His eyes left hers. The painting above her head was an original Sam Francis. He liked it a lot. He liked Michele a lot, as well. He sipped his wine, feeling as buoyant as he had in months.
“So,” Michele began.
“So.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Fine.”
“Aren’t we the jolly twosome, though.”
Michele smiled. “Either that or liars.”
They laughed uneasily.
“So what have you been doing lately?” Michele asked finally, re-crossing her legs, fiddling.
He thought of his slavering pursuit of Lucinda Finders, of his conspiracy to blackmail Chas Stone, of his endangerment of Esther Preston. “Nothing I’m proud of,” he said. “How about you?”
She shrugged. “The usual. I help out one day a week at Heather’s school. That’s fun.”
“Doing what?”
“I mostly help the art teacher get the materials distributed and collected. Monitor at recess. Go along on field trips. You know. It gives me an idea of how Heather spends her day, at least.”
“Right.”
“I’m pleased with the school, D.T. They’re doing a nice job.”
For what Michele was paying them they should be making Einsteins by the gross. “It’s nice you’re involved like that,” he told her.
Her dimples told him she was pleased. “I’m doing something new with my own art, too. I’ve gotten kind of serious about it again.”
“Good.”
“Want to see?”
“Sure.”
She hopped up and led him toward the rear of the house, to the servant’s room that was now her studio. Much of her old work was on the walls; some he liked, some were of a formlessness he couldn’t bear. The piece of sculpture that had been the major focus of her work while they were married—a bronze rendering of an Amazon contorted in unbearable agony—was now headless and consigned to the far corner of the room. He gestured at it. “Accident?”
“Statement.”
He raised a brow.
“Not about women; just about me.”
She said nothing further. He made his way through scattered cans and jars and tubes of paint and joined her in the center of the room. She stood next to a large easel which was draped with a thick black cloth. “Ready?” she asked.
He nodded.
Michele flipped away the shroud. “Da Daaa.”
It was a piece of glass, the size and shape of a window or a canvass, half-covered with bright paint: abstract, wild, electric. “Glass?” he asked.
She nodded, eyeing the piece critically. “Do you know glass is perpetually melting, D.T.? Did you know that after a period of time all windows are thicker at the bottom than at the top? So with glass I get a kinetic element, but so subtle it will never be apparent in my lifetime. I enjoy not knowing what my painting will eventually be saying. It gives me, I don’t know, a link with the future.”
“With glass you might get a link but you also might get breakage.”
“I know, and I’m sure a few accidents will happen. But in between those times just think how careful people will be with my work.” Michele’s eyes sparkled. “As opposed to the canvasses they toss around so negligently. None of that with the Conway Double Panes.”
“Double?”
“I’m going to paint both sides. Abstract on one, photo-realism on the other. You get tired of one you just flip it over, et voilà—new mood, new color, new ambiance.”
“Sounds good.”
“I’m buying a gallery, too, did I tell you?”
“No.”
“Downtown. Michele’s. Just a small place, so I can exhibit my friends, and me, and maybe some unknowns as well. I think it’ll even make some money. Eventually. Joyce Tuttle’s going to run it for me.”
“I thought Joyce was marrying money.”
“That fell through. Seems he was rather seriously into wearing women’s clothes.”
“I hope the gallery does well, Michele. Really.”
“Thanks, D.T. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands these days, since Heather’s in school or at ballet class all day. I don’t know, I wanted to start doing something, you know? Instead of just being something? Does that make sense?” Her wide eyes begged the answer he quickly gave.
“Sure.”
“I know a lot of very talented artists who haven’t got the gimmick it takes to break into the established galleries, and, well, I think I’d be contributing something, don’t you?”
“No doubt about it.”
“Do you mean it? Or do you think I’m being silly?”
“It’s a very worthwhile project, Michele. Go for it.”
She took his hand, inclined her head to his shoulder. He wrapped her with an arm. “I’m relieved, D.T. It’s odd that I still need your approval, isn’t it?”
“You’re not looking for approval, Michele; you’re just making conversation.”
She paused, and surveyed the studio, and nodded silently, confirming something that seemed important. “Let’s go back,” she said, and returned him to the den.
They retook their places and regrasped their drinks, then toasted each other silently. “You said something about being depressed.”
“Well, you know me. Even when I feel good I get depressed because I’m not depressed.”
“Any specific cause?”
“Only my life. It seems to be getting away from me.”
Michele’s eyes glinted. “Are you succumbing to one of those tiresome midlife crises, D.T.? I would have thought you were more original than that.”
He shrugged. “I’m just succumbing. Period.”
“Everything all right with you and Barbara?”
“Let’s just say everything’s the same.”
Michele blinked. “I imagine the two of you together, you know.”
“Doing what?”
“Having sex.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Isn’t that outré? I keep wondering what she does for you that I never did.”
He only smiled.
“Okay, D.T. Is she better in bed than I was? That’s what I really want to know.” Her laugh was too nervous to make his answer easy.
“She’s different, Michele. Only different.”
“Different how? Just out of curiosity.”
He tried to fend her off. “What makes you curious?”
She shrugged. “I’d just like to think that despite the rest of our problems our sex life was always pretty good.”
“It was. No question.”
“But not good enough.”
“It had a lot to overcome,” D.T. said, and kept himself from glancing at his surroundings, then countered her question with one of his own. “How about George? How’s he do between the sheets? Not that it’s any of my business.”
“Are you implying I’ve engaged in premarital sex, D.T.?”
“Yes.” He grinned but Michele didn’t match it.
“George is … delicate. Tasteful, one might say.”
D.T. smiled maliciously. “Too bad.”
Michele started to reply but she was interrupted by the arrival of the dervish that was their daughter. Heather scampered to his side and threw herself into his lap and kissed him. He kissed her back and squeezed her. She scrambled off his legs and snuggled in beside him, pressed tightly against his flank by the fat leather arms of the chair. He dropped his own arm across her shoulders.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Daddy,” she said while still wriggling toward comfort.
“Happy Thanksgiving to you, honey. How’re you doing?”
“Fine.”
“How’s school?”
“Okay. I’m going to be in a play. Will you come see me?”
“Sure. What’s the play about?”
“Germs.”
“Great. What else have you been doing?”
“Playing with Katra.”
“Playing what?”
“Ms. Pac-Man.
I beat her every time.”
“What’s Ms. Pac-Man?”
“A video game. Geez, Daddy. Katra has Atari; I have Intellivision. I think Intellivision’s better, don’t you?”
“Unquestionably.”
Michele stood up. “I’ll have to leave you two alone for a minute,” she said. “I think Mirabelle needs my help.” She winked at D.T. and left the room.
Heather wriggled even closer to his side. Her hair was tied with yellow bows and smelled like lemons. Her skin was a confection. “Are you a happy girl?” he asked her, as he always did.
“Yes.”
“No problems?”
“I have to have braces.”
“Really? When?”
“A few years from now. My teeth are crooked. See?”
She showed him. They were. “What do you know about Thanksgiving?” he asked as she closed her mouth over her orthodontist’s future fortune. “Did you study it in school?”
“We studied it last year. The Indians and the Pilgrims and that one, what’s his name?”
“Squanto?”
“Yes. Him. He showed them how to use fish. Do they still do that, Daddy, put fish in the ground to make things grow? It seems awfully gross.”
“They use mostly chemicals now, I think. Have you thought about what you’re thankful for today?”
“I’m thankful for you and Mommy.” Her face would have converted Mencken.
“I’m glad, honey. You have a whole lot of things to be thankful for, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“You’re smart, and pretty, and healthy, and you have a nice house and nice clothes, and nice friends, and a mommy and daddy who love you very much. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?”
“Uh huh.”
“A lot of children in the world don’t have all those things, did you know that? Lots of them don’t have any of them.”
“I know.”
“Lots of kids are hungry every day. And sick. And live in the streets because they don’t have a house. I just want you to think a little about those kids on a day like this, okay? Just for a little bit?”
“Okay.” She turned and looked at him. “But what should I do about them, Daddy? I don’t know what I should do about those people.” Her voice was a tearful plea.
He had blown it again, had tried to do his duty and as usual it was all more complicated than he knew, and he had caused his daughter needless grief. She had thought more about those kids than he had, and like everyone else she didn’t know what to do and he couldn’t begin to tell her.
“You don’t have to do anything right now, honey. Not a thing. Right now it’s only important that you think about them for a minute today, and maybe pray for them, and not pretend they don’t exist, like lots of people do. Then maybe some day when you’re older there’ll be other things you can do.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, cast a vote. Write a check. Smile a smile, maybe. Lots of things.” He tried to smile himself.
“I have a nice smile. My teacher said so.”
“You have the nicest smile I’ve ever seen.”
He squeezed her roughly. Like her mother moments earlier, she tilted her head against his chest. He was miserably ecstatic.
“Will you be glad when George gets here, honey?”
“I guess.”
“Is he over here a lot?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does he stay all night sometimes?”
“Why would he do that? He has his own house.”
“Have you seen it? His house, I mean?”
“Once.”
“Is it nice?”
“It’s okay.”
“Is it big?”
“Not as big as this. Why do you always ask me about George, Daddy?”
“I don’t always ask you about George, honey. I just want to make sure you and George are friends, that’s all.”
“We’re friends. Can we do something, Daddy?”
“Sure. Why don’t you show me your room?” he said. “Maybe we can play a game.”
“What game?
“Whatever you want.”
“Donkey Kong?”
“How about Crazy Eights? Remember how we used to play Crazy Eights a lot?”
“Okay,” she said, and led him out of the den and up the staircase and into the marvel that was her room. They fooled with toys and dolls and books and records, played Crazy Eights and Donkey Kong and Simon Says, and she beat him at all of them. The next thing he knew Michele was in the doorway, telling him that George had arrived, asking if he wanted to come down. He left Heather reluctantly and followed his ex-wife down the stairs and shook hands with the man she intended to marry in three months. His replacement.
Michele gave them wine and they retired to the den to talk. George had seen a play he’d liked, and a concert he hadn’t, and he was intelligent and articulate and amusing in explaining each reaction. By the time dinner was served he found himself enjoying George, as he was enjoying Heather and Michele. They seemed a family already, a happy one, and there was much laughter and affection and good feeling and good food and so it surprised him greatly when Michele got up in the middle of the meal and fled the room in tears.
TRIAL
SEVENTEEN
“Jerome Fitzgerald on two,” Bobby E. Lee announced.
D.T. dropped his gum into the wastebasket and pushed a button. “Jerome. How are you and your pension plan?”
“I’m calling about the Preston case, D.T.”
“I thought you might be.”
D.T. had spoken with Jerome Fitzgerald twice in the three months since he’d filed the complaint against Nathaniel Preston in November. The first was to arrange a time for a hearing on Jerome’s demurrer that the complaint failed to plead facts sufficient to state a cause of action. Jerome had cried long and hard at the hearing, arguing that Mrs. Preston had no legally cognizable claim against her former husband, and that even if she had possessed a claim at one time she had slept on her rights to the extent that legal limitations and equitable laches had long ago worked to bar the suit. Jerome had lost on all counts, though just barely, the law and motion judge making clear through a spectrum of scowls and scoffs his reluctance to rule in D.T.’s favor and his confidence that Jerome’s points might well prevail after evidence was introduced at trial.
Their second conversation had been a result of Jerome’s attempt to take Esther Preston’s deposition. On that one, D.T. had bluffed and won. He’d carefully outlined the torment of Mrs. Preston’s disease, and supplemented his call with a doctor’s opinion, obtained by Rita Holloway from her boyfriend, to the effect that the rigors of a deposition would be seriously harmful to Mrs. Preston’s already delicate neurology. When Jerome had persisted, D.T. had threatened to go to court for a protective order that would stop the deposition, armed with a videotape so heartrending it would be guaranteed to convince any judge with tear ducts that the poor woman was not up to it. When even that hadn’t been enough, D.T. had threatened to take Esther Preston’s predicament to the papers, as illustrative of the plight of the handicapped in a heartless and legalistic world, and of the burden placed on public programs by the failure of private individuals to do their duty to those who depended on them, e.g., the wealthy physician who abandoned his impoverished former spouse to the public dole.
With that, Jerome had folded his tent, had made do with D.T.’s barely relevant answers to interrogatories and his unhelpful responses to Jerome’s request for admissions of matters of fact. D.T. had prepared both documents in the wee hours of the night before they were due, with the help of half a fifth of Jack Daniels and a copy of his law school yearbook opened to a picture of Jerome Fitzgerald accepting an award from the regional vice president of his legal fraternity. The award honored Jerome’s significant achievements in the study of law, which Jerome had most often accomplished by tearing pages out of assigned journal articles before anyone else had a chance to consult them.
&
nbsp; Now it was summary judgment Jerome was after, claiming that the facts of the case were undisputed, that the only questions at issue were legal ones, whether fraud had occurred, whether Mrs. Preston had a legal interest in her husband’s medical degree that could be asserted at this late date, whether statutes of limitation and laches barred all claims. Jerome had filed an affidavit of Dr. Preston in support of his motion, seventeen pages of self-righteous disclaimers and outraged assertions covering every phrase of the complaint against him.
D.T. was worried. His case was weak at best, despite Rita Holloway’s efforts to improve it through the acquisition of evidence, and if the judge bought the Preston affidavit at face value then D.T. and Mrs. Preston would be tossed out on their ears and the doctor would be off the hook forever. D.T.’s plan, if it began to look bad at the hearing, was to call the doctor to the stand in person, to insist that Preston’s evidence be given under oath rather than by affidavit, so D.T. would at least have the pleasure of working the doctor over on cross-examination before final judgment was entered.
But perhaps Jerome would make another settlement offer. The last time they’d talked, Jerome had made a firm offer of twelve-five. Nuisance value, no more. D.T. had rejected it out of hand. Confidently, to Jerome. Nervously, to himself.
“Dr. Preston told me he’d been served with a subpoena for the hearing Thursday, D.T.,” Jerome said, his voice thin with betrayal.
“Good,” D.T. said.
“But we’ve filed his affidavit, D.T. There won’t be any need for live testimony.”
“There will be if I have anything to say about it. You can’t cross-examine an affidavit.”
“But—”
“But nothing. If you prevail with only that pathetic affidavit as evidence I’ll be in the court of appeals before nightfall.”
“Well, I just wish you’d talked to me before you had him served. Dr. Preston said it was embarrassing to have the sheriff lurking in his waiting room.”
“Good,” D.T. said again.
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