by Buffa, D. W.
I could not believe that he had come all the way up from southern California and had not called me first. He explained that he had come to see the game.
“What game?”
“USC, Southern Cal. Who else? They’re playing Berkeley on Saturday. You didn’t know?” he remarked, shaking his head as we headed out the door and down the courthouse steps to the street. He moved with that same smooth suppressed power, his head up, his eyes darting all around: the graceful remnant of the great athlete he once had been. Watching him I felt better, younger, than I had felt in a long time.
“You didn’t know?” he laughed. “That sounds like you. So wrapped up in what you’re doing, you don’t know what’s going on. Southern Cal – remember? We went to school there once, played football, chased girls... is it coming back to you now?” he chided.
He stopped so quickly I had to take a step back to where he was standing. The sidewalk was crowded, the street full of noise, and while the sky was dark the lights from all the busy stores and the passing cars made it almost seem like day. “You were great in there – did I tell you that? Best I’ve ever seen. That other guy – Franklin – he’s not bad; but, Christ, no match for you! You’re good, not bad at all; almost made me think she might not have done it. Almost,” he added significantly before he turned on his heel and started down the street again.
“Where are we going?” he asked a moment later. “Let’s have dinner somewhere. You have time, don’t you? I mean, even during a trial you remember sometimes to eat, don’t you?”
“Ever occur to you I might have a date?”
“Great! I’d love to meet her,” he said without breaking stride. “You have a date, night of a trial - what a laugh! Unless - ?” He grabbed my arm and made me face him, eager to make me try to lie about it. “With her?”
“If I’m screwing her, don’t you think the least I can do is buy her dinner once in a while?”
“You’re not screwing her.” He searched my eyes just to be sure. “I’d be screwing her,” he added with the proud exaggeration of remembered triumphs. “But you – no, you’re too caught up in the trial. It’s just like before, all you could think about was the game. We’d run into the stadium the crowd going nuts, and I’d check out all the cheerleaders, but you wouldn’t even notice.” He started laughing, and without any idea why he was doing it, I started laughing too, knowing that, whatever it was, as soon as he told me I would be laughing even harder.
“That last year, the last game, regular game, before the Rose Bowl game. We were playing UCLA – and let’s face it, they always had the best looking cheerleaders – I took the second half kickoff back for a touchdown. All the blocking was set up down the left side, and I started that way, but then went the other way instead. Everyone thought it was a brilliant decision, something I saw in the coverage – What a joke! There was this great looking blonde – a cheerleader, one of theirs – standing on the sideline on about the thirty. I wanted to run right by her, and I did, and when I got there, knew I was going all the way, I yelled at her, told her to give me her number after the game.”
“Did she?”
“Did she what?”
“Leave you her number?”
Tommy threw me a blank look of incomprehension, as if it were the dumbest question he had ever heard, and then first his shoulders, and then his chest, began to rumble.
“Of course! Why do you think I ran all that way?- So she couldn’t say no!”
“You’re lucky your dick didn’t fall off, with all the girls you had.”
He did not miss a beat; he almost never did.
“It did, but that’s all right, it grew back twice as big. Where the hell we going for dinner? I’m getting tired of walking.” Before I could answer, he thought of something else, another way to taunt me about the different way we had led our lives, and, doing it, remind me how much we had in common. “Listen, it wasn’t my fault, all those women. Look at it this way: they all wanted to sleep with me, but they all wanted to marry you.”
I gave him a look that questioned both his veracity and his sense of proportion.
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
It went on like this, back and forth, half said sentences and words heavy with our own peculiar meaning, phrases that made no sense but launched long paragraphs about our remembered and no doubt embellished past, paragraphs that were even more outrageous when they told the whole, unvarnished truth. We were half a block past the restaurant before I realized it was the place we were looking for.
It was a small Italian restaurant, started by an old Sicilian while was he was still young and staffed by two aging waiters who, because of some ancient quarrel, the cause of which they had both forgotten, would only speak when necessary and only through a third party. Generally this was the owner, who would stand between them and, like a good translator, listen carefully before he rendered word for word an exact repetition of what was said. The menu was as old as the owner and just as reliable. I had been coming here for years and, no matter how many times I told him, he could not remember my name, but he always greeted me with open arms.
“Mr…., how long has it been? Too long, too long!”
“I was here last night.”
“Yes, I know,” he lied, the grin on his face cutting deeper until he managed to make it look like sorrow; “but even a day is too long. You weren’t here for lunch. I think you never come for lunch,” he added with downcast eyes. “You can imagine the grief we feel.” He gestured for one of the waiters and then whispered, “One of these silent assassins I employ will take care of you. The ravioli is quite good tonight. Almost edible. Someday I’ll find a cook!”
“You come here a lot?” asked Tommy after we ordered.
“All the time. I like the anonymity of the place. Tourists don’t know about it, and the locals mind their own business. And despite what the owner said, it’s some of the best food in the city.”
Tommy was hungry, and so was I. We ate French bread and drank red wine and as we felt better, more comfortable and relaxed, we began to talk more about the present.
“I was not going to come at first. It’s a free trip - the alumni association pays for everything – but I don’t like living in the past the way a lot of these guys do. It was the best time of my life, but what’s the point? – You can’t go back and do it again. I wasn’t going to come, but then you had this trial and we had talked about St. James before; and so I said I would, but only if I could come up a day or so early, instead of flying up with everyone else Friday afternoon.” He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “You know what those things are like: camp out at the hotel night before a game, everybody gets drunk and tells a lot of lies, and then, because we used to be great, we stand out there on the sidelines and some idiot television reporter comes up and asks you what you’re doing now that your great career is over. Last time that happened, I looked into the camera and said I was an attorney with the government and we were looking into corruption in the television industry. They didn’t ask me anything after that. So, as I say, it was a free trip, and I figured at that price you were worth it.”
He took another piece of bread and finished off his glass. Glancing around to make sure no one at the tables near us could hear, he asked me about the case, or rather, asked about Danielle.
“She’s really Jean’s sister? I met her, couple of times,” he added when I seemed surprised that he remembered. “I liked her. She was great looking, in a different kind of way. I liked her a lot. Maybe too outgoing for you, too interested in what was going on. Was that it? She was a little like my wife that way, wasn’t she? They both liked having a good time, being around other people.”
I did not say anything; I did not need to. We both knew he was right. With a marvelous talent for summation, he cut right to the heart of the matter.
“But this one, the sister – she’s the kind that makes you think she only wants to be around you. Even when she’s with other people, the c
enter of attention, she lets you know, she has that look that says she’d run off with you in a minute, if only she had the chance.”
I tried to dismiss it with a laugh, but the laughter died on my lips and I gave him what might be called a second look, a closer scrutiny that admitted that what he said was nearer to the truth than I might have wanted.
“That’s the real reason I came up. Don’t misunderstand,” he added immediately. “I wanted to see you; I wanted to watch how you handled yourself in court. But I wanted to warn you: she’s dangerous. Hell, any woman that looks like that is dangerous. That’s not what I mean.”
Before he could tell me precisely what he did mean, the silent waiter brought our order. He wore the same expression of doubt and disappointment he always did when you had not bothered to ask him what he recommended, a lifted eyebrow, the mocking certainty that if you had only listened to him you would have ordered something else.
“It’s even worse,” I explained to Tommy as he tried the ravioli, “if you ask him what he thinks and decide on something else. I did that once. Next time I came in, he wouldn’t serve me. He stood off in the corner like I wasn’t here. Wouldn’t move.”
“And you like this place?”
I glanced around, as if I were seeing it for the first time, a small, unpromising place, without any obvious attractions: tarnished silverware and threadbare tablecloths, a worn carpet and dull lighting, and a clientele that for the most part came only out of habit.
“Like it? I’m used to it. I come here, I don’t have to think. It’s like court: everything works, once you learn the rules.
“And you’re right about the food,” said Tommy with enthusiasm as he lapped up another helping.
“After a while,” I confessed, “you don’t even notice that – until you go somewhere else. Then you realize that it’s better here.”
Tommy put down his fork and with a faded linen napkin wiped his mouth.
“That’s all you do, isn’t it? – Practice law, try cases, and eat dinner here. Did you ever think you might want to have a life?”
“I have a life,” I protested mildly, and a little defensively. “I like what I do.”
“What about women? After Jean – that was years ago. You ever think about…?”
“You’re divorced – Do you?”
“Marriage? Again – hell, I don’t know. Depends. Never know, I might. But you!” he cried, ready to taunt me with what he knew about me. “You won’t – not unless….No, that won’t happen. But someone like her, someone that perfect….”
“What are you talking about?”
“Danielle St. James. Lot of guys would like to go to bed with her, but you’d fall in love with her. It’s like everything you’ve ever done.” His eyes glittered with the achievement of his own discovery, what he had finally figured out, though he had really always known it. “Nothing was ever good enough because you could always see how it could be better. Used to make me a little nuts, to tell you the God’s honest truth,” he laughed. “Good thing I loved you like a brother, because, Christ, you could be annoying! Remember the game against Stanford? I broke one off for eight yards just before half, and what did you tell me as we walked off the field? – That if I had kept my head up when I hit the hole, I could have cut faster to the right!”
I remembered, and it was true, and I felt like a fool because of it; but it was a long time ago and so now I could laugh and admit that I might have taken things a little too seriously. Tommy shook his head, but with affection, the way you do for someone you like who tries hard to do something at which he is not very good, and then he reached across the table and took my wrist and told me that none of that mattered.
“Listen to me. I had speed, I knew what I could do; I didn’t have to work at it. But the truth is that I wish I had been more like you, that things hadn’t come so easy. I might have learned something, how to get better, how important it is to work. There’s something else, and I mean this: You’re a hell of a lot better in a courtroom than I ever was on a football field, but you still don’t think it’s good enough. That’s something else I found out today. I had lunch with the court reporter.”
“Philip Conrad? You had lunch with him?”
“In the courthouse cafeteria. It was crowded. I saw him sitting alone at a table, asked if I could join him. I told him I’d been with the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A. That didn’t impress him. I told him you and I had gone to school together. He got all excited. Told me you were his favorite lawyer, said he was the court reporter in one of the first cases you took to trial. He seemed surprised when I told him we played ball together. Said he didn’t know that about you, that you had never mentioned it. He wanted to know what you were like then, and I wasn’t quite sure what to tell him. He doesn’t strike me as the kind who wants to hear about how you played; he’s too serious for that. He wanted to know who you were. I told him how you used to watch film. You didn’t care much about the plays that didn’t work; you said anyone could see what was wrong with them. You only really studied the ones that worked, not to see why they worked, but what could be done to make them work even better.”
Tommy rested his elbows on the table and folded his hands together in front of his mouth. A distant look came into his eyes, remembering, I think, what we had both been like, all those years ago. It lasted only a second, and then a smile flashed across his face and he started back on the story he wanted to tell me.
“His eyes – Conrad, the court reporter; nice man, by the way – got all wide and eager. He had to tell me something. The first trial, the first of yours in which he was the court reporter, a case no one thought you had a chance to win... He said he had never seen anything like it, the way you destroyed the prosecution’s main witness with one of the most devastating cross-examinations he had ever seen, and done it so easily that it almost seemed as if the witness had only been waiting for the chance to tell the jury that everything he had said to the prosecuting attorney had been a lie. But that surprise wasn’t anything like what happened next, after the trial was over.”
Tommy looked at me with a baffled expression and then started laughing. He threw up his hands, exuberant that someone else, an anonymous court reporter, had had the same experience, and with the same reaction, as his own.
“He’s sitting there in his cubbyhole office, and this young lawyer – barely out of law school, only had two or three trials – comes in and starts to ask how much it will cost to get a transcript of the trial. Tells him he knows he charges by the page, but if he tells him how much it might run, he can pay him something now and the rest when it’s finished. The guy didn’t know what to think. He knows you’re pretty damn good in a courtroom, but you obviously don’t know much about the law.
“‘You only appeal when you lose, Mr. Morrison,’ he explains. ‘That’s the only time you need to go back through the transcript: when you have to find some judicial mistake, some error of law. And the prosecution can’t appeal a verdict of acquittal in a criminal case, so you see, there’s no need to bother with a transcript. You won, Mr. Morrison, and the prosecution can’t appeal. There’s nothing more you have to do.’
“And then, to his astonishment, you tell him that’s the reason you want the transcript. He still hasn’t forgotten what you said.
“‘I know I won; I thought I better find out why.’
“You weren’t interested in any mistakes the judge might have made. That’s what Conrad told me. You were only interested in mistakes of your own, things you might have done better, ways you might improve. And it wasn’t just in that trial you did it; you’ve done it in every trial since, all the years you’ve been practicing. That’s you, all right: nothing is ever good enough; you can always do it better. Must make you crazy, knowing no matter how hard you try, nothing is ever going to be perfect.”
He moved his right shoulder back and turned his head, looking at me, as it seemed, not just from a different angle but with a new perspective.
&n
bsp; “That’s why she’s got you, isn’t it? It’s how she looks. That’s got to be about as perfect as it gets. It’s probably what made St. James do half the things he did, at least in the beginning when he was first with her. Looks like….”
He paused, remembering something, or perhaps it just now came to him, the thought that brought everything together, made sense out of at least some of what had happened. He bent forward, searching my eyes in a way that told me that this was important and that it was important for me.
“That’s what they both did, as near as I can tell: made themselves crazy trying to have it all. Ask the question no one takes seriously anymore: why didn’t he quit, and get out when it was still safe? Why did he keep going after more? And more than the money, why did he have to have her? And why did she have to have him? The reason is that they didn’t know what they wanted, only that it had to be more. That’s what I was trying to tell you, the reason I wanted to see you: to warn you, if you didn’t know it already. She may have been the kid sister of the girl you wanted to marry, but she isn’t a kid anymore, and whatever she was like then….”
I stopped him with a look that said there was nothing he could tell me about Danielle I had not already thought about.
“I’m her lawyer. She’s on trial for murdering her husband. What is it you think I don’t know?”
There was now no more nostalgia. We were not reminiscing about the past. We were two lawyers, still good friends, but too experienced to yield to the illusions of younger men. We had been burned too often to take very much on trust.
“She did it, didn’t she? – I know you can’t tell me, but it makes sense. What was she going to do, sail around the world the rest of her life, married to a fugitive, never able to come home?”
“He might not have been able to come back, but she could have. He was the one indicted.”
Troubled and momentarily disconcerted, Tommy stared off into the distance, pondering, as it seemed, some dilemma. The only thing I could tell for certain that, whatever it was, it had to do with Danielle.