Compelling Evidence

CHAPTER 6

In the days following Ben’s death, my mind has been playing tag with thoughts of recrimination, of my role in his misery with Talia. The funeral is now past, part of yesterday’s news. Alone in my office I study a copy of the Trib, which lies on my desk next to a tall glass of bourbon. I look at the three-column photo above the fold.

Talia was, I think, at least in that moment when light hit Mr. Kodak’s emulsion, heavily into appearances. She has made the front page. Her face shrouded by black lace, her mourning suit by Armani, she is the chic picture of stoic sorrow. She stands three steps up on the cathedral stairs for the world to see, head held erect, a slight breeze ruffling the lace about her face. All that is missing is the toddler at her knee dressed in long coat; saluting the coffin. Under the picture a bold lead for the cutline: WIDOW GRIEVES. Talia knows how to set a scene.

I sip my drink and remember our last meeting. A dim hotel room across the river, ensconced in a once posh tennis resort now turned to seed.

I rolled to her side of the bed and felt the cold wetness of my own passions, a small portion of which had pooled in the creases of the sheets beneath where her loins had rested.

She moved about the room a picture of indolent calm, gathering wisps of lacy underthings. Silence seemed Talia’s special refuge after passion.

In my own time I came to understand that Talia was an innocent, in the way that rich men’s daughters are often innocent, as if they are somehow immune to the usual social conventions. In the months that we met, following my separation from Nikki, whenever we registered at a hotel I huddled under a broad-brimmed hat behind the heavy collar of a long coat in the winter or oversized dark glasses that concealed a good part of my face in the heat of summer. I used more aliases than there are characters in a Tolstoy novel.

But with Talia, what you saw is what you got. To my chagrin she was soon on a first-name basis with the clerks at the myriad of no-tell motels and roadside hostelries we frequented. To her, discretion was a word without meaning.

“How’s Nikki?” she asked. “And your daughter. How’s Sarah?”

“We agreed not to talk about them, remember?”

“She’s so cute.”

Talia’s interest and concern were genuine. She had helped me on two occasions make support when my take from the firm, my bonus after salary, was a little light. These were short-term loans, which at the time I attributed to our relationship. Now, in retrospect, I wonder whether they were so much for my benefit as Sarah’s, for Talia possesses the universal maternal instinct. She lacks all capacity to harm small animals and children.

“They’re fine,” I said.

She turned and noticed that I was staring wide-eyed at her from the bed. “A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

“Is that all they’re worth?”

“Won’t know “til I hear them.”

She was standing at the foot of the bed, a sheer teddy gracing her body, facing away from me, gazing into the mirror as she arranged her hair, long brunette locks in a mock bun high on her head. Her left foot was raised-resting on the low stool in front of the vanity, the muscles of her thigh flexed in an athletic pose. The filigree of lace trimming the right leg was cut high on the hip and pulled into the crack of her buttocks. Her stance revealed the erotic and distinct crease separating her thigh from the gentle hillock of her ass. I remember the surge of desire. That is how it was, always, with Talia-instant arousal. Moments after spending every ounce of my manhood locked in her embrace my eyes were again drawn to her long legs and tapered waist, the delicate wisps of hair at the nape of her neck.

“Well?” she said. She was waiting for some deep revelation, some mirror into my inner being.

“You really want to know what I’m thinking?”

“I do,” she said.

“I’m thinking about jumping you one more time before you can get out of this room.” I strove for a little wickedness in my smile-a touch of Jack Nicholson captured in the squint of my eyes. Watching her there in the dim shadows of that room, I was a bundle of lust.

She giggled. “Sorry, can’t. Have to meet Benjamin.” Talia insisted on using his full Christian name in their social circle. It was, at first, one of those things they cooed over in public. But as with so many older men with younger women, it had begun to go sour and now rubbed like a burr under his saddle whenever she called him by name.

“He called me this morning before I left the office. Some dark, brooding secret,” she said, her eyebrows arched in mock suspense.

There was an instant knot in my stomach, the kind that accompanies dark prophecies. “What did he want?” I ask.

“Who knows? You know Benjamin. If he’s of a mind, he can breathe intrigue into last week’s grocery list.”

“Maybe we should discuss a little business,” I said. “These are supposed to be business meetings.”

But instead of concern, I drew indifference from Talia.

“You do remember? Business?” I said. “What if he asks what we’ve been doing twice a week for the past four months? Wants to know why we haven’t finished putting the limited partnership together?”

In his own way, Ben had cast the die that led to this thing between Talia and me. He felt that she needed a little legal talent to lead her through the morass of fine print in a couple of real estate transactions. I knew little enough about real estate. But the duty fell to the junior associate, Ben’s trusted protege. Talia held a real estate broker’s license, but Ben made the deals, fed her the commercial clients that kept her in business, that allowed her to buy her own pearls and run the Mercedes through a corporation that Ben had set up in her name.

“Don’t be so uptight. Lighten up. Remember,” she said, “you are getting paid by the hour.” Then she laughed.

It fed some prurient fantasy in Talia, in the shell game that was Potter’s system of accounting for my time with her, that at least on the books I was pulling down $175 an hour. In one of my less satisfying performances when I peaked too early, when passion erupted a little too quickly, she sat frustrated at the edge of the bed, turned, looked at me: “You oughta be ashamed,” she said, “billing in minimum increments of every six minutes.”

But on that day, as I lay in the bed watching her dress, Ben’s furtive meeting with Talia had my full attention. I was not going to be put off.

“What are you gonna tell him if he asks?” I persisted.

The vision of this woman in that moment is fixed in my mind like a cast bronze. She stood there with this vacant stare. I knew it-she had nothing prepared. Great, I thought, if Ben hits her with a question she’s gonna wing it. After what seemed like an eternity, she looked at me, winked, and said: “I’ve got it. I’ll just tell ’im what you lawyers always say when you sell a piece of property. I’ll tell him I was busy ‘conveying a little fee tail.’ “ She bent at the waist, her back arched, flattening her hands on the stool, and gazed lustfully at me over her shoulder and hitched the tight globes of her buttocks in a pert wiggle for my benefit-and then did that schoolgirl giggle she does so well.

In her words and antics there was a distinct fragrance. I could not place it at the time, but in retrospect I can now identify it with clear precision. It was the aroma of my career going up in smoke.

It was one of Talia’s less endearing qualities, her unquenchable penchant to face life and all of its drama with unfaltering whimsy. She could never fathom that I am of that vast generation for whom the drug of choice is now Maalox.

“This is serious,” I say. “What are you going to tell Ben?”

She had straightened up, arching her back, the fingers of one hand feathering the fringe of lace at the crease of her thigh. My nether-part was at full attention, under the sheet.

“You know, you really are an ‘A’ type,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“An ‘A’ type personality. A lot of undirected hostility, purposeless time urgency-the whole nine yards.” She’d been gathering jargon like kindling from her analyst again.

“You weren’t complaining five minutes ago.”

She turned, looked at me, and smiled. “Can I help it if I like a good, compulsive fuck?” She didn’t laugh, for there was some truth to this, but she did show a lot of flashing teeth-even pearls of whiteness against her country-club tan.

In the months that I had known her, she carried me to a level of erotic excitement that I, in the early throes of middle age, had never before experienced. Dealing with Talia was a sojourn, which I am now convinced I will never again experience-one of those periods of your life that in later years you replay in your mind like the movies of your childhood.

Without warning she was on her hands and knees at the end of the bed, crawling toward me, the scissoring, slender, bronze globes of her behind, the crack ruffled by lace, reflected through muted light in the mirror behind her.

She looked at me-large, round, dark eyes-and giggled. Then without warning her head sank beneath the sheets-toward my rising prominence, toward the art of persuasion that surpasses all reason.