Other people

Eighteen Francine

When it became obvious that the case was going to be taking me out of the office more than I could cover with ordinary excuses, I decided to tell X about the rape. I kept it to a minimum. I'd been attacked. Chances are that the man would be prosecuted. I was cooperating. I didn't tell him that it was me who was determined to get Koslak behind bars.

"I'm sorry it happened," X said. "I'm glad it didn't make the papers."

"The trial might," I told him.

"It could blow your security clearance."

"Is that all you're concerned about?"

"Don't get angry, Francine," he said. "No clearance, no job."

I couldn't allow myself to think about that. I immersed myself in my assignment, one I really liked. X was preparing a two-page insert on hypocrisy for a speech to be given by the American Ambassador to the U.N. It wasn't for a particular speech, but was to be kept on hand for any occasion that might prompt a speech in the Assembly. It was my boss's idea to round up ten or twelve quickly told examples of hypocritical conduct on the highest level. My job was to scour around for historical incidents in odd parts of the world so that it wouldn't look like we were picking on Western Europe or the Soviet Union. Every continent had to be included, except Australia. And the personages involved had to be immediately identifiable. The idea was that the insert would be used when the Ambassador addressed the Assembly as an adversary against a position taken by "the other side," which by this time included most of the world. It was assumed that whatever the Ambassador was speaking against could be attacked as hypocritical. I think the point of the exercise was to convey to the people who could still bear to listen to the U.N. on radio or watch snippets on TV that the Ambassador was a master of political history and irony, someone who could send up the enemy and therefore might be in line for high elective office. Of course the taxpayers' money was not supposed to be spent on promoting a domestic political candidate, so the exercise on hypocrisy was itself hypocritical, and I was having a good time ferreting out material for my boss to choose from.

I had left word with Margo, who fended my calls, to take messages except for dire emergencies. When she buzzed me in the middle of Hypocrisy Number Nine, she said, "This isn't a dire emergency, it's your lawyer. Later?"

"No," I said, "I'll take it."

Sometimes as I answer a phone call, I see myself as if I were a camera watching me.

"Hello, hello," I said, as though saying it twice made the announcement more personal.

"Hello yourself," Thomassy's voice said, "I've got good news." I pictured him sitting, then standing.

"Are you sitting or standing?" I asked.

"Running," he said. "Aren't you interested in the good news?"

"Of course."

"One D.A. down, one to go."

"You see," I said, "even members of the legal establishment can be reasonable."

"Don't be so sure. I had him by the short hairs."

"How affectionate."

"It wasn't affection. I had some information I didn't think the D.A. wanted to see circulated further. When can you come see me?"

"Today?"

"Preferably. I want to bring you up to date."

"I should be finished in an hour, but it's pretty late now."

"I'll wait for you."

Thomassy the Impregnable sounded human. He added, "Do you have a dinner date?"

"I was going to eat my parents'."

He laughed. "Why don't you call and tell them you won't be home."

"At all?"

"For dinner, I meant."

"They're at a worrying stage."

"Tell them you're with me."

"After hours? They'll worry more. Especially my father. He thinks all men think as he does about me."

By the time I arrived Thomassy's secretary had gone. The outer door wasn't locked. I went in quietly. The door to his office was open. I coughed to catch his attention. He looked up from his paperwork, came out bearing a smile I couldn't associate with the man I had first met. He plunked himself down on the couch in the reception area.

"Please don't stand," he said, gesturing at one of the armchairs. "You feeling better?"

"Got lost in work today," I said. "Helped."

"Good." Though I was ten feet away, I felt as if he were examining my face with his hands.

"This is a business meeting?" I asked.

"Yes."

"You're going to tell me what happened with the Assistant D.A."

He shifted his eyes from their examination of me.

"Yes," he said.

And so he told me about his meeting with Lefkowitz. He stood up to act out the part about sweeping past Lefkowitz's secretary, taking the young lawyer for a breathless walk. He had me laughing. Thomassy should have been an actor.

On the phone it sounded like blackmail. He's making light of it.

"I have a feeling," I said, "that you don't usually fill in your clients along the way."

"You're damn right."

"Why are you doing it now?"

He hesitated. We both knew why.

"You're pretty proud of the way you overwhelmed the poor kid," I said.

"He's about your age. He ought to be able to take care of himself. You can, can't you?"

"Yes I can. If I were up against a blackmailer like you, I'd call the cops."

Thomassy laughed, then immediately apologized. "I'm sorry," he said, "I keep forgetting how naive most people are about the police."

"And about life?"

"Right."

"Like they think the ends don't Justify the means."

He had picked up a magazine from the table. Now he put it down carefully as if he was restraining himself from slamming it. "All right, Miss Philosophy Major."

"Political science," I said.

"Life is not school. A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets. If a woman has a starving child and steals food, those means justify the ends. I'll bet you're for euthanasia."

"Where warranted."

"Okay, you're justifying killing on grounds that it's merciful. You blink the means to secure the end. Think of yourself in a packed lifeboat at sea, filled to capacity, and there's that extra swimmer coming up, wanting to climb aboard. You know the boat won't hold him, do you smash his hands as he tries to hoist himself aboard? What right do you think you have to decide whether someone else is going to live?"

"Maybe one more wouldn't sink the boat."

"Maybe it would. And you'd find out by taking the guy aboard."

"Yes I would."

"Endangering fifteen people maybe. Maybe drowning them."

"I'm civilized."

"To whom, the fifteen already aboard the boat?"

"What would you do?"

"Save the people in the boat."

"By shoving off the fellow trying to get in?"

"If necessary, yes. A bad means to a good end."

"I suppose it'd be easy for you."

A flash of anger reddened his face. He let it pass, then said, "It's a matter of experience. It gets easier to make realistic decisions. Even tough ones."

"You're saying it's easy for you to use a kid like Lefkowitz to twist the D.A.'s—"

"On your account!" he interrupted.

"— after a lifetime of using courtroom tricks."

"I haven't lived a lifetime," he said.

Thomassy was what, fortyish? How few years ago I used to think of that as an age beyond the divide of us and them, over the hill, old people. We move the borderline of acceptability away from us as the years slip. I haven't lived a lifetime, says the vital man.

He continued in a different voice, the mentor trying to be patient with a slow pupil.

"I bet your best teachers in school taught by tricks. I can give you half a dozen examples from my own…"

"Yes?"

"Tricks. Bad means to good ends."

"Not blackmail."

"You want to be a bishop, says the cardinal, you do as I say. I don't know of any area of life where blackmail doesn't get used. It's just we feel more comfortable being hypocritical about it. Why are you laughing?"

I had to tell him what I'd spent the day doing.

"Well," he said, "nice girl spends day cooking up hypocrisy examples to use hypocritically. Bad boy spends day twisting the D.A.'s arm to prosecute a crime."

"What if I said it offended me to have blackmail used for me?"

"I'd say don't get caught doing anything for the rest of your life and you'll be okay. And drop this case."

The gulf I was getting to know was the one between two lawyers, this man and my father. My father lived by the protections afforded by propriety, forms, the sure knowledge that the right people will continue to pretend. Thomassy was man with the mask off, cutting through the bullshit my father thought of as those things that made people civil. Had the barbarians come? The barbarians have always been here. The Widmers were a permanent minority, dwindling as mobile classes cottoned onto the rules the world was governed by.

"You haven't said a thing in two minutes," said Thomassy.

"I've been thinking."

"That disqualifies you from a lot of occupations."

"You think," I said.

"Yes I do."

"Not enough," I said.

"Some things don't have to be rethought every week. Some people learn from experience."

"I thought you were inviting me to dinner tonight."

"I am."

"The Annapolis?"

"I had in mind a place that makes a very interesting light meal."

"Has it got ambience?"

"You'll see."

He took me to his house.

Thomassy's house was on a street with six or seven houses, not too close to each other, each set back a hundred feet from the road, enough space for a lawn with a single specimen tree. In the middle of the block, between two of the houses, there seemed to be a house missing. There was only a gravel driveway going back more than a hundred yards into a wooded area. You had to go most of the way before you saw the small house nestled among the trees. In the middle of civilization, Thomassy had gotten himself a forest home, seclusion in the suburbs, invisible to strangers.

"Like it?" he asked.

"A hermit's keep."

"Let's go inside."

Inside, the place was a surprise, a den of opulence, walnut walls, expensive furniture, lots of places to sit comfortably or lounge, bookshelves floor to ceiling on one long wall, a carpet that looked authentic Turkish, swirls of blue-grey against a background of burnt umber and a subdued maroon. Over the couch, lit by a recessed ceiling light of its own, was a single painting of a long-necked woman.

He was looking at me as I looked at the Modigliani.

"Cost a fortune?" I asked.

"Half. I bought it quite some time ago."

"It's beautiful."

"Yes," he said, then looked away from me.

"This isn't the kind of bachelor pad one expects," I said.

"What did you expect? First, let me get you a drink."

"Anything. With soda."

He busied himself.

"I guess I expected something that looked like a couple of furnished rooms."

"A man without a woman equals poor taste."

"Right."

He handed me the drink. "Well, there's a lot of chauvinism around on both sides," he said. "You are the first female visitor I've had who'd know who painted that picture."

"Maybe you've gotten into the habit of fucking down."

"What does that mean?"

One second I feel I can say anything to Thomassy the way I would to a close girl friend, the next it's like this, trapped on the giving end of something that startled him.

"You choose the women you go with."

"Sure I do."

"And they're like Jane what's-her-name?"

"More or less."

"Less. Maybe you fuck down because it minimizes the whole procedure."

I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He was avoiding looking directly at me. Uncharacteristic. I felt cruel joy. Thomassy was vulnerable. He was a human being, just like the rest of us.

The dinner he prepared was an avocado with a choice of lemon or vinaigrette, a Basque omelet that may have been the best omelet of any kind I had ever had, an endive salad made with walnut oil and an unlabeled vinegar he said he bought privately. The coffee had a touch of chocolate and was served with whipped cream.

We ate in the short leg of the L that connected the living room and the kitchen. In the corner where the walls met there was an arrangement of plants, a three-foot dracaena in a tub on the floor, and three or four hanging pots with ivies and ferns. In the center of the long wall hung a large painting, perhaps four feet wide, of a grain field in a high wind, done with thousands of small strokes. It was very close to abstraction, yet one knew it was a field ready for harvest and that the velocity of the wind was a danger to the high stalks.

"Who?" I asked.

"Hyde Solomon."

"A newcomer?"

"No. He started making it in the fifties I guess. He's got bad eyes. Very nearly blind."

"He's got good eyes," I said.

"What's left of them. I was introduced to him at an opening after I bought that. He's a tall man, stammers, painfully shy, knows his work is good that's all. In one respect I envy him."

I tried to guess, unsuccessfully.

"When he's finished, some of his work, maybe just a few, will survive. Nothing I do survives. A lawyer is a member of the performing arts, though not even movies are taken to preserve the act."

He was right, of course. Cocksure success, master of his profession, winner, finds life wanting. Wanting posterity. Denied Dr. Koch, denied doctors, lawyers, teachers, except for the innovating genius, the legend. Art, if it survives, lingers. The rest of us head for the dustbin. I'm surprised artists aren't hated more by the transients.

"I'm a salesman," he said. "I sell cases to juries. Or to punk D.A.s. Get that look off your face," he said to me, "I'm not fishing for sympathy. It's just that sometimes I wish I made something that might last. I cook up an act that vanishes as fast as this meal."

"It was very good." I touched my napkin to my lips.

"You expected a TV dinner."

"Sort of."

"You're a treasury of prejudices," he said.

"So it seems."

"Attractively packaged."

"Thank you," I said.

"With a good mind."

"That surprises me," I said.

"That you have a good mind?"

"That you think I do. I know I have."

"I know you know you have."

"Two modest folks," I said. "I thought opposites attract."

At ten o'clock George snapped on the TV for the news.

"Good news or bad?" I asked.

"Always bad," he said. "People watch to be sure others are worse off."

"Why watch?"

Out of habit, I'd run the sink water and started cleaning off the few dinner dishes.

"I'm not," he said.

I turned around. He was watching me. Suddenly he was on his feet. "I'll do those," he said.

He came up behind me. The front of his body was touching the back of mine. I felt his lips on the lobe of my right ear, just for a second.

"It's all right," I said. "A woman doesn't want to be admired just for her mind."

He put his arms around me and took the dish I was rinsing carefully out of my hands and put it aside.

"I'll do those later," he said.

"I should be going soon."

He turned me toward him.

"My hands are wet," I said.

He took my head in both his hands and touched his lips to mine, a skim for a split second.

I kept my wet hands wide apart as he kissed me again, this time mouth to mouth.

I broke away. "My hands are wet," I said, breathless.

"I don't care."

And then I put my wet hands around him as our mouths met. I could feel his body's warmth and my own heart pound. And suddenly he was kissing the side of my neck, then below and behind my ear, I could feel his tongue flicker, and then our mouths were together again until, to breathe, I pulled away, feeling the blood in my face, and I was quickly drying my hands on the dish towel when he pulled me into his arms again and I knew we both knew it was no use fighting it any more and we were holding each other tightly and desperately, and then we were moving each other to the couch, not wanting to let go, but we had to, to open the couch, and then it was kissing again, and clothes coming off, his and mine, and we were lying clasped, kissing lips, faces, shoulders, then holding on, sealed against each other, until he raised his head and realized there were tears in my eyes and his bewildered look was begging for an explanation.

I could hear the thud of my heart.

"What's the matter?" he whispered.

I couldn't find my voice.

"Tell me," he said.

It was like the anxiety attacks I would get in the middle of the night when insomnia stole my sleeping hours, a fear that my heart would burst from the thudding.

"It's like driving the first time after an accident," I said.

We lay side by side for a while. I tried not to think of Koslak. The harder I tried, the more I thought of it, detail by detail.

"I want to get drunk," I said.

"I wouldn't recommend it. Do you get drunk often?"

"No. Not in ten years."

When I was in my last year in high school, I had gone on a triple date, the jocks enjoying their own company. We girls felt dragged along, I wanted to leave, I didn't want to be a spoilsport, I drank too much of whatever we were all drinking, and I was sick all over the ladies' room and wretched all night and the day afterwards.

"I am not a drinker," I said.

George smiled. "I know that."

He got up, naked and unashamed, and went somewhere, returning with two elegant glasses filled halfway with something I didn't recognize.

"Madeira," he said. "Rainwater." He took a sip. "Magic," he said, and handed me my glass. "It's a one-drink drink. Safe."

I looked at the glass skeptically.

"It's okay," he said. "Try it."

I took a sip.

"Lovely," I said, licking it from my lips.

"Don't do that," he said.

"What?" I took another sip. He leaned over and licked my lower lip. No one had ever done that. He slid onto the bed, holding his glass upright as if it were a gyroscope. Then he tipped it slightly and let a few drops splash onto my breasts.

"Don't move," he said, and gave me his glass to hold. There I was, helplessly holding one glass in each hand, unable to move, and he licked the Madeira from each breast and from the valley between.

He borrowed his glass back, tipped it lower down, then handed it back, my handcuff. I looked at the two glasses, at the ceiling, then at the soft hair of his head as he licked the drops of Madeira from below my navel and from the inside of my thighs. I concentrated on the two glasses, trying not to think of the tongue that was now moving in a way that I felt down the stems of my legs and upwards to my chest, as my breathing gasped again and again until I felt a sudden thick shudder of release, eros flooding, I clasped his head with my thighs like a vise, hoping I wasn't hurting him, and then he was suddenly alongside me, taking the glasses away, putting them on the floor, and clasping me with the full length of his body as the waves slowly waned and I was at peace.

"Was the Madeira good?" I asked.

"Delicious," he said.

I turned my attentions to him, hoping I could make love to him with half the skill he had, and when we both seemed ready for our first joining, I turned him over onto me, and saw the surprise in his eyes as he was suddenly, terribly impotent.

"It's because I was raped," I said.

"No, no," he said. "I swear. It makes no difference."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know."

I felt at fault and desperate. I tried to arouse him in every way I remembered. The harder I tried, the less his response. It was no use. Finally, I collapsed back in defeat.

I took his offer of a lit cigarette.

"I thought you have a lot of women," I said.

"I have had."

"This happen often?"

"Not for years."

"Why single me out?" Then quickly, "I didn't mean it to sound that way." I kissed him, but he was not there to receive it.

Finally he said, "We can come up with a lot of suppositions, but we'd never know if we were right, so let's not."

"Next time," I said.

"We don't know," he said.

We must have both slept for a bit. At least I did. When I opened my eyes, he was propped up against two pillows, staring into space.

He had seemed to me a man who could do anything.