breasts like yours are kind of hard for any man to ignore, Ruth.”

  “Are you flirting with me, Ricky? My own daughter’s attorney? And for the second time this morning, I might add.”

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, swallowed once, and stared at the painted image of Ruth displayed on the easel. My shakes gradually subsided. And, so help me, Little Ricky began to respond unbidden, to the point where I feared a visible tautness in a spot difficult to explain. “Flirting. That’s one word for it.”

  “If I were a litigious woman, I might consider suing you for sexual harassment or whatever they’re calling nowadays. In my mother’s day I understand the newspapers called it heartbalm.”

  “It’s not precisely the same thing.”

  “It is in essen
ce. A financial penalty exacted from rich and foolish married men guilty of bad judgment and lack of self-control. Married men who, when caught up in the throes of sexual arousal, comport themselves no better than naughty schoolboys.”

  My Blackberry rang. “Excuse me,” I said, grateful for the interruption.

  “Law office,” I answered.

  A tiny voice dripping with bedroom suggestion sighed at the other end, a long, lingering, wordless sigh.

  “Can’t talk now, Drey,” I said. “Can I call you later?”

  “Mistah Lawyer Ricky Galeer.”

  “Tyranno? Put Drey back on.”

  “Drey ain’t here, Mistah Ricky. That was me playin’, runnin’ you phone head.” Sounded like haid. I excused myself, stepped down the hallway and into a bathroom and closed the door.

  “I’m busy, Tyranno.”

  “You better be busy hustlin’ up my money, nephew.”

  “Tyranno, I’m as broke as I was two weeks ago. Even broker, in fact. Now on top of everything else I have some monster hospital bills to contend with.”

  “Guess what I been doin’?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Been settin’ up my Ipod, fittin’ to spam every email at the courthouse and all the shysters and ambulance chasers in the area-wide yellow pages with a link to a certain action video. Was a bitch programmin’ in all them emails. You was to pay me now, I might be persuaded to delete every last one.”

  “I can’t help you, Tyranno. I told you, I have no money. Tyranno?” The line was dead. Why do blackmailers exhibit such deplorable telephone etiquette?

  I was in a child’s bathroom judging from the decorations. There was a pink wicker clothes hamper opposite the sink. Hoping there might be something of Ruth’s in there, perhaps some soiled underthings, I opened the lid and peeked inside. No brassieres. No women’s panties, only those of a very young girl. An unpleasant odor assailed my nostrils, instantly familiar.