Solomon vs. Lord

by Paul Levine

  No way did their relationship fit her well-conceived definition of love. No way was it a rational, synergistic coupling of two people with mutual interests and similar values. This coupling was animalistic, like Judge Gridley's beagles in the barn.

  It was irrational. Illogical. Insane.

  So why did she do something so hurtful and self-destructive? Bruce deserved better. And Solomon? The poor guy had resisted. For a moment, she wondered if she was guilty of date rape, at least in some philosophical way.

  When she left Steve in the chickee hut, she'd felt a mixture of guilt and apprehension. She feared Bruce would see it on her face. But he'd been oblivious, rambling on about the low clouds holding in the heat and the snow being a blessing in disguise. Then he grinned and said: “A blessing in the skies.” Okay, so he was a little impaired in the humor department. Could she spend an eternity with a man who couldn't make her laugh?

  She slipped out of bed, dressed quietly, and left.

  The morning was clear and chilly, the sun still low in the east, as she aimed the Taurus north. She would call Jackie on the cell, roust her from bed. But before she could dial the number, her cell phone rang, and she checked the readout. Solomon. What was there to say? She let it ring.

  Traffic was light on South Dixie, and when she reached LeJeune Road in the Gables, she hung a right, even though that wasn't the way to Grove Isle. Why had she turned there? Did the car have a mind of its own? Then a left on Kumquat. She slowed as she approached the bungalow with the Brazilian pepper tree and Spanish dagger shrub.

  What am I doing? What stable, mature decision is this?

  Running from your fiancé's house to your lover's.

  Is that what Solomon is? My lover?

  She had never liked the word. It always sounded sleazy.

  She stopped the car across the street from Solomon's house. His old Cadillac was parked out front, top up. Another car, too. A Lincoln with a personalized plate: MAVEN-1. Then she remembered: Marvin was a Sunday morning regular for breakfast. As she sat there, a second car pulled up, an old Chevrolet sedan. She watched as Cadillac Johnson got out. He was wearing blue coveralls instead of his usual dashiki.

  She thought about walking in, calling out: “What's cooking?”

  But it would be awkward. She mustn't talk to Solomon until she decided just what the hell she was going to do with her life. And where he fit in. Which he didn't.

  She put the car in gear and drove away.

  Jackie hit a lazy lob that lacked height, distance, and desire. Victoria, who had been camped at the net, took two steps backward, aimed her left hand skyward as if pointing at a shooting star, then brought the racquet forward in a vicious overhead smash. The ball rocketed toward Jackie, who hopped sideways and yelped as she took a stinging hit on her calf.

  “Ow! Jeez.”

  “Sorry.” Victoria walked back to the baseline. They were on a green clay court at Grove Isle. Just on the other side of the windscreened fence, boats were tied up at the dock and the bay rippled with whitecaps. “That's six-love. One more set. Your serve.”

  “Forget it.” Jackie was rubbing her calf. “It says ‘Wilson' on my leg. What are you mad at me about?”

  “Nothing.” It wasn't something you just blurted out: “By the way, Jackie, I never told you before, but I'm really a lascivious slut.”

  “So what's going on? You've been taking out your frustrations on that fuzzy ball since we started playing.” She walked to the sideline table, grabbed a fleece pullover, and slipped into it.

  Victoria joined her, opened a thermos of coffee, poured for both of them. “I'm just a little tense, that's all.”

  “Pre-wedding jitters.”

  “That's exactly what Solomon said.”

  “When's he going to call me, anyway?”

  “He's kind of unpredictable, so I wouldn't be sitting by the phone.”

  “If I didn't know better, I'd think you were seeing that Bad Boy on the side.”

  Victoria was silent.

  “Usually, this is where you say, ‘Jac-kie,' the way Sister Agnes did when I wore stretch pants in seventh grade.”

  Victoria sipped her coffee.

  Jackie studied her. “Fu-ck me! You and the Bad Boy?”

  Victoria remained silent.

  “C'mon, Vic. What's the use of getting boned if you can't tell your best bud?”

  “Last night—” Victoria began, with some trepidation.

  “I knew it! I knew the day you met him.”

  “How? I despised Solomon.”

  “Exactly. He got you so worked up, I knew something was going to happen.” Jackie lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “How was it?”

  “You mean physically?”

  “What other way is there?”

  “Jac-kie.”

  “C'mon, tell me, Vic. Did you pop more than once? Did he? Tell me, and I'll tell you about this Honduran coffee baron who can lick his own eyebrows.”

  Victoria had vowed not to go into detail. She wouldn't describe how Steve pressed all the right buttons, including the button that mattered.

  “I'll bet it was great,” Jackie said, pumping her.

  I won't get down and dirty.

  “Was it great?” Jackie said.

  I'll keep the discussion on a high plane.

  “Between Bruce and Steve, who's the better clit tickler? C'mon, I need play-by-play.”

  “It was un-fucking-believable,” Victoria said, surprising herself with her language. “I was on fire. Burning with fever.”

  Jackie made a show of fanning herself with an open hand. “Oh, my God.”

  “When he was inside me, it was like he was touching me everywhere. Like an electrical current. And so intense. One volt more, I swear, I would have passed out.”

  Jackie made a grunting sound that was close to being obscene.

  Victoria lowered her voice. “With my eyes closed, I actually saw sparks.”

  “No.”

  “Like a meteor shower.”

  “I think I'm getting wet.”

  Victoria took another sip of coffee. “Now I need to figure out why I did it.”

  “What's to figure? You were horny. Solomon's hot. You got laid.”

  “It's more complicated than that!”

  “Then figure it out the next time he boinks you.”

  “What next time?”

  “C'mon, you gonna give up the greatest sex of your life?”

  Victoria felt lost. She yearned for advice, but her best friend was off in sexual fantasyland.

  “I'm going home and checking the batteries in Mr. Happy,” Jackie said.

  Maybe she should call The Queen for advice, Victoria thought. Catch up with her in Switzerland or Rome, or wherever. The Queen had more experience with men. On second thought, Victoria knew exactly what her mother would say. “I've been unhappy rich and unhappy poor,” The Queen would say. “Unhappy rich is better.”

  “Maybe I'm afraid of happiness. Maybe I'm trying to sabotage my relationship with Bruce.”

  “What's the problem? Marry Bruce. Boff Solomon on the side.”

  “I can't do that!”

  “Then do what you lawyers do. Grab a yellow pad. Write down the pluses and minuses of each guy.” Jackie handed her a flyer for the Grove Isle Christmas party, turning it over to the blank side. “Start with Bruce. Write down a personality trait you really like, then compare him with Solomon on the same characteristic.”

  “Does this come from Cosmo or did you make it up?” Victoria said, grabbing a pen from her purse and starting to write.

  Jackie peered over Victoria's shoulder at the list. “No contest. The Bad Boy wins.”

  “C'mon, Jackie. This is serious.”

  “Okay, then give Solomon a chance. He's gotta have at least one quality you like.”

  “He has wonderful parenting skills. You can see that with Bobby. Plus . . .”

  “Hang on a sec,” Jackie said. “Aren't you beating around the bush
? No pun intended.”

  “You mean sex.”

  “Ye-ah. What about Bruce, other than the fact he's hung like a Clydesdale?”

  “He's good. But maybe a trifle mechanical . . .”

  “Mechanical is fine for a dishwasher, but from what you said about the Bad Boy . . .”

  “Solomon makes me laugh and he makes me lunch. . . .”

  “And he makes you come. Combo platter. Excellent. C'mon. If you had to make a decision, which by the way you do, who's it gonna be?”

  “What would you do?”

  “Can't help you, Vic. But I might be interested in your discard.”

  Victoria tried to focus, tried to see through the clouds of indecision. It's fine to celebrate the power of multiple orgasms, but that's surely no reason to spend your life with the perpetrator. . . .

  “If you've gotta think this hard,” Jackie said, “you're gonna make the wrong decision.”

  “I can't just go with my emotions. I need to analyze all the factors.”

  “You're getting a man, not a mutual fund.”

  Victoria took a deep breath. “Bruce and I have similar interests. Similar values. Our love is perfectly logical. Perfectly rational. I made a commitment to him, a reasoned, thoughtful commitment. He's everything anyone could want. I mean, no one's perfect, right?”

  Jackie didn't answer, so Victoria just kept going. “I'm going to marry Bruce. And that's final.”

  Forty

  NO HUGS, NO KISSES,

  NO ERRORS

  On a quiet Sunday night—Victoria wouldn't return his calls and Bobby was reading the encyclopedia—Steve sat at the kitchen table, snacking on red peppers and goat cheese and drinking Grolsch, the Dutch beer. He turned on the laptop and started Googling.

  First, he plugged “Replengren” into the search window, and bingo, a hundred references popped up. A synthetic hormone manufactured in Germany, Replengren regenerated damaged brain cells in rats, but not without side effects, including impaired motor skills. The FDA was considering whether to approve the drug for testing on humans, but so far, no decision had been made.

  Holy shit.

  Would Kranchick jump the gun with an experimental drug?

  He put her name into the search engine and came up with a dozen monographs and research papers she'd written over the years. He'd found these earlier when he did his original homework, coming up with her article “Unlocking Your Inner Rain Man.” But this time, he was looking for something specific. Using the FIND function, he searched everything she'd written for the word “Replengren.”

  Nothing. She'd never mentioned the drug.

  He set about reading Kranchick's papers anyway. He skipped the highly technical studies with charts of acid secretions and diagrams of brain electrical activity. He skimmed the ones speculating on the cause of autism, everything from measles in pregnant women to food additives and PCBs. He spent more time—a two-beer read—on a savant syndrome piece in which Kranchick predicted that transcranial magnetic stimulation would soon produce startling mental feats in both autistic and nonautistic persons.

  What he read twice, highlighting with a yellow marker after printing it out—just as Victoria would have done—was the oldest and least technical of all the articles. It was an opinion piece in a medical journal from Kranchick's first year of residency at a Baltimore hospital. He'd read it before but it had meant little then. Now, viewed in the context of Replengren, it took on new meaning. In the article, Kranchick criticized a hospital's decision to fire a researcher who'd purposely induced psychotic episodes in schizophrenics by giving them amphetamines.

  “Didn't Edward Jenner inject smallpox into an eight-year-old boy in order to come up with a vaccine?” she wrote. “Didn't Walter Reed allow infected mosquitos to attack Cuban workers in order to discover the cause of yellow fever? Didn't Louis Pasteur test his rabies vaccine on children even before he tried it on animals?”

  Steve felt his heartbeat quicken. What was the question he'd just asked himself?

  Would Kranchick jump the gun with an experimental drug?

  Some questions are too easy. Why not ask: Is Pincher a prick? Is Zinkavich a ton of truffled pork? He skipped to the last paragraph of Kranchick's article.

  “Advances in medicine require courage, vision, and the uncompromising ability to go where others fear to tread. The greater good demands no less.”

  The greater good.

  Steve wanted to ask Kranchick who gave her the right to play God. But that could wait. He had his trial strategy to consider and another Grolsch to drink. How could he prove that Kranchick was giving an unapproved drug to the patients at Rockland? The handwritten note Cadillac snatched from the wastebasket wasn't admissible. And how would he even tell Victoria about it? He could imagine their conversation.

  She: “Dammit, Solomon. What you've done is unethical and illegal.”

  He: “But we learned the truth. When the law doesn't work . . .”

  She: “Live with it! You can't decide what laws to follow and what to ignore. Who gave you the right to play God?”

  He: “Touché.”

  Even after polishing off another Grolsch, he didn't know what to do.

  By Monday, the cold front had pushed out to sea, and the morning was sunny and warm. Parked under the portico at Brickell Townhouse, listening to Bob Marley ask, “Is this love?” Steve waited for Victoria. He figured he had not seen her in thirty-two hours, nineteen minutes, and forty-six seconds. Roughly.

  This morning they would begin selecting a jury in the Barksdale trial, and sometime after dark, they would start taking testimony in Bobby's case. He was up to his ass in Pinchers and Finks. But at the moment, all he could think about was Victoria.

  Thirty-two hours and twenty minutes ago—make it twenty-one—she had climbed out of the straw, leaving him alone and forlorn. He had dialed her number three times on Sunday; she never picked up, never returned his calls.

  She's pretending it didn't happen. Well, he could do the same.

  But it wouldn't work. Their lovemaking was playing on an endless loop in what was left of his brain.

  A moment later, she came flying out the lobby door in full trial uniform: double-breasted charcoal suit and a simple strand of pearls. Looking serious. Businesslike. And beautiful. She good-morninged the doorman, tossed her briefcase into the backseat, and hopped in. “Sorry I'm late.”

  No “Good morning, sweetheart.” No peck on the cheek. Not even a smile.

  “No problem,” he said.

  Sooner or later, she'd have to confront it. He felt like shouting: “I told you how I feel. Now you tell me.”

  In sullen silence, he drove up Twelfth Avenue toward the Justice Building. This was how it was going to be. No hugs, no kisses, no errors. So much he wanted to say, but the atmosphere was all wrong. The harsh sunlight of day had replaced the flaming torches, the Cuban love songs, the swirling snow. Besides, hadn't he already laid it all out? He'd said he loved her. What else could he do?

  “Who's going to handle voir dire?” she asked. A professional tone, one partner to another.

  “You do the talking. I'll watch the jurors, take notes.”

  “Really?”

  “You're friendlier. They'll like you more. Hell, they'll fall in love with you.”

  Love, he thought. He had love on the brain.

  The air horn sounded on the drawbridge at the Miami River. Dammit, they'd be stuck a good five minutes. He wouldn't add it to his laws, but it's a good idea not to be late to court the first day of a murder trial. He pulled to a stop, third car in line.

  “So?” he said.

  “So?”

  He couldn't help himself. He couldn't not ask. “What's the deal? Is this gonna be another ‘it never happened'?”

  She stayed quiet. A white egret high-stepped its way up the ascending bridge. On the radio, Jimmy Cliff boasted he could see clearly now.

  “It happened,” she said finally.

  He waited for her to c
ontinue, but she didn't. The egret kept going uphill. Jimmy Cliff claimed it was a bright sunshiny day, but it sure didn't feel that way to Steve. “I'm a little on edge here, trying to figure just where I stand.”

  The bridge had gotten too steep. The egret took off and circled over the river, where a freighter loaded with minivans moved ponderously toward the open ocean.

  “I can't think about you right now,” she said.

  “That's a little cold, isn't it?”

  “We have a murder case to try all day, then Bobby's case tonight, then we do it all over again tomorrow. Bruce is breathing down my neck about seating charts for the reception, and he's ordered an avocado tree ice sculpture without asking me. Jackie hates her dress, my period's due tomorrow, and you, Steve Solomon, want me to bat my eyes and tell you how the earth moved, and it's never been that way before, and oh, my God, let's sail off to some island together.”

  “Did it? The earth move, I mean.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “First you blast me because I didn't express my feelings. Now I've put my balls on the chopping block, and what do you do?”

  “I'm tabling you.”

  “Table Bigby and the ice sculpture. Talk to me, dammit.”

  “Not until both cases are over. When everything's finished, we'll talk.” The barrier arm on the bridge was lifting. “Now, let's go win a murder trial.”

  Forty-one

  SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES

  Steve and Victoria climbed the front steps of the Justice Building, just as the Voodoo Squad janitors finished their cleanup. The cakes, candles, and skulls—offerings to various Santeria gods from families of defendants—were tossed into garbage bags, and the accused were left to their fate before mere mortals: judges and jurors.

  Katrina would be waiting in the lawyer-client lounge. Victoria hoped she had followed instructions on what to wear. They had spent several hours last night in Katrina's vast closet, Victoria spending a good deal of the time saying, “No.”

  No to the one-button tuxedo in silk crepe de chine, with the plunging neckline.