by Lia Matera
Even though I’d seen his videotapes, his bluntness startled me. I didn’t think I’d be able to sit through this. Not after last night.
“Licked to orgasm, I mean.” He knelt, camera close to the devotees’ faces. “That seems fair, doesn’t it? Commercially viable, right?”
Around the circle, everyone froze for a moment.
Then a woman smiled. A man laughed. Brother rose, turning slowly to capture reactions.
“Doesn’t that seem fair?” he asked again, as if he badly needed the validation of their agreement.
A few people said yes.
I made myself stay, but it wasn’t easy. It was an endless ninety minutes of increasingly more elaborate “bargains,” announced and discussed at philosophic length by the guru. Roy and Rhonda acted as facilitators, breaking the ice with their instant compliance. Brother Mike, leaning nimbly close or hovering overhead, collected video images.
It was too much. The embarrassment that was notably absent from the group … I seemed to endure all of it. My clothes were soaked with sweat, and I felt almost battered. The smell of sex was heavy in the room.
And no one used condoms. I wondered whether I was watching these people’s “liberation” or their infection.
The whole thing gave me the creeps. What was worse: it aroused me. That was the part I hated most.
When Brother Mike congratulated them on how well they’d “explored their energy,” I slipped out of the room and dashed back upstairs.
I needed to be alone. I needed to get some perspective on what I’d witnessed before I could talk to my client—or anyone else—about it.
17
When I heard the knock at my door a half hour later, I considered ignoring it. I’d taken a quick shower and changed into my bulkiest, least sexy sweater. I felt as if I’d been stuffing my face with fudge, as if I’d overindulged in something cloyingly bad for me.
Afraid more might be required of me as guest or lawyer, I reluctantly opened the door.
It was Brother Mike himself, beaming, rather disheveled, still looking like an absentminded math professor. “Well, that went pretty well, don’t you think?”
“I guess that depends on what you were trying to accomplish.” My tone was cold.
He didn’t seem to notice. He stepped into my room. “I’d have come right up to talk to you, but I often get excited. One of the women helps me out.”
I took an appalled step backward. Reminded myself that sex was the background against which this lawsuit would be played. If I couldn’t hear my client speak frankly, I wouldn’t make it as his lawyer.
I remembered how difficult it had been dealing with my craziest client, Wallace Bean, who’d shot two United States senators. And yet Bean, influenced by Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson movies, had seemed more mainstream American—and therefore easier to understand—than Brother Mike. His outlook had been mass culture minus a few IQ points and minus the ability to perceive movies as feel-good fantasies, not how-to manuals. Mike Hover was another matter. His meshing of cerebral and carnal was disturbing, almost disgusting. I’d have to work on that, in myself and in my legal presentation of him.
“So, tell me”—I managed to sound professional— “was this session typical?”
He nodded, grinning. “That’s why I came up. I was so pleased. I was afraid you’d see something atypical. Like one time, the group got thrown off by someone remembering an early traumatic experience. She got very hostile and wild.”
“What did you do?”
He looked surprised. “We took her out of the group. But the energy lingered, it was so intense. There was a victimized feeling from the group that wasn’t a real part of its dynamic. I couldn’t work with it. For example, the woman I’m talking about, when I got her into a group of people who’d been sexually abused, we both did fine with that energy. But the way she left her mark on the other group …” He shook his head. “It just didn’t work.”
“So you prescreen your groups? For similar …” I couldn’t quite think what to call it.
“Not prescreen. Every once in a while, I ask someone to leave and come back later when there’s a more compatible group. Usually, you know, it’s more a question of what’s predominant in the group. For the tapes, we set up specialty groups.” He plunked himself onto a chair. “It made for better movies.”
“How did you prescreen? How did you guard against someone being wrong for the group?”
“They’d all done it with me before. I just shuffled them into the right groups and did the videotaping. Pretty bland stuff. But I did some interesting things with it later. I’ll have the Rs give you those tapes. The ones at the video rental places, those aren’t any fun. Those are for seed money.”
He slumped, crossing his foot over his knee and tapping it lightly with his finger. “There are a lot of hard feelings here toward Arabella.”
“I’ve heard some murmurs.”
“From Rhonda? Well, Arabella couldn’t have sexualized us if we weren’t ready for it. She’s one of these people that when she walks into a room, the whole room feels different.”
“From my limited observation, it seems you analyze things almost exclusively according to sexual ‘energies.’“ I failed to keep the word out of aural quotation marks.
He suddenly sat very straight, his face alight. He looked like a happy child. “I know what would work for you sexually.”
“No.”
“If you—”
“If you go any farther, I will leave, and you can find yourself another lawyer. It was useful to me to observe your session, so I did. There was nothing personal about it. This is a business relationship, and I will not discuss my private life.”
“But if it helped you—”
“Do you want me to continue as your lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“Then we don’t talk about me.”
His head tilted and his eyelids drooped. He looked like a mathematician squinting at a calculus equation. “This is rare. I rarely have premonitions. But I trust them.”
“Is this premonition about the case?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know what it’s ‘about,’ in that sense. It’s about you.”
I took a backward step, putting a little more distance between me and this man. He could persuade people—yuppie lawyers, even—to have sex on film, films intended for distribution. I’d lived in San Francisco during the Jim Jones years. I mistrusted that kind of charisma, mistrusted those who held others in their sway.
I’d have to be careful. If I let him share his premonition, I might, to some small degree, accept it and help fulfill it. If I refused to hear it, I bowed to superstition and disquiet.
“Just to be clear,” I spoke slowly, “I regard this as a professional relationship. To the extent that who you are is part of the case, then yes, even your premonitions are germane. Not for their content, but as an insight into your mental process.”
He grinned. “It must drive your loved ones crazy to have you be so measured and precise on the outside and so chaotic in what you actually end up doing.”
I was about to object: I’d stayed on track, my career and reputation were intact. But I considered my elopement shortly after my eighteenth birthday. The way I left town without a word when my marriage broke up. More recently, the way I’d chucked Sandy for Hal without discussion, connected briefly with Ted McGuin though we had nothing in common.
“That’s depends on how you look at it,” I replied. “You could say that to anyone, and leave it to them to find it applicable.”
“I wonder. I’ll have to think about that.” He rose, stretching. “Well, I have a lot of confidence in you. I think you’ll take care of it just right.”
“Take care of what?”
“But I won’t.” He looked as if something had surprised him, as if he were viewing
some internal movie. “You watched one of your clients die.”
I felt my stomach knot. Dan Crosetti, who’d deserved a lot more from life. “Yes. It was in all the newspapers.”
“Was it? It was very hard on you. It closed up a big place inside you. That’s too bad. Try to remember that what you’re feeling is magnified extremely by the previous trauma. Try to separate that out so you can fix on the important detail.” He shook his head. “I can’t quite grab it, whatever it is. But you’ll notice it, if you can stay focused.”
He walked past me, making the kind of sounds a person makes when he’s reading something interesting. “Funny—I keep thinking it has to do with me, too. But I can’t quite feel how.”
It wasn’t until he was out the door that he said, “If I don’t see you … You should have sex with someone who—”
“Stop,” I warned him.
“Right.” With a grin, he added, “Force of habit.”
If he hadn’t turned and walked away, whistling absently, I’d have verbalized my anger.
As it was, I slammed the door. I’d told him plainly my private life was off-limits. His assessment was asinine—of course, since he didn’t know me. What angered me was the gall of it: giving advice without information. Urging people to act on his guesses. Just because he had the gift—maybe it was as ingenuous as it seemed and maybe it wasn’t—of sounding as if he knew.
I’d rather make my own mistakes than be right by another’s decree.
Lucky thing.
18
The next morning, a member of last night’s session rapped at my partially open door. It was eight-fifteen. I was showered and dressed, about to go in search of coffee.
The man was well-groomed in a polo shirt and Dockers jeans, probably in his late thirties. He had the pleased look of a handsome man and seemed to expect some grateful flirtation from me. But my attitude was colored by what I’d seen in him last night: a preference for being rough and (even under those circumstances) unromantic. I tried to overcome my aversion. This was something about him I had no right to know.
“What can I do for you?” I asked him.
“Brother Mike asked me to bring you to his room.”
“All right.” The sooner the better. I had an afternoon flight out, and it would take me most of the morning to ferry to the mainland and ride the airporter down to Seattle.
“I’ll show you where it is.” He stood back to let me exit.
We started down the hall, passing a group of people clustered beside a window. I flashed on what I’d seen them do the night before.
It was awful. It was like being in a household where every person was a former lover. I knew and could visualize too much about each of them. My reaction was almost physical; I felt a little sick. My escort stopped at a big door, painted blue. “This is it, but …”
“Yes?”
“I know about the problems with Arabella and all that. I know you’re a lawyer. I am, too,” he added with an in-group grin.
Did he expect congratulations? Hail fellow, well met? I waited.
He looked over my shoulder, not meeting my eye. “I was in a couple of videos with her.” A quick glance to see if I was impressed. “I got to know her. And the other girls.”
I tried to feel sympathy. He’d known the dead women. Maybe he’d cared for them. In any case, the death of six acquaintances would be shocking.
But he seemed to expect a particular response. And I didn’t know what it was.
“We even filmed some videos at The Back Door after closing. That was”—a half-smile—“interesting.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and another man and Brother Mike and the girls. Man …” He cupped his hands over imaginary breasts.
There was little sympathy in his manner, little acknowledgment that people—not just “girls”—had died. “The women were devotees?”
“Them? God, no.” His smirk was indecorous at best.
Lawyers are trained to be conventional in their social expression. What did his tone mean? That the women, because of Arabella’s lawsuit, had become enemies of the commune?
“We were only there twenty minutes, half an hour, at a time,” he continued. “I think it was more a favor to Arabella. She was into filming them with us.”
“Did they sign releases?” The one signed by Margaret Lenin warned participants that the videos might be distributed for public viewing. Signatories consented to “any use or alteration of images contained therein, for commercial or any other purposes” without expectation of payment.
“No, it was more on a horsing-around level. Arabella took a few of us over there a couple of nights, and Brother Mike brought the camera. He wasn’t doing sessions or anything. Arabella mentioned she’d taken home movies—that’s what she called them—for him before. But the point I’m trying to make is, I do know her.”
I interpreted his grin as stupidly lascivious. Perhaps the reaction was unfair. It was freighted with years of disdain for certain kinds of men, men with clichéd suppositions about what women wanted and liked. Dumb men in bars. Full-of-themselves jocks in lawyer suits.
“Anyway, the reason I bring this up: if I can be of any help to you …” He extracted a business card from his shirt pocket. “I do know her. Rather well.” He left little doubt as to what “rather well” meant.
I took his card. A maritime lawyer. Some help he’d be.
I knocked at Mike Hover’s door.
He called out, “Who is it?”
I answered.
“If you’re alone, come in.”
I glanced behind me, waiting for the lawyer to leave. He looked disappointed. But he turned and walked away.
I stepped into a corner room of little wall and many windows. Light from the white-sky morning showed a chill, austere space with a cluttered desk, an easy chair, and a small four-poster bed.
I wanted to focus on the decor of the room, on the view from the window. I didn’t want to focus on Brother Mike, handcuffed hand and foot to the posts of the bed, a loose black cowl over his face, not a stitch of clothing on his thin, out-of-shape body.
“Close the door,” he said gently.
This was not working out for me. As much as I wanted a splashy, highly visible case, I couldn’t handle all the naked bodies, all the sexual oddity.
I was at a loss for words. I shut the door.
“I’m not quite sure how to get out of these,” he said.
“Shall I call Roy?” I wondered if he’d done this to himself or if it had been part of exploring his “energies.”
“She took the keys.”
Trying not to look down, I yanked a blanket out from under him and covered him. I pulled the cowl from his face. “Are you saying this was involuntary?”
“Well, it was a surprise, if that’s what you mean.” He was flushed, damp hair sticking to his forehead. “I was sound asleep. One of my hands was shackled before I even woke up.”
“And you didn’t struggle?”
“I don’t suppose I did, I was so much in my dream still. I was dreaming that Arabella—”
“What did you actually see? Or feel or smell?”
“I felt passion and happiness—from the person with the handcuffs, I mean. A true and satisfying and profoundly motivating anger. That’s what kept me half in the dream state, I think. I was feeling that from Arabella in the dream, and when I woke up with one hand cuffed and something going over my eyes, I was still feeling this rush of, like I said, the purest joy of anger.” He sounded more bewildered than embarrassed. “So I didn’t fight. I let her cuff the other hand. I was sharing her exultation.”
He surprised me. I didn’t regard anger as one of the happier emotions.
A spark of intellectual engagement vivified his expression. “Anger can be very dark and negative and even para
lytically caustic in some people,” he explained. “People like you, who survive by retaining control. But every once in a while in some people, you see that real American can-do kind of anger. Our films teach it to us, right back from the World War Two musicals to the Rambo movies. To be angry is to be energized. It’s the American high. That’s why we love alcohol so much; it works well with anger. And anger makes us happy.”
I supposed. “Did your attacker say anything to you?”
“Well, I don’t know.” His tone shifted back into bewilderment. “I was getting such a hit of the energy, I don’t remember if any of it was verbalized. I really don’t remember.”
Damn, he’d make a terrible witness.
“Did you notice any identifying characteristics? The way the hands felt? A kind of perfume? Are you sure it was a woman?”
“No, no. None of the surface stuff. I wasn’t tuned into that.”
Great. “Well, whoever it was, where did she go? Do you have any idea?” I glanced at the French doors leading to what appeared to be a balcony. “Did she go out this way?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, for a couple of minutes I was caught up in her emotions. Then I realized I needed help. I called out and luckily someone was in the hall for me to send after you. But I didn’t hear her leave. At a certain point, I just felt she was gone.”
I gave the doors a push, stepping onto a small balcony with stairs down to the lawn. Adirondack chairs faced the rail. I ran my hand over one of the arms, wiping away a fine stipple of dew. The seat, I noticed, was dry. I supposed the handcuffer had occupied it, perhaps preparing the cuffs and cowl.
In the meadow below, devotees raised their arms toward the fog-dimmed sun, bending backward, then forward. There was no sign of anyone fleeing.
I stepped back in.
“Why did you call for me?” I examined the shackle securing his pale, crooked-toed foot to the bedpost. His ankle was blue-veined and hairy, small in its chrome loop.