So, all in all, things had been reasonably tolerable that Saturday afternoon when Ashton and Jennifer had come into my office, and we moved to my house, where we were now munching carrot sticks, straining for conversation, and staring off into my backyard during the awkward silences while Jack the Bear curled morosely in a corner.
After one silence, Jennifer looked at my big live oak and said, “You know, if you took that tree out, you’d have room for a swimming pool.”
I let that pass.
“Ashton, here”—she reached over and patted his knee as if I didn’t know who Ashton was—“he has a very big swimming pool.” Extra emphasis on very big.
“Good for Ashton,” Newly said, and in his voice I heard the faint tremor of stamping hooves on the ground.
“Jenn, here,” Ashton said, and reached over and patted not her knee, I swear, but one of her huge breasts, as if that identified to me who Jennifer was, “is an ace swimmer. She went to college on a diving scholarship and did competitive swimming.”
“Oh, a P.E. major?” Newly quipped, and I thought, Well, that would explain a great deal. I’m sure her breasts float, and that must help in the competitive swimming, whatever that was.
Jennifer took a bite of a carrot stick and then dipped it back in the soy sour cream, teeth marks plainly visible on the end that went into the dip.
“Oh, no, not P.E. I was a public relations major. But I never actually graduated.”
Well, no duh, I thought, and made a mental note to throw out the dip at the first opportunity and certainly not to take another bite of it.
“Tell her what you do now, babe,” Ashton said, and poked her breast with a carrot stick.
“Oh, later, sweetie, that’s so bor-oor-ring. Why don’t we all go over to your house, sweetie, and go swimming? I can show everyone my dance series of dives.”
And, I thought, your cute little Stairmastertoned butt and breasts by modern science. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Newly sit up and suck in his stomach, and I wondered if he was embarrassed to appear in swim trunks in front of Jennifer and Ashton. This from a man who’d been cavorting around my house in a pair of ladies’ pink tap pants.
“No, tell us,” I asked, curious about what Jennifer did do. I had assumed, apparently incorrectly, that she was simply a professional blonde and that Ashton supported her.
“Oh, it is so bo-oor-ring,” she repeated.
“Tell us,” Newly said, and I thought, Oh, great, now we’re begging her to tell us what she does for a living.
“Oh, okay. But I warned you. I work for a service that does medical transcriptions and billings for doctors.”
Yep, right, boring, I thought.
“That’s how we met,” Ashton said. “I was deposing her boss in a case. Just background stuff, but Jennifer helped me understand the procedures.”
“You see, we do a lot of work for different doctors. Sometimes it’s overflow, you know, stuff that their regular staff can’t handle, and sometimes we do all the transcriptions and billings for the doctors. See, that way, the doctor doesn’t have to pay all our, you know, benefits and salary and stuff and fool with all that paperwork of hiring staff. Instead they just pay us a fee.”
Okay, boring, I thought. Stop.
None of us said anything.
“Well, told you,” she said, and grinned. “So, let’s go to Ashton’s and go swimming in his big pool.”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“First, though, where’s your powder room?” Jennifer asked. “I can’t hold it any longer.”
A huge, rowdy Rottweiler jumped all over Jennifer when we first stepped into Ashton’s overly air-conditioned house. Why do people who live in the subtropics set their air conditioners at thirty degrees? Why don’t they just move to North Dakota?
Jennifer and the dog had a love fiesta with each other, cooing and licking and petting and romping, while Ashton said, “This is Bearess, her dog.” You know, Bear but with the ess, like actress.” Even Ashton seemed sheepish about explaining that.
“Does Jennifer live here?” I asked.
“No, just stays over on the weekends. Her and the dog.”
“Her and the dog” were about done demonstrating their undying devotion to each other, and yes, it was sweet, but a bit overdone, and we followed Ashton inside, where he pointed out a changing room for Newly and me.
Ten minutes later, we were all suited up, gathered in the screened porch of Ashton’s big pink stucco monster house, ready to dive into the very big swimming pool. Jennifer oooed a bit and then went into the kitchen to bring us wine, giving Newly a good view of her perfect butt, which I noticed he noticed even though he was turning blue from holding in his stomach. Bearess followed her mistress into the kitchen in a perfect show of doggy devotion.
Ashton was fuddling around, waving his arms, and being just way, way too manic even for him. I noticed his pupils were like full moons over the Gulf. He had not been that way at my house, but then he had taken a long time to change into his swimsuit, which I suspected had been chosen by Jennifer, as the average man of Ashton’s age, even if he did do the YMCA with the rest of us, would rarely choose a suit that way, way too brief. Unless he was European, which Ashton, the native Floridian, was not.
His little swimsuit left few secrets, but that didn’t particularly interest me beyond a quick assessment to see if he was falling apart since the last time I’d seen his body on display. I’d seen Ashton completely naked at a resort in Boca Grande, during a late-night drinking contest that ended up in the pool, much to the dismay of the management of that old, genteel plantation inn. Needless to say, the law firm of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley went elsewhere now for our yearly firm retreats.
After noting that Ashton was holding up remarkably well for a man duking it out with his fifties and with questionable substance-abuse habits, I studied the pool in his backyard and checked out the new diving board. A bit high for my taste. Personally, I like to tiptoe into a pool, one inch at a time.
Jennifer came back into the screened porch wearing a pair of white jeans over her bikini bottoms, Bearess following in a tippy-toe fashion and looking oddly whimsical for such a big dog. “I’m so sorry,” she said, purring, “but we are just sooo completely out of wine. I need to run down to the ABC Store and get some more. Won’t be but a sec.”
We made the usual protestations that we didn’t need wine, but she was going to be a good hostess whether we wanted her to be or not, and she left. Ashton and Bearess followed her to the door.
Not two minutes later, Ashton came back out onto the porch. Bearess came with him, but she seemed all out of energy and mopey. Ashton had changed into a polo and jeans and said he needed to run out for refreshments too.
After an exchange of euphemisms, I basically figured out that he needed to run out to score some coke. I didn’t need any, thank you, I told him, emphasizing that I didn’t do street drugs, and Newly was noncommittal, no doubt trying to get a read on whether he’d get in trouble with me for snorting a line (he would!), but Ashton was adamant.
Poof—like little bunnies down a hole, our host and hostess were gone. Only Bearess, the oddly named Rottweiler, was left to keep us company.
“Pretty weird, huh?” I said. “They invite us over and then, one at a time, they leave us.”
All by ourselves. Except for the dog, who looked pretty permissive.
Not a hall monitor in sight. Kicking around in our bathing suits in the shallow end of a truly enormous blue-tiled pool. I felt a tingling rush start running up and down my legs, then heat gathering at the fulcrum of the rushes.
Newly, apparently thinking along the same lines, reached over and fingered the elastic in the top of my bikini bottoms, then tickled my flat stomach, which I kept that way by working like a son of a bitch on the evil crunch machine at the Y.
“You work out like you do for the job, to keep your stamina up? Or because you’re afraid of getting old?” Pretty serious questions for Newly. But
then he grinned. “Or just to look drop-dead in a bikini?”
“Because I’m afraid of being weak,” I said.
“Yeah, me too.”
Um, things are getting too heavy, I thought.
As if he read my mind, Newly grinned again and added, “And to catch young chicks like you.” Then he tickled my belly again, ran his fingers down low on my stomach and circled, not too low, but low enough to get me thinking about whether you could make love in a big blue pool and not drown.
“Skinny-dipping, anyone?” I said, and giggled, pulling away from Newly. I swam out to the center of the pool and floated, my face up to the security light overhead and my hair drifting out behind me like a dark veil on the water. Then I flipped over and dove under, my not-too-shabby butt pointed up in the air for a moment until I submerged and pulled my bikini bottoms off. Breaking the surface of the water, I threw my bottoms toward Newly, who missed them but definitely caught the spirit of things. A minute later his trunks were floating on the water, drifting toward the drain in what passed for a current in the pool, and Bearess jumped in, grabbed the trunks, shook the dickens out of them, and jumped back on the tile floor. She began to do that growly shake, rattle, and roll thing dogs like to do with your clothes.
We didn’t care two whits about the dog and Newly’s trunks. He wasn’t going to be needing them for the next few minutes.
Newly started swimming toward me as if he were trying out for the Olympic swim team. I dove for the bottom. When I surfaced in front of him, he caught me and kissed my mouth and then my breasts, which were still modestly in the little bikini top.
The water made me buoyant as Newly rubbed against me, and then I remembered my safe-sex rule. “Condom,” I screamed. From the edge of the pool, Bearess stopped killing Newly’s swim trunks and started watching us.
“Aw, hon,” Newly said. “Just this once won’t hurt.”
The national anthem of the teenage pregnancy roster. No way I fell for that.
“Condom,” I said, pinching his nipples extra hard in frustration.
Newly swam to the edge of the pool and vaulted up on the tile next to Bearess, who jumped up and wagged her tail. Newly turned back and said, “Hon, I didn’t bring any.”
“Look in Ashton’s bedroom,” I shouted, and Newly ran off, trailing pool water through Ashton’s house as Bearess ran after him. Good thing she was an affable dog.
He was gone so long I was about to lose interest. But when he came running back out, Bearess still running and wagging after him, he said, “Hon, you would not believe what all that man has in his night-stand. Want to try a French tickler?”
I convinced Newly that an ordinary Trojan would do fine, thank you, and to hurry it up. He complied and jumped back into the pool and swam over to me. On the side of the pool, on the wet tile floor, Bearess picked up his trunks again and started eating them.
Soon, I forgot to worry about the impact of nylon on the digestive track of a Rottweiler, as Newly revived my interest.
At my house the next morning, Newly raised the ante and asked the dreaded C question.
Children.
Technically, “it depends” is about the most honest and accurate answer a person can offer to most questions.
So when Newly had casually sipped his coffee, safely across the kitchen from me, with Jack the Bear playing chaperone, and then asked, “How do you feel about children?” I answered: “It depends.”
It depends on whose children, and how soon they go home.
Of course, Benicio, Bonita’s firstborn, who had practically grown up in my office, was a pretty cool fourteen-year-old, and had taught me the dirty words in Spanish like caray, chingalo, and mierda, and Bonita’s other children were not without their accident-prone charm. Even my brother Dan’s children were not wholly without appeal, though I saw them twice a year for about an hour when they visited before they rushed off to the beach to get sunburned and jellyfish-stung.
What, of course, Newly was asking was whether I wanted to have children.
No, I was saving up my mess tolerance for a puppy, a Rottweiler like Emily, from Fred and Olivia. Children did not figure into the equation.
I was going to have to do something about Newly, and soon.
Chapter 17
I make lists. I make memoranda to the files that contain detailed lists. I photocopy my lists and take copies of the most important ones home in case the law firm burns and I have to document my actions in a legal malpractice suit or during a partnership investigation of my work. Once I’ve memorized these memos, I store them in large plastic boxes in a climate-controlled, fire-protected (meaning sprinklers and an extra charge) storage unit, for which I pay a monthly sum to avoid collecting plastic boxes of paper in my own house.
This list-making is neither a genetic nor an environmental trait, as neither my brothers nor my parents were list makers, nor did they ever draft a memo to a file.
Oh, yeah, my mother’s list would be “Open Coke bottle. Drink. Take pill. Open next bottle.”
My outlaw Pentecostal brother’s list would be “Fertilize the pot. Pray in tongues. Save a heathen.” Delvon might have been three decades late for the Jesus Freak movement, but he fundamentally believed Jesus was the first great peace-and-love hippie who didn’t object to pot smoking so long as you loved your neighbors.
My other brother’s list would be “Go to work. Fill vending machines all day. Come home.” Proving the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, my brother Dan drives a Coca-Cola delivery truck and starts off each week by delivering two cases to our mother, who won’t let him in the house and never pays him. Dan had joined the Marines after graduating from high school, triggering identical cries of outrage from Delvon and me. But affable, shallow-thinking Dan had gone into the Marines and come out again still affable and shallow-thinking. Except he had seen enough of the world to satisfy him, and he had saved his money to put a down payment on a red-brick three-two, split design, and married his high school sweetheart, another affable, shallow thinker who reads TV Guide and Dear Abby and absolutely nothing else. They had two tow-headed kids who appear, so far, to be perfectly normal.
My father’s list would be “Get up. Walk to dock. Sit down.” In his days as an attorney, my father was a disorganized, somewhat disheveled professional who skated on thin ice and would never have survived in either a city law firm or the modern legal environment. But he was scrupulously honest and unfailingly polite, and he never let the paint peel on the outside of the house, and in our small town that made him a success, notwithstanding his dearth of lists and file memos.
My own lists and file memoranda transcend the mere to-do lists and cover your ass memos of the average attorney and approach Russian novels in their scale and proportion and incomprehensibility.
It was while boxing up the lists and memoranda I had collected in my house for the now closed Dr. Trusdale file that I realized someone had gone through that modest collection—modest because I had had the file only five weeks before he was killed and I had settled the case.
The papers were not perfectly straight across the top, and one page had been returned to the folder out of numerical order.
Newly, of course, became the lead suspect. Newly, who for some reason was still living in my house. Newly, who had no obvious reason to snoop in a closed file but was the only person with full access to the files in my house.
I discovered my misaligned and soon-to-be-stored papers on a Sunday and went to the television room to accuse Newly as he drafted a complaint in a rear-end collision case on a yellow legal pad balanced on his knees, sipped a beer, and cheered on the Marlins. Jack the Bear was a morose pudding of dog inertia at Newly’s feet. I glanced at the Rottweiler and wondered if you could give a dog Prozac. Somebody did something on the television screen, and Newly cheered. Jack didn’t even rise or growl or move.
“Don’t you need to concentrate?” I asked, looking at the legal pad where Newly was scribbling something his secretary wo
uld have to decipher later.
“I can do this in my sleep, hon,” he said, smiling at me. “What do you need?”
I needed him to get out of my house, I thought.
I needed him to explain why he was snooping.
But first, I realized, I needed him to fly with me to Atlanta when I met with Dr. Jamieson, the new expert witness I was going to hire in the veggie baby case unless he turned out to be an ugly, repulsive human that juries would inherently mistrust. I needed Newly to get me through the airport in Atlanta, given my dreaded airport phobia. It was bad enough that the doctor’s own schedule was delaying my trip to Atlanta to interview him, but the thought of flying there without Newly to protect me was just too much to consider right now.
Newly had, of course, already agreed to go, taking a day off from work, for which I could not reimburse him.
So, as I watched him lounging on my couch, I decided I’d better wait until after the trip to Atlanta to pick a fight and kick him out. Marriages have been based on less.
Now that Jack was off duty, Newly and I ended up christening the couch, which for some reason was about the only piece of furniture we hadn’t made love on or over, and then I showered and went back into my den for a few hours of work. Jack the Bear, looking like the poster child of depression, lay on the floor and refused to budge.
Chapter 18
Before I could even get to Atlanta to check out my potential expert witness, Stephen LaBlanc had hyper-ventilated himself and me back into an emergency hearing before Judge Goddard, demanding that I commit to an expert witness immediately and that we set a trial date promptly, and, of course, that the judge deny my second motion for a continuance, because Stephen’s clients, the ever gentle good-parents, were simply unable to cope with the emotional blackmail of our stalling, plus they were under enormous financial strain, having to, you know, like, actually care for their own baby.
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