The cold night air awakened me. I thought about what Stan had asked me, or at least what was implied by his question. I wondered how many times I had been asked what I got out of being a criminal lawyer. I hated most of my clients. I spent much of my time in depressing places like prisons. The money wasn’t great. As a criminal lawyer I was looked down on by judges, other lawyers, the public—except perhaps the couple to whom I had just been so rude, and Eleanor, who was bored with her husband.
It wasn’t hard to explain why very few lawyers did criminal work and even fewer went on doing it for any length of time. I didn’t have a good explanation for why I had remained in this work for so long.
I could see Jenny through the windows of the French doors leading out to the terrace. She was pointing a finger at Charles, making a point. I loved her earnestness. I always had.
I could have killed her when she told me she was going to leave me. She had worked for years before Molly was born, and I was sure that she could have gone back to work without breaking up the marriage. Her work was just an excuse to get out of the marriage. We’d had so many problems that had gone unresolved for so long, the distance between us obviously seemed unbridgeable to her. I had understood that—I understood that, but I wanted to kill her anyway. No, “kill” is too strong. I had been furious. I was still angry.
Her agreement to leave Molly with me, even though she retained equal custody, must have been painful. I knew that she had agonized over it. She loved Molly as much as I did, and I knew she believed me when I assured her that as soon as she was ready to take Molly, we would begin having her divide her time between our respective houses. In the meantime Molly stayed with her mother on weekends at her apartment ten minutes away. Weren’t we the model, modern couple!
I wondered how much of my anger was over losing Jenny and how much was over losing control of the relationship. Whatever the mixed sources of my anger, I still managed to conduct myself in a civilized manner. I had used my genuine concern for Molly to restrain my rage. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been as controlled if I hadn’t had the welfare of my child to focus on.
The irony was that Jenny and I rarely had fights over anything that really bothered us personally. Here was I, a professional fighter, and over the years I had often expressed rage, or indignation, or joy, or sadness—but I only seemed capable of doing that in a courtroom.
For years I had been troubled by my difficulty in expressing in my personal life the same range and depth of feeling. My relationship with Jenny had often seemed infinitely more threatening than a packed courtroom. Frequently, the problem had not just been in the expression of feeling but in a failure to experience those feelings at all—or, as Jenny had often claimed, to experience them with sufficient intensity to recognize them.
Getting angry in a personal confrontation could mean actually losing control and becoming vulnerable, and that could be terrifying. Ironically, I showed virtuoso skill in the courtroom at appearing transported by emotion, when in reality my emotions were on a tether every moment.
All the emotions skillfully displayed in a courtroom had a purpose—winning. I wondered if I was guilty of overkill in the way that I had disposed of Lisa, and if I had gone at her with more than I had needed.
I turned away from the house, looked down the long driveway, took a pull on my drink. The darkness down the driveway seemed thicker because of the lights of the house behind me. The air was moist and warm for November. The dusk spread like a mist to the edge of the property, where a streetlamp threw some light. The large ironwork gate framed a spray of gray light behind it. As I stared at the gate, I noticed what could have been a figure of someone standing just behind it. The black shadow didn’t move, but as I looked more closely, I saw it could have been the outline of a person. The distance and the darkness made it impossible to determine if it was a man or a woman, but it did seem to be a human silhouette.
Suddenly the headlights of a rapidly moving car appeared on the road outside the house. The car passed the front gate, casting its light on the silhouette. For a fleeting moment the shape became clear. There was no question there was a person there, and it was a woman. I had a moment’s panic as I realized that the form looked very much like Lisa Altman.
“What the hell would she be doing there?” I muttered to myself. When the car passed, the image returned to a silhouette, a kind of menacing, grayish ghost. I took a few tentative steps toward the figure, then stopped. I didn’t want to confront it. I turned and went back into the house to rejoin my daughter’s party.
As I stepped into the living room, Jenny walked toward me. She was a handsome woman, tall and straight, with an honest, open face. Her new short haircut, worn boyishly with a part, emphasized her no-nonsense appearance. Of course, she still wore no makeup.
“I should have thought to look for you on the terrace,” Jenny said. The flecks of orange in her dark brown eyes always gave a warmth to her gaze, and the little crow’s-feet in the corner of her eyes lent even more warmth to her smile.
“Hi, Jen,” I said. I put my arm around her and hugged her affectionately. She didn’t respond to my embrace.
“So how’s single life treating you?” I asked. We had been divorced for six months, but it had been almost a year since she had moved out.
“Oh, Michael, it’s a jungle out there.” Her sarcasm was new, and I didn’t find it very attractive.
“I don’t know why you ever married me in the first place,” I said.
“Because you overpowered me the way you overpower juries. That’s why.”
“Maybe we can still sort things out.”
“You don’t give up, do you.”
“You know I hate to lose.”
“You haven’t lost. There was no winner or loser.”
“Oh, really? You’re sure about that?” I asked.
“You made our marriage into a contest.”
“The divorce was uncontested,” I said, making a technical and irrelevant point.
“We’re both better off now, and Molly will also be better off in the long run.”
“We all live in the short run.”
“I won’t argue with you, sweetheart. You make a living out of arguing.”
“I know. I’m good at it.”
“You’ll find a woman who’ll like living with ‘the killer in the courtroom.’ That’s all you ever wanted to be.”
“I wish you didn’t have such contempt for what I do.”
“You have as much contempt for it as I do,” she said.
“We weren’t like that in the beginning,” I said. We had met when Jenny was fresh out of Vassar, still very much the innocent product of her WASP upbringing. The idyllic country life she’d had as a kid in northwest Connecticut had always seemed a different world from the Newark that I had known. Since her parents had treated her as if she’d died when she married me, I never did get to learn much about that life firsthand.
“You were different then,” she said.
“We both were,” I said.
“I know. It’s nobody’s fault. I just couldn’t deal with your obsession with your work,” she said. “And the way it infected our relationship.”
“This sounds like a subject you’ve discussed with your shrink.”
“I have to admit it did come up,” Jenny said.
“Isn’t it a fact that I’m dealing with a prepared witness?” I asked, half jokingly.
“When I married you, I thought you really cared about people.”
“I still do care about people—certain people: Molly and, believe it or not, you,” I said.
Jenny looked around the room. “It’s a very nice party. Molly seems really happy,” she said.
“Judith is doing a terrific job. She’s the best nanny in the world. Molly hardly misses you.”
“You are a bastard. I see her as much as you do.”
“A bastard?” I smiled and tried to put my arm around her again.
Jenny shrugged my arm off he
r shoulder. “All you hot shot criminal lawyers are so terribly perceptive about other people, predicting how we’ll respond to your shrewd tactics, manipulating us.”
“Jenny…”
“But in your personal lives, with your enormous egos, you have no understanding of your own behavior. For all the time we lived together you even claimed to have no interest in it.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this indictment, and it was clear to me that Jenny was right. It was also clear to me that her latest attack was a response to my reference to her abandoning Molly. I knew very well that Jenny had an open nerve of guilt over that. I was sorry I had attacked her. It was only a reflex.
“Calm down, Jenny. Please. The truth is I miss you,” I said.
Chapter 5
I WALKED UP TO the front door of a large hospital building and entered. It was the morning after I had won my case, and I was on my way to visit my sick friend and mentor, Lloyd Singer.
I made my way to an elevator, got on, ascended, got off on the sixth floor, and walked over to the nurses’ station.
“Good morning, Mr. Roehmer,” the nurse said. “You’re late this morning.”
“My trial is over. How is he today?” I asked.
“Basically the same. I don’t think it will be much longer. I’m sorry, Mr. Roehmer. Although he did seem to come awake for a few moments after you left yesterday.”
I nodded and headed down the corridor.
I entered the mint green room of my friend and sat down beside him. Bear’s bony body was a yellow-brown from the breakdown of his liver. He was breathing in quick, short breaths, unaware of my arrival.
“Good morning, Bear,” I said. He didn’t move.
I sat quietly for a few moments, then reached over and took Bear’s hand and held it. I shared the silence for a few more moments with my friend. He was asleep, maybe even in a coma.
During these last three years Bear had often complained to me about his liver. “My goddamn liver,” he would say.
“The ‘problem’ with his liver,” Jenny said to me more than once, “is that it’s pickled in Jameson Irish Whiskey.” I, of course, never dared to mention that to Bear, for fear of hurting his feelings. I always thought that, in a weird way, Jenny was jealous of my relationship with Bear.
I viewed most judges as adversaries, if not enemies. Judges often came from the upper classes, representing power and rules that the poor and uneducated never understood. Ever since my clerkship with him I’d always considered Bear to be different from any other judge, although he was the wealthy son and grandson of lawyers. He was always generous and kind to me.
I always admired the way Bear had retained his strong belief in our system of justice. I might have started out with lofty notions about “the law,” but I had sure as hell lost them a long time ago.
It had been painful for me these last few years to watch my friend, this once powerful chunk of a man, slowly dying. In contrast to the musty smell of tradition and power in Bear’s chambers, the antiseptic odor of the hospital room unnerved me.
“Well, I won the case. You would have been very proud,” I said, stroking my friend’s hand. He still lay unmoving, his eyes closed. “I picked a good jury, but the key was the victim… or the alleged victim… who knows. Guilty or innocent, I got her on the cross, no question about that.”
I paused for a few moments. I knew that Bear probably wouldn’t have been so proud of what I had done to that woman. I wasn’t so proud of it either.
“This is a long way from your chambers in the old courthouse. I loved the oak-paneled walls…. Even my little office next door to your chambers when I was your clerk had oak-paneled walls. … And that’s where you swore me in as prosecutor. … Whatever happened to your wonderful mahogany desk? I loved the smell of all the books in your chambers.” I looked down at Bear’s sleeping face and continued talking—I assumed to myself. “You used to joke that it was the smell of tradition and order… not like the goddamn smell of this room. I’m sure you hate it here, too.”
I turned my friend’s hand over in mine, hesitating for a moment. “Bear, I miss our talks. I know you can’t hear me, but I need to talk to you.”
I looked at the lines on the inside of Bear’s hand. “How did you do it? I mean, how did you keep it all together?”
I looked up from his hand to confirm that he was still asleep.
“I’m losing it, Bear. I’m terrified of losing control. I’ve grown to hate the people I fight for. Monsters. I used to love their worlds. The more desperate they were, the more fascinating I found them. It used to make me feel so alive. Now I feel dead.
“I know it would be wrong to blame everything on my work. Obviously my shrink is right that most of my personality was formed before I decided to become a lawyer. But I’m sure that over the years the problems I brought into adult life have been made a lot worse by my work.”
I struggled to find the main source of my complaint At this point I simply didn’t know. All I understood was that I was close to breaking. I blathered on to Bear, feeling a certain freedom in the knowledge that he wasn’t taking in what I was saying.
“The constant exposure to so many lies has made me incapable of trusting people. I haven’t made a new friend in maybe twenty years. I can’t meet people without automatically sizing up character and trustworthiness, searching out evil motives. I don’t know if you ever noticed, but I have this reflex of recalling all inconsistent statements, no matter how trivial. Good habits for a criminal lawyer—if only they didn’t bleed into my personal life… as if I have a personal life.”
At this point the dialogue with Bear continued in my head. I started to feel I was in the middle of a summation. And I was just warming to a climax. “Destroying witnesses has led to an arrogance, to an inflated sense of control over people that’s not so easy to leave behind in the courtroom. The temptation to dominate a social situation or individual… sometimes it’s irresistible. I’m sure this adversarial reflex helped destroy my marriage. I know how much you liked Jenny.
“Bear, I can’t stand the fact that I destroyed that woman. She seemed so vulnerable. Maybe she led my client on. I really never knew. But I do know I hurt her. She didn’t have a chance against me. It might have been necessary, but… I think I enjoyed it. Yes, I actually enjoyed doing it. I felt excited, thrilled while I did it. I keep thinking about her.”
Bear’s eyes opened. His lips parted. They were dry. I removed a washcloth from the white nightstand next to the bed and dampened it in the water pitcher on top of the nightstand. I patted Bear’s lips with the moist cloth.
Bear struggled to speak. “Michael,” he said in a near whisper, “we’ve seen so many acts of inhumanity in our lives.” I could see that each word was a struggle for him.
I clutched my friend’s hand again. “That’s true, Bear.”
“You know I’ve always been sustained by my belief in God,” Bear said.
“Yes, I know.”
Bear struggled to keep his eyes opened. “There was one thing I wanted to hear from you, Michael.”
“Yes, Bear?”
“Tell me the truth, Michael. How do you think I’ll be judged in heaven?”
“I’m sure you’ll be judged fairly, Bear.” I stroked the back of my friend’s hand.
Bear closed his eyes. A moment later he reopened them. It was obvious that my friend was frightened.
“Michael, you must help me,” Bear pleaded.
“Of course, Bear,” I said.
Bear tried to lift his head up from the pillow to look into my eyes. “You must help me, Michael.”
“How can I help you, Bear?”
“Help me, Michael. No one can represent a client better than you. You’re the best. You must defend me. You must speak on my behalf. You’re the only one I would trust. Will you do that for me, Michael?”
“Bear, I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that.”
Bear closed his eyes again. A moment lat
er he reopened them. This time there was an angry look on his face. “Tell me one thing, Michael.”
“Yes, Bear.”
“Did I send enough of those bastards away?” Bear began to laugh, a dry, high-pitched, shrill laugh.
“You did the best you could, Bear.” I forced myself to smile.
Chapter 6
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING day and I was sitting next to Norman Dogbein and a few other defense lawyers in front of the wooden rail separating the well of the courtroom from the mostly empty rows of spectator seats behind me. Judge Fazio was on the bench, and the usual assortment of attendants were present: court officers, clerk, stenographer, prosecutor.
Over all the years I had been in court, the grimmest times for me had been the sentencing days, when mothers, wives, or kids of the defendants would sit like beaten-down, pathetic victims and listen to lawyers use phrases like “a life of poverty,” “without the benefit of a father,” and “driven to a life of crime.”
On a sentencing day, after each lawyer spoke, it would be the defendant’s turn. Some would beg; others would defiantly insist they were innocent; most would sullenly stare at the judge and say nothing. When defendants were given their opportunity to influence the judge, the judge would usually send them to prison.
Although the trial could be seen as theater, it was easy to forget that the victim often bled real blood; and that at the end of the performance, when the play was over, the defendant often went off to a terrifying punishment.
As I awaited my turn, my mind drifted to the time when I was just starting out. I used to be terribly nervous on sentencing day as I watched one defendant after another stand up to hear the announcement of his fate. I used to try to imagine what it would be like if I were the one about to learn how I would spend the next five or ten years of my life. I would tremble inside.
It had been a long time since I had trembled inside. I no longer put myself in the skin of these people.
Question of Consent: A Novel Page 5