Al-Tounsi

by Anton Piatigorsky

  Gideon stood abruptly. “Excuse me, guys. I’ll be right back.” He escaped into the bathroom, shut the door and splashed water on his face. He hoped his distress wasn’t too obvious. He stood at the sink, refusing to look at himself in the mirror.

  This jealousy and narcissism, this sense of doom and failure, the comically and utterly clichéd Jewish self-loathing—how could he succumb to it? All this anxiety about his relevance might as well have come from his father’s brain. Dr. Seymour Rosen had a wiry body and a bald head, a big bent nose and a closet full of tweed jackets. He used to pace back and forth in their tiny kitchen in West Ridge, practically carving a rut into the linoleum. He would come home at night after working long hours in the uptown office, treating fevers and polio limps and broken noses from neighborhood stick-ball games, or on Saturday afternoons volunteering to treat the “less fortunate negroes” at his downtown clinic. He must have seen quasi-third-world problems down there. He would deposit himself in his favorite armchair, pick up a novel or an issue of The Paris Review, or listen to a classical record, or an opera on the radio—always that same avid and nervous engagement with art. A nonentity. Surely that’s what Seymour thought about himself every night of his life. He passed his evenings in silent terror. Gideon had always been able to read the doubt and dread on his father’s face. He was a man who worried about whether or not he was capable of understanding “important” and “worthwhile” artistic creations, or if he would be able to recognize which contemporary artists might someday sit at the canonical table beside Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Mozart. He worried that he had somehow missed the boat, or that he had been too stupid to see which boat was the right one to catch. It didn’t matter to him in the slightest that he was a beloved West Ridge GP, or that he commanded respect everywhere he went. Gideon had once walked with his father down the street when he was five years old, and to this day he still remembered the hats doffed at the corner store, the polite questions about Seymour’s health, asked by friendly passersby. None of that deference mattered to his father. None of that respect touched him. Nothing was more powerful than his own insecurity, fright and envy. And was Seymour’s past neurosis really any different from Gideon’s own, right now? The tinny tone and jumpy inflection of Seymour’s voice rang in Gideon’s head: That Jascha Heifetz is a wonder, Estelle, one of the all-time greatest, and we’ll be lucky to see him do Tchaikovsky next week. Or: Don’t forget, Faulkner’s a revolutionary, our century’s Shakespeare, our country’s Shakespeare, and I love him, just love him—I’m so engrossed in this book I can barely eat, Estelle, I can’t get enough of it! That was from the summer they rented the beachfront cottage on Lake Michigan, a handsome shingled place, when Gideon was ten. Gideon was jogging through the screened porch past his anguished father, en route to lunch with his mother and sister, when he stopped in shock at the sight of Seymour’s sweaty, concentrated face. His father spent the entire two weeks of that vacation hunkered down in the wicker chair, hunched over Absalom, Absalom, probably trying to figure out what the hell that book meant, while Abigail and Gideon built their sand castles and swam and rolled down the dunes.

  But Seymour was right to be so insecure. He was a second-rate mind who didn’t understand anything. Gideon’s mother once told him a story, which had occurred back in the summer of ’42, when Gideon was just a baby, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had performed Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony for the first time. It was a brand new piece, and Seymour had struggled with his decision about whether or not they should go to hear it. The problem, it seemed, was that there was strong disagreement in the critical community about the symphony’s worth. On one hand, the weeping Russian masses and the pro-war American propaganda machine loved it, and said it was the greatest thing since Beethoven, but on the other hand, Rachmaninoff and Virgil Thomson said that serious and discerning ears had no business listening to it, as it was nothing but crass melodrama. A week before the premiere, Seymour still didn’t know whom to side with. He paced the house and barked about the undercooked potatoes or the dishes in the sink, and covered his ears whenever Gideon cried. Seymour spent the entire day before the premiere in his bedroom with a hot water bottle on his stomach and the lights turned off, mumbling about how he was a fool and a philistine, how he knew nothing at all about taste or culture or art. Gideon had latched onto that story as the definitive portrait of his father. Seymour was incapable of assessing anything for himself. He used to quote Cleanth Brooks’s Well Wrought Urn word for word. All of his opinions were derived from his cultural masters, really no different from Gideon with his precious Brandeis this, Brandeis that. So did that mean Gideon was a second-rate mind, just like his father?

  Enough. He left the bathroom, returned to his family. He sat on the couch and turned his attention to the film’s narrative thrall. The Stasi officer was eavesdropping on the playwright, who was playing a piano sonata.

  “Donnersmarck’s use of music is as deft as Kubrick’s.”

  Max was scanning the screen with reverence, his bare feet resting on the cushions and his skinny knees pressed against his hagiographic T-shirt. What a comment! Gideon filled with empathic sadness. Did his dear boy feel the same crippling self-doubt that Seymour had once felt, that was plaguing Gideon so terribly right now? Was this a shared suffering, a genetic curse? Was pathological insecurity the real link between Seymour and Max and him? When Max watched how Stanley Kubrick wielded his camera in Strangelove, or listened to the thrilling score of The Shining, was he primarily seeing and hearing his own inability to create work on that high level?

  Soon the credits were rolling. Jacob popped out of his armchair, flipped on the lights and stopped the disc. Victoria and Max stretched their backs, their four arms rising parallel above their heads. “Now that is a great movie,” Jacob declared, glancing back at his somber father, as if taunting and challenging him to disagree. He held up the disc for observation. “And I don’t care what anybody else says about it.”

  Late that night, the storm surging outside sounded like a symphony, played by an orchestra of tall trees’ swishing branches, and wind whistling through close-set houses, and windows drummed by fat raindrops. Victoria slept serenely, but under the high rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning Gideon lay awake, constrained by his tucked-in sheet.

  There was a suicide in Subic Bay two days earlier. A Saudi prisoner of six years, who had never been allowed to meet with a lawyer or contest his imprisonment, hung himself in his cell. The military had tried to suppress the news, but Amnesty International had gotten wind of it and now it was all over the news. Tonight CNN had been flush with the would-be presidential candidates from both parties outdoing each other with their plans either to close Subic Bay and transfer the prisoners into the United States for civilian trial or to keep it open, and possibly even expand it. Everyone had a definitive opinion. Gideon had watched the news with the volume turned up, although Victoria scowled beside him in bed, trying to read. More attention, still, for his precious case. Now he couldn’t turn off his mind.

  With Al-Tounsi reviving, he considered the prospects of the case realistically. He was a fool if he believed that it would be different from any other status quo suit. If he got to write its majority opinion, his argument wouldn’t break any new ground. Any so-called “radical” liberal position would merely call for the maintenance of rulings already codified. It would support precedent and reinforce the existing bright line between war and peace. He could only argue for stasis. What was the point of fighting like crazy to hear Al-Tounsi as if his identity rested on it?

  No, the only potential for revolution in Al-Tounsi was the conservative one: the hawkish redefinition of war and peace. That was the painful fact of his miserable era. Justices who reimagined conservatism for a contemporary context were the only ones with any claim on innovation. Killian Quinn was the architect of that new jurisprudence, the primary justice from the Eberly Court with a legitimate claim on the history books. It was a maddening fact—becau
se although Killian’s techniques were clever, his mind sharp and his prose sharper still, his values were retrograde. Why did those principles have to be so cutting-edge? It wasn’t fair. Gideon groaned, and it came out louder than expected.

  Victoria woke up abruptly. In a fog, she focused on her husband. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing. I just groaned. You can go back to sleep.”

  Victoria lowered her head. Soon her ribcage rose and fell with each long breath.

  Gideon stared at the ceiling and imagined talking to Justice Brandeis. Tell me, then, Louis, what would you do if you were me?

  Brandeis’s imaginary advice, so easy for Gideon to conjure, streamed without pause: Concentrate on what you do best, on what is most needed. Not on futile cases like Al-Tounsi that you imagine will be significant. Remember you are the Court’s undisputed expert on administrative law, author of that foundational text elucidating “separation of powers” questions in Title 5 U.S.C. 500 et seq. Why not focus on that? Essential administrative cases rise to the Court each and every year, so pour your attention into them, jockey for their opinions whenever you can, instill them with as much creativity and imagination as you can muster.

  I know Administrative law is important, countered Gideon, but nobody actually cares about it. I want to expand personal rights—constitutionally mandated health care, housing, gay marriage.

  It’s overstated, the glamour of our storied individual rights, continued the imaginary voice of Brandeis. The smooth functioning of our enormous federal apparatus in challenging times is a far more serious problem than—

  “You should really try to get some sleep. I can tell you’re not trying.”

  Victoria’s back was turned to him, her mass of thick gray hair splayed across her pillow. She lay motionless, but obviously not asleep. Gideon sighed. He listened to the rain outside, which had lessened into a gentle patter.

  He closed his eyes, and there, unbidden, was Ellen, 30 years earlier, when she was a paralegal in Chicago. Her cherubic faced was framed by her teased blond hair, her pale skin powdered with copious blush. Her eyebrows were plucked and penciled into arches, and she had magazine-model teeth, a testament to modern orthodontics. Ellen Granger. Her most appealing feature had been her complete faith in his genius. The night their affair ended Ellen had bought a bit of pot from her younger sister Kay, and she asked Gideon if he wanted to smoke it when he dropped by her apartment, morose and irritable, collapsing into her dilapidated couch. He had been working late at the office on yet another trivial case that he knew would never blaze any new legal ground or accomplish any progressive reforms, and wasn’t even all that interesting in purely intellectual terms. What the hell am I doing on this old cat-hair covered sofa? Gideon wondered. Why aren’t I lying in bed with Victoria? He mumbled something about the drugs being a juvenile idea, that he was a 40-year-old man and not a kid, for God sakes, but then for reasons still mysterious to him, he smoked that pot with Ellen—his first and only foray into illegal substances.

  Gideon smiled at the memory of what happened once the drug took effect. He was overwhelmed by the past, which suddenly seemed to influence every gesture made and word uttered. The past was all around him, inside him, everywhere, and what a weird state of hyper-consciousness that was. When he muttered some half-phrase to Ellen, nothing more than a brief dismissal of the case he had been working, he heard a huge personal drama inside those words: his childhood vanity, his longing for greatness. He heard his blind acceptance of his mother’s proclamation of his genius, the roots of his own arrogance and superiority. Behind another throw-away phrase, Gideon heard himself echoing his father’s futile search for meaning through the arts, and then he realized that his grandfather Moshe must have passed down that desperation and insecurity to Gideon’s father from his own awful childhood of pogroms and squalor back in Galicia—all that baggage and more in a single stupid comment! And then, worse still, when Ellen complimented him on the shape of his haircut, he heard in his lover’s calculatedly playful tone her Iowa-born mother—or rather Gideon’s fantasy of Ellen’s mother—a woman who must have mitigated her oppressive husband’s foul moods on the farm by complimenting the little autocrat incessantly on his hair, on his strength lifting bales of hay, and on his intelligence and dexterity in fixing the tractor. And then, worst of all, he suddenly understood that Ellen’s frequent compliments to him about his intelligence, wisdom and looks were really nothing more than her aping of her own mother’s survival reflex. All of Ellen’s praise for him was a mask for her own insecurity, a means of guaranteeing that Gideon would find her tolerable and attractive, and that he would want to keep her around. Her compliments had nothing to do with his actual talents. She didn’t think he was a genius, or rather, she didn’t care one way or another. It was only that she understood him (rightly!) as a proud and vain man, and that he really liked it a lot when she called him a genius. He had been duped by his own petty, selfish needs, and by Ellen’s.

  Gideon’s drugged vision made the room spin around a radius at the center of his nose. His disembodied voice jabbered on, but he knew, quite suddenly, that he was trying too hard, that he had always tried too hard, and that he had to stop. He was 40 years old, and it was time to stop. He apologized to Ellen, took a long walk home by the shore of Lake Michigan, and in the morning confessed his affair to Victoria.

  What then? The years that followed their marital crisis had been the most productive of his life. He stopped comparing himself incessantly, stopped lamenting that Brandeis’s important insights had already been institutionalized and championed by the Warren Court of the ’50s and ’60s, stripping Gideon of his opportunity to be a liberal hero, and he refocused his attention on the present, a recalculation that cleared away his emotional debris and improved the quality of his work. Without losing hours in fruitless anxiety, Gideon stopped laboring on cases and articles, and his associations grew more lucid and precise. His logic distilled into wise and solid arcs, his prose shimmered, his results were undeniably good. He allowed himself to take a year and a half off from his legal practice to write his comprehensive analysis of Administrative Law—how it had functioned in the past, how it could be improved in the future—and the result was that “classic” work, published by a prestigious academic press, still hailed as the single best text on the subject to date. His return to the firm after the book’s publication had been equally blessed, as he led a few major cases to successful argument before the Supreme Court. And then, to his astonishment, not long after his return, Gideon was nominated to an empty seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago—and by a staunchly Republican president, no less. All of that success, all of it, was because he had relaxed his insane anxiety and abandoned those paralyzing comparisons with Louis Brandeis. How ironic, how predictable: only by letting go of his striving for status had he been able to achieve something in his life.

  And it was in those years that Gideon realized just how lucky he was, how fortuitous and wise, to be married to Victoria Chilton. She never pandered to his vanity like Ellen had—indeed, he had only started that affair because of his weakness and insecurity, his infantile need to feel special. Once Gideon realized it, and denied himself the cheap reward of Ellen’s praise, he could all the more appreciate Victoria’s refusal to indulge him, her strength in erecting emotional boundaries. She never had any patience for his whining about how today’s personal rights cases were only the natural extension of rights already enumerated by others. She absolutely refused to treat him like anything but an adult, and silently insisted that he treat himself like one as well. Oh, how he loved Victoria after his affair! How he still loved her. She kept him above the abyss of his own despair.

  A high flash of lightning illuminated his bedroom, and then thunder rumbled distantly. Gideon shifted to his side, reached out and ran his fingers through his wife’s smooth, once flaxen hair, still so beautiful, but now the color of polished silver.

  “Victoria.” She didn’t st
ir.

  He let his fingers fall to the pillow. He was indebted to her wisdom in ways he was still discovering. She had never asked him for anything. Except this once. How could he ever forgive himself for the cruelty and selfishness of what he was about to do? Because he knew he wasn’t going to leave the bench. He couldn’t do that for anything in the world. Not for the happiness of his children, or of his beloved wife. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay on in his job for another 20 years, 30 if he was lucky enough to live that long. He wanted to die on the fucking bench like Chief Justice Harlan Stone, one of the blood vessels popping in his brain as he read aloud from a dissenting opinion—Girouard v. United States, if Gideon remembered correctly. Who the hell wants to retire before he’s a vegetable? He would only leave the Court when the doctors declared him brain-dead in his robes, when he had to be wheeled out of chambers in a stretcher, down the marbled corridors lined with weeping colleagues and clerks, past officers of the Court with their hats doffed like the residents of West Ridge for his father, and visitors too stunned and shocked to click their little cameras. He would stay on until the bitter end, fighting with Killian, Charles and Joanna, attempting to win over Talos in a tenuous coalition, struggling with cases, impartial to the achievements of any other justice past or present, having the time of his life, trying to get that one masterful opinion written before he was buried once and for all. Nothing else would satisfy him. Nothing else seemed right. The key ideological war of his generation was raging around him, and Gideon Rosen had been called into service for that epic fight.