The Legal Limit

by Martin Clark

  “Clement was just saying how crowded it is here,” Allison said blandly.

  “Cheap beer and free food will bring out the masses,” Clement cracked. Despite the swarm of people and stifling heat, a white cotton sweater was tied around his neck. He was wearing snug shorts that halted before they reached mid-thigh.

  “Lured me here,” Mason said.

  The other woman pressed closer to the bar, her drink held above the crowd, out of harm’s way. “I’m switching to tequila,” she said to Allison.

  “We’re just back from St. John,” Allison mentioned, turning to face Mason, her expression and intent impossible to decipher.

  Clement took this as an invitation to slide his arm around her waist.

  “Hey, great. Hope you had blue skies.” Mason was deflated, a bit embarrassed. His common rearing had never been a concern for him before, but for whatever reason, he suddenly, for a moment, felt like an interloper, smelling of high-dollar cologne—an extravagant birthday gift from his mom—and dressed in slacks he’d ironed himself while eating leftover KFC from the bucket and watching a Dallas rerun, a bare mattress and sleeping bag in his bedroom, a single fan blowing through the apartment to lessen the suffocating tenth-floor humidity.

  “Thanks again for your kindness,” Allison said cryptically.

  “Ah…oh,” Clement said, raising an index finger to his lips. “Are you the Romeo who sent my sweetheart the bouquet?” He was nearly as tall as Mason, with sharp, alert features and long brown hair that made him attractive in the casual fashion of men who are at ease around sailboats and tennis courts and know how to fox-trot at black-tie galas, who rarely wear socks and favor money clips over wallets.

  “Pardon?”

  Clement didn’t flinch. “I asked if you sent flowers to Allison.”

  “I did, but what is it to you?” Mason lowered his cup of beer.

  “It’s a free country, Marlon,” he said, unruffled. “Send away. I just like to know where my competition lies.” He directed a wolfish smile at Mason. “Though for the short term, not to put too fine a point on it, I can’t see any reason for you to hang around here hitting on my girlfriend.”

  “Mason, not Marlon.” He kept his composure. “And I suppose you’re right. But things do have a tendency to change. Not many men can get away with wearing a cape over the long haul—you, Underdog, Elvis, French kings. Never know.”

  “What, pray tell, are you talking about?” Clement asked. “My first beer made me a little incoherent, too.”

  Mason patted his throat. “Oh damn—my bad. That’s a sweater tied around your neck. Sorry.” He bulled his way forward and kissed Allison’s cheek, surprising her, and he peered at Clement, told him he’d enjoyed meeting him, deadpanned it with a wink in every syllable, and what was Clement going to do, quick as it came, in a jammed bar, with a guy as big and audacious as Mason. “Hope you liked the flowers,” he said to her. “I delivered them myself.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t forget, Underdog could fly,” Clement said. “He was the star of the show.”

  Later, a friend of Allison’s, at her bidding, approached Mason and requested his number, and Allison woke him at three in the morning, inviting him to meet her in twenty minutes for biscuits and gravy at a diner on Cary Street. She poured vodka from a flask into her tomato juice and sprinkled the drink with a lemon squeeze, and they talked for two hours, shared the saturated biscuits, a BLT and a piece of pie with meringue topping, selected from the glass display case near the cash register. At first, Mason was sore about their earlier meeting at the bar, and he sat back against the wooden booth and frowned and tucked his chin and—even though he realized he should’ve been far more cavalier—wanted to know why she was keeping company with a guy dressed for the local theater troupe’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang revival.

  “If you didn’t think he was impressive, you wouldn’t be so curious, now would you?” She took a sip of her doctored juice, looking at him over the glass’s rim.

  “I’d ask you the same question if you were dating Grendel or Sasquatch—flummoxed doesn’t mean I thought he was impressive.”

  “I don’t get the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang reference. I don’t think it’s technically too accurate.”

  “How about effete and goofy? That’s what I was aiming for.”

  “Clement is neither. If he were, I wouldn’t see him. He’s an architect, a published poet and a ranked amateur tennis player. He spent a month in El Salvador, not for the politics, mind you, but just trying to help out. He was stabbed in the arm and arrested once while he was there. I would hope, Mason, if you and I were together in a bar and another man showed an interest in me, you’d give him his walking papers, same as Clem did with you.”

  Mason mentioned he didn’t care for poetry, informed her of his Matchbox car analogy, adding he’d need to see the hospital report before he believed Clement Watkins, Jr., had been wounded in the course of tending to the poor and unfortunate in another country. “Maybe he was nicked by a cricket bat or beaned by a snooker ball—I’d come closer to believing one of those.”

  She sawed off a chunk of biscuit, loaded it onto her fork and offered it in his direction, stopping near his plate so he’d have to leave his small sulk and move forward to get it. “You’re blown up like a toad,” she teased. “Jealous as a schoolboy.”

  He relaxed and took hold of the silverware and food, fed himself. “I’m not anything. I was a little—what’s the right word?—surprised to discover you had a boyfriend after we spent the night together.”

  She cocked her head playfully. “So, what, you expected me to sit home arranging my figurines and reading the Brontë sisters, waiting for you to call?” She idly bumped a piece of piecrust with a spoon. “Listen, Mason, it’s more complicated than you might think.” Her voice changed, her face sobered. “Clement and I have been on and off for a while now, and we’d booked this trip months ago. He’s about eighty-five percent for me, if you know what I mean, and that’s more than a lot of people ever have, so I’ve been sorta trying to figure out if I’ve reached the max. It’s like a dress that’s flattering but not perfect, the kind you’d wear to work or to an important party but not to your five-year high school reunion. And who knows about you, okay? Or even if it matters long-term, since we’ve known each other for all of a few days. There’s no need to be upset about it, not really. I’m sure you’ve probably been in the same situation.”

  “I guess,” he answered. “Most everyone has. At any rate, it’s decent of you to explain. I had a great night when we met, and—see there—not only did I call, but I sent flowers, too. It’ll be my stated goal to move the meter to at least ninety percent.”

  They began dating the next evening and eight months later decided they’d see only each other, though with the exception of two ill-advised reunions with Brenda and a dizzy weekend of shacking up at Virginia Beach with a girl he met at a poolside bar, Mason didn’t take advantage of their open-ended arrangement, and all his wandering came during the first month of their courtship. When they finally had sex it was unhinged and passionate, a celebration that began as she was helping him hang curtains in his austere apartment, and despite her bacchanalian zigs and zags and a bearing that rained down frank allure, she confided to Mason she’d been with only four other men, all of them serious beaus except a professional soccer player in Monte Carlo.

  Allison was a painter, and a very talented one as best Mason could tell, and she made her living that way. She had no patience with Reagan but thought Tip O’Neill was a blundering, backroom hack, she never failed to acknowledge the donation hats in front of walleyed saxophone players and street-corner beggars, she attended the Episcopal church most Sundays—a Saturday night of merrymaking notwithstanding—and dragged Mason along and, most important, she seemed to have no malice, no scores to settle with anyone, no bruises, no trigger points, a bright woman whose sunny nature was never mistaken for naïveté. Oddly, she’d been to a series of colleges, but held no degree
. She’d studied in Rhode Island, Paris, California, North Carolina and at a diesel school in Nashville, explaining to Mason she learned what she needed to know and left before the superfluous hours of calculus and medieval history.

  Her rich, daredevil father had perished in a scuba-diving accident, became lost in an underwater cave and exhausted his air, a horrific death counted down by the needle of an oxygen gauge, and she often told people her mom died later of a broken heart, but the truth was cancer had gnawed up Sophia Rand’s pancreas when her only child was twenty and nursing her at home, doling out pills and changing giant diapers, honoring a frightened parent’s plea not to be hospitalized and given over to the custody of antiseptic strangers.

  On a chilly, wet Thursday in the fall of 1986, she admitted to Mason she was afraid the dope and partying were chain-ganging her, and she asked him to miss work and look after her while she dealt with it. He rented a house at Nags Head, where he took care of her for eleven straight days. They walked on the beach, fired late-night bottle rockets toward the dark-gray ocean, prepared mac and cheese from a kit, cooked seafood spaghetti, carted Whoppers and fried-flounder plates from town to their kitchen and played Monopoly for real money and then sex so that “taking a ride on the Reading” became part of their private lexicon. Without any warning or preface, she woke up at dawn in their second week there and starting filling her suitcase and said she was ready to go home, done. “Thank you,” she told him as they were poking down a sand and grass driveway, aiming toward the hardtop. “I love you.”

  It was on the return trip she revealed something else, that she’d been “fortunate with money,” the beneficiary of a grandfather’s trust, not enough to make her rich, but enough to make her comfortable, a windfall of close to two hundred thousand dollars every year.

  “Shit,” Mason joshed, “let’s get married.”

  Chapter Five

  Less than a year later, in April of 1987, that’s what they did, got married by a priest at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, not too far from Allison’s town house. Mason was making solid money by now, and Allison had recently sold out a twelve-painting opening, and they set aside three weeks for their honeymoon, first visiting her flighty aunt in Naples, Florida, then stopping to spend time with Sadie Grace, who baked them a lemon chess pie and unpacked photos of Mason, everything from his baby shot naked in the bathroom sink to his blue-tuxedoed prom picture. Without protest, Allison accompanied Mason to a trailer park to meet Gates, and when their visit was finished, the brothers hugged and exchanged sincere good-byes and she covered Gates’s hand with her own, told him she was pleased to be his sister-in-law, wrote down his address and sent him a note the next evening, enclosing a quick sketch of the Patrick County mountains, highlighted with a splash of watercolor. From there, they traveled to a rented cottage in Cape Cod, which they scarcely left for two weeks, under each other’s spell, slaphappy each morning when they awoke and remembered—oh, wow, damn—they were wed.

  Their daughter, Grace Hannah Hunt, was born on September 8, 1988, and she was a delight to her parents, especially her father, who’d occasionally feared during Allison’s pregnancy that whatever had haunted Curt might be recessive in him, might somehow bubble in his blood and turn him into a belt-swinging beast where his child was concerned. He grew ever more bumbling and protective as Allison’s due date neared, became a sweet, devoted oaf, but at her urging he chose to wait outside the delivery room, elected not to loiter about underfoot mouthing slogans from behind a surgical mask as she ached and strained and tore giving birth. When he held Grace for the first time, he clutched her to his chest and knelt, his knees on the hospital’s hard institutional tile, his eyes astonished by a face that jotted down everything superior from her parents. “We did it,” he said to Allison, his whole attention on the baby, his voice raspy. True to form, drained and weary after a taxing labor, she blew him a kiss, proud and relieved and over the moon with her infant girl and giddy husband.

  For the next several months, Mason took two-hour lunches and frequently worked half days, and despite their lip service about how happy they were for him and how they believed family was paramount, the partners at his firm grew disgruntled with his productivity and office habits. Mason recognized the tension but didn’t give a damn, and in the late summer of 1989, he was hauled into a partners’ conference and informed by a guy wearing a flamboyant red tie and matching suspenders that the firm respected his commitment to his daughter—and good for him, fine and dandy—but thirty billable hours a week would not be earning him a corner office or a partnership check. “You’re a crackerjack lawyer, Mason,” the managing partner chimed in, “by far the best associate we have. But it’s like we bought a Porsche that we can only drive at thirty miles per hour. We’re telling you now so you won’t feel ambushed or mistreated when we make promotion decisions.”

  Mason wasn’t insulted. He’d known what was expected when he signed on—fifty billable hours per week, minimum—and he wasn’t pulling his share of the load, plain and simple. “I appreciate the heads-up,” he replied, surveying the table and making eye contact with everyone in the room. “Believe me, I’m grateful for the latitude so far, and I understand the economics of this firm. Still, it’s altogether possible—assuming it’s satisfactory with you ladies and gentlemen—that I’ve found my niche. I’m happy with my pay, happy with my status and happy with my hours.” He stopped and rolled around a smile, signaling he recognized how his response would play with many of the lawyers listening. “Most likely, I’ll be content as this firm’s first associate-for-life.” He paused again. “The understudy without ambition.”

  Allison was a darling from the get-go, come what may. “You know I can manage this by myself,” she informed him that same evening, the family at their kitchen table, Grace shoveling up banana pieces with tiny soaked fingers. “I hate for you to be kept behind because of us.” She shrugged. “Or, for all I care, you can quit today. Makes no difference to me.”

  “I’m okay. Hell, they’re paying me close to eighty grand, and I’m around you guys enough to not miss the important parts. I figure I’ve got it made.”

  “You realize you don’t have to do twice as much, pay off a family debt, prove something…because of Curt, because of your father.” Her heel was tapping a wooden chair leg. She was twisting her wedding ring. “I just wanted to clear the air. To mention it. Once.”

  The suggestion irritated him. “Curt-fucking-Hunt,” he croaked after a deliberate silence, “has nothing to do with me and my daughter.”

  “Good.” She made her voice comically deep, mocking his boss, a man with wavy silver hair and monogrammed cuff links: “We love having you home, in all your goldbricking, underachieving glory.”

  An interesting by-product of his vocational stall was that Mason appeared in court frequently and tried a number of cases, almost always the dogs, Hail Marys and quagmires no one else wanted attached to their résumés or partnership review files. “I’m the Hamilton Burger of Richmond,” he quipped to friends. “Wile E. Coyote, attorney at law.” Because he had nothing to lose in most instances, he was free to learn on the fly, and he became confident and adept in the courtroom, discovering how to corral evasive witnesses with cross-examination questions, mastering the tricks and rhythms of a jury proceeding, and sorting through which technicalities were critical and which didn’t amount to a hill of beans. He was never unprepared or indifferent, and his clients were well served. Judges and other lawyers respected him.

  And so it went, until the clerk of the Patrick County Circuit Court, a gracious, lanky man named David Hanby, phoned Mason at his office in Richmond, and not finding him there, located him at home, watching Grace while her mother touched up a painting that was almost ready for a gallery in Delaware. It was 1993, May, and Grace was closing in on five years old. When the call came, she was alternating between a coloring book and a battered Etch A Sketch her namesake grandmother had purchased at a Stuart flea market. Mason was surprised to h
ear from Hanby, alarmed at first. “Everything okay there?” he quickly asked the clerk. “Mom? Is something going on with Gates?”

  “Oh, no. I saw Sadie Grace at the church potluck last week, and she was fine, fit as a fiddle.” He cleared his throat. “I assume Gates is still at Powhatan. I know that’s a burden for you and your mother. I’m real sorry for you both.”

  “Thank goodness,” Mason told him. “I’m relieved. It’s not every day you receive a call from home, out of the blue.”

  Hanby chuckled. “Well, I certainly hope I’m not interruptin’ you. I’m glad to see you high-powered, big-city lawyers are able to knock off early.” His tone made it apparent he was kidding; if anything, he was impressed to find Mason cooling his heels on a Tuesday afternoon.

  “As I understand it, the office runs better if I’m absent,” Mason replied in the kind of modest give-and-take that was a mainstay in Patrick County, and also had the advantage of leaving Hanby with an impression that was more favorable than the truth of the matter. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hanby?”

  “Ah. I’m calling on behalf of Judge Richardson and our bar.” Here he was precise, his diction stilted, the syllables flags and trumpets. “I’m going to connect you with the judge, but I wanted you to know our commonwealth’s attorney, Tony Black, is leaving to take a job in Roanoke. I think you recall Tony?”