Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor (solomon versus lord)

by Paul Levine

  “I’ll bet you do,” he said. “I’ll bet you like foreign films with subtitles or love stories with sappy endings. Me, I go to the movies by myself, and I like to laugh, forget my troubles. So I see the comedies. Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant, Natural Born Killers. Ever see any of them?”

  “They’re not comedies,” she heard herself say.

  “Sure they are. Take the scene in Reservoir Dogs. One of the robbers has a cop tied up. He wants to know who’s the informant in the gang. The cop won’t tell him, so the robber cuts his ear off.”

  With his free hand, Shank roughly grabbed Lisa’s ear, twisting it, painfully. “Now, here’s the funny part. I’d already done it. I cut a guy’s ear off maybe ten, twelve years before I saw the movie. So I’m watching it, thinking you don’t get that much blood from an ear. That wasn’t realistic. But the screams. The screams were real.”

  He’s a madman, and he’s going to cut me.

  She knew a girl from the Tiki whose jealous boyfriend slashed her breasts to keep her from dancing. Lisa was paralyzed with fear. Her eyes searched frantically to see if he was holding a knife.

  He let go of her ear and his hand brushed against her neck, seductively, stopping to fondle the single pearl earring. Then he kissed her neck, and unleashing his tongue like a serpent, he licked her. With a repulsive slurping sound, his tongue slithered up the slope of her neck.

  I’m going to throw up. Jesus, if he doesn’t stop, I’m going to…

  His tongue withdrew and his teeth clenched the pearl earring, holding it there a second, freezing her with terror. Then he wrenched his head downward, ferociously tearing the post through her earlobe, yanking it free with a twist of his head like a pit bull mauling its prey.

  She screamed as the pain shot through her, the sensation of her own shredding skin terrifying her.

  Max stood, frozen in place.

  Shank twisted her arm even higher against her shoulder blade. “Do you have fear now, Lisa? Do you have respect?”

  Blinking through tears, she begged him, “Please! Please stop.”

  “Say it, bitch!” Again he twisted her arm, until she thought the ligaments would tear loose from the bones.

  “I have fear,” she cried, eyes squeezed shut, her shoulder screaming in agony. “I have respect.”

  He let her go. Her arm throbbed. Her ear stung. Blood dribbled from her earlobe. She felt faint.

  “Good,” Shank said, pocketing the bloody earring like spare change. “I’ve got confidence in you, Lisa. When you’re through with the judge, he’ll vote to revoke the Constitution if you ask him to. You do your job, Lisa, we’ve got no problems.” He flashed a smile as jagged as a cracked eggshell. “You don’t, I’ll take your other earring and the ear, too.”

  He said it softly, matter-of-factly, without anger. Max hurried to Lisa’s side and wrapped his arms around her just as her legs buckled.

  Still speaking in a hushed voice, Shank said, “Now why don’t you take a little walk so Max can bring you up to speed?”

  Silently, Max guided her to the door. She was too shocked, too much in pain, to protest. As she stepped into the corridor, Lisa took one look back inside the apartment. Shank was lighting another cigarette. He took a deep drag, then tossed the match onto her Persian rug.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Shoe Box

  Samuel Adams Truitt may have become a justice of the Supreme Court but at home, he still carried out the trash. And walked the dog, a russet-haired mutt with retriever and shepherd blood named Sopchoppy, Sop for short. And verbally sparred with his wife, Connie, she of the patrician good looks and slashing wit. And on regular cycles, for the past two years, he gave his wife twice daily injections of Pergonal plus a 5 A.M. blood test, all aimed at increasing her egg production so that with the help of a fertility expert, a petri dish, and divine intervention, they could enjoy the benefits of parenthood.

  So far, the in vitro fertilization had not worked. All the ultrasounds, all the drugs with their chaotic mood-altering side effects, all the hours in the doctor’s office squeezing her hand while a scope was inserted through her abdomen into the ovaries, all the needles depositing fertilized eggs into the uterus… all for nothing.

  For a while, he thought the experience brought them together. It was one of the few remaining areas of common passion or even interest. They laughed over Truitt’s discomfort at walking into the OB-GYN’s waiting room filled with suspicious women, then disappearing into a rest room to masturbate into a plastic cup.

  “Was it good for you?” she had asked.

  “My hands were too cold,” he replied, “so the nurse helped.”

  Connie had shown him endless wallpaper patterns, paint chips, and photos clipped from Architectural Digest as they set about planning the nursery. Sam Truitt didn’t know calico from chintz, and in fact spent several years of bachelorhood with window coverings of old bedsheets, but he took an interest in the mythical nursery for the mythical baby because it made Connie happy.

  But lately, after so many misses, after Connie’s headaches and nausea, exuberant hopes followed by deep despair, after more than twenty-thousand dollars in medical bills, there was little talk of babies and bassinets. Connie’s moods had become both extreme and unpredictable. She would burst into tears at the sight of a pregnant woman or laugh hysterically at inopportune times.

  Today, Truitt knew, Connie had been to the doctor to see if the latest implant of a fertilized egg or “pre-embryo,” in Dr. Kalstone’s lingo, had taken hold.

  God, let her be pregnant.

  Sam Truitt wanted to be a father; he wanted Connie to be happy; and he wanted to preserve his marriage. At the moment, all three were in jeopardy.

  He had just stuffed a bulging garbage bag into the plastic curbside container. He had walked and pooper-scooped Sop, fed and brushed him, and told him he was sorry there were no game birds to chase in the neighborhood.

  Carrying the recycle container to join the garbage at the curb, Truitt opened the gate in the black wrought iron fence to what was laughingly called their front yard. It was a rectangular space of dry brown grass roughly large enough for a single grave. One block away was the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the narrow manmade waterway where tourists now ride in mule-drawn boats and locals hike and jog along a towpath lined with giant sycamores and willows.

  The cramped town house was only twenty-seven feet wide-fifteen feet shorter than his snap to the punter-but stood three stories high. It was, Connie told him, a shoe box standing on end.

  But it was in Georgetown, which is where she wanted to live. Insisted on it, really. Her family’s second home had been here when she was growing up, when her father was a U.S. senator from Connecticut. That house was three times the size of this one. But property was cheaper then, and her mother’s inheritance fueled not only Daddy’s political career but also a lifestyle far in excess of what an elected official could provide.

  Truitt walked up two flights of stairs to the bedroom, eager to hear about Connie’s visit to the doctor but apprehensive at the same time. She sat at her vanity applying makeup, seemingly oblivious to his presence.

  If she’s silent, does it mean she’s not pregnant? No, the husband is not permitted to draw an adverse inference from the wife’s failure to testify.

  At thirty-eight, Connie was a striking woman whose fine bone structure, manner, and posture spoke of cultured breeding and expensive schooling. Truitt did a fancy sidestep to get around her without banging her elbow. “At home, I had my own sitting room,” she said in greeting, as if reading his mind about the tight confines of the town house.

  At home.

  Home being Waltham, Massachusetts. Home being where they had spent the bulk of their not entirely happy marriage. Home not being where they now lived.

  “It’s the nineties,” he replied. “Downsizing is in. I read it in USA Today.”

  “Sam, you don’t read USA Today.”

  She kept her eyes on the mirror, where she w
as smoothing a glistening liquid on her lips. Whatever happened to simple lipstick? He could not keep up with women’s fashions. Sam Truitt could tell you what Thomas Paine had for breakfast the day he wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” but he was oblivious to what his wife wore to the Kennedy Center last Saturday night, coincidentally, to see a revival of 1776. Or, for that matter, the names of the two couples-her friends not his-with whom they shared an apres-theater supper, her expression, not his.

  He dodged around the bed and opened the door to what the broker had called the walk-in closet but which would not accommodate anyone with shoulders wider than the average coat hanger. Connie’s clothing took up all of her side and most of his. He stripped down to his underwear, straight-armed a number of her cocktail dresses, and hung up his suit. Feeling claustrophobic and not wanting to jitterbug past Connie like Emmitt Smith squeezing through the off-tackle hole, Truitt sat on the edge of the bed with its duvet of roses and hyacinths and looked at his wife in the vanity mirror.

  He couldn’t stand it any longer. “How did it go today?”

  “I had lunch with Stephanie,” she said, her eyes meeting his in the glass.

  Objection! Not responsive. Your Honor, please admonish the witness to answer the question.

  “They’re building a gazebo in their backyard,” Connie continued.

  Truitt pondered this tidbit of news. Just what does one say to a wife whose sister is building a gazebo in the backyard of her showy two-million-dollar home? That it will be a nice addition to her Jacuzzi, lap pool, and sauna? That it must be nice being married to a lobbyist whose basic claim to fame is being the son-in-law of a former senator-fame enough to make $850,000 a year, more than five times the salary of a Supreme Court justice.

  “Gazebos are nice,” he said, prudently.

  “She showed me the plans. It has a gas grill, a microwave, dishwasher, full-size refrigerator, plus an ice-cream fountain and a wet bar with two beer taps.”

  Why is she dragging it out? Am I going to be a father or not?

  “What, no roller coaster?”

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said. “Or a snob.”

  “What!”

  “A reverse snob, actually.”

  He was stumped. “What does that mean, that I look down on people who are better than I am?”

  “No, you look down on people who have attained goals which you think are”-she paused to find the right word, searching the breadth and depth of her Bryn Mawr-Sorbonne vocabulary-“inconsequential or frivolous.”

  “I cop a plea,” he said. “Guilty as charged. What are the sentencing guidelines for a repeat offender?”

  “Life,” she said, “without parole.”

  He smiled with real pleasure. That was the old Connie. In the fencing match that was their life, a parry was usually followed by a thrust. Sometimes he yearned for the early days when they made each other laugh and competed to see who had the sharper wit. Connie usually won.

  He watched his wife lift her long, chestnut hair into some impossible upswept pile that she clasped with several silver barrettes. Most of the time, she wore her hair parted in the middle, where it fell, long and swingy, across her shoulders. It made her look like a college coed. Now, with her hair up, she looked regal, Princess of the Capitol, with a long, slender neck and prominent cheekbones, her dark hair set off by flawless porcelain skin.

  He pondered the nature of their relationship. Did he love her? Maybe it wasn’t a raging passion, but there was still care and affection and occasionally, warmth.

  Sam Truitt had met Constance Parham at her family’s third home, the summer cottage on Nantucket. Truitt was an assistant professor at Harvard Law with no particular interest in politics, but he had a professed animosity toward many of President Reagan’s appointees to the federal bench. Senator Lowell Parham was the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and after reading one of Truitt’s diatribes in The New Republic, he began calling on him to draft questions for judicial appointees considered unqualified.

  Truitt was not ordinarily an introspective man, but he thought now of the forces that had brought him to Connie. Constance Parham was eight years his junior, just finishing up a graduate degree in art history when they met. He remembered the instant attraction to this tall, sassy brunette with a quick wit and a lethal tongue. She had the clean WASP features of her mother, a high forehead with a widow’s peak, a wide smile, and the gift of her father’s laughter and intelligence. Connie could hold her martinis, crack wise, and beat most men at tennis.

  Looking back now, Truitt thought he fell in love with the family. The senator was a liberal without being a sissy, a Harvard intellectual who liked to hunt, fish, and drink bourbon. His wife was a descendant of Massachusetts Puritans who made several fortunes in New England textile mills and had the foresight to shift their wealth into Arizona real estate just before their businesses succumbed to foreign competition. Alice Parham adored her husband, who returned her love in both public and private displays of affection. Constance Parham grew up with the benefits of status and privilege, boarding school in Europe, a college curriculum that required a commute to Paris, and an endless supply of eligible suitors, some Cabots, some Lodges, some Kennedys. And one Truitt.

  ***

  “It’ll be nice for the kids,” he said, after a moment.

  “What?”

  “The ice cream bar. Maybe the beer taps too, for all I know.”

  “What are you implying?” Irritated now.

  “Nothing, just that the gazebo will be nice for your sister’s children, our nieces and nephews, the little blond platoon of well-fed Virginia storm troopers.”

  Actually, there were only four of them, all in braces, all in private schools, all with their own horses in their own stables. The orthodontics and tuition alone must be astounding, he thought, not to mention the oats and carrots. Harold Bellows, his brother-in-law, had an eighty-acre estate in Virginia. In the basement of the sprawling home was an English pub. A real one, the stained glass and dark wood stripped from a country pub in the Cotswolds. To Truitt, it represented the essence of ugly-American acquisitiveness. Taken from a place enjoyed by an entire village, the old scarred wood bar-ripe with the wet scent of a hundred years of spilled ale-was now used, if at all, by one pudgy, overpaid apologist for sugar growers, oil companies, and heaven help us, handgun manufacturers.

  “You’re attacking me,” she said angrily.

  “What? How?”

  “You’re reminding me in a cheap and cowardly way that we don’t have children, that I can’t have children, that my tubes are scarred, but your sperm count is in the top one percent. You’re a first team All-American sperm machine with a wife who can’t complete a pass.”

  Oh no. God no.

  His heart sank. She had answered the question of the day, the question of the decade, the question of their lives. He walked over to the vanity and put his arms around her. Her shoulders felt like pillars of ice. “Connie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  She glared at him in the mirror. “If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t have used Stephanie’s children to disparage me.”

  He wondered if every marriage had one wound that would never heal. “I didn’t! Sometimes a gazebo is just a gazebo. I was just making conversation about our spoiled nieces and nephews and a goddamn gazebo that’s probably bigger than our house.”

  “Exactly! You were striking out at me because of the gazebo. You thought I was belittling the amount of money you make in comparison to Harold, so you brought up the children to hurt me, to remind me that I’m defective, that I’m not a whole woman.”

  “No! I swear-”

  “It’s your fault as much as mine,” he fired back. “You’re the bastard who knocked me up back on the island.”

  The ferocity of her words startled him, and he backed off, retreating to the bed. His head throbbed. Their arguments were becoming more severe, Connie’s attacks more cutting.


  “Connie, what can I say to you? You’re not defective. You’re a bright, witty, breathtaking woman, and I don’t care how much money Harold makes. I don’t care if he moves the Smithsonian into his gazebo and invites the Washington Redskins to play in his backyard. So let’s just forget it.”

  In the mirror, he saw her eyes brim with tears. There would be no more playful banter today. She had brought back the memories, which hung over them like the stalled thunderhead of a summer storm. At the time, Connie was just finishing her master’s degree, still writing her thesis on French impressionism. They’d just starting going out, and one August night, after a swim in the cold Atlantic at dusk off Siasconset on Nantucket Island, wrapped in a blanket on the beach, they’d made love. He remembered even now her salty taste, her long wet hair falling into her face, his body grinding into her with the urgency and passion of new lovers.

  My God, the heat we brought to each other.

  He could still picture the fusion of their bodies, each of them heedless of the scraping sand and incoming tide, seeing only the first stars of evening, the rising moon, and the fire in each other’s eyes. What he wouldn’t give to re-create that with her now. For longer than he cared to admit, their lovemaking had been infrequent and perfunctory.

  But then… oh Lord, then the sex had been synchronized with the pounding of the waves. He had sung out her name on the sea breeze, exploding into her with a thunderclap from within, watching bolts of lightning through closed eyes.

  He had also exploded into her without protection, an event that just now prompted Connie to refer to her husband not as “Sweetheart” but rather as “the bastard who knocked me up back on the island.” Actually, he had used a condom, but it burst because, in his feverish haste, he had neglected to squeeze out the air pocket in the tip, which then detonated in the midst of their furious coupling. Sam Truitt’s manual dexterity, it seemed, was limited to putting a spiral on the long snap.

  Connie became pregnant. Their first crisis, the one that would launch all the others. Just like the chaos theory the physicists introduced to popular culture. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a typhoon in the Pacific. And, he supposed, the explosion of a condom on Nantucket can cause an October freeze in Georgetown fifteen years later.