My victory champagne was wearing off. I crossed my legs in the offending suit, breathed in the spicy smells of the shop, and watched the sluggish traffic through the neon letters in the MORRONE’S MEATS sign, with its glowing orange pig. My father’s shop was in the Italian Market, a city district of stores and outdoor stands hawking fresh crabs, squid, and poultry alongside detergent, pantyhose, and sponge mops. Cars crept down Ninth Street, navigating between the stalls and debris like an urban Scylla and Charybdis.
“They should clean up here,” I said to no father in particular. “Pick up the garbage. Don’t you think?”
Thwack!
Wooden pallets and cardboard boxes were piled in the gutter; pictures of apples smiled from the boxes and the California oranges looked positively giddy. But the fruit pictures were the only thing smiling in the market lately. An arsonist had burned Palumbo’s restaurant to the ground, tearing the heart out of the neighborhood, and a Vietnamese jewelry store down the street was robbed at gunpoint last week. My father’s shop hadn’t been hit. He thought the crooks respected him; I thought they knew he was broke.
“Dad, when are you going to sell this place?”
Thwack! His glasses, owing to their weight, slipped to the bumpy end of his nose. His eyesight was worsening daily; he was becoming the Mr. Magoo of butchers. He’d knife himself someday, if somebody else didn’t.
“Come on, Dad. You’re not mad at me for the trial, you’re mad because of the Sullivan case.”
“Right.”
Vito speaks! “How long you gonna stay mad?”
“Forever.”
Such a reasonable man. “Dad, you want to discuss this rationally for a change?”
“Fine, Miss Fresh Mouth.”
My full name. Usually he shortened it to Miss Fresh. “Listen, Fiske Hamilton is a federal judge, one of the most respected on the bench. He needed a lawyer, so he came to me. What’s wrong with that?”
“You’re livin’ with his son.”
“Yeah, so?” I lived with Paul Hamilton without benefit of marriage. The fact still rankled my father, even though he didn’t like Paul at all. Just one of the many paradoxes that made up Vito Morrone.
Thwack!
“Dad?”
“Like I said,” he said cryptically.
LeVonne Bayson, who was sweeping up sawdust in the corner, smiled to himself. LeVonne was the shy black teenager who worked for my father. We all pretended LeVonne was there to help with the customers, but that wasn’t the real reason. There weren’t enough customers to keep even my father busy, or my Uncle Sal, who hung out in the shop from time to time.
“LeVonne,” I called out, “do you know what this man is talking about? Can you translate for me? Would you tell the butcher I’m very happy to be in his country?”
LeVonne smiled like someone on a TV on mute and continued rearranging the sawdust.
Thwack! “What? What’sa matter, she don’t understand English, Professor? Tell her it means ‘like I said.’”
LeVonne shook his head, showing the wisdom not to referee. His skin was smooth, he was on the small side, and his features were still boyish as he looked down over the worn end of the broomstick. He wore his hair cut close to his head and a sparse patch of black fuzz was beginning to sprout under his chin.
“Why don’t you just talk to me, Dad?”
“You shoulda said no. No. N-O.”
“Turned down the Sullivan case? Why? It’s the biggest sexual harassment case in the country, it’s once-in-a-lifetime.”
“That’s why you’re doing it?”
Partly. “Christ, what was I supposed to do? Say ‘Look, Judge, I know you’re in trouble and I’m a hot-shit lawyer and I’m practically engaged to your son, but can you just take your business elsewhere?’”
“Hmph.” He wiped the cleaver on his apron and dropped it into the slot beside the carving board. Then he grabbed a well-worn boning knife, sliced a sliver of spongy fat from a chop, and threw the fat into a dented bucket. “Rita, did you ever think the judge mighta done it? Huh?”
I had, but I rejected it. “Fiske Hamilton? He’s a class act, Dad. A Yale grad, a partner at Morgan Lewis for ten years before he went on the bench. He didn’t harass her. I asked him and he denied it.”
Milky brown eyes flared behind his glasses. “It said in the paper he was chasin’ her around the office, right in the courthouse. It was in the Daily News, did you see?”
“You gonna believe everything you read?”
“You gonna believe everything you hear?” He laughed, then looked over at LeVonne. “Mr. President, you like that one?” he shouted, and LeVonne smiled his secret smile.
“Dad, this woman’s asking for three million dollars in damages. Intentional infliction of emotional distress, the whole works. She just wants to make a quick buck, that’s all there is to it.”
“No, I saw that girl’s picture, I saw that girl’s face, and I’m tellin’ you, she’s not doin’ it for the money.” He flopped the chop over and trimmed the remaining streaks of fat from the moist, pink flesh. A trickle of thin blood oozed onto the carving board, a lighter color than the Jackson Pollock bloodstains on his apron. This was why I became a vegetarian, no question.
“Dad, why are you still mad about this? It’s a done deal. I take her deposition tomorrow.”
“I don’t care how classy the judge is, I don’t like him usin’ my daughter.”
It stung. “He’s not using me.”
“The judge was screwin’ around on his wife and he thinks you’ll cover it up. He’s bluffin’ you and you don’t even see it.”
“He’s not bluffing. I asked him, I watched him answer.”
He wagged the knife at me. “Don’t watch the player, watch the cards. You got the cards in front of you and you’re not lookin’ at them. He’s playin’ you for a chump.”
“But I know Fiske. He’s Paul’s father. He’s family.”
“Whose family? You’re not married, so the judge ain’t family. I don’t know him, wouldn’t know him if I ran over him.”
I stifled a laugh at my father’s choice of words. His eyesight was so poor he ran over two bicycles and a child’s foot last year. Remarkably, the foot was fine, but the Schwinns were DOA.
“Dad, Fiske is a federal judge.”
“Oh, yeah? So what’s he got between his legs—a gavel?”
So genteel. My father loved to talk dirty; it was his favorite thing, after butchering lambs and running over the toes of small children. His coarseness drove my mother nuts until she fooled us both and had the last laugh.
“Mark my words,” he said, making circles in the air with the pointy knife. “I’ve been around the block a few times.”
“Not in the car, I hope.”
LeVonne actually laughed out loud, or at least audibly. My father managed a smile, too, but I think it was at the lamb chops. There on the carving board, in carnal tribute to his skill, stood twelve pink chops, evenly sliced and arranged like a king’s crown. “Ain’t that pretty?” he said.
“It’s art, Vito.”
“Miss Fresh Mouth.”
“You’re the one. You.”
Silence fell while we both cooled down. I knew we would, we always did. Coming apart and coming together, like pigeons fussing on a street corner. It had been like this for as long as I could remember. He had raised me by himself, in this shop. I cut my first chicken at age eight and my first deck of cards the year later. An atypical girlhood, we’ll leave it at that.
“All right, the chops are pretty,” I said finally.
He nodded. “So. You want something to take home? I got nice Delmonicos in the back.”
“No thanks. I don’t eat dead things, remember?” I watched him set the lamb on an old white scale. On its side were yellowed stickers from Licenses and Inspections and a gold star from some forgotten something when I was little. He peered down through his bifocals to read the numbers on the scale.
“Miss Priss. You
need red meat. It’s good for you, gives you protein.”
Right. “Anyway, I want to go out and eat. To celebrate.”
“Take the steaks, honey.” He winked and wrapped up the chops. “Stay in and celebrate.”
I forced a smile. My father didn’t know Paul and I hadn’t been getting along. I’d been trying not to worry about it, it happened in a relationship. I’d hoped it would change with Sullivan. Paul was close to his parents and was already showing an interest in his father’s defense. We were talking more than we ever had. It was the reason I’d taken the case, even though judges and butchers apparently disapproved.
And it didn’t matter, really, whether Judge Hamilton had harassed his secretary or not.
All that mattered was that I had to win.
3
I sat at the dining room table next to a half glass of chardonnay, waiting for Paul to come home. The day’s mail littered the table’s smooth walnut finish. I had opened the bills and flipped through the catalogs, had read all the mail except for the letter that mattered. I wasn’t ready just yet. I took a sip of wine, the crystal goblet knife-thin at the edge. The wine was cold, too chilled even to taste.
I looked around the room that Paul, a forensic architect, had designed. The walls were painted a slate gray with a creamy molding, harmonizing with a gray and burgundy Tabriz. Against the far wall was a walnut sideboard that had been in the Hamilton family since the Triassic, and above it hung a watercolor of a still life. I was beginning to wonder if the furnishings were compatible in a way that Paul and I could never be.
The unopened letter was from my doctor. The envelope had a linen texture, its color was a stark, cool white. It made an almost luminous oblong on the table as twilight fell and the room darkened. I didn’t get up to turn on a light, though. There was nothing I really wanted to see.
I took another sip of wine and rolled it around on my tongue. It was developing a taste as it warmed up, it was too young. Paul had taught me what “young” meant as applied to the taste of wine, as he had taught me many other things you couldn’t learn on a stool in a butcher shop. We’d been together for five years but were no closer to marriage than our fifth date. It was my reluctance; trying to build a practice, I had postponed the decision. Now it was upon us, and we were in trouble.
ALEXANDER EHRLMANN, M.D. I had almost forgotten about it during the trial, then Sullivan heated up. Dr. Ehrlmann had been one of the messages on my voice mail, but I hadn’t had time to return the call. Hadn’t made time to return it. Didn’t know what to do with what he would tell me.
Most of all, I didn’t know what to tell Paul, who was God-knows-where, way past dinnertime. I no longer felt like celebrating. I felt like sitting and drinking, so when he came in he’d feel guilty about being late on my big night. Then I wanted to open the envelope, throw it in his face, and make him feel guilty about that, too. But I knew I would do none of these things. I had kept it to myself since the initial finding, grown used to the idea. Accepted it, prepared myself to talk about it. If it turned out to be bad news, that is.
Maybe it would be good news.
My gaze fell on the unopened envelope. It challenged me to turn it over, like the last down card in a poker hand. Could be the worst news you ever had, could be the best. Come on, big shot, you’re a player, turn it over. Play.
I took a last swig of wine and didn’t care that it was underage. I picked up the envelope and inserted a taupe-polished thumbnail under the back flap. It only took a second to read. It would take longer than that to understand. Suddenly I heard Paul’s Cherokee rumbling onto the gravel driveway. I put the letter back in the envelope and slipped it into the stack of catalogs.
In a minute Paul opened the front door and set down beside it whatever he was carrying. A tube of blueprints, a briefcase. Paul placed things down with care, he moved things aside to make room for other things. I used to watch him play chess with his father; they both handled the wooden chesspieces as if they would explode if dropped.
“Rita?” Paul called out. “Where are you?” He came into the dining room and turned on the sleek halogen light, then dimmed it when I shielded my eyes. “What’s the matter, did you lose?”
Yes. “No.”
He walked to the end of the table, his mouth a small circle of concern. It was his strongest feature, full and sweet, and then his eyes, a deep blue behind rimless glasses. An intelligent face with a strong chin, framed by sandy brown hair. And longish sideburns, at my request.
“I’m surprised you’re home,” he said. “I thought you’d be working late.”
“Why would I do that? I worked all day, all month.”
“But you have the deposition tomorrow in Dad’s case.”
“I get to eat, don’t I? I thought we could go out to dinner. Maybe to Carolina’s for a Caesar salad. And puffy rolls and butter shaped like flowers.”
He sighed. “Sorry, honey. I ate already.”
“Where?”
“On the road.” He eased into a captain’s chair and crossed his legs. Long, thin legs, with nicely defined knees. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because I love you.”
He smiled faintly. “I love you, too.”
“Do you?”
“Of course. What’s gotten into you?”
I almost laughed out loud, but it wasn’t funny. “A virus, actually. HPV. Not HIV, HPV. Human papilloma-virus. It’s a whole different thing.”
His smile faded. “Are you serious?”
“It’s highly contagious. Some people even get warts, of all things. I don’t have that strain, thank God. There are lots of strains, apparently. I know all about it, now that I have it for sure.”
“Is this a joke? Rita?” He paled under the tan he got visiting job sites. Looking up at buildings, figuring out why concrete cracked or glass panes popped out.
“Dr. Ehrlmann can’t tell for sure when I was infected because the virus can remain inactive for months or years. Even ten years, in rare cases.”
“A virus?”
“There’s no real treatment. Ehrlmann tells me that 10 percent of his patients have it. It showed up in my last Pap test, then they retested for it.”
“Are you okay? Are you sick?”
“I’m fine, but it’s a risk factor for cervical cancer, so Ehrlmann says I’ll have to have three Paps a year instead of one. He’ll monitor it. I’ll be fine.”
He raked a slim hand through his hair and it flopped back into place. “Can I do anything?”
You already did, handsome. “Now that I have it, you probably do, too. But there’s no risk factor in men, or the risk is so low it’s insignificant.”
“Risk factor for what?”
“Penile cancer.”
“What did you say?” He swallowed hard, which I enjoyed. His Adam’s apple went up and down like a little elevator.
“Penile cancer. Cancer of the penis,” I said, at risk of putting too fine a point on it.
His forehead dropped into his hands.
“It’s not going to fall off, Paul.”
He shook his head in the cup of his hands. I guessed he was mulling over the falling-off part. Clunk.
“You okay?” I asked him.
He looked up and laughed, his face flushed. “Me? Oh, I’m just peachy.” He reached across the table and grabbed my glass of wine. “May I?”
“Be my guest, but it’s jailbait.”
Paul downed the wine without noticing its youth. “You can make jokes about anything.”
Almost anything. “People who have HPV generally don’t know they have it. So they don’t know if they pass it on.”
“How do they get it?”
Did he really not know? If so, I hesitated to say it, because that would make it real. “It’s sexually transmitted,” I said anyway.
“Like gonorrhea?”
“Right, like gonorrhea, from the good old days when STDs didn’t kill you. So there’s only one outstanding question,
as I see it. Where did we get a sexually transmitted disease when I have never been unfaithful to you?”
He set the empty glass down and his face fell, collapsing into deep lines around the mouth and eyes. Lines formed by forty-odd years of laughter and sorrow, both fraudulent and authentic. “What are you saying?” he asked, his tone quiet.
Watch the cards, not the player. “I’m asking you if you’re having an affair. I want you to tell me the truth.”
His mouth fell open and he was speechless. It reminded me of myself standing in front of Judge Kroungold. Suddenly I realized what had pissed my father off about my fake mourning in court. I had cheated. It wasn’t a bluff, it was a cheat. A fine line, and I hadn’t seen it. Had Paul cheated? Had he crossed the line, too?
“How can you ask me this?” he was saying.
“Tell me the truth, Paul. It’s not like we’ve been getting along so well, I know that.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m fooling around!”
“You work late a lot.”
He stood up. “So do you and I’m not accusing you of anything.”
Which is when it occurred to me. He wasn’t accusing me. It didn’t even occur to him to accuse me. Maybe because he already knew how we got it.
“Rita, I am not having an affair. I’m not, I swear it.”
I didn’t look at him. I was too busy looking at the cards.
“You must have contracted it before we met. You just said it could lie dormant for years, even ten years. You didn’t cheat on me and I didn’t cheat on you, so that’s how you got it. From before. Didn’t he say that was possible?”
“He said the odds were low.”
“But it’s possible. That’s what happened, babe.”
I nodded. I know a lot about odds. So much I still couldn’t look at him. My mind was reeling.
“Rita,” he said, touching my hand, “I love you, I swear it.”
I looked up then. His eyes were stone blue and desperate. His forehead seemed damp, but his grasp was dry and certain.