by Grant Mccrea
She was in her recliner.
One thing in life, at least, I could count on.
I told her that Melissa had died. I filled in some details. I didn’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell her about Harwood. I didn’t tell her about the night before.
Oh dear, she said more than once. That’s terrible.
I didn’t feel better.
Of course I wasn’t going to feel better, right away. It was a process. I had to go through it. Blah, blah, blah.
A long silence.
There’s something I’ve always wanted to talk to you about, Sheila said.
Okay, I said.
I’d like to talk about why you married her.
I stared at the air conditioner behind Sheila’s desk. I looked at the clock above it. It sat next to a book. The Challenge of Pain. Ronald Melzack. I almost laughed. It was about physical pain, though. I’d read it once. In college. I didn’t remember much about it. One idea was that pain was not some absolute, measurable thing. Everyone felt it differently. I looked back at the clock. Still twenty minutes left. Shit. I didn’t want to be there.
Which was strange. Normally I wanted to stay as long as possible.
Things were different, now.
I looked at Sheila.
Why you married Melissa? she reminded me.
I’ve often asked myself that question, I said.
You have?
Yes. Mostly because …because when I think about it, I don’t really know her. I didn’t really know her. I’ve never really known her. At all.
You knew enough to marry her.
I knew I loved her.
Yes. And maybe that’s enough. But as I recall, you hadn’t even met her parents.
That’s true. I still haven’t. She wasn’t speaking to them.
Or any other members of her family.
If any. She never mentioned any others.
You don’t even know where she was from, do you?
Illinois, I think. Or Indiana. Something with an I.
Ithaca?
Could be.
That’s sort of my point.
I get your point. But what’s the point? Of your point.
Don’t you think it’s a little unusual?
What’s unusual?
To marry someone you know almost nothing about?
Unusual? Probably. But I’m an unusual guy. I kind of like that about myself.
You are. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In itself. I’d just like to explore this particular aspect of your …difference.
Explore away.
Did the thought ever occur to you, any time before the marriage? That maybe you should know a bit more about her?
No. I mean, I don’t think so. I was never so terribly close to my own family, you know. Of course you know.
Yes, I know that.
She just made me feel so good.
In what way?
I remember the nights in her apartment. It was tiny. Just enough room for a bed and the TV. And a small bedside table. And the kitchen, at the end of the room. The window looked out onto a brick wall. Two feet away. And it was always overheated. The apartment. So we took our clothes off. As soon as we got there. And lay on the bed. And drank wine. Cheap wine. But good wine. Stuff I hunted up. An unknown Rhône or two. Some esoteric stuff from Spain. And smoked cigarettes. Listened to Tom Waits. And I would read her poetry. Mine. T.S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas. Stuff that moved me. And it would move her. And her skin was so soft. And I’d think, This is what heaven must be like. Really. That’s what I’d think. That’s how it felt. I know it sounds stupid.
No, it doesn’t sound stupid. It sounds sad.
Sad? How does it sound sad? Is going to heaven sad?
Not if it really was heaven. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t sustainable.
Well, you’ve got that right.
The pursuit of bliss.
Yes.
That’s what it is.
Yes.
But bliss is not for us.
Us mortals.
No. Bliss is for the Gods.
Yes. I know. I know.
I hung my head. What a fool I was.
We had it for a while, I said.
Yes. And then?
Yeah. Then. If it wasn’t hell, it was a reasonable facsimile.
That’s what it is, you see? Pleasure and pain are relative concepts. If you weren’t capable of that bliss, you’d never know it. And you’d never feel the pain of its absence.
Sure, but what’s the point? We should all live within a tiny emotional range? B to C? No high Fs? Now that’s a life worth living.
No. No. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you have to recognize those highs for what they are. Moments. Glimpses of heaven. Luck. Not what you can expect from day to day. Or even ever again. It’s part of the art of living.
Now that’s sad.
Yes, she said. In a way. In a way it’s sad. That heaven’s not here on earth. But that’s part of growing up, isn’t it? Coming to terms with that fact?
Sure, I said. Sure. I’ve just never been sure that I want to grow up.
I know, she said. I know.
59.
I WENT TO WORK. I knew I didn’t have to. The firm always gave you two weeks, no questions asked, when a family member died. But Kelly had gone to school. She didn’t want to stay inside and brood. The thought of being home alone, picking scabs, didn’t appeal to me either. Action. Activity. It was the only thing. To keep the seconds from turning into hours. To keep from thinking about things. Things that didn’t bear thinking about.
On the way to the office I took a detour to the alley. Maybe it had some secrets it would be willing to give up. To a widower.
The Dumpster was gone. The fire escapes were still there. The metal doors closed tight. Not telling me anything.
No surprise, really. The police surely had already combed every square inch. No secrets left for me to find.
I went over to the metal door on the left side. I stared at it. It wanted to tell me something. I sat down on the broken asphalt. I waited for the door to speak.
The weeds had grown a bit. The rust perhaps had spread a millimeter more. I couldn’t tell.
I lit a cigarette.
I felt like crying.
I held it back.
The door wasn’t talking. I upbraided it.
Talk to me, I said.
It sat in Buddha-like indifference in its rusted frame.
Talk to me, I said. I know you’re hiding something. Sure, you don’t care. You’ll be here long after the rest of us are dust motes in this alley. If we’re lucky. But I care. Come on. Throw me a bone.
The steel door spoke.
Patience, it said.
Patience, I repeated. Okay. I’ll see what I can do.
I sat another minute.
It wasn’t going to give me anything more.
I went around the corner. I walked the three blocks. I rang Jules’s bell. No answer. Nobody home.
I rang again.
No answer.
I waited five minutes.
My cell phone rang. ‘Private number.’ I ignored it.
Patience.
I rang again.
I waited another five minutes. Nothing.
Mission accomplished. Don’t quit your day job.
I went to the office.
I endured the gauntlet of sympathy-wishers. They were surprised to see me. I didn’t feel like explaining. I felt badly that I found no solace in their stilted efforts to help. I knew they meant well.
Dorita came by. She declined to make the usual noises. She just gave me a hug. A good long hug.
We didn’t say a word.
It was enough.
I sat and stared at the wall. No thoughts intruded.
There was a knock on the door. I turned my head. Warwick. It startled me. I couldn’t recall another time he’d come by my office. Normally, you got a call from Cherise, summoning you to His Chambers for
an audience.
I’m sorry, he said.
He actually seemed to mean it.
Thanks, I said.
If there’s anything we can do.
No, no. I’m dealing.
You don’t have to be here. Take as much time as you like. We can cover for you.
Thank you, Charles. I appreciate that. But I’d rather be here. Passes the time, you know.
I understand. Well, like I said, anything we can do.
All right, I said. Thanks.
He left.
Hell, maybe he was human after all.
How confusing.
There was a message from Vinnie Price. He wanted to talk about the Futterman case. I had nothing else to do. I called him in.
I gathered Vinnie hadn’t gotten the news. Which was all to the good. He wanted my advice. He’d been working on the Futterman case for six months. High-profile. An honor to be selected. But he’d encountered a thorny ethical issue.
I knew that if he’d come to me about it, and not Uptight Bob Shumaker, Firm Ethics Guru, it was not a run-of-the-mill problem. Not your everyday thing. Not amenable to solution by reference to Shumaker’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Canons of Ethics and the vast and impenetrable body of cases and commentary that adhered to them like leeches on flesh.
Vinnie Price explained the problem. We were representing the wife of a certain high-profile actor, model and sometime disco maven. His wife was rather well known herself, and notoriously high-strung. Now, it seemed that the actor had invited a few people over to his palatial penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side for an evening of fine wine, good food and witty repartee. One of the guests had been a young protégé of his, one Michael Millar, an aspiring leading man.
According to Millar’s version of events, as recited in the complaint he later filed in State Court, the actor’s wife, our client, had lured him onto the roof deck of the penthouse, where she suggested it might be pleasant to perform oral sex on him. Millar, anxious to make the right impression on his hosts, acquiesced.
The night then proceeded apace. Much alcohol, and perhaps the odd gram of a Schedule I substance well known to fabulously wealthy overachievers, was consumed by all. There was dancing. Laughter. General frivolity. And all went home in guarded limousines, as a gray dawn descended on Manhattan.
The next day, Millar arrived on the set of a reality-show pilot in which he had been awarded a small but highly visible part, feeling rather good about himself. He had ingratiated himself with the high-powered couple. He’d had a good time too.
Then the police arrived.
After the guests had left the night before, it seemed, the actor had confronted his high-strung wife, our client. Someone had made a salacious comment. He wanted to know the truth. What had transpired on the roof? he asked. At first, the flustered lady had denied any knowledge of the episode. But when confronted with some evidence, consisting of a whitish stain upon the custom-designed calf’s leather settee reposing on the roof deck, eminently susceptible to DNA analysis, she confessed: Millar had forced himself upon her.
The actor then contacted the local constabulary, not forgetting to put in a side call to a prominent politician of his acquaintance, and the wheels of justice were set in motion. Millar was confronted on the set, handcuffed, patted down and shoved into the back of a squad car. At the station, he was read his rights, and told that he was being charged with second-degree sexual assault.
Then the fun really started.
According to Millar’s complaint, three burly officers of New York’s Finest then proceeded to strip-search him, probing orifices that he wasn’t sure he’d known he had, and, most egregiously, making raucous fun of the size of his member. Which, he hastened to explain, right there in the complaint, was merely shrunken to near invisibility by fear and consternation. Under normal conditions, he insisted, it was a healthy size and circumference. But nevertheless.
All of this I had heard before, in more or less detail, but Vinnie had more to say. Our client had devised an imaginative line of attack on Millar’s accusation that she had forced herself on his unsuspecting manhood. Not possible, she’d told Vinnie. Had it been a voluntary act, she averred, she’d have swallowed the evidence. To do otherwise was to risk damaging the exquisite leather covering of the aforementioned settee. Only irrational emotion brought on by the traumatic event of Millar’s forcing himself upon her could have impelled her to eject the dangerously caustic fluid upon its delicate surface.
Although caught up in the excitement of the story, and laughing so hard that I’d almost forgotten that I was actually profoundly depressed and confused, I did not neglect to ask Vinnie what ethical issue had arisen in these circumstances.
The problem is this, he said. Our client keeps telling me how attractive I am.
Well, I said, you can’t blame her.
I don’t blame her, of course. But she’s asking me out. She wants to take me to dinner. Dancing. Meet her girlfriends.
Oh dear.
Yes. I just don’t think that I can keep working on this case, Rick. But I know how important it is to the firm. High-profile and all. We can’t just fire the client. But if I recuse myself—
So to speak.
So to speak. If I recuse myself, I’m afraid that she’s going to do something drastic. She’s a bloody nutcase, Rick.
Well Vinnie, let’s not rush to judgment. She’s been severely traumatized.
He gave me a wry smile.
Anyway, I continued, it’s a great story. But I don’t feel qualified to opine on the ethical problem. Hardly at all. That’s a call that only one man can make.
Oh shut up.
Yes. Bob Shumaker.
Jesus.
Glad I could help, I said.
Vinnie left my office laughing. I was left to ponder whether he had made the whole thing up. Either way, I thought, he’s a good kid. Wish I’d had a son like that.
Wrong thought. Sons. Mothers. Daughters. Wives. My shoulders slumped. My stomach hurt. I worried about Kelly. I had to get home.
But that half-hour with Vinnie had told me one important thing. I’d been right. Action. Activity. Each minute of laughter was powerful enough to erase an hour of self-loathing.
Maybe I could get through this.
60.
I GOT A CALL. Not a call I could ignore. Much as I would have liked to.
It was Laura Cochrane. She was the Assistant Coroner. In charge of the actual work. I was surprised. Not badly so. An old friend, Laura. An expert witness, long ago. The Johnson case. Mississippi. Dog days. Death. The death penalty.
I didn’t believe in it. I don’t believe in it. So sue me. The State, in all its majesty, killing people. It isn’t right. The ritual. The hood. The rope. The rifle. The cigarette. The straps. The hood. The chair. The gurney. The arms spread wide and strapped to it. The last meal. Billy Ray Rector, saving his dessert for ‘after the execution.’ The needle. The countdown. Finality. Who’s to pull the switch?
It doesn’t make a difference how you do it. Not a damn. The result is the same.
And everyone has their excuse. ‘It’s just my job.’ ‘I had to do it.’ ‘If not me to pull the switch, then someone else will do it.’ Who? No matter. Someone. Who tells them that? Who tells each cog and wheel and joint and bearing that together make the big machine that says ‘Not me’? It wasn’t me made the decision, it was him, or her, or them, and yes, the system, them, the people, all of them.
The State. The will. The people. Jesus, what was that? Nobody with a gram of blame, of responsibility. We’d rather drink ourselves oblivious than think, Oh yes, that’s me, I’ll be there too, I’ll be as nothing, as the man on the gurney there, like him, dust and ashes, it won’t make a damn bit of difference, me or him, whatever we were blamed for, tried to do or failed, we’ll both be dead as doornails.
I felt fairly strongly about it.
Laura was in private practice then. She’d volunteered, like the rest of us. She’d do
ne her best. Come up with a theory. We’d pinned our hopes on it. Our client, Johnson, a sad and schizophrenic man, had been there. We couldn’t deny it. He’d confessed. He’d stabbed the knife into the bodies of the man, his wife, the children. But, our psychologist had testified, he didn’t mean to do what he’d so manifestly done. And even if he had, Laura had concluded, the bodies had been corpses long before he’d come into the room. Done in already by the depredations of his friend. All Gavin’s fault, it was, that nasty young and angry Gavin, who’d told him that he had to cut them all.
You’ve got to do it, Gavin said. You’ve got to do something too.
She’d testified. She’d done her best. If the victims had been already dead, how could Johnson be a murderer?
She’d tried. It hadn’t worked. I couldn’t criticize. She’d done what she could do.
There’s something about being at trial. In the trenches. Even more so when a life is at stake. The bonds you form last a lifetime. Sometimes more. I still went every year to Miklos Kariakin’s grave. To say hello, and thanks. For all he taught me as a young and eager lawyer. For the all-nighters we pulled together, early in my career, in the defense of the indefensible. The bullshit sessions over bourbon and potato chips in cheap hotels in faraway places. Shreveport. Texarkana. Mobile. My death penalty education. My introduction to the life of hard-ass no-holds-barred trial work.
Sifting every piece of paper. Covering every angle. Being way over-prepared, for every witness and contingency. Litigation is the art of over-preparation. The art of never having to say later, Damn, I should have asked him that. So that the one time in a thousand that an otherwise random comment of Officer Brunson, in his statement made in 1987, contradicted what he said on the stand today, fourteen years later, you had it there. It was in your head. It was on a piece of paper. And you knew just where that piece of paper was.
So, Laura and I had bonds that never would break. But she also had a job to do. Cutting up my wife, for one. So first, I was surprised, to get a call from Laura. I didn’t want my friends involved in all of this. Still less exploring my late wife’s anatomy.
But then, in some strange way, it seemed inevitable.
Whatever was the fate the Gods decreed, I’d live with it.