The Little Death

by Michael Nava

  “I can think of plenty of reasons for not joining your firm,” I replied, “none of them related to being gay.”

  “They aren’t why you’ll turn me down,” he said.

  I laid my fork aside and glanced out the window. It was luminous with summer light. Gold and I had a variation of this conversation nearly every time we talked. Since each of our positions was set in stone, the only thing our talking accomplished was to get us angry at each other.

  “Every choice closes doors,” I said, “and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they’re surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did. I don’t invite unhappiness, Aaron. Avoiding conflict may not be the noblest principle, but it works for me.”

  “Can you say you’re happy?”

  “No, can you?”

  “No, but there are substitutes.”

  I didn’t need to ask him what his substitutes were, I knew. Work was at the top of the list. In fact, work was the whole of his list. It had been mine, too, but recently I’d lost a big case and word had it I was burned out. Maybe I was, but if so, what was my alternative to work? I had never thought to cultivate any. The waitress came around and I offered her my cup for coffee, promising myself I would sit down later and think about the future, hoping it would creep up on me before I had the chance. I told Aaron about my jailhouse interviews.

  “Hugh Paris,” Gold said, “that name is familiar.”

  “Think he trades stock on insider information?”

  “Maybe he’s rich.” I shook my head. “You’d be surprised,” Gold continued, “at the number of the rich in our little town. They may not control their money, or know exactly where it comes from, but it dribbles in, from trusts, stocks, annuities.”

  “Whether or not he was rich,” I said, “I wish he’d talked to me. He looked like he was carrying a secret he needed badly to unload.”

  “Another missed possibility?” Gold asked as he reached for the check. I let him take it.

  It was a little after eight when I got to my office on the fourth floor of the courthouse. There were already people waiting in the reception room, thumbing through the inevitable packets of official looking papers that criminal defendants seem to generate as they go through the system. The receptionist had not yet come in, so they stopped me as I walked through and I tried to answer their questions. Finally, I made it to the door that separated us from our clients. I walked down the narrow corridor, made narrower by the presence of file cabinets, for which there was no other space, pushed against the walls. I passed my small, sunless office and headed toward the lounge.

  Frances Kelly, the supervising attorney, sat at a table with the daily legal journal spread out in front of her. She let a cigarette burn between her fingers, lifting it to her lips just as the ash fell, dropping on the lapel of her jacket.

  She looked up at me as I poured myself some coffee. “Did you know Roger Chaney?” she asked.

  “Not well,” I answered. “He left the office just as I was coming in.”

  “Excellent lawyer,” she said. “He and I trained together, shared an office. He helped me prepare for my first trial.”

  “Is there something about him in the journal?” I asked, sitting across from her as she lit another cigarette.

  “He’s being arraigned today in federal court in San Francisco,” she said, “on a conspiracy to distribute cocaine charge.”

  “Roger Chaney?” I asked, incredulously. “I thought you were going to tell me he’d been elevated to the bench.”

  “With Roger,” she replied, “it could’ve gone either way.”

  “Are the charges true, then?”

  “I know he had a very successful practice defending some big dealers, and he was making a lot of money, but that was never the lure of the law for him.”

  “No? Then what?”

  She rose heavily, an elegant fat woman in a linen suit with black hair and beautiful, clear eyes, and ambled to the coffee urn. “He was an intellectual virtuoso,” she said, “convinced he could talk circles around any other lawyer or judge, and he was right. But the courtroom isn’t the real world.”

  “He thought he could get away with something?”

  “We must presume him innocent,” she said, piously, “but he had that kind of vanity.” After a second she added, “So do you.”

  She headed for the door and motioned for me to follow. We went into her office, the only one with a window. Outside, a thin layer of smog rose in the direction of San Jose, but the view to the brown hills surrounding the university was clear as they rolled beyond the palm trees and red tile roofs.

  Frances was saying, “I sometimes think really brilliant people shouldn’t be permitted to practice law. They get bored too easily and cause trouble.”

  “Are you about to pass along some advice?”

  She laughed. “I just wanted to know how you are, Henry. You’ve been with us three months and we haven’t had much chance to talk.” She referred to my forced transfer from the main office in San Jose to this branch office. The topic of conversation, my mental health, now came into focus as sharply as the yellow rose in the vase at the edge of Frances’ desk. I was annoyed by both.

  “Considering that my transfer was against my will, I’m fine.”

  “I had nothing to do with the transfer,” she said. “You’re not being put out to pasture, just given a rest after your last trial.”

  “Which I lost,” I said. “That was the real reason I got kicked down from felony trials to arraignments.”

  “The jury convicted him,” she said, “and no one faults your work which, considering the circumstances, was excellent.” I didn’t know whether by circumstances she referred to the fact that only a few I.Q. points separated my client from a vegetable or the fact that he used an axe handle to bludgeon his elderly parents to death. A series of coroner’s photographs passed through my mind. Pained by the recollection, I touched my fingers to my forehead. She caught the gesture and tactfully looked away.

  “The circumstances were of no interest to the jury,” I said. “They sent him to Death Row.”

  “That’s on appeal.”

  “And I was farmed out here, to rusticate.”

  “You object to my company?” She expelled a gust of cigarette smoke that passed through the sunlight like a cloud.

  “But seriously,” I replied.

  “To rest,” she said, “from the pressures of trial court. I could see the burn-out on your face when you first got here.”

  “Send me back,” I said. “I’ve done nothing but interview clients for other lawyers and sit in arraignment court haggling with the D.A. over public nuisance cases.”

  “Whether you go back is not my call.”

  “Whether?” I demanded. “Not when? Call San Jose and tell them that I didn’t crack up, after all. Tell them I’m burned out from the other end. I mean, you all think I’m demoralized or exhausted from my work, but I’m not. It’s the rest of my life I’m burned out on. This job keeps me going.” I heard the tremor in my voice so I cut myself short.

  “I’m not proposing to take your job away,” she replied. “Everyone in the office knows you’re one of the best lawyers we have.” She put out her cigarette in an onyx ashtray and lit another. “The office has just hired a dozen new lawyers, most fresh out of law school. They’re looking for someone to train them. The job is yours if you want it.”

  “That’s the second-best offer I’ve had this morning,” I said. She looked puzzled. “It’s nothing. I don’t see myself as a teacher.”

  “You have so much to pass along.”

  “I’m thirty-three, Frances, not sixty-three. I’m not ready to sit on the veranda and tell war stories.”

  “Think about it,” she said. She noticed me looking at the rose and she plucked it from the vase and handed it to me.

  “And if I don’t t
ake the job, my exile continues.”

  “The rose is from my garden,” she replied.

  “My favorite flower,” I said, standing.

  In my office, I dropped the rose into the trash can and sat down. There was a pile of cases to be reviewed before I went down to arraignment court that afternoon. There was also a list of clients to be interviewed and advised, and cases to be assigned to other lawyers. I opened the first file and thought, immediately, of Hugh Paris sitting in his cell downstairs. And here, I told myself, I sit in my cell upstairs. I dismissed the thought as self-pity compounded with a pang of lust. But the little room was too warm, suddenly, and I could not concentrate on the papers before me.

  I got up and went into the bathroom where I washed my face in cold water. Looking at the mirror, I studied that face carefully. I pressed my fingers, lightly, at the corners of my eyes, smoothing out the wrinkles and I looked, almost, twenty-five again. I could quit and start over, I told the reflection in the mirror. My eyes answered, start what over? What is there?

  Another lawyer came in, and I turned from the mirror, said hello to him and went back to my office.

  The morning dragged on as I shuffled files from one side of my desk to the other. Outside my office, I heard the babble of voices as the other lawyers interviewed clients and witnesses or hurried off to court shouting last minute questions about a legal issue or a particular judge’s temperament. I felt the excitement but did not share it.

  There comes a point in the career of every criminal defense lawyer when he realizes that what keeps him in practice are his prejudices not his principles. Suspicion of authority and contempt for the platitudes with which injustice too often cloaks itself can take you a long way but, ultimately, they are no substitute for the simple faith that what you are doing is right. It came to me, as I sat there buried in papers, that I had lost that faith.

  I left a message with Frances’s secretary that I wanted to see her after lunch, then went off to a nearby bar and had a couple of drinks. As I sat on the barstool cracking peanuts and sipping my bourbon, my thoughts veered back to Hugh Paris.

  It was nothing as trivial as lust. Seeing him had precipitated this crisis because I had not been able to help him, though I wanted to. And, after all, what did my help amount to? Getting someone less time in jail than otherwise or even getting him off were often temporary respites in long-term downward slides. That was the extent of the assistance I could offer—dispensing placebos to the terminally ill.

  Frances was in her office when I knocked at the door. She beckoned me in and I sat down, swallowing the mint I’d been chewing to mask the bourbon on my breath. It was important that she not know I had been drinking.

  “Frances, I’ve made a decision.”

  “You’ll teach the class?”

  “No.” I gripped my hands together in my lap. “I’m quitting.”

  “What?” She stared at me.

  “I called San Jose and told them. I wanted to tell you, too. I wanted to thank you for your many kindnesses—” I stopped. The air between us buzzed with inarticulate feeling.

  “Henry, you can’t mean this. Take a few days off, a few weeks if you want. Travel.”

  I shook my head. “I hate traveling. I have no hobbies. I’m thirty-three years old and all I know about life is what I learned in law school or the inside of a courtroom. And it’s pathetically little, Frances.” She reached for a cigarette. “I know I’m a little old for it, but I believe I’m having an identity crisis.”

  “That’s no reason to quit your job,” she replied.

  “This is more than my job, it’s my life. And it’s not enough.” I rose. “Do you understand?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Not very clearly.” I sat down again. “I met a man in the jail this morning, an inmate. I wanted to help him, to offer him some kind of comfort, something human. But all I knew how to do was deliver speeches.”

  “We offer people what no one else can give them,” Frances said, “a possible way out of their trouble. Is that so insignificant?”

  “Of course not, when it works. But so often it doesn’t, and anyway,” I laid my hands on her desk, “what does that give me?”

  She sighed. “Well that’s the key, isn’t it? If you’ve reached the point of asking that question then whatever you’re getting from it is obviously not enough.”

  “Wish me luck.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll wish you’ll change your mind.”

  “I won’t.”

  “All right,” she said, “then good luck.”

  I went back to my office and cleaned out my desk. Some of the other lawyers drifted in, stood around nervously, said a few well-intended words. By three o’clock I’d done nearly everything I needed to do to extricate myself from my job. Just before I left I called down to the jail. Hugh Paris had been bailed out by someone who signed the bail receipt as John Smith. I gathered up the last of my papers and left.

  2

  I WAS AWAKE THE SECOND I heard the movement in the shrubs outside the bedroom window. I glanced at the clock on the bed-stand; it was a little after three a.m. The soft but distinctive shuffle of footsteps echoed outside and then I heard a quick rap at the front door. I got out of bed, pulled on a pair of pants and went into the living room. I stood near the door and listened. The last time I had been awakened at that hour was by a disgruntled, drunken client who wanted to break my legs. He might have, too, had he not passed out while we were talking.

  There was another knock, louder and more urgent. I peered through the peephole. Hugh Paris stood shivering in the dark. He wore a pair of jeans and a gray polo shirt. I was startled to see him but not surprised. In the two weeks since I’d seen him at the jail, I’d thought of him often, the way one thinks of unfinished business. The thought of him nagged at the back of my mind for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was his beautiful, calm face. One could ascribe any kind of character, from priest to libertine, to his remote and handsome face. A breeze blew his hair across his forehead. He touched his knuckles to the door and rapped harder. I opened it enough for him to see me.

  “Don’t turn on any lights,” he said. “I think I was followed.”

  “Come in.” I opened the door a little wider and he slipped through. I ordered him to stand still and patted him down for weapons. He wasn’t even carrying a wallet. “All right,” I said. “Come over to my desk. I have a reading lamp that will give us enough light without attracting attention.” He followed me and sat down. I touched the light switch and his face leapt forward from the darkness like a flame.

  He said, “I could use a drink.”

  “First tell me how you got my address.”

  “I called your office yesterday, and when they told me you quit I convinced the receptionist that we’d gone to college together and I was passing through town and wanted to surprise you.” He shivered. I went over to the kitchen counter and brought back a bottle of Jack Daniels and two glasses. As he drank, I noticed for the first time that he was about my age—not younger, as I’d remembered. The skin beneath his eyes was pouched with fatigue, as though he had awakened from a long sleep. He set his empty glass on the desk, and I moved the bottle toward him. The liquor brought the color back to his face.

  “When someone comes to visit me at this hour, I assume it’s not just to chat,” I said.

  “I need a place to stay tonight.”

  “And you don’t have any better friends?” He poured himself another drink. I caught the glint of his watch. It was very thin and elegant, mounted on a black leather strap. I had seen watches like that before. They went along with trust funds, prep schools and names ending with Roman numerals.

  Hugh was saying something. I asked, “What?”

  “You asked me if I had any better friends and I said no. I came down from the city.”

  “And you were followed? By whom?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said, and, as if as an afterthought he added, “I o
nly need the bed for the night.” His inflection was sexual and I thought about it for a second before responding.

  “As flattering as it is, I can’t believe you came here to proposition me,” I said, “which is not to say that couldn’t be part of the deal. But why don’t you tell me what you really want.”

  He smiled, charmingly, ruefully. “All right, Henry. I may not look like it but I come from money. Old and famous money. A lot of it has been spent to keep me out of San Francisco.”

  “Why?”

  “My grandfather controls the money, and he hates me.”

  “Because you’re gay?”

  “That probably has something to do with it,” he said, lightly. “There have been other problems through the years.”

  “Drugs?” I guessed, remembering the circumstances of his arrest.

  “You’ve seen hypes before?” I nodded. He held his right arm out beneath the dim yellow light. I saw bluish bruises clustered at intervals up and down his vein. They were faint and there were no recent marks or scabs.

  “You stopped using?”

  “Six months ago. I told my grandfather. He was not impressed.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Robert Paris,” he said, as if each syllable was significant.

  I thought for a second the name meant something to me but recognition faded as quickly as it came.

  “The name is not familiar.”

  “No? It doesn’t mean anything to most people but I thought you might recognize it.” I shook my head and he shrugged. “I think he had me followed tonight.”

  “Why? If he hates you, why should he concern himself with your whereabouts?”

  “Money. I have certain rights to the family fortune,” he said, lifting his glass. “My grandfather would like to extinguish them.”

  “You mean with some legal action?”

  “No,” he replied, softly, “I mean murder.” He drained his glass. I knew at once that he believed what he was saying, but I did not believe it. From my experience, I did not believe in premeditated murder any more than an agnostic believes in God and for the same reason; there never was any proof. Whether a killing occurs in an instant or years after some remembered slight, no killer is ever in his right mind when he kills. For me, that ruled out premeditation.