by Scott Turow
Apparently at puberty the bones in the inner ear harden so that the Brownian ringing can no longer be heard. Which is just as well. Because by then there are other distractions. For me, during most of my married life, the allure of other women has been like that daily hum which I willfully ignored, and when I started working around Carolyn that resolve went weak, and the pitch rose, vibrated, sang.
“And I can’t really tell you why,” I said to Robinson.
I consider myself a person of values. I had always despised my father for his philandering. On Friday nights he was emitted from the household like a wandering cat, headed for a tavern and, later, the Hotel Delaney over on Western Avenue, only a little better than a flop, with its old woolen carpets worn to the backing over the stairs, and the naphtha scent of some chemical agent used to control the infestation of pests. There he would pursue his passion with various soiled women—barroom chippies, horny divorcees, wives out on the sneak. Before he left on these outings, he had dinner with my mother and me. We both knew where he was going. He would hum, the only sound anything like music which came from him all week.
But somehow as I worked around Carolyn, with her jangling jewelry and her light perfume, her silk blouses, her red lipstick and painted nails, that large heaving bosom and her long legs, that splash of bright hair, I became overwhelmed by her—and in just that fashion, detail by detail, so that I would become excited when I smelled her scent on another woman who passed me in the hall.
“And I can’t really tell you why. Maybe that’s why I am here. Some frequency is heard and everything begins to shatter. A vibration sets in, a fundamental tone, and the whole interior is shaking. We’d talk about the trial, our lives, whatever, and she seemed such a remarkable mix of things. Symphonic. A symphonic personality. Disciplined and glamorous. This musical laugh. And an orthodontic wonder of a smile. She was much wittier than I expected; tough, as they said, but she did not seem hard.”
I was affected particularly by her offhand remarks, the way her eyes, hooded with shadow and liner, would take on this tone of level assessment. Analyzing politics or witnesses or cops, she showed you just how firm a purchase she had on what was going on. And that was very exciting to me, to meet a woman who seemed to really have the lowdown, who was moving through the world at Carolyn’s speed, and who was so many different things to different people. Maybe it was the contrast to Barbara, who is so deliberately none of that.
“Here was this bold, bright, handsome woman, much celebrated, with a kind of spotlight radiance. And I find I am going down to her office—which is itself a minor wonder in a place as stark as ours, Carolyn having taken the trouble to add a small Oriental rug, plants, an antique bookcase, and an Empire desk she snagged through a connection with Central Services—I’m going down there with nothing to say. There is this heat, this parched sensation—all the old crappy metaphors—and I start thinking, Jesus Christ, this can’t be happening. And maybe it still wouldn’t have, but about this time I begin to notice, I begin to think she is paying attention to me. She is looking at me. Oh, I know, this sounds like high school. No, worse, junior high school. But there is this thing, people don’t look at one another.”
And when we’re interviewing witnesses, I turn and Carolyn is staring at me, watching with this placid, almost rueful smile, as I do my stuff—or in a meeting with Raymond, all the top felony people, I’ll glance up, I’ll feel the weight of her eyes on me, and she continues watching me in such an unwavering fashion that I do something, a wink, a smile, as a form of acknowledgment, and she responds, usually that little cat’s grin, and if I’m speaking I stop, everything washes out of my mind, it is just Carolyn, things are unraveling right from the center of the skein.
“That was the worst part, this incredible domination of my feelings. I get in the shower, I drive down the street—it’s Carolyn. Fantasies. Conversations with her. An uninterrupted movie. I see her full of relaxed amusement and appreciation—of me. Of me. I can’t finish a phone call; I can’t read a prosecution memo or a brief.”
And all of it, this whole grand obsession, carried on in the face of a racing heart, a turning gut, a frantic sense of resistance and disbelief. I shudder at random moments. I tell myself that this has not happened. This is a juvenile episode, a mind trick like déjà vu. I grope around inside myself for the old reality. I say to myself that I will get up in the morning feeling unaffected, feeling right again and sane.
But I do not, of course, and the moments when I am with her, the anticipation, the appreciation is exquisite. I feel short of breath and giddy. I laugh too easily, too much. I do what I can to stay near her, show her a paper over her shoulder while she’s at her desk, so that I can linger with the details of her person: her hammered golden earrings, the odors of her bathwater and her breath, the soft bluish color of her nape when her hair falls away. And then, when I’m by myself, I feel desperate and ashamed. This raging, mad obsession! Where is my world? I am departing. I am gone already.
4
In the dark, the red-and-blue figure of Spider-Man can be made out on the wall above my son’s bed. Life-size, he is poised in a wrestler’s crouch, prepared to take on all invaders.
I did not grow up reading the comics—it was too lighthearted an activity for the home I was raised in. But when Nat was two or three we began, each Sunday, to explore the funny papers together. While Barbara slept, I made Nat breakfast. Then, with my son very close beside me, we sat on the sofa in the sunroom as we discussed and recollected the weekly progress in each strip. All the random little-boy fury of that age would leave him, and he was reduced to a more essential self, small and full of a transport I could feel through his body. So it was that I came to establish my rapport with the Web Slinger. Now Nat, in second grade and almost brittlely self-sufficient, reads the funnies by himself. I must await a moment when I will not be noticed to check on Peter Parker’s fate. They really are funny, I explained to Barbara a few weeks ago when I was observed with the comics in my hands. Oh, for crying out loud, muttered my wife, the almost Ph.D.
Now I touch the fine hair, so thin against Nat’s scalp. If I fuss long enough, Nat, accustomed by the years to my late arrivals, will probably rouse himself to murmur some gentle appreciation. I stop here first each evening. I have an almost physical craving for the reassurance. Right before Nat’s birth we moved out here, to Nearing, a former ferry port to which the city dwellers fled long enough ago that it is called a town rather than a suburb. Although it was Barbara who initially favored this move, by now she would eagerly forsake Nearing, which she sometimes blames for her isolation. I’m the one who needs the distance from the city, the gap in time and space, to manufacture in myself a sense that some perimeter protects us against what I see each day. I suppose that is another reason I was happy to see Spider-Man assume his place here. I take comfort in Spidey’s agile vigilance.
I find Barbara face down on our bed, largely unclothed. She is breathless, the tight muscles of her narrow back lustrous with sweat. The VCR hums in rewind. On the set, the news has just begun.
“Exercise?” I ask.
“Masturbation,” Barbara answers. “Refuge of the lonely housewife.”
She does not bother a backward glance. Instead, I advance and kiss her quickly on the neck.
“I called from the bus station when I missed the 8:35. You weren’t here. I left a message on the tape.”
“I got it,” she says. “I was picking up Nat. He had dinner with Mom. I tried to get in some extra time on the mainframe.”
“Productive?”
“A waste.” She rolls over and back, breasts girdled in her sports bra.
As I undress, I receive a laconic report from Barbara on the day’s occurrences. A neighbor’s illness. The bill from the mechanic. The latest with her mother. Barbara delivers all this information lying face down on the coverlet in a tone of weariness. This her drear offensive, a bitterness too tired even to be regret, against which I defend in the simplest fash
ion, by seeming not to notice. I show interest in each remark, enthusiasm for every detail. And in the meantime, an inner density gathers, a known sensation, as if my veins have become clogged with lead. I am home.
About five years ago, just when I thought we were getting ready to have another child, Barbara announced that she was going back to school, entering a Ph.D. program in mathematics. She had filed the application and taken the exams without a word to me. My surprise was taken as disapproval, and my protests to the contrary have always been disparaged. But I did not disapprove. I never thought Barbara was obligated to be homebound. My reaction was to something else. Not so much that I was not consulted, but that I really never could have guessed. In college, Barbara had been a math whiz, taking graduate division classes of two or three students with renowned professors, all of them hermit-like creatures with wild-grown beards. But she had been cavalier about her abilities. Now, I learned, mathematics was a calling. A consuming interest. About which I had not heard a word in more than half a decade.
At the moment Barbara is facing her dissertation. When she started, she told me that projects like hers—I could not possibly explain it—are sometimes set out in a space as small as a dozen pages. Whether those were words of hope or illusion, the dissertation has lingered like a chronic disease, one more source of her painful melancholy. Whenever I pass by the study, she is looking pitifully over her desk, out the window toward a single dwarf cherry tree that has failed to thrive in the clay landfill in our back yard.
Waiting for inspiration, she reads. Nothing so much of this world as newspapers and magazines. Instead, she carts in from the university library armloads of heavy texts on arcane subjects. Psycholinguistics. Semiotics. Braille and sign language for the deaf. She is a devotee of facts. She reclines at night on her brocade living-room sofa, eating Belgian chocolates, and finds out about the operation of the world she never visits. She reads, literally, about life on Mars, the biographies of men and women whom most people would find boring, and certainly obscure. Then there will be a spate of medical reading. Last month she spent with books that seemed to be about cryogenics, artificial insemination, and the history of lenses. What is occurring on these galaxian visits to other planets of human learning is unknown to me. No doubt she would share her newfound knowledge if I asked. But over time I have lost the ability even to pretend high interest, and Barbara regards my dullness to these matters as a failing. It is easier to maintain my own counsel, while Barbara roams the far-off realms.
Not long ago it occurred to me that my wife; with her abrupt social mannerisms, her general aversion to most human beings, her dark taciturn side, and her virtual armory of private and largely uncommunicated passions could be described only as weird. She has virtually no serious friendships aside from her relationship with her mother, to whom, when I met her, Barbara barely spoke, and whom she still regards with cynicism and suspicion. Like my own mother, when she was alive, Barbara seems largely a willing captive within the walls of her own home, flawlessly keeping our house, tending our child, and toiling endlessly with her formulae and computer algorithms.
Without really noticing at first, I become aware that both of us have ceased comment, even motion, and are facing the television set, where the screen has filled with images of today’s service for Carolyn. Raymond’s car arrives and the back of my head is briefly shown. The son is escorted up to the doors of the chapel. The newsreader is doing a voice-over: Eight hundred persons, including many city leaders, gathered at First Presbyterian Church for final rites for Carolyn Polhemus, a deputy prosecuting attorney slain three nights ago in a brutal rape-murder. Now people are emerging. The mayor and Raymond are both depicted speaking to reporters, but only Nico gets audio. He employs the quietest voice he knows and deflects questions about the investigation of the murder. “I came to remember a colleague,” he tells the camera, with one foot in his car.
It is Barbara who speaks first.
“How was it?” She has wrapped herself now in a red silk robe.
“Gala,” I answer. “In a way. A meeting of all the luminaries.”
“Did you cry?”
“Come on, Barbara.”
“I’m serious.” She is leaning forward. Her jaw is set and there is a savage deadness in her eye. I always marvel that Barbara’s anger remains so near at hand. Over the years, her superior access has become a source of intimidation. She knows I am slower to respond, restrained by archaic fears, the dark weight of memory. My parents often fell into robust shouting matches, even occasional brawls. I have such a vivid recollection of one night when I awoke to their disturbance and found that my mother had taken hold of a handful of my father’s Brillo-y red hair while she slapped him with a rolled-up newspaper, as if he were a dog. The aftermath of these quarrels would send my mother to bed for days, where she would lie spent, dwelling with the sensational pain of enormous migraine headaches that required her to remain in a darkened room and left me under an injunction to make no sound.
Lacking that kind of refuge now, I move over to a basket of clean laundry Barbara has brought up and begin matching the socks. For a moment we are silent, left to the burbling of the TV and the nighttime noises of the house. A tiny finger of the river runs behind the homes half a block away, and without the traffic you can hear it licking. The furnace kicks in two floors below. On for the first time today, it will spill up through the ducts a kind of oily effluvium.
“Nico was trying hard enough to look unhappy,” Barbara finally tells me.
“He wasn’t very successful if you saw him up close. He was positively radiant. He thinks he’s got a shot at Raymond now.”
“Is that possible?”
I sort the socks and shrug. “He’s gained a lot of ground with this thing.”
Barbara, a witness all these years to Raymond’s invincibility, is obviously surprised, but the mathematician in her shows, for I can see that she is quickly factoring the new possibilities. She grabs at her hair, gray-flecked and curly, worn in a fashionable shag, and her pretty face takes on the light of curiosity.
“What would you do, Rusty, if that happened? If Raymond lost?”
“Accept it. What else could I do?”
“I mean for a living.”
Blue with blue. Black with black. It is not easy with only incandescent light. Some years ago I used to talk about leaving the office. That was when I could still imagine myself as a defense lawyer. But I never got around to making that move, and it has been some time since we have spoken at all about my future.
“I don’t know what I’d do,” I tell her honestly. “I’m a lawyer. I’d practice law. Teach. I don’t know. Delay says he’s going to keep me on as chief deputy.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.” I take my stockings to my drawer. “He was a river of bullshit today. Told me, in a very serious tone, that the only real primary opponent he had been afraid of was me. You know, as if I would talk Raymond into stepping aside and anointing me successor.”
“You should have,” Barbara says.
I look back at her.
“Really.” Her enthusiasm, in a way, is not surprising. Barbara has always felt a spouse’s disdain for the boss. And besides, all of this comes, somewhat, at my expense. I’m the one who lacked the nerve to do what everybody else could see was obvious.
“I am not a politician.”
“Oh, you’d make do,” says Barbara. “You’d love to be P.A.” As I figured: I am tweaked by wife’s superior knowledge of my nature. I decide to sidestep and tell Barbara that this is all academic. Raymond will pull through.
“Bolcarro will finally endorse him. Or we’ll catch the killer”—I nod toward the TV set—“and he’ll ride into Election Day with all the media murmuring his name.”
“How’s he going to do that?” asks Barbara. “Do they have a suspect?”
“We have shit.”
“So?”
“So Dan Lipranzer and Rusty Sabich will work day and nig
ht for the next two weeks and catch Raymond a killer. That’s the strategy. Carefully devised.”
The remote snaps and the TV shrinks to a star. Behind me, I hear from Barbara a whinny, a snort. It is not a pleasant sound. When I look back, her eyes, fixed upon me, are stilled to a zero point, an absolute in hatred.
“You are so predictable,” she says, low and mean. “You’re in charge of this investigation?”
“Of course.”
“‘Of course’?”
“Barbara, I’m the chief deputy prosecuting attorney and Raymond’s running for his life. Who else would handle the investigation? Raymond would do it himself if he weren’t campaigning fourteen hours a day.”
It was the prospect of a moment just like this that left me in a state of excruciating unease a couple of days ago when I realized that I would have to phone Barbara to tell her what had happened. I could not ignore it; that would pretend too much. My call was for the announced purpose of telling Barbara I would be late. The office, I explained, was in an uproar.
Carolyn Polhemus is dead, I added.
Huh, said Barbara. Her tone was one of detached wonder. An overdose? she asked.
I stared at the receiver in my hand, marveling at the depth of this misunderstanding.
But I cannot divert her now. Barbara’s rage is gathering.
“Tell me the truth,” she says. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?”
“Barbara—”
“No,” she says, standing now. “Answer me. Is that professional—for you to be doing this? There are 120 lawyers down there. Can’t they find anybody who didn’t sleep with her?”
I am familiar with this rise in pitch and descent in tactics. I strive to remain even.
“Barbara, Raymond asked me to do it.”
“Oh, spare me, Rusty. Spare me the high purpose, noble crap. You could explain to Raymond why you shouldn’t do this.”
“I don’t care to. I would be letting him down. And it happens to be none of his business.”