‘You have five minutes, Mason. Do your best.’
He did not even touch his belt to lower his trousers until he had crept inside, where he was overwhelmed by the intense odor. Someone, probably the girl, had vomited, and the smell was heavy in the close air, which was sodden with overheated breaths and perspiration. The box was so low he could not really kneel over her and had to support himself with one hand to pull down his pants. The girl was talking to herself, half sentences, song lyrics, he thought, a high-pitched mumbo jumbo. He made out one phrase she sang: ‘I want to hold your hand.’
She addressed him when he touched her. ‘Hey, honey,’ she said in a lyrical, drunken, carefree voice, seeming to relish this fleeting moment of anesthesia.
He wanted to make the most of his opportunity and explored the girl’s skinny body without much tenderness. A wool skirt was in a lump at her waist, and a silky undergarment had been pushed up to her shoulders. Lying down, she had only the smallest swell of breasts and tiny nipples like peas.
When he had first crawled into the carton, revolted by the heat and the smells, it occurred to him that he had to do no more than push his pants down to his ankles. None of the boys in the hallway would know what had happened. He could rock a bit, then talk the good game that so many fools talked on Sunday morning. But that was the point. No one would know. He was free. And although he was drilled by terror, he was going ahead, because he wanted to get this moment over with. There were two groups in the world, the ones who had and the ones who hadn’t, and he was convinced that every uncertainty of his age would be abated if he crossed that divide.
When he entered her, after a terrible moment of fumbling, his body was divided by a scream from his own heart. With startling clarity, he heard warnings of damnation. But those were the voices he was determined to be free from, and so he continued and finished that way, determined, somehow isolated from the sensations of pleasure. The girl, as he remembered, had rested a hand on his back and made some effort to move below him.
When he was done, he refastened his trousers.
‘Are you okay?’ he whispered before he crawled out.
‘Oh, honey,’ she answered.
‘No, really. Are you okay?’ He touched her cheek for the first time.
She was singing again, with a sudden clarity that frightened him.
His eyes stung when he emerged into the blazing fluorescence of the hallway. A few men reached out to pat his back and joked about his speed—he might not have been inside two minutes—but he wanted to escape the hungry pack. They had no idea what had actually happened. It was not what they thought or what they were celebrating. A moment later he was downstairs, trying to make whatever he could out of having passed through the membrane between his fantasies and his life. The Scotch was starting to back up on him.
Mario Alfieri’s blind date, Joan—with whom Mario was destined to spend the next thirty-seven years, until he died in the second World Trade Center tower on 9/11—appeared from the door of the bath designated for the weekend as the ladies’ room. She nearly ran into George while he was still trying to jam his shirttails into his trousers.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked.
He could not find a discreet answer. ‘Life is strange,’ he told her.
As much of a wise guy as Mario, Joan eyed him at length and asked, ‘Compared to what?’
* * *
Over the decades, when Judge Mason has loitered with the incident in recollection—and that is not often—he has dismissed it under the rubric of amusing follies of youth. Everyone had a first experience, and half of them were crazy. Faltering. Unsuccessful. Life and love moved forward to a better footing. He has not fully considered this moment in years and never attached to it the name he is required to apply today: a crime.
He reconsiders the word, the idea. Crime? He is a lawyer, a master of distinctions. It is not the same at all. Yet the incident is too close to the case he heard this morning for any comfort. The girl was drunk. Virtually incoherent. Her actions might have passed for consent in those days. But not now. The men in that dormitory hallway, including most especially him, had, in every sense of the antique phrase, taken advantage of her.
In the tomb darkness of the parking garage, George Mason feels how harshly his heart is beating. This is serious. Because he realizes that he has suddenly lost one of the comforts of middle age. There is joint pain, fading hearing, and trouble recalling names—even cancer. But generally speaking, not this. Yet now his soul seems as insubstantial as a fume. At the age of fifty-nine, George Mason wonders who he is.
6
PATRICE
“DID WE EVER TALK about my first time?” George asks Patrice at the hospital that night. The radioactive treatment required her to suspend her thyroid-replacement therapy, and she has been left feeling, as she puts it, ‘energetic as moss.’ At 7:00 P.M., she lies in the hospital bed, paging through a magazine. George himself is wrapped like a present—paper gown, cap, and booties—and sits behind a line taped on the floor, seven yards from his wife. Tonight, after they let him through the sealed outer area into her room, he did not get within ten feet of her bed before his wife raised both hands in warning to keep him from embracing her. ‘George, don’t be Sir Galahad. I know the nurse just told you not to get near me.’ She made him leave the burrito dinner he brought her on a table across the room, from which she retrieved it.
Despite the required distance, it has been a companionable visit, much better than their stilted exchanges yesterday through the prison-like phones. Patrice is looking forward to her possible release tomorrow night and has offered several entertaining thoughts on what she refers to as ‘life as hazmat.’ But the question he just asked her was apropos of nothing, and Patrice’s eyes, a penetrating blue, distinct as gemstones, flash toward him, one eyebrow encroaching on her dark forehead.
“I mean sex,” he adds.
“I understood, George,” she says and with that casts her eyes at the intercom rising on a separate metal stalk beside her bed. George, however, is secure. A loud bleat echoes from the speaker before the nurses’ station may listen in. More to the point, his memories from the garage lie on him like a heavy stone rolled off the entrance to a tomb. He has been waiting for the right moment to discuss all this with Patrice and has spoken up suddenly, knowing the staff will shoo him out soon. The radiation-sensitive badge they pasted on his gown over his heart remains green, but the bar is shrinking.
“Did I?” he asks. He has known Patrice’s story for decades. At seventeen, with a man of twenty-six, for whom she thought she had a passion. The backseat of a car. The usual squirming. Tab A. Slot B. And realizing in the aftermath that her main desire had been to get it over with and not for the smashing, handsome, worthless buddy of her older brother.
Patrice frowns, turning another page. “Not that I can recall, Georgie,” she says, then adds, with typical tart understatement. “Perhaps it means something that I never asked.”
He plows on, though, eager for her help.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” he says. “In the context of this case.”
“What case?”
“The one with the four boys? From Glen Brae?” He forces himself to say, “The rape. I told you it was argued today.” George heard a press account of the argument on the radio as he was driving here. ‘Dramatic developments,’ the reporter said. One judge had suggested that the entire case might be tossed out. Tape rolled of Sapperstein crowing on the courthouse steps as if Nathan Koll had not clobbered him from behind. George constantly longs for the days when public discourse was sterile and proper, and not the semaphore called spin.
“And how did that go?” Patrice asks, already forgetting what he told her on the phone this afternoon. It is one of the incurable issues between them that she takes his profession lightly. Her achievements as an architect are tangible. Buildings can stand for centuries. Beauty, above all, endures. Attorneys, by contrast, just mince around with words. B
ut because Patrice so often sees the legal enterprise as farcical, and lawyers as a swarming scrum of uncontrolled neurotics, she enjoys George’s description of the contest between Jordan Sapperstein and Nathan Koll. It’s a virtual travel poster for her view of the land called Law. Even in her weariness, she laughs at length for the first time this evening.
“And where do you come out in all of this?” she asks.
“Not with Koll. Not exactly.”
“So, where?”
“I don’t really know. But I’m bothered. And somehow. Well—that’s why I asked. About whether I told you. Because I suddenly realized that my experience was not unlike—” Now he struggles.
“Like what?” There is an undertone of alarm.
“This case. Warnovits.”
“Please, George. I’m sure it was nothing like it at all.” She tries to sound soothing, but anger curls her voice at the edges. As she said: It means something that she never asked. She is not merely a spectator, that’s what she’s telling him. Sex, after all, matters. The culture screams it. Not to mention our preoccupations. Like death, it remains one of life’s predetermined destinations, and thus is a land of heavy portent whenever one arrives.
In the interval, her fine features have darkened, and her gaze on him is more alert.
“Georgie, you don’t seem yourself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Don’t play dumb, George. It’s not you to stew about cases. You’re distracted. Have you found your cell phone yet?”
He’s messing up. He can see that. Her needs deserve to predominate, and her clear need right now is for George to be what he always is. Poised. Stable. Loyal as a hound. It would be preposterous, after all, to ask her to feel sorry for him because of her brush with mortality. Worse, Patrice would take it as a breach of faith. When she leaves the hospital tomorrow, or the day after, she intends to use the term cured. The evil invading cells are certain to have been annihilated and thus exert no claim on their future. She wants George to lock arms with her and march forward with no looking back.
“I’m fine, mate,” he answers.
A knock. His hour is up. From the door, he waves brightly.
“Home tomorrow,” he says. “No more hospital.”
“No more hospital,” she repeats.
In the air lock between the room and the hospital corridor, George removes the paper layers that covered him and pushes them into a special bag he was given when he entered. A technician sweeps him with a bright orange hand-held Geiger counter, a device the same size as a walkie-talkie. He may go. Striding down the garishly lit hospital corridor, he passes the doorways that often frame briefly glimpsed portraits of anguish. Yet his mind remains on his wife.
When George met Patrice, he was in his third year in law school and she was a sophomore at Easton College. At a traffic light near the Easton campus, he had gazed over into an MG Roadster in the next lane, its top down in the sun, and found himself stunned by the sight of the driver. The young woman had the kind of tidy, perfect beauty that would last forever; she would still be called gorgeous at ninety. When she caught George ogling, he pretended he’d been staring at the parafoam dice that hung from the rearview mirror rather than at her.
‘I’ve never understood what those are for,’ he said through his open window. ‘The dice? Is it luck?’ His impression was that the toys would make it harder to see out the window.
In response, he had gotten her cool smile.
‘I’ll have to ask my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘It’s his car.’
The light changed and she was gone, but the next time he saw her, at a party, she recognized him.
‘I never found out about the dice,’ she said. ‘Somehow when you asked me, I realized that the best thing about that guy was the convertible.’
He had thought then that he was getting in on the ground floor—before hordes of fellows his age were pursuing her, perhaps even before Patrice realized how much better she could do. There is never an ounce of false modesty when George declares that he married up, took a wife who is more capable than he. But Patrice was far ahead of him—as always. She knew what he was and had plans of her own. She wanted someone solid, faithful, supportive—and impressed. She had gone to architecture school, been the standout he expected, and then heaved most of it out when their second son was born. When she resumed practice, she worked on residences—not the highest art of architecture, pop tunes when she could have been composing symphonies. But she never complained. Patrice has always known her desires in a far more determined way than most human beings.
He has reached their house in Nearing. They have lived here almost a quarter of a century, having bought the place not long after George entered private practice. It was a starter home, but over the years it became Patrice’s canvas. They have undertaken four separate renovations, each one of which Patrice, unlike her husband, greeted as if it were the arrival of spring. What began as a flat-roofed Prairie-style ranch is now a two-and-a-half-story house graced with Arts and Crafts details and some touches of Wright, and is more than three times its original size.
With the taste of a burrito still somehow lodged in his salivary glands, George stops in the kitchen for a bottle of water before heading to his study to sort what the postman has delivered and to check his e-mail. George remains slightly vexed by Patrice’s forbidding reaction when he compared Warnovits with his own encounter decades ago. His wife at moments is wont to demand perfection of him. He is, fundamentally, her beautiful George—nearly as pretty as she is, well mannered, well liked, the senior member of a family that, as one of their friends said long ago, looks as if it came off the cover of a J. Crew catalog.
This has worked out well for them, because he is equally demanding of himself, a tendency that might well have been alleviated by age, were it not for going on the bench. Judging, to George’s mind, is essentially an arrogant enterprise. As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system—the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges—would take care of that; they didn’t need his help. But a judge’s duty is to declare right and wrong, a daring undertaking, because it contains an implicit warranty that you are above the weaknesses you denounce. After remembering what happened forty years ago in a refrigerator box, he regards that as a pitiable charade.
The incident, confined to recollected fragments for decades, is now coming back to him in larger pieces. And as he settles at his desk, George abruptly recalls that it had not ended with Joan, the young woman who was to become Mario’s wife, cracking wise about life.
‘Sweet Christ crucified, there’s a girl asleep in the library,’ the dorm proctor, Franklin Grigson, told George the following day. At 8:00 A.M., the old dorm languished in the somnolent air of a Sunday morning. Grigson and George might have been the only two young men awake after the night of partying. Grigson was heading to church. George was returning from the men’s room, where he had been sick yet again. He was better now, but his head still felt like the clanger in a ringing steeple bell.
‘Do us all a favor,’ Grigson said. ‘Find whoever she belongs to and have him get her out of here.’ If the girl was discovered, the unforgiving deans would revoke parietal hours for the dorm for the balance of the semester.
George crept to the library door. It was a handsome room, wainscoted in light oak in which generations of collegians had occasionally engraved their initials. The recessed bookcases were fully encumbered with old leather-bound volumes. On the torn maroon sofa farthest from the door, a girl slept. She was a slender, auburn-haired creature, in a raveled tartan skirt. A huge hole had eaten through the calf of one leg of her sheer tights. With just a glance, George knew who she was.
Upstairs, he pounded on Hugh Brierly’s door until Brierly appeared on the threshold, clad only in his pajama bottoms.
‘You lie,’ Brierly said. He claimed that he had escorted her to the dorm’s front steps and offered to find a ride, but that the young woman was soberin
g up and said she would look after herself.
‘You didn’t take her home?’ George asked. A gentleman—several of them—could have his way with a young lady in a refrigerator carton, but it was a breach of a code George had been taught was sacred not to see her back to her house.
‘Don’t be a pussy, Mason. I don’t know where she’s from. She showed up at the football game. What was I supposed to do? Escort her back to Scott?’ he said, referring to the stadium.
‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ George asked.
‘Me? You had as much to do with her as I did. You get rid of the slut,’ Brierly said and shut the door. Remembering the fistful of ‘rent’ Brierly had collected the night before, George pounded for some time, but Hugh would not open up. To the best of George’s memory, they never spoke again.
Downstairs, the young woman had awakened. She was a mess. Sitting on the threadbare Oriental carpet, she braced herself against one wall, trying to separate the patches of her long hair gummed together by the detritus of what had passed the night before. From her reddened features, he took it that she had allergies or a cold. The large gold pin that was meant to hold her wraparound kilt had been reinserted sideways, and there was a bright magenta stain from Hi-C covering the upper portion of her blouse. When she saw George in the doorway, her look was piercing.
“Whatta you want?”
The question, as he recalled, had struck him dumb. Because he had realized suddenly that there was in fact something he desired from her. Now, forty-some years later, sitting in the large leather desk chair that once was in his law office, George Mason is still. Along the pathways of memory, he crawls like a bomb expert creeping down a tunnel. It is a sensitive operation. A false move will destroy his chance, because he hopes for a second to inhabit the skin of that young man who was still unformed at the core. What had he wanted from her, as he stood at the threshold? Not forgiveness. It would flatter him too much to think his state of moral understanding was so far ahead of his times. In those days, it never once occurred to him that she might have been in any sense unwilling. He must have felt some lash of shame for sinning and some embarrassment at seeing her. Perhaps he was visited by an impulse to blame her, to call her names, as Brierly had. But standing twenty feet from her in the old library, preposterously, improbably, he had wanted one thing more than any other: connection. He had been with her in public, when she had been virtually insensate. But they had been joined in that fundamental way. Euclid said that a straight line is the most direct connection between two points, no matter how random or distant, and at that moment George Mason would have told you that it was a rule about sex as much as about geometry. Was it instinctive that a bounty of tenderness went with the act? Looking at her, he felt acute despair that she did not even know his name.