Innocent

  Not that there will be any of that tonight. Once I'm in our bedroom, I realize I have entirely misread the meaning of Barbara waiting up. Steel hardens her face when she is upset--the jaw, the eyes--and right now, it's all iron.

  I ask the simple yet eternally dangerous question: "What's the matter?"

  She frumps around beneath the covers. "I just think you could've talked to me first," she says. The remark is incomprehensible until she adds, "About Koll."

  My jaw actually hangs. "Koll?"

  "You think this doesn't affect me, too? You made a decision, Rusty, to put me through months of campaigning, without even speaking to me. You think I'll be able to go to the grocery store after a workout with my hair plastered to my cheek and smelling like a gym sock?"

  The truth is that Barbara orders most of our groceries online, but I skip the debater's point and ask simply why not.

  "Because my husband would be pissed off. Especially if somebody sticks a microphone in front of my face. Or takes a picture."

  "Nobody is going to take a picture of you, Barbara."

  "If your ads are on TV, everybody will be watching me. Wife of a candidate for supreme court justice? It's like being a minister's spouse. It's bad enough as it is with you as chief judge. But now I'm really going to have to play the part."

  There is no talking her out of this vague paranoia; I have tried for decades. Instead, I am struck by her remark about playing a part. We do not often get to this point, where the terms under which our marriage resumed are forced into the open. Nat was our mutual priority. After that, I have been entitled to remake my life as best I can with no deference to her. But because I accept that order as morally correct, I do not think often of how that must feel to Barbara--an unending penance as a drug-controlled Stepford wife.

  "I'm sorry," I say. "You're right. I should have talked to you."

  "But you wouldn't have thought about it, would you?"

  "I just apologized, Barbara."

  "No, no matter what it means to me, you really wouldn't have thought about letting N.J. become chief."

  "Barbara, I can't consider whether or not my wife is"--I visibly reach for words, so we both know what has been rejected: 'mentally unbalanced,' 'bipolar,' 'nuts'--"publicity shy in making professional decisions. N.J. would damage the court enormously as chief. I put my own self-interest aside. I can hardly place more weight on yours."

  "Because you're Rusty the paragon. Saint Rusty. You always need to run a steeplechase before you can let yourself have what you want. I'm sick of this."

  You're sick, I nearly say. But I stop myself. I always stop myself. She will rage now, and I will just absorb it, thinking as a mantra, She's crazy, you know she's crazy, let her be crazy.

  And so it goes. She works herself into a greater fury with each moment. I take a chair and say next to nothing except to repeat her name from time to time. She leaves the bed and resembles a boxer, pacing as if she were in the ring, fists clenched but hurling invective instead of punches. I am thoughtless, cold, self-absorbed, and unconcerned about her. In time, I go to the medicine cabinet to locate the Stelazine. I show her the pill and wait to see if she will take it before she enters the final, destructive phase in which she will lay ruin to something more or less precious to me. In the past, right in front of me, she has smashed the crystal bookends I was given by the bar association when I was elevated to chief judge; immolated my tuxedo trousers with the fire flick we use to light the barbecue; and thrown into the toilet two Cubans I had been given by Judge Doyle. Tonight, she finds the box George gave me, removes my gift, and right in front of me scissors the epaulets off the shoulders of the robe.

  "Barbara!" I scream, yet do not stand to stop her. My outburst, or her act, is enough to reel her back a bit, and she snatches the pill off her bedside table and downs it. In half an hour, she will be in a druggy coma that will cause her to sleep most of tomorrow. There will be no apology. A day or two from now, we will be back to where we started. Distant. Careful. Disconnected. With months of peace ahead before the next eruption.

  I find my way to the sofa in my study outside the bedroom. A pillow, sheet, and blanket are stored there for these occasions. Barbara's rages always shake me, since sooner or later I look down through a tunnel in time to the crime twenty-one years ago, wondering what madness made me think we could go on.

  I have a Scotch in the kitchen. When I became a lawyer, I had no use for alcohol. At this age, I drink too much, rarely to excess but seldom heading off to bed without first administering some liquid anesthesia. In the john, I empty my bladder for the last time and hold there. At certain times of year, the moon shines directly through this bathroom skylight. As I stand in the magic glow, the memory of Anna's physical presence returns, potent as the melody of a favorite song. I recall my wife's remark about my difficulties in letting myself have what I want, and almost in reprisal I release myself to the sensation, not merely the movie of Anna and me locked in embrace, but the languor and exhilaration of escaping the restraint on which I've staked my life for decades.

  I linger there, until, with time, I recede to the present, until my mind takes over from my senses and begins a lawyerly interrogation of myself. The Declaration of Independence said we have a right to pursue happiness--but not to find it. Children die in Darfur. In America, men dig ditches. I have power, meaningful work, a son who loves me, three squares every day, and a house with air-conditioning. Why am I entitled to more?

  I return to the kitchen for another drink, then make my bed on the leather sofa. The liquor has done its job, and I am drifting into the dust of sleep. And so concludes the day commemorating my sixty years on earth, with the feeling of Anna's lips lightly on mine and my brain cycling through the eternal questions. Can I ever be happy? Can I truly lie down to die without trying to find out?

  * * *

  The role of judge and clerk is largely unique in contemporary professional life, because a law clerk is basically engaged in an apprenticeship. They come to me brilliant but unmolded, and I spend two years showing them nothing less than how to reason about legal problems. I was a clerk myself thirty-five years ago, to the chief justice of the state supreme court, Philip Goldenstein. Like most law clerks, I still worship my judge. Phil Goldenstein was one of those people called to public life by his passionate faith in humanity, believing that good lurked in every soul and that his job as a politician or a judge was merely to help let it out. That is the sentimental faith of another era and certainly, if I have to be blunt, not one I ever took up. But my clerkship was a glorious experience nonetheless, because Phil became the first person to see great things for me as an attorney. I viewed the law as a palace of light, whose radiance would erase the mean and crabbed darkness of my parents' home. Being accepted in that realm meant my soul had exceeded the tiny boundaries for which I had always feared I was destined.

  I'm not sure I've been able to follow the justice's generous example with my clerks. My father never gave me a model of gentle authority, and I probably draw back too often and come off as officious and self-impressed. But a judge's clerks are his heirs in the law, and I have a special attachment to many of them. The seven former clerks who attend Anna's party Friday night are among my favorites, all of them notable successes in the profession. They join the rest of my staff to make a jolly table of fifteen in a dark back room at the Matchbook. We all drink too much wine and gently roast Anna, who is ribbed about her constant dieting, her laments over single life, her sneaking of occasional cigarettes, and the way she turns a suit into casual attire. One person has bought her bedroom slippers to wear in the office.

  When the event is over, Anna drives me back to the courthouse, as we planned. I'm going to get my briefcase, and she will box up the last of her belongings, then drop me at the Nearing bus. Instead, it turns out that each of us has bought the other a small gift. I sit on my old sofa, whose cracked leather inevitably reminds me a little of my own face, in order to open the box. It holds a miniatur
e scale of justice, which Anna has had engraved: "To the Chief--Love and gratitude forever, Anna"

  "Lovely," I say, then she sets herself down beside me with the small package I have given her.

  Distance. Closeness. The words are not merely metaphors. We walk down the street nearer to the persons with whom we are connected. And in the last months of Anna's clerkship, a professional distance has largely vanished between us. When we get into an elevator, she inevitably crowds right in front of me. 'Oops,' she will say as she wedges her rump against me, looking over her shoulder to laugh. And of course, now she sits flank to flank, shoulder to shoulder, not an angstrom between us. The sight of my present--a pen set for her desk and a note invoking Phil Goldenstein, telling her she is destined for great things--brings her to tears. "You mean so much to me, Judge," she says.

  And so, as if it signifies nothing at all, she drops her head against my chest and I eventually wrap my arm around her. We say nothing, not a word, for minutes, but we do not change positions, my hand now tight on her firm shoulder and her fine hair, sweet with the applications of conditioners and shampoo, resting right above my heart. There is no need to voice what is being debated. The longing and the attachment are fierce. But the perils and the pointlessness are plain. We are curled together, each trying to determine which loss would be worse--going forward or turning away. I still have no idea what will happen. But in this moment I learn one thing: I have been lying to myself for months. Because I am fully willing.

  And so I sit there thinking, Will it happen, will it actually happen, how can it, how can it not, how can it? It is like the moment when the jury foreman stands with the folded verdict form in his hand. Life will change. Life will be different. The words cannot be spoken quickly enough.

  In my moments given to this fantasy, I have promised myself the decision will be only hers. I will not ask or make advances. And so I hold her to me now, but do no more. The feeling of her solid form arouses me naturally, but I merely wait, and the time goes on and on, perhaps twenty minutes in total, until eventually I feel her face turn up to me from within the crook of my arm and the warmth of her breath on my neck. Now, she is waiting. Poised. I feel her there. I do not think No or even Wait. Instead, this is my thought: Never again. If not now, then never again. Never again the chance to embrace the most fundamental excitement in life.

  And so I look down to her. Our lips meet, our tongues. I groan out loud, and she whispers, "Rusty, oh, Rusty." I find the exquisite softness of the breast that I have imagined in my hand a thousand times. She pulls away to see me, and I view her, beautiful, serene, and utterly without a second thought. And then she speaks the words that elevate my soul. This daring, gorgeous young woman says, "Kiss me again."

  Afterward, she drives me to the bus and near the station veers into an alley so we can kiss good-bye.

  Me! my heart screams, Chief Sabich, smooching like a seventeen-year-old in the shadows beyond the cone of light from the streetlamp.

  "When will I see you?" she asks.

  "Oh, Anna."

  "Please," she says. "Not just once. I would feel so slutty." She stops. "Sluttier."

  I know there will never be a sweeter moment than the one we had just had. Less inept, but never more exultant.

  "All affairs end badly," I say. I am perhaps the world's leading exhibit. Tried for murder. "We both should think about this."

  "We both have," she answers. "I could see you thinking every time you looked at me for months. Please. So we can talk, if nothing else?"

  We both know that the only talk will occur between the acts, but I nod and then alight after kissing her deeply again. Her car, an aged Subaru, goes off with the phlegmy sound of a failing muffler. I walk slowly to the bus. How, my heart shrieks, how can I be doing this again? How can any human being make another time the same mistake that all but ruined his life? Knowing the likelihood of one more catastrophe? I ask myself these questions with every step. But the answer is always the same: Because what has lain between then and now--because that time is not fully deserving of being called living.

  CHAPTER 6

  Tommy, October 13, 2008

  Jim Brand applied to the PA's office out of the bottom of his night law school class and received a form rejection. But he showed up in the reception area to beg for an interview, and Tommy, passing by, liked what he saw. It was Tommy who pushed Brand through the hiring committee, taught him how to write a decent brief, made Jim the puppy lawyer on a number of big cases. And Brand, in time, proved out. He had a natural feeling for the courtroom, with the instincts of a jock who knew when there was trouble on his blind side. Defense lawyers lamented his smash-mouth style, but they said that about Tommy, too.

  But unlike most people you do a favor, Jim Brand never forgot who he owed. Tommy was his big brother. They had been best men at each other's weddings. Even now, once a month, at least, Tommy and Brand had lunch by themselves, both as a way to keep up with each other and to noodle on the office's recurring problems, which were otherwise easily ignored in the onrush of emergencies. Usually they had a quick sandwich nearby, but today Brand left a message with the secretaries for Tommy to meet him downstairs at noon. Jim was just nosing his Mercedes out of the concrete parking structure abutting the County Building and the courthouse when Tommy got to the street.

  "Where to?" Tommy asked from the passenger seat. Brand loved this car, a 2006 E-Class that he'd bought cheap after a three-month quest involving constant conversations about what he'd turned up on the Internet or in want ads. He and his girls polished it every Sunday, and he'd found a leather cleaner that gave the vehicle that new-car smell. The auto was so pristine, Tommy was not comfortable even crossing his legs, for fear his shoes might leave dust on the seat cushion. About the happiest day of Brand's life came when he was pulling out one evening and some toothless wino teetered by and said, 'Hey, man, that's some slick sled.' Brand still repeated the line all the time.

  "I was thinking Giaccolone's," said Brand.

  "Oh, God." At Giaccolone's they stuck an entire veal cutlet in an Italian roll and buried it in marinara. As a young PA, Tommy would take the dicks who'd worked on a case over there whenever a jury went out, but these days one sandwich was an entire week's calorie count. "I'm gonna feel like a boa constrictor trying to digest a horse."

  "You're going to enjoy lunch," said Brand, which was the first clue Tommy had that something was up.

  Giaccolone's was not very far from the U, and the famine appetites of undergraduates had sustained the place years ago, when it required youthful bravado or armed companions to enter the neighborhood. Back then it was a mess around here. The playground across the street was a weed-choked empty lot, with purple thistles growing beside refuse dumped in the middle of the night--worn wheel drums and chunks of stressed concrete with the rusty rebar sticking out. Now there were sleek town houses over there, and Tony Giaccolone, the third generation in the business, had done the unthinkable and added salads to the huge menu that hung over the counter. The U Medical Center, whose free-form architectural style resembled a bunch of Tomaso's blocks dumped on the floor, had crept within a few hundred yards, morphing and expanding like one of the cancers they were famous for treating there.

  Around the back of Giaccolone's there were concrete picnic tables. With their sandwiches, each dense as a brick, Brand and Tommy headed that way. A copper-colored Buddha in a suit sprang to his feet as they approached.

  "Hey there," said Brand. "Boss, you remember Marco Cantu, right? Marco, you know the PA."

  "Hey, Tom." Cantu wound up and smashed his hand into Tommy's. In Marco's days on the force, he had been known as No Cantu, smart enough but legendary lazy, the kind of cop who proved they shouldn't have put air-conditioning in the cruisers, because in the summer Marco wouldn't get out even to stop a murder. He had landed on his feet somewhere, though. Tommy remembered that much. Put in his twenty, then rode the diversity wave into paradise.

  "Veep for security at the Gresham,"
said Cantu when Tommy asked what he was up to these days. The Gresham was a classic hotel, built around a magnificent lobby where the marble pillars rose tall as sequoias. Tommy was over there now and then for bar association functions, but you needed a corporate expense account to pay for the rooms.

  "That must be a tough gig," said Molto. "Once a month, you go into crisis mode when you need to whisper to some drunken executive that it's time to leave the bar."

  "Actually," said Marco, "I got a staff of four to do that. I just listen in on my earpiece." Cantu had the device in his pocket and held it up for a second for laughs.

  "What about celebrities?" asked Brand, who was always starstruck. "You must get a few."

  "Oh, yeah," said Marco. "And they can be a handful." He told the story of a nineteen-year-old rock star who clubbed his way around town one night and decided when he returned at three a.m., utterly toasted, that it was a good idea to remove every stitch of clothing in the lobby. "I didn't know what to do first," said Marco, "block the paparazzi or turn up the heat to keep the kid from catching cold. What a little twerp."

  "You get some local celebrities, too," said Brand. "Didn't you tell me you were running into the chief judge of the appellate court all the time over there spring before last?"