by Alon Preiss
“Has she ever been engaged?”
“Yes. In college. Informally engaged. I mean, she loved a man, and they certainly probably intended to marry, though it was never discussed, but they never did, and she still loves him. She’ll get married to someone else. Later. In a later book.”
“Whom will she marry?” Carly said whom with a pronounced emphasis, as though she had just learned the word and thought it offered her some added legitimacy, like those clear-lensed spectacles a celebrity might wear to make himself look smart.
Alice thought about Andrea’s future husband. What would Blake be like in this fictional universe?
“Jake,” Alice said. “Jake Morris.”
“Who is this man?”
“Older than her,” Alice said. “Rich guy.”
It sounded wrong. Alice backtracked.
“Maybe not.”
Carly took her last sip of mineral water. “I think not. I think that’s off-base.”
“Well, things can happen,” Alice said. “But I guess I see Andrea never marrying. Never aging. She’s not real.”
“She’ll never move out of that apartment in the sky?” Carly asked. “Never stop sunbathing topless on foreign beaches?”
“Never. Life doesn’t really complicate things for her.”
“The way it does for the rest of us,” Carly said. “You think that if Andrea were to age, the way the rest of us do, her life would grow complicated. The bad guys wouldn’t be one hundred percent bad — the good guys wouldn’t be so good? She’d fall into a complicated marriage?”
Alice laughed. “You made a mistake not to give me that wine. If I had wine, I’d still be talking. But I don’t, so I won’t.”
“This is my method,” Carly said urgently. “I need to know something about you, something inside your head that comes out rarely if ever, which can be inside my head when I’m portraying Andrea. Something I’ll know, which the audience will sense only unconsciously. Do you know what I mean, Alice? Do you understand?”
Alice understood. Alice thought about her secret; about her big secret, the one that made people sad, and that she didn’t like to discuss. She decided to pass. “I can tell you only that my husband is the nicest man you could ever want to meet. Everyone will tell you that, I think. I pity everyone who isn’t me right now.”
“I’m sure. Rich guy?”
“Not the richest you’ve ever known. But the richest I have. His name is Blake Maurow, and he’s — ”
Carly’s face filled with amused shock, and Alice stopped speaking.
“I know Blake!” Carly exclaimed. “I have some stupid line of sweaters or miniskirts, or some sort of shit like that — I don’t even know what it is, but my name’s on the label. It’s stupid shit that I wear on the show that girls would want to buy so they can be like me. When the corporation came to me to see if I was interested, it was Blake. I mostly deal with his peons, but whenever anything important happens, it’s Blake on the phone.”
She shook her head in amazement.
“Is this a coincidence?” Alice asked. “Did Blake give you my book?”
Carly brushed the idea aside. “Oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember how I even got the book.”
Alice sat back in silence.
“Blake Maurow.” Carly laughed, and then she seemed embarrassed to have laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said, staring down at her silverware. “Blake’s a wonderful man. I just — ”
An awkward pause followed, an implied insult hanging in the air only half-retracted. Then Carly shrugged, and looked right up into Alice’s eyes. “It’s strange, but from what I’d heard about you, I wanted to meet you to get more insight into Andrea. I thought I might even — I don’t know. Dye my hair black.”
Carly grabbed a carrot stick and bit into it; pieces of carrot mushed around in her mouth as she spoke. “Andrea wouldn’t be married to Blake Maurow, would she?” Alice’s mystery maven was not married to a rich man, many years older than she. She did not live in a rich man’s apartment overlooking the park.
Alice nodded, too vigorously. “She might! If she loved him!”
Carly looked dubious. “But don’t you see? She wouldn’t love him, would she?”
Alice wanted to get angry; she wanted to storm out. But more than that, she wanted this movie to happen. She wanted to be a best-selling mystery writer. She wanted the admiration of Hollywood. So she nodded. “You know,” she said, “I guess you’re right.” Then, with self-conscious jokiness, Alice said some awkward things about the weather, changing the subject as bluntly as she could. Carly smiled and laughed more artificially than she had before. It started to rain. From out of nothing. And lunch on the terrace was ruined.
Riding home in Carly’s limo, the quick brush of Carly’s lips still fresh on her cheek, Alice shut her eyes and let herself think back to her last shot at independent success. She could still picture her little office, the furniture she had rented herself, the stationery with her company name and logo at the top, the activity that hummed through the hallways during the boom years, the telephones ringing with important people asking to speak to her, her assistant typing contracts and letters and business solicitations, the fluorescent lights whirring and buzzing. Alice could see herself back then: walking a little straighter, talking a little louder, smiling a lot more deeply. And pursuing men with confidence, vigor, and notable success, back when such things were just for fun.
She wondered now whether Carly were right. Whether Andrea, pregnant and broke, would have married Blake (or, rather, “Jake”) or whether she would have stuck it out on her own. Did Andrea believe — and Alice, too, unconsciously, as Andrea’s creator — that you could never depend on a man to rescue you? As Blake had rescued her....
In Andrea’s life, what would Jake be like? What secrets would he be hiding? Would they be the same secrets that the real Blake was hiding, whatever they were? Would everything end in tears, a terrible mistake, Andrea and Jake careening toward an inevitably tragic conclusion? Of their own volition, awful bloody vignettes and shocking betrayals flitted through her head. Alice smiled. A good idea, maybe, for a book.
Harriet Pointer arrived at the state penitentiary at 10 in the morning, waited patiently as her various pieces of identification were examined, as her reason for the visit was checked and reconfirmed. Through it all, she was again pleased by the guard’s behavior: unceasingly polite, friendly, smiling, as though he were any other service provider. The prisoners she glimpsed through the bullet proof glass seemed also relatively content, like well-cared for employees in some unionized factory, from thirty years ago.
Harriet, as she approached the end of her middle-aged years, did not yearn for the beauty of her youth. She broadcast strength in her purposeful stride, in her proud smile and steely gaze, which together succeeded in deterring both danger and weak men. She wore the punishment of the years — nearly six decades of gravity, and the effects of having given birth on four separate occasions — as medals won in the fiercest of wars. Though she didn’t fully realize it, she remained physically striking. Some men still thought she was beautiful, though she didn’t know it — they were afraid to tell her, these secret admirers — and Harriet Pointer would have insisted that she didn’t care, anyway. She had an old woman’s voice, scratchy and withered, yet with just the hint of a girl’s youthful flirt, like a flashlight beam cutting through ash and smoke.
“Mrs. Pointer.” Harriet saw her client walking through the visitor’s area, sandwiched between two guards. He managed a small, shy smile. He was glad to see her. Harriet’s client was a convicted murderer named Eric. Small guy, unthreatening and polite. A stocky little white guy, with short curly hair, fat little nose in the middle of a round friendly face. Seemed like the type of nice boy a homely girl might bring home to her parents, a guy who’d probably get a pretty good job but not a spectacular one, accountant or insurance adjuster, something that would buy a little house and one kid’s college education. Eric really was a nice
enough guy, as a matter of fact, other than being a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, which in her heart she did not really believe that he was. She knew it intellectually. He had never denied it, never explained himself. He’d done it. She just could not emotionally believe that he had done it, and that she could still like him. So she forgot about it. She pushed it out of her mind. Eric was a nice little guy who’d been wronged — which was true, after all — and that’s all she chose to believe.
The visitors’ area was a big room, painted bright cheery shades of red and blue. The paint looked fresh, just as it had when she’d last been here, a year and a half earlier, for Eric’s first deposition. At first glance, just a happy place. Wives reunited with their husbands. Mothers and sons. Fathers hugging their children. Smiles all around, and laughter echoing through the room. Some forced gaiety, but perhaps no more than at an average family’s Thanksgiving meal.
Couple of years ago, in the middle of the night, someone came into Eric’s cell and stabbed him. That much was uncontested. Harriet thought that she could prove in court that the cell couldn’t have been unlocked without a guard opening one of the gates at either end of the cellblock, and that the cell itself couldn’t have been unlocked without a guard acting as accessory. In the middle of the night, someone came in while he slept, stabbed him twice, slipped out again. Footsteps pattering quickly away down the hallway. Blood was all over the sheets, but Eric wasn’t hurt that badly, just shaken. He spent the night in the prison hospital, the doctor sewed him up, sent him back to his cell after two days. Later, during recreation, some other inmate came up to Eric, said it was all a mistake. The assailant worked for a low-level drug-dealing convict somewhere in the system. He wanted to scare the snitch in the cell next door, as a warning, but everything had gotten screwed up. Eric kept himself willfully ignorant of the names of the prisoners who had wronged him. The guards were indemnified, and they couldn’t legally face any financial penalties for this. So here they were, suing the state.
“The state’s lawyer will ask you all sorts of questions that you won’t be able to answer,” she said, “just for the sake of asking you all sorts of questions that you won’t be able to answer.” She and Eric were in a small conference room at the back corner of the visitors’ area, a room as dim and gray as the visitors’ area was cheery. “He’s going to try to get you to say Yeah to some question you couldn’t possibly know the answer to, so that he can use it against you later. He wants to make it look like you’re lying when even he knows you’re just trying to help.” She made sure Eric was listening. “You understand that, right?” she said.
He nodded.
“So don’t answer anything you don’t know the answer to. Just say you don’t know. Don’t guess. Remember this: He knows you’re right. Everyone knows it. The state’s case is physically impossible to defend. We all know it. He’ll act confident, but he knows he’ll lose if you keep your wits. So keep your wits. Don’t let him intimidate you. All right?”
He nodded again.
Harriet and Eric sat in the little room, reviewing the events of the day he was stabbed. That day, he was on keep lock for getting into a fight with (or getting picked on by) another inmate during dinner the night before. The bell rang at 7 in the morning, waking him. Breakfast came, which he didn’t eat. Spent the morning reading a book; couldn’t remember if he ate lunch. At around three, he continued a chess game with an inmate locked up in the company one floor down and a few cells away, each of them sitting in their cells with their numbered chess boards, their moves relayed by quick shouts that bounced off the walls. Recreation period. That was a shower day, Eric recalled. He was permitted two of those a week. Dinner in his cell. Finally, after some hours of sleep, the unexpected moment he awoke to a stabbing pain, in a pool of blood, with a hulking, darkened figure standing over his bed, who quickly turned and fled. Eric didn’t shout out, didn’t call to the guards for help, didn’t scream that someone had tried to kill him, made no effort to see his assailant caught. He just listened as the man’s footsteps faded away down the hallway. He knew the guy was passing the guards. He heard the gate closing again. He knew what was going on. Even were an honest guard to hear his shouts, he did not want this prisoner apprehended. He didn’t want to think about anyone punishing this man who attacked him. He knew the risks of speaking out. So he stayed quiet and held his side, wrapped in his bloody sheets until morning.
“All night long, holding your side?” Harriet asked.
“From approximately 4 a.m., when I was stabbed, until 7 a.m., when the new rotation of guards came on,” he said.
“Were you frightened?”
He said that he wasn’t.
“Why not? Why didn’t that scare you?”
He said that he didn’t know. He shrugged, and he fell silent.
In the afternoon, the reporter turned up, a mousy woman who took out her machine, then stayed quiet, and then five minutes later, Peter Manello turned up. He was the lawyer for the state, a little guy in a bad suit that was so bad and so cheap, she was sure he was doing some sort of character, lowering expectations, or putting on a little guy persona, or something. Introducing himself, he was aggressively, self-consciously friendly. He was such a friendly back-slapper, in fact, she was certain that he was going to be a killer in the deposition and just wanted her to know before he got going that it was just business, just his job. And she was right. He repeated questions in disbelief, again and again, even when she’d made it clear that she knew the phrase “asked and answered.” He tried to trick Eric into slipping up and revealing privileged information. She advised Eric not to answer, and Manello threatened to make a motion to the court to compel a response. Harriet rolled her eyes.
Still, Manello made Eric sweat, he made him shake. Often, when Eric answered some innocuous question, Manello would seem too interested; sometimes he would whistle through his teeth; once he muttered, “Ahah!” then told Harriet, “I think I may need to extend this deposition to pursue this line of inquiry. I didn’t know I was going to find out all this.” Harriet tried to signal to Eric that this was all bluster. She tried to reassure him, even told Manello to stop playing to the jury. Still, eventually Eric was shaken, intimidated. The guy who’d held his side all night after being stabbed by an unknown assailant, hostile guards who’d sooner kill him than help him patrolling outside his cell. Eric was stammering, shaking his head and trying to get out a sentence straight. Harriet smiled at him sympathetically, and she called for a break.
“They’re just questions,” she explained to Eric. Manello was outside getting coffee from a machine. “Just answer them.” Her client was so vulnerable now, so defenseless, and Harriet was the only person who could help him. He was a big, white, round baby. She felt very close to him now, and this realization jolted her. This one moment was all that mattered, and everything that had come before was like fiction, a book someone had written that had never really happened. Maybe he had done terrible things before this; probably he had done terrible things before this. But right now, he was a harmless stammering child, and she wanted to help him, she wanted to give him everything he wanted. A big payoff, a new life. Happiness. Whatever. She was so blind, so human now.
“It’s his voice,” Eric said. “It’s how he asks his questions.” Still frightened.
Harriet nodded. “He looks down at you. You know that he doesn’t really care what you have to say. And so you can’t get a sentence out. It gets stuck on your tongue and you can’t talk.”
Eric nodded.
“Just look at me,” she said. “Listen to his question, but pretend it’s just you and me alone in the room. Just being friendly. Look at me, and when he talks, imagine it’s me talking. You won’t stutter anymore, I think.”
Harriet smiled, and she wondered where she’d learned that trick. Then she remembered.
Manello laughed as he and Harriet walked out of the prison gates into the sunshine and back to their cars.
“Such a pro
found thing, walking out of the prison gates,” he said. “I think about it every time I leave.” Then, after a pause, “Why don’t we just settle the whole damn thing now?” he asked.
“You seemed so confident,” she said. “Gave me the impression you actually thought you’d win on the merits.”
“Maybe I will,” he said. “Okay, forget it.”
“Fine,” she said quickly.
“Just kidding.”
Harriet stopped walking. “You and I both know he was stabbed,” she said, “and that it couldn’t have happened in the middle of the night without prison guards being involved. No one gambled on Eric being brave enough to call them on it. Maybe you’re just trying to make life unpleasant for him so that he’ll be too shaken to pursue this. Don’t bet on that either. The prison guards couldn’t do it, and neither can you.” She felt proud of this client, and a little bit angry, too. “You can’t scare him.”
“It’s just my job, Harriet,” he said. “You don’t really care about this murderer.”
“In this country, we don’t sentence people to be stabbed by drug dealers. You understand my point? I do care that prison guards are taking money from mobsters to let them assassinate other prisoners. Okay? I do care about that”