by Paul Levine
* * *
“It’ll be nice for the kids,” he said, after a moment.
“What?”
“The ice cream bar. Maybe the beer taps too, for all I know.”
“What are you implying?” Irritated now.
“Nothing, just that the gazebo will be nice for your sister’s children, our nieces and nephews, the little blond platoon of well-fed Virginia storm troopers.”
Actually, there were only four of them, all in braces, all in private schools, all with their own horses in their own stables. The orthodontics and tuition alone must be astounding, he thought, not to mention the oats and carrots. Harold Bellows, his brother-in-law, had an eighty-acre estate in Virginia. In the basement of the sprawling home was an English pub. A real one, the stained glass and dark wood stripped from a country pub in the Cotswolds. To Truitt, it represented the essence of ugly-American acquisitiveness. Taken from a place enjoyed by an entire village, the old scarred wood bar—ripe with the wet scent of a hundred years of spilled ale—was now used, if at all, by one pudgy, overpaid apologist for sugar growers, oil companies, and heaven help us, handgun manufacturers.
“You’re attacking me,” she said angrily.
“What? How?”
“You’re reminding me in a cheap and cowardly way that we don’t have children, that I can’t have children, that my tubes are scarred, but your sperm count is in the top one percent. You’re a first team All-American sperm machine with a wife who can’t complete a pass.”
Oh no. God no.
His heart sank. She had answered the question of the day, the question of the decade, the question of their lives. He walked over to the vanity and put his arms around her. Her shoulders felt like pillars of ice. “Connie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She glared at him in the mirror. “If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t have used Stephanie’s children to disparage me.”
He wondered if every marriage had one wound that would never heal. “I didn’t! Sometimes a gazebo is just a gazebo. I was just making conversation about our spoiled nieces and nephews and a goddamn gazebo that’s probably bigger than our house.”
“Exactly! You were striking out at me because of the gazebo. You thought I was belittling the amount of money you make in comparison to Harold, so you brought up the children to hurt me, to remind me that I’m defective, that I’m not a whole woman.”
“No! I swear—”
“It’s your fault as much as mine,” he fired back. “You’re the bastard who knocked me up back on the island.”
The ferocity of her words startled him, and he backed off, retreating to the bed. His head throbbed. Their arguments were becoming more severe, Connie’s attacks more cutting.
“Connie, what can I say to you? You’re not defective. You’re a bright, witty, breathtaking woman, and I don’t care how much money Harold makes. I don’t care if he moves the Smithsonian into his gazebo and invites the Washington Redskins to play in his backyard. So let’s just forget it.”
In the mirror, he saw her eyes brim with tears. There would be no more playful banter today. She had brought back the memories, which hung over them like the stalled thunderhead of a summer storm. At the time, Connie was just finishing her master’s degree, still writing her thesis on French impressionism. They’d just starting going out, and one August night, after a swim in the cold Atlantic at dusk off Siasconset on Nantucket Island, wrapped in a blanket on the beach, they’d made love. He remembered even now her salty taste, her long wet hair falling into her face, his body grinding into her with the urgency and passion of new lovers.
My God, the heat we brought to each other.
He could still picture the fusion of their bodies, each of them heedless of the scraping sand and incoming tide, seeing only the first stars of evening, the rising moon, and the fire in each other’s eyes. What he wouldn’t give to re-create that with her now. For longer than he cared to admit, their lovemaking had been infrequent and perfunctory.
But then … oh Lord, then the sex had been synchronized with the pounding of the waves. He had sung out her name on the sea breeze, exploding into her with a thunderclap from within, watching bolts of lightning through closed eyes.
He had also exploded into her without protection, an event that just now prompted Connie to refer to her husband not as “Sweetheart” but rather as “the bastard who knocked me up back on the island.” Actually, he had used a condom, but it burst because, in his feverish haste, he had neglected to squeeze out the air pocket in the tip, which then detonated in the midst of their furious coupling. Sam Truitt’s manual dexterity, it seemed, was limited to putting a spiral on the long snap.
Connie became pregnant. Their first crisis, the one that would launch all the others. Just like the chaos theory the physicists introduced to popular culture. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a typhoon in the Pacific. And, he supposed, the explosion of a condom on Nantucket can cause an October freeze in Georgetown fifteen years later.
At the time, they handled the situation surprisingly well. He was sensitive, caring, understanding. She was thoughtful, mature, and decisive.
He said it was her choice all the way. He believed, then as a man, and now as a judge, that the woman had all the votes. There was no talk of marriage. After all, they barely knew each other. But if she chose to have the child, he promised to be there for them both. He’d visit, bring birthday presents, pay for everything right up through college. He gave himself an A for his hypothetical parenting skills, which she reminded him, were considerably greater than his actual contraception skills.
The abortion was quick and apparently without incident. Well, not without psychological incident. Connie became depressed. He felt guilty. He’d never heard the term back then, but now he supposed they were snared in a codependent relationship. He wouldn’t leave her, not like that. He was captured in the web of her moodiness, sinking in the quicksand of her unfulfilled needs.
They were married six months later, and the artificiality of the closeness that carried them through the abortion soon evaporated. For reasons neither they nor the doctors could understand, this healthy, athletic, screw-every-damn-night couple could not conceive. Several years later they learned that the abortion had caused an infection, which scarred her Fallopian tubes.
Complicating their lives, hanging over them like an unseen ghost, was the child they never had. They did not even create an illusion, a fantasy child to sustain them like the playwright Albee’s ineffectual George and vicious Martha, locked in a perpetual embrace of psychological cruelty. Their life together had begun with the act of conceiving an unwanted child on the shore of an ocean, and in what Sam’s Southern Baptist relatives would have considered an act of biblical retribution, they cried a sea of tears trying to duplicate the feat.
“Do you know what really angers me?” she asked, finally.
Everything, he thought.
“The fact that you don’t see the connection between your words and the source of your feelings,” she answered herself.
He had to get out of there. The bedroom was growing smaller by the minute. He stood and tried to escape, squeezing between his wife and the bed, banging his shin into an open vanity drawer.
“Damn! Plessy versus Ferguson!” When he was angry, Truitt tried to confine his profanity to the names of horrific Supreme Court decisions. Sopchoppy responded with a quiet woof.
“I told you this house was too small,” she said as he fled, hopping on one foot.
The Truitts’ two-hundred-year-old farmhouse near Waltham was ten times larger, Connie frequently reminded him. They had eighteen gently rolling acres with a stream on one side of the property and a duck pond on the other. But Connie was unhappy there, too, always complaining that the house was too big, too drafty, too old, too far from Boston.
Washington was going to be their move to the city. Embassy parties, dinner at Citronelle, shopping for antiques.
Sam Truitt cared noth
ing for black tie dinners or sautéed foie gras with poached figs in port wine sauce. His tastes were simpler, preferring cut-off jeans and a meal of plain grilled snapper and boiled swamp cabbage, a legacy of growing up in Everglades City. It took him thirty years to find out that his momma’s swamp cabbage was called heart of palm when served in fancy restaurants, including The Palm, and an appetizer portion could set you back eight bucks. He used to eat about a pound of the concoction for supper. His mother, a Florida Cracker, would slice open a palm tree with a machete and cook the fibrous meat with sow’s belly or ham hock in a fifty-five-gallon drum on an open fire. They’d eat, year-round, at a picnic table under a live oak tree, zebra butterflies flapping over their heads, causing typhoons in Tonga, he now supposed.
Washington was also going to rejuvenate the marriage, and who knows, maybe lead to a magical fertility that had escaped them farther north. So far, all it had accomplished was to bring them into closer confinement.
Two scorpions in a shoe box.
He preferred the open spaces of the wetlands where he grew up. Connie insisted on referring to the Everglades as “the swamp,” despite his insistence that it was really a slow-moving freshwater river some sixty miles wide. Just after his nomination to the Court last spring, he returned to Florida for “Sam Truitt” day, which the local weekly termed the largest celebration the town had ever seen, if you didn’t count the annual seafood festival. The volunteer fire department led a parade, with the high school band playing off-key Sousa. A chugging John Deere tractor hauled Sam and Connie down Conch Avenue on a float with papier-mâché pillars representing the Supreme Court, Connie choking on the diesel fumes that hung in the humid air.
In the sweltering Fishermen’s Hall, Truitt made a speech, tracing his success to values learned in the sloughs and creeks of the Ten Thousand Islands, and Connie stood there in a yellow sundress, fanning herself with a commemorative poster, complaining about the heat, picking over the supper of fried catfish, hush puppies, and key lime pie—washed down with sugar-laden iced tea. Later, manhandling bottles of tequila, Truitt and some of the good ole boys, now leathery fishermen with scarred hands and squinty eyes, swapped lies about their youth and who built the fastest airboat from broken airplane propellers and old Chevy engines.
Truitt hadn’t been home since his mother’s funeral eight years earlier. His father had died three years before that. This time, as he clasped hands and slapped shoulders of old friends and acquaintances, he kept an eye on Connie, studying her discomfort. While he felt at home, she looked afraid of stepping in something squishy and repulsive.
That night in their motel room, as they settled onto opposite sides of the lumpy bed, Connie said, “I didn’t know I’d married Huck Finn.”
“Yes you did,” he replied.
Sam Truitt knew that Connie would have been happier married to a real estate developer who made millions building condos in protected wetlands, or an investment banker who knew the value of the deutsche mark when the markets opened each day—anyone whose net worth equaled her appetite for consumption.
To Truitt, status was achieved by deeds, not dollars. His love of the law was paramount over building a net worth. It also took priority over personal relations, something he acknowledged as a flaw in his character. When they first moved to Washington, he realized that he was more concerned about the needs of migrant workers than those of his newly migrated wife.
He accepted the fact that Connie grew less affectionate each year. Hell, he deserved it. Sam Truitt was, after all, a man who had difficulty expressing his emotions, much less fulfilling the emotional needs of another person. Who could blame Connie if she longed for a man who would pamper his wife instead of illegal aliens?
So Sam Truitt understood half a dozen years earlier when she had her first affair, with the tennis pro at the club, of all the mundane clichés. He responded with an affair of his own, an adoring law student, in violation of university rules and his own ethics. I’ll see your cliché and raise you another. They weathered those storms and stayed together.
At first, Connie had seemed happy when he received the Supreme Court appointment. No more faculty teas with their dreary gossip washed down by watery punch. Life in Washington would be different. But she must have been thinking of her father’s social whirl as a senator, always making the rounds of chic parties and Georgetown dinners. She was not prepared for the more monastic life of a Supreme Court justice. Boredom set in quickly. After not having worked for years, Connie began an interior decorating business. Now, her fondest hope was for the defeat of the Democratic president in the next election, both to punish him for appointing her husband, and to bring wealthy Republicans to town with an insatiable desire to redecorate.
His shin still throbbing, a truce having been declared by his retreat from the bedroom, Truitt was sitting at the small desk in the study when he heard Connie’s voice. “Did you hire the third law clerk, Sam?”
“Yes,” he called back, as he thumbed through the briefs for the first oral argument of the new term. “She’s a real winner. Lisa Premont.”
“Tell me about her.” Connie was moving around in the bedroom. They were talking to each other now separated by the landing at the top of the stairs—and years of missed connections.
“She’s from the West Coast. Berkeley, Stanford, then a year clerking on the D.C. circuit.”
“A California beach bunny?”
“She’s a fisherman’s daughter and smart as hell.”
“I’ll bet she’s pretty.”
He could lie, of course. “She looks like Howard Stern in drag.”
But the first time Connie had the clerks over for dinner, she’d brain him with a lamb chop. “As a matter of fact, she’s quite attractive,” he said.
“I thought you had a bounce in your step when you came home today.”
“I had to pee.”
She walked into his study from the master bedroom. She was wearing a sleeveless black silk cocktail dress, a triple strand of pearls, and matching earrings.
“My God, you’re beautiful,” he said.
“Look at you!” she cried. “You’re not ready.”
“Ready for what?” he asked, even though it occurred to him that she was dressed for a party while he was wearing a twenty-year-old Wake Forest sweatshirt with holes in both Ds of Demon Deacons.
“The reception at the Watergate. It starts at seven. Hurry up. I’ll find your tux.”
“What reception?”
“The benefit! The one Stephanie and Harold invited us to, bought our tickets, a thousand dollars each.”
“Not the one sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers,” he said, vaguely recalling having told his brother-in-law thanks but no thanks.
“Who cares who’s sponsoring? It’s for the hospital. It’s nonpolitical, nonsectarian, nonoffensive even to a holier-than-thou associate justice on the Supreme fucking Court.”
“I told Harold we couldn’t go,” he said guiltily, realizing he’d forgotten to tell Connie.
“What! Why?”
“NAM is amicus curiae in a major case on punitive damages, and they’re involved in another half dozen cases with cert petitions pending. Besides, I can’t accept a gift from a lobbyist.”
“You must be kidding. Do you think you’ll be compromised by eating their goat cheese on endive?”
“No, but my attendance makes it appear they have access to the Court.”
Holding her high-heeled black shoes in one hand, Connie waved her hairbrush at him with the other. “Don’t do this, Sam! Don’t do this to me. I’m going stir crazy in this damn shoe box.”
“I know it seems silly or quaint, or just plain stupid, but a Supreme Court Justice has to live like a monk.” He thought of the chief, who wasn’t right about many things, but on this one, he was. “Some justices won’t even attend the President’s State of the Union address because of separation of powers. Even those who go refuse to applaud.”
“Yo
u’re right, Sam. It is stupid. Now, are you getting dressed or not?”
He looked into her eyes, which were ablaze with hostility. All the disappointments and frustrations of a life that didn’t turn out the way she planned seemed to be reflected in her glare, in her bearing, in the way she pointed the hairbrush at him as if it were a Saturday night special manufactured by one of her brother-in-law’s clients.
“I can’t, Connie. I’m sorry, but I can’t”
She threw the hairbrush at him. He slipped his head to the side like a boxer dodging a punch, and the brush clattered against the wall. She hastily pulled on her shoes, smoothed her dress over her flat stomach, and looked at him, her upper lip quivering with anger. “All right, Mr. Supreme Court Justice,” she said, spitting out the words. “Be a monk. Be a bishop or a cardinal or the damn pope for all I care.”
She turned dramatically and left the room, looking like a leading lady playing her big scene in her shimmering black dress. She started down the narrow staircase, two flights to the ground, her stiletto heels clapping against the wooden stairs like rifle shots. “But I’ll tell you this,” she called out, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to be a nun!”
This and other e-books by Paul Levine may be found at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JAKELASSITER
About the Author
The author of 14 novels, Paul Levine won the John D. MacDonald fiction award and was nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, International Thriller, and James Thurber prizes. A former trial lawyer, he also wrote more than 20 episodes of the CBS military drama “JAG” and co-created the Supreme Court drama “First Monday” starring James Garner and Joe Mantegna. He is the author of the “Jake Lassiter” series, the “Solomon vs. Lord” series, and the thriller “Illegal.” His next novel will be “Lassiter,” due from Bantam in Fall 2011. Visit his Web site at http://www.paul-levine.com.
E-books by Paul Levine may be found at http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JAKELASSITER