by Kia Corthron
Eliot keeps his door open the remainder of the day, his eye on Andi retyping Beau’s documents. It’s already five and her pile is huge. She has taken no notice of Eliot’s attention as she is anxiously focused on not making another blunder. The elevator sounds, and Andi and Eliot look up.
She wears a dazzling red dress, sleeveless and provocatively cut at the neckline, snugly fit to clarify every curve from shoulder to hem, the latter barely concealing the knees. Gold hoops dangling around her wrists, a white hat accessorized with a red sash, red gloves, and four-inch shining red heels. But most striking as she steps toward the entrance to Winston Douglas is something in her eyes, in her closed-mouth smile: confidence. This is what causes Andi, and Eliot in his office, to inadvertently stand.
“May I—” The receptionist does not get the question out. She has never before seen Didi, but now she looks at the visitor staring at Eliot, and at Eliot staring at the visitor, and Andi needs to ask nothing. The two women are standing next to each other, Andi wearing an outfit as drab gray as her mood, and in an instant Eliot finally sees Andi’s age, and knows now what Andi had understood all along, why she never really wanted to go to Gary with him, to take that step: the universes that divide them. She sits, resuming her typing, the rat-tat seeming to underscore her despondency.
“What are you—” He too gets stuck mid-question.
“What am I doing here? I don’t know. I told that stupid travel agent ‘Chicago’ and look. She sends me to Indianapolis,” all the while striding toward his office as if she had been here a thousand times before. They shut the door and when, after a long period of quiet, a burst of their laughter causes Andi to mistype, she calmly tears out the sheet and replaces it, resigned to be sitting here another long night. When she calls to order her dinner for the third time this week, the man already knows chicken chow mein before she says it.
12
She points her index finger at him. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Lying on her side, torso propped up by elbow, cheek leaning against fist. Their naked bodies covered by the flowery hotel spread. She teases him about his wandering mind. Just a game to her, keep him on his toes.
Plenty of injustice in their American world. That’s why she became a lawyer, that’s why she had volunteered her time, her self, for the little boys. But less consequential concerns that drive those who can afford it to analysis and those who can’t to Jesus—she is immune to such trivialities, tossing it all off with a laugh. He has never before met someone who had her priorities so straight, and he tells her this now, that was what he had been thinking.
He’s surprised to see her smile fade. She rolls over onto her back. “Hmm.”
When she’d called this morning, she was dialing him from this hotel room. She’d hoped he would be with her here last night, but of course he never picked up his home phone. So she devised the strategy to show up end-of-day at his office, spending the afternoon exploring Indianapolis. He waits for her to say how boring it all was, but then Didi can make any place an adventure if she sets her mind to it. As an art and architecture enthusiast, she made visits to the Tudor-Gothic Scottish Rite Cathedral, the neoclassical Soldiers & Sailors Monument, the art deco state library, and, since she was in the capital, of course the Parthenon-inspired statehouse. She was charmed to walk the various bridges crossing the canal, and finally made certain to hit Walker Theatre on The Avenue. Afterward, she quickly found the little boutique to purchase the red dress just in time to hop into a cab to the east side, step into his firm promptly at five, and drag him away in case he had any intention of working late to catch up on all those damn divorce cases. In his car to the hotel they were giddy with anticipation, but when she put her key into the door and they entered, glimpsing the charming décor and the beckoning queen-size bed, they’d stopped short. Something was wrong, something vital forgotten. And then without speaking it they knew, and for two hours they sat at the table discussing Max and Jordan’s case, what they’d done right and their missteps, not wallowing in guilt but rather evaluating the process as objectively as they could. And when at last the topic felt exhausted for the present, their brains picked over and worn out, then they had sex. And then they had sex again.
“Whatever you see, or think you see. I wasn’t born into it. Yes, I went to a nice North Carolina Negro college, and I was in the esteemed sorority with all the other light-skinned rich girls. Not exactly maverick thinking on my part. And we felt superior to the dark poor girls and all that, and the boys made us feel superior the way they were always up under us, and some of the dark poor girls made us feel superior with their envy. But of course we knew deep down it was all a ruse.” Her eyes on the ceiling fan, her mind far away. “This girl. Renaissance Art, junior year. I’d wondered if her parents were Africans, that’s how coal black she was. Stunning. Even with our twisted ideas of American beauty, no one could dispute that girl was anything but gorgeous. Transfer student from California, she didn’t know anything about me. Turned out she was brilliant as well as beautiful, an international studies major with a four-oh average who took an upperclass overview of Leonardo and Michelangelo and the van Eycks for the hell of it. And once she happened to catch my eye, and I tried to smile, I was embarrassed because I realized I had been staring, I mean she was so striking. And she returned my smile with this look, this. Contempt. With one glance she pegged me, a frivolous girl desperate to fit in, and desperate to be thought of as anything but that.” Didi makes herself dizzy, her eyes fixed on one blade circling the fan.
He is aware she has given him a gift, perhaps the first ever. This story she would not tell just anyone.
“Were you pre-law?”
She laughs. “Those days I wasn’t thinking about anything but my MRS degree. Art history.” Her eyes lower, toward the framed flowers still life above the desk. “And then Emmett Till. I’d just graduated.” She sits up, arms outside the covers hugging her legs. “Those pictures. He was a kid, and that. Thing. That mutilated, disfigured thing that was left after those goddamn bastards were through with him, and suddenly at twenty-two I’m infused with purpose. And my rich daddy pulled some strings and a week later I’m sitting in a Chicago classroom jotting notes on the Magna Carta.” She turns to Eliot, his eyes fixed on her. She smiles. “So what’s with you and your secretary?”
He stiffens. “What?”
“‘What?’ ‘Who?’ The woman who practically fell off her chair when I walked in today. Not that I didn’t have my suspicions before. When a receptionist puts you on hold all she says is ‘Just a moment,’ but I sure have noticed how the tone of ‘Just a moment’s changed since you and I started screwing.”
“I doubt—”
“Don’t get me wrong, she’s always professional. Can’t say I knew for sure until this afternoon, the way she looked at me, the way she looked at you. For a prude, you sure seem to have trouble keeping your pants up.”
“Yes! You’re right, okay? Something happened between us, it’s over.”
“Not for her.”
“Things take time. She’s having a rough go of it now.” He sighs. “There’s this jackass at work—”
“There always is.”
“And she’s going to school. Law school, and working full-time. I try to be sympathetic.”
Didi gazes at him. “What’s her name?”
“Andi.” He picks up the room service menu from his night table. “Wanna order in?”
“So what’s she interested in? I’d think after her insider look at public interest law she’d be sprinting to a corporation.”
He studies the offerings, relieved to see several reasonably priced entrees. “Pretty much going for the same stuff as us.” He shrugs. “Says she’d like to work toward legalizing abortion.”
“Good for her.”
Eliot looks up.
“This old sharecropper woman where I grew up.” Didi absen
tly scratches an insect bite on her arm. “Her whole life in mourning after her sharecropper daughter died trying to prevent her eighth child because she and her sharecropper husband and her seven sharecropper kids were already starving.” She shakes her head. “Should have been done in a hospital. Safe.”
He is quiet.
“What?”
He swallows. “Just for the record. If it happened, you wouldn’t be alone. I don’t run away from my responsibilities.”
“What are you talking about?” The hairs around her face gently blowing with the whipping fan.
“If you became pregnant. I’d marry you.”
She stares at him, her mouth agape, then roars in laughter, falling onto her back. “Well! There’s a comfort.”
“What?”
“Eliot! A kid wouldn’t change your life.”
“Of course—”
“And which of us is gonna be staying home to raise it while the other continues practicing law? I have work to do too, you know!” A fly buzzes near her face and she harshly swats it away.
He speaks quietly. “There’s that birth control pill.”
“Honey, we’re just gonna have to keep making do with my diaphragm cuz I don’t touch nothin the first year the FDA approves it, let somebody else be the guinea pig.” She stretches. “Your boss seems like a nice guy. Letting her go home early.”
“Who?”
“Andi.”
“Oh. Yeah, Beau would have made her work all night, again. Winston loves him, or at least feels loyal to him. Beau’s been there since the beginning. So he gets mostly free rein, but once in a while he goes too far, has to be pulled back. Never saw him so crazy like today though.”
“It must be more than loyalty if Winston’s kept him on.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s great at his job, luckily I’ve never had the pleasure to be assigned to work closely with him.” Eliot goes back to the menu. “I don’t want to spend the rest of the evening talking about Beau Greene. You want steak or chicken?”
“What did Winston say about the outcome of the case?”
He looks at her, then gazes out the window. “That our arguments were sound. That we’d done our job and it all came down to the judge. But then all I gave him were the legal facts. Not the important stuff.”
“What’s the important stuff?”
A streetlamp weak, flickering. “The boys. They have no concept. We took Claudette out for a late lunch the afternoon I got there, eight days before the hearing. She said when Sawyer had given the disposition orders, her son clearly heard the judge’s words, that they would be sent away until twenty-one, and yet three days later Jordan asked the guards, ‘Is it almost time for me to see my mama?’” His eyes lower. “I didn’t tell Winston when Farn announced his decision there had been that momentary silence of disbelief. And then as the guards started dragging Jordan and Max away, the mothers began wailing and the fathers began moaning and Jordan started bawling, screaming for his mother, only now fully comprehending that he was going right back to the reformatory, and Max. The guard leading Max toward the door and he turns around to tell his mother, ‘Don’t give my fire truck away.’ Max, who may be a grown man before he’s released, and at the exit he turns again: ‘Don’t give my scooter away.’”
His steak is well done, hers medium rare. They eat at the table, she in her robe, he in his underwear. Then she calls the front desk, and he’s surprised when minutes later a small watermelon is delivered.
“I bought it earlier, asked them to chill it.” She eagerly slices the fruit. “Growing up, it was my favorite. And when I came to school in the North, it was the first thing I disowned. Afraid it made me look bumpkin. Pickaninny. Recently I’ve reclaimed it. Looks like a sweet one.” She glances up to find him staring at her, and points her finger. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
He looks down. “I can’t.”
“You must.”
His voice cracks. “I was thinking how lucky I am to have found you.”
“Yes, you’re the luckiest man on earth. Now here’s the thing. Am I on the train back to Chicago in the morning or am I staying at your place tomorrow night? Because my budget can withstand two hotel nights, but that’s the limit.”
“Oh.” He looks around, their fleeting lap of luxury. “I’ll pay.”
“You’ll pay starting tomorrow night. Or we go to your apartment. Unless you’re hiding a wife there.”
He smiles. “I need to clean it.”
“Oh you’re such a neat freak! Alright, you get your butt home in the morning to dust your knickknack shelves while I do some more shopping. We’ll meet for lunch, then a museum. Your condolence party officially ends tonight, tomorrow begins my gainful-employment celebration so you’ll be taking me to a nice restaurant for dinner, then back to your place. A plan?”
“A plan.”
“Okay. Now. Inspired by the watermelon, let’s talk about the South.”
The main reason she had wanted to get together, besides gratifying their carnality, was to make sure he doesn’t give up on the balmy states. It could be discouraging, a case involving innocent children and still the forces of evil triumph, but it is only if we continue to fight the good fight that those forces will eventually subside, wither, and die. It will be a long struggle, progress would be slow, but there would be progress. There are school systems six years post-Brown that still refuse to integrate, there are poll taxes and fraudulent tests designed to deny Negroes the vote. Much to be done, and they could use every good lawyer out there and she assures him from her observations over the last months that he is a superb lawyer, and this embarrasses him. Of course there’s also plenty to do above the Cotton Belt, God does she know that. But the atrocities occurring in the Northeast and Midwest ghettos still pale in comparison to the savage collective White Power of Georgia and Alabama and Louisiana and Mississippi.
“Okay, there’s my pitch.” He looks down, his eyes fixed on the watermelon rind. “What?”
“Did you know Clarence Darrow once bribed a juror?”
She stares. “Really?”
“Evidence points that way.”
“When?”
“Nineteen twelve. Labor disputes. Two white brothers blew up the L.A. Times building. If they were found guilty and it was pretty clear they would be, the AFL feared it would bring down unions in the whole country.”
“The McNamara Brothers, I’ve read of it. People died. Right?”
“Twenty-one. A hundred injured.”
She takes this in. Then looks at him. “And Darrow bribed a juror?”
“Appears so.”
She shakes her head. “God.” She considers it again. “God!”
“Okay. What if it was a colored man accused of raping a white woman, South Carolina. No physical evidence, no credible circumstantial evidence, every damn person in the courtroom knows he didn’t commit the crime, that likely a crime was not committed at all, and still this poor farmer, this father of five sent to the chair. That is if he’s lucky enough to make it there before the mob gets him. Same old story, right? But what if an opportunity arose. Slip a few bucks to a juror. What’s the ethical choice? Stick to the book and let an innocent man die? Or fudge a little, and possibly save an innocent life. Is respect for the law more important than justice?”
She considers his question, looking for the answer on the table, the walls. “Would you? Tamper?”
He runs his finger through a puddle of water in the rind. Sighs silently.
“Guess I could never bring myself to do it. Some faith ingrained in me, the American court system was designed for justice and, eventually, justice will prevail. Guess that’d be the last words I told my strapped-in trembling innocent client before they flipped the switch.”
They put the room service tray outside the door and slide under the sheets. He caresses her
most private areas which she has generously shared with him, kissing her from there up through her belly, her breasts, her throat, where her sweat-beaded smiling face awaits him. When it’s over they lie on their backs, his arm around her. She looks at him, the picture of tranquillity, his eyelids falling in a distant sleepy fashion, and now he is the one fixated on the turning ceiling fan. She points her finger. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
What he is thinking is why in the hell Will found it necessary to take Andi out for an after-work drink tonight. Yes, she had had a hard day, but here was Will, a married man, and Andi in a very vulnerable emotional place. Winston had negotiated, telling stressed Andi to go home and rest, then return at her leisure over the weekend for a few hours to finish up the work. Eliot and Didi were only a few steps behind, but in the elevator Andi and Will only seemed to see each other, appearing like a very attractive couple, she looking easily a decade less than her early forties and he all of his forty-six, her Chinese delivery tucked under her arm for later, and through eyes still moist she looked up at him with her sad smile. He pulled the gate over and, as the door was falling closed, Will had gently, tenderly, touched her upper arm.
Eliot turns to Didi, delicately stroking her breast. “I was thinking I’d better run to Woolworth’s in the morning for a new toilet scrubber, my old one’s worn out.” She slaps his arm and rolls on top of him, both of them laughing, she more easily than he.
13
Eliot flips over the page of his day calendar: Tuesday, October 4th. He has not been to the office during regular hours since Sam Daughtery’s trial began Monday a week ago, stopping by only in the evenings after court. In that time he would occasionally find a late-working Beau or Will or Winston. Andi never. But he’s here early now, Winston having left a memo yesterday to let him know there would be an all-office meeting at 9 a.m. The boss had promised to keep things brief, plenty of time for Eliot to get to court by eleven, the start time of today’s proceedings.
As he scratches notes, he gradually becomes aware of how frequently he has glanced at his telephone. It has remained equally silent when he has been here in the evenings, as has his home number. And Didi knows what his schedule is like these days, at what times she can reach him.