Killian gulped down the oversized bolus in his mouth. “I’m worried about you, that’s all. You don’t look well. What’s going on with you?” He wiped the splotch on his jacket with a napkin, which only seemed to embed the cheese deeper into the fabric.
On the far side of the room, Justice Bryce was talking to a striking young woman in a brocade suit—a real beauty with a mane of thick black hair, smooth olive skin, and perfect legs. The whole package. Killian scanned her up and down, every inch of that fine body. What was an outsider, gorgeous as she might be, doing at a private clerks’ function?
“The end of this term has been difficult.” Rodney was answering a query that Killian had now all but forgotten. Justice Sykes stared at the rug, looking uncomfortable exposing even this modicum of personal information. “Perhaps I’m overworked. Something of that sort. I’m not certain. Whatever’s the matter, I’m eager for the break.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re going to get one.” Killian watched the brocaded woman’s naked heel rise from the back of her two-inch pump and descend again into its awaiting cradle, which Killian now wished was his own sweaty palm. “What you need is a beach. Florida or Rehoboth. Or your own native California. Although the water’s too cold out there.”
Rodney shrugged. “I’m not certain what I need.”
It was sad, Rodney’s tone, somber and strange and uncharacteristic. He sounded like a crushed man. Maybe that’s what happened to everyone in this job eventually; they got worn down and defeated by the futility of writing useless opinions, years of being ignored by the other eight, and by the endless onslaught of mentally taxing work. It was depressing to think about. So maybe he should stop contemplating Rodney Sykes’s odd mood, and his own miserable failings, and instead think about that black-haired beauty across the room shifting her weight from side to side on the balls of her feet, and tossing the hump of her taut ass back and forth like a very firm and well-played volleyball. Killian pointed at her.
“That woman over there, talking with Joanna. She wasn’t a clerk this term, was she?”
Rodney roused and looked at her. “Oh, no.”
“What’s she doing here? She’s not supposed to be here.”
“I believe she’s one of Joanna’s for next term. As I recall, she’s a good friend to a clerk from this year, and so she was invited to the party with Justice Bryce’s consent.”
“Right.” Killian suppressed a sigh. He did not need a whole year with that beauty working in the Supreme Court. Killian had always maintained absolute respect for the firm sexual boundaries separating the aging justices from clerks, secretaries, and other employees of the Court, and had prided himself on never crossing that line—no matter that he had privately lusted after Vita, Kolmann’s clerk in 1994–1995, or Tatyana, Davidson’s impossibly svelte, Russian-immigrant clerk in ’99—but today Killian felt weak, like he couldn’t overcome the challenge. He would have to remove himself from an embarrassing situation. He would have to escape from the room before he was caught ogling the new clerk.
Killian’s ears tingled from the pulls and pricks of McGovern and Coyote. “Slip over to the Folger for an early lunch,” whispered Coyote. An image of Katherine’s small breasts and pink nipples flashed in his mind. “I bet you can still get back here with enough time to review cert memos before conference.”
“Or you can choose to eat lunch alone in your chambers.” McGovern wrapped a white sheet around Katherine’s nakedness.
Killian popped the last piece of bagel into his mouth and clasped his colleague’s shoulder. “Rodney, I do believe I’m all partied out. I’m like a drunken fraternity boy, four in the morning, pledge week.”
Rodney chuckled and shook his head.
“Feeling hateful of the world. Feeling furious at the manifold stupidity and vanity of our species. Feeling judgmental and misanthropic.”
“How unfortunate. Although not unprecedented for you.”
“Puts me in the mood for Timon of Athens. So, Justice Sykes, if you’ll please excuse me.”
“Certainly.” Rodney Sykes offered another slight bow, his tacit approval of Killian’s Shakespeare habit. “I shall see you in conference.”
The Folger Shakespeare Library—thank the Good Lord in Heaven—was a two-minute walk from the Supreme Court Building. Killian left the West Conference Room and marched out the back entrance on Second Street, his legs smoldering. He affirmed his plan in transit: to visit the Folger’s Old Reading Room, request his favorite late 18th-century edition of Shakespeare, and sit with that sacred text, studying the hateful rantings of the abused Athenian Timon, until Katherine discovered him, pulled him into her office, unrolled the blinds, and fucked his brains out. And how will you feel, the Justice wondered, as he trotted across East Capital Street and up the library’s short marble steps, his brow already dripping, when you’ve added yet another mortal sin to your résumé? Another devilish act in defiance of a cardinal virtue, depriving you of God’s sanctifying grace, killing and damning your soul to the fire and brimstone of hell? If he did indeed transgress—and his pull toward sin was so gravitational now that he couldn’t imagine avoiding it—then he would find salvation through confession, as he had done many times before, through Father Elko’s prescribed penitence, those punishments suffered with gratitude and relief.
Killian slipped through the Folger’s art-deco entrance, beneath the marble Mask of Comedy protruding above the glass door. The bigger complication with his plan was material rather than spiritual. His erectile dysfunction, which had bothered him for a decade running, had shifted in recent months from a sporadic problem into a chronic condition, meaning the great carnal sin might prove too difficult to complete. The prospect of failure only quickened his step. The base conditions fueling his desire—all of this stress and anger and rage—hadn’t abated. He felt rendered futile by another lost case, another dissent against the majority, another scathing editorial in a liberal newspaper. His intelligence and insight were meaningless in this corrupt world. Heck, being right was meaningless. And if the satisfaction of release in some young woman’s embrace couldn’t be counted on, what would become of him?
Killian flashed his Folger Reader’s card to the half-sleeping guard seated at the entrance and then walked the short hallway to the Old Reading Room. He passed through a glass door etched with an hexagonal pattern, like a honeycomb. The tiny green-carpeted Registrar’s office was staffed, as always, by Eric, a young and ominous gatekeeper, who took his job of blocking entry to anyone without a Reader’s card too seriously. Killian and Eric exchanged tight, closed-lipped smiles. What the hell did it matter if a fellow American without a card wanted to peek in at that beautiful room, so long as they promised not to disturb any of the concentrating scholars? Killian signed his name in the log.
The Reading Room was designed to mimic the great hall of a prosperous Elizabethan house with high-trussed roof, marble fireplace and two-tiered chandeliers lit by dozens of electric candles. The Head of Reference, Dr. Anne Frezel, a spry, elderly woman sporting a gray bob, glanced up from the journal she was reading at the circulation desk and greeted him with her typical formality: “Good Morning, Justice Quinn.”
“Dr. Frezel,” replied Killian, tersely. There was no good reason for this continuing reserve on Frezel’s part; Killian had been coming to this same dang library for years, she knew him well, and they should have long since graduated into addressing each other by first names. But no, this eminent scholar on “Women in the Elizabethan Era,” who was obviously a knee-jerk reactionary and left-leaning feminist, who fit the mold of a faithful reader of The New York Times and Washington Post, would never dream of letting down her guard in the company of a demon conservative like Killian Quinn. He was, after all, a crude bigot, a misogynist, an old-school paternalist, who had declared himself a vocal critic of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment back in the ’70s and early ’80s. How could a man like that ever be forgiven? Never mind that he believed gender rights were included in
the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Killian plucked a white call slip from the neat stack on the circulation desk and scribbled the memorized call number for volume five of his favorite Shakespeare edition. He handed the slip to Dr. Frezel. Although his handwriting was disastrous and near illegible, the Head of Reference never had trouble interpreting his requests. Dr. Frazel nodded and disappeared into the rare book stacks behind the desk. Maybe her antipathy was more personal than political. She must have witnessed Katherine chatting playfully with him in the Reading Room on occasion, maybe even saw them disappearing into Katherine’s office, closing the door and turning the blinds behind them. Maybe Dr. Frazel didn’t want to see her colleague hurt by a married man.
Good God, if Dr. Frazel ever told a reporter about them, it would all be over, everything, his entire life’s work. Killian’s spine tingled at the thought. But she could never know for certain. Katherine certainly wouldn’t tell.
A dozen or so scholars sat hunched around the oak tables, their desk lights focused on the rare books perched in foam support cradles to protect their fragile spines. None of these quiet PhD students or visiting scholars ever seemed to register Killian’s presence. Katherine wasn’t sitting with any of them. Killian hoped to spy his lover on one of the twin balconies that flanked the main body of the Reading Room, pulling a book from an ornate, carved shelf, but again he was disappointed.
Dr. Frezel returned with Killian’s large book, which she handed over gingerly, both hands beneath it. He nodded thanks and lumbered across the room to his favorite seat, beneath a stained-glass window depicting the Seven Ages of Man as taken from Jaques’s famous speech in As You Like It. He laid the volume in a foam support.
Killian rubbed his fingertips over the smooth cover of this beloved edition of Shakespeare’s work, published at Oxford in 1770. He was fond of its decorative features—the spray motif and raised band along the book’s spine; the silken green-and-white headband and smooth gilt edges; the gold-tooled image of Shakespeare leaning against a tower of books that was impressed into its crimson, calf-leather cover—but his main reason for choosing the Oxford edition instead of some other was historical rather than decorative: its date of publication. Nothing like sitting here in the Old Reading Room, turning these fragile pages, imagining that James Madison owned a copy of this same six-volume set in his own personal library. Madison himself, sitting at his desk in his Montpelier estate, fire roaring, candles lit, perusing these pages. It was impossible to conceive of anything like that happening when you were reading a paperback Shakespeare in private chambers or, worse still, a digital version on a computer screen or e-reader.
Killian opened the volume to the first play, Timon of Athens, and skimmed the archaic text, the S’s printed like elongated F’s. Although he loved the entire play, he was not in the mood for the first three acts of Timon, which detail the protagonist’s generosity to his fellow Athenians and the meaty drama of his downfall: Timon’s loss of fortune and subsequent discovery that his so-called friends are fickle and cruel. Instead he flipped to the last two acts, when Timon has retreated into the wilderness as a hermit and misanthrope, unwashed and feral, and berates anyone who visits him.
Who dares, who dares,
In purity of manhood stand upright
And say this man’s a flatterer? If one be,
So are they all, for every grise of fortune
Is smooth’d by that below: the learned pate
Ducks to the golden fool; all’s obliquy.
There’s nothing level in our cursed natures
But direct villainy.
Oh yes, railing against humanity was the right stuff for today. Killian felt like standing on his chair and shouting “Amen!” across the mock-Elizabethan reading room. The vast majority of people in the world really were fools at best, villains at worst, and even the wisest amongst them would happily defer to an idiot if he might get rich in doing so. Justice Quinn’s long experience with the law had exposed him to countless cases of greedy plaintiffs and negligent defendants, prodigal children and wicked parents, narcissists, egomaniacs, outright cutthroats. The world was packed full of evil human beings, billions and billions of them, driven by devilish instincts, fallen natures, original sin. Brother turned against brother, friend murdered friend, collaborator stole from collaborator, and together they lied to their investors. People were bad—pretty much without exception. The majesty of the law, especially American constitutional law, was rooted in its mechanism for balancing one group’s dark tendencies with another’s, equally foul. Competing interests stabilized like immobile rams, their horns locked in battle. They balanced in federalism or triangulated in checks and balances, countering one another to create a stable foundation. Let men be evil so long as the law muzzles their wickedness structurally. If Timon were alive today, he would of course concede the effectiveness of American institutions. Timon would accept the U.S. Constitution, at least how it worked in its root conception. He would understand the truth in Killian’s jurisprudential claims, unlike certain unnamed editors of major East Coast newspapers or Ivy League law reviews. Now, if only the other justices on the Court would respect the text as written and stop projecting their ill-conceived personal desires onto the nation’s foundational source of law.
A set of slender fingers slipped over the top of his weathered page, tiny, like a child’s, with impeccably trim and clean nails that had no polish.
“Timon of Athens? Again?”
Killian smiled at Katherine. “A person can never have too much Timon.”
“You must be in a bad mood.”
“Less so with each and every line. Less still with you before me.”
The openness of Katherine’s expression, her sparkling wide-set eyes, the smoothness of her skin—it was all so striking. She bit a swatch of skin off her bottom lip, but Katherine’s brightness shined on, obliterating the dark pits of Killian’s anger and frustration. My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun, he thought. No way Shakespeare had a mistress that looked like Katherine Kirsch.
“Come to my office.” Katherine turned to go.
He kept himself from staring at her ass. He waited until she was gone, and then stood and heaved his book out of the foam support, cradling it with both arms as he approached the circulation desk. Dr. Frezel was studying him with an undisguised, sly squint, and Killian’s throat caught. Of course, she had to know what was going on between him and Katherine. Dr. Frezel was too smart not to know.
He laid the heavy book on her desk, tapped his fingers on its leather cover, and offered the Head of Reference such a frank and wide grin that it could be nothing other than a taunt.
“I won’t be needing this anymore today, Dr. Frezel.” Killian’s aggressive stare still dared the woman to speak. “Thank you very much.”
Katherine awaited him downstairs, where the ceilings were neither high nor stately, and the decor invoked the 20th century institutional rather than pseudo-Elizabethan court. Fluorescent bulbs in a paneled ceiling, blue wall-to-wall polyester carpet that had nothing in common with the rugs of Shakespeare’s era. It would have been nice had Katherine pulled the blinds on her office’s interior window and waited for his arrival in the plush armchair, but no such luck; she was standing beside her desk. Killian sighed, closed the door, and took her hand. Katherine slipped it out of his greedy clasp, laughing.
“Not so fast, buster.”
He collapsed in the armchair, which expelled a faint cloud of dust, crossed his legs and shrugged, as if to say: All right, what? What do you want from me?—the same gesture he offered his prospective clerks in their interviews. “Nice to see you, Katherine. Been a long time.”
“Four months.”
“Really?” The Justice pulled his brow to feign surprise. “That long?”
Katherine’s smile was thin, but she didn’t look hurt.
Killian shook his head at the mysterious workings of time. “I’m sorry. I lose track in the sp
ring. End of term, you know. You look well, though.”
Katherine showed only the slightest trace of a tremor in the contours of her round face. So calm and even-tempered, such cool composure, leaning against her desk with her arms crossed. She had a way of making him feel he wasn’t in control of their relationship, even though he was setting all the terms and limits. She radiated dignity, which had to be the by-product of her wealthy and disciplined childhood in South Carolina, the daughter of a senior vice president at Sonoco, who, rumor had it, was a man of impeccable values and scratch golfing skills. Katherine had once told Killian, with mortification but detectable pride, that her family used finger bowls at their family meals.
“I can’t say you look happy to see me.”
“I’m quite happy to see you, Killian.”
He pressed his fingertips against his lips, but immediately disliked the preposterous gesture, which seemed like something an English professor or psychoanalyst might do when trying to lord his superiority over students or patients. “I’ve missed you.”
“Four months without a word is a funny way of showing it.” Katherine unfurled her arms and sat on her desk.
The recessed fluorescent bulbs in Katherine’s office were covered by frosted plastic paneling and those ubiquitous ceiling tiles, PVCs—whatever that actually stood for.
“Yoo-hoo, Killian, over here.” Katherine waved.
“I’m sorry.” Killian sighed. “It’s not you. I’m just irritated by work.”
“I can tell.”
“No, worse than irritated—I’m enraged and infuriated. I’m surrounded by intelligent men and women—bright people who I respect and even like—but every day I’m confronted with greater evidence that most of these esteemed colleagues of mine simply do not understand the proper role of the judicial branch in our triangulated system of government. They don’t get it, Katherine, what we’re supposed to do and not do. They refuse to let the Constitution function as designed. And it’s been like this for the full twenty years of my tenure, as you know, as I’ve said many times. I’ve had this argument with them ad infinitum, and the world at large, like some raving Jeremiah, so I wouldn’t say I’m surprised by it, but still it’s frustrating to have the one or two integral, majority decisions of my career undermined and overturned by judges who rely on such obviously flawed logic. It’s depressing. Did you read that New York Times editorial?”
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