Presumed innocent

Chapter 20

"I take it," Barbara says, "that you're very pleased about Larren." We are on the highway now, finally free of the downtown traffic. Barbara is behind the wheel. We have learned in recent weeks that my distraction is such that the world is not safe when I drive. There is a primitive relief with the cameras and the clamor behind us. The press pack followed us from the courthouse, down the street, snapping pictures, the huge video cameras lurching toward us like some monster's eyes. We walked slowly. Try, Sandy urged us earlier, to look relaxed. We left Kemp at a corner two blocks on. If every day goes like this one, he said, Nico won't get past opening statement. Jamie by nature is a cheerful soul, but somehow his bonhomie conjured a shadow. Every day will not be like this one. Grimmer moments are ahead. I shook his hand and told him he was a pro. Barbara kissed him on the cheek.

"Larren is a good draw," I say, "the best probably." I hesitate only because of Raymond. Neither he nor Judge Lyttle would ever communicate outside of court about the case, but the presence of the judge's best friend as a witness is bound to have some impact, one way or the other, depending on the balance of Raymond's sympathies. I touch Barbara's hand, on the wheel. "I appreciate your being there."

"I don't mind," she says. "Really. It was very interesting," she adds, sincere as ever in her curiosity, "if you don't consider the circumstances."

Mine is what the lawyers call a 'high-profile case'-the press attention will continue to be intense. In that situation, communication with the eventual jurors begins long before they come to court for jury service. Nico has been winning the press battles so far. I have to do what I can to project a positive image. Since I am charged, in essence, with murder and adultery, it is important that the public believe that my wife has not lost faith in me. Barbara's attendance at every event the media will cover is critical. Stern insisted that she come downtown so that he could explain this to her face to face. Given her distaste for public occasions, her narrow suspicions of outsiders, I expected her to regard this as a taxing assignment. But she has not resisted. Her support in the last two months has been unfailing. While she continues to view me as the victim of my own follies-this time for having ever been enamored of public life and cutthroat politics-she recognizes that things have passed well beyond the stage where I am being served right. She regularly expresses confidence in my vindication and, without a word from me, presented me with a $50,000 cashier's check to cover Sandy's retainer and the later fees, which was drawn from a trust which her father left exclusively in her control. She has listened with fast attention to hours of table conversation in which I lambaste Nico and Molto or describe the intricacies of little strategies that Stern has devised. In the evenings, when I am apt to recede to a withdrawn vacancy, she will come to stroke my hand. She has taken on some of my suffering. Although she evinces bravery, I know that there are moments, alone, when she has cried.

Not only the stress of these extraordinary events, but the radical alteration of my schedule has added a new tempo to our relations. I journey to the library; draft notes for my defense; root pointlessly in the garden. But we are alone together now, much of the time. With the summer, Barbara has few responsibilities at the U. and we linger over breakfast after I drop Nat off for camp. At lunch, I go out and pick greens for our salad. And a new sexual languor has moved softly into our relationship. 'I was thinking we should do it,' she announced one afternoon from the sofa, where she was reclining with obscure reading material and Belgian chocolates. Thus, an afternoon encounter has become our new routine. It is easiest for her crouched over me, hunkered down. The birds sing outside the windows; the daylight seeps beyond the edges of the bedroom blinds. Barbara rolls around with my pin driven deep inside her, that muscular vortex at work, her eyes closed but rolling, her face otherwise serene as her hue increases and she works toward the point of release.

Barbara is an imaginative, athletic lover; it was not sensual deprivation which drove me to Carolyn. I cannot complain about hang-ups or fetishes or what Barbara will not do. Even in the worst of our times, even amid the upheaval that followed my idiotic confessions last winter, sex was not abandoned. We are of the revolutionary generation. We spoke openly of sexuality. When we were young we tended it like a magic lantern, and we continue to find its place. We have become expert in the physiognomy of pleasure, the nodes to press, the points to massage. Barbara, a woman of the eighties, would find it a further insult to do without.

For the time being, the clinical aspect which inhabited our relations for months is gone. But even now I find something desperate and sad in Barbara's loving. There are distances yet left to cross. I lie in bed in the sweet afternoons while Barbara dozes, the midday suburban quiet soothing and beguiling after years of downtown racket, and consider the mystery to me that is my wife.

Even at the zenith of my passion for Carolyn, I gave no thought to leaving. If my marriage to Barbara at times has been equivocal, our family life has not. We both dote relentlessly on Nat. I grew up knowing that other families lived differently from mine. They spoke across the dinner table; they went together to the movies and soda fountains. I saw them running, playing ball in the open fields of the Public Forest. I yearned. They shared a life. Our existence as a family, as parents and child, is the single aspiration of my childhood that I feel I have fulfilled, the only wound of that time I have healed.

And yet to pretend that Nathaniel is our sole salvation is too cynical. Pessimistic. False. Even in the grimmest period, we both respond to the inner commandments that find some value here. My wife is an attractive woman-extremely so. She minds the mirror carefully, assuming certain predetermined angles to be sure she remains intact: her bustline still peaked; the waist, notwithstanding pregnancy, still girlish; her dark, precise features not yet losing fineness in any gathering of adipose, or slackening from beneath the jaw. She could certainly find suitors; she chooses not to. She is an able woman. And on her father's death, $100,000 was placed in trust for her, so that it is not need which keeps her from departing. For better or for worse, there must be truth in the bitter words that she will sometimes hurl at me in the heat of quarrels: that I am the only one, the one person, save Nat, whom she has ever loved.

In the clement periods, as now, Barbara's devotion is apt to be extreme. She is eager to have me absorb her attentions. I become her ambassador to the outside world, bringing back to Nearing observations and stories. When I am on trial, I will frequently arrive home at 11 p.m. or midnight to find Barbara waiting in her housecoat, my dinner warm. We sit together and, she listens with her intense, abstracted curiosity to what has taken place that day, much like a thirties child before the radio. The dishes clank; I speak with my mouth full, and Barbara laughs and marvels about the witnesses, the cops, the lawyers whom she sees only through me.

And for me? What is there? Certainly I value loyalty and commitment, kindness and attention, when they are shown. Her instants of selfless love, so focused upon me, are balm for my abraded ego. But it would be phony and hollow if I were to claim that there are not also moments when I despise her. The injured son of an angry man, I cannot fully master my vulnerabilities to her blackish moods. In her fits of lacerating sarcasm, I feel my hands twitch with the impulse toward strangulation. In response to these periods, I have taught myself to manifest an indifference, which, over time, has begun to become real. We stumble into a sickening cycle, a tug of war in which we are each maneuvering for position by forever stepping back.

But those times are far off now, and almost forgiven. We wait instead on the brink of discovery. What is it that holds me? Some yearning. In the languid afternoons, I seem almost to seize it, even while the doors and windows of my soul are thrown open to a fundamental gratitude. We have never been without momentary eruptions; Barbara is incapable of long-term serenity. But we have also made our trips to the brightest spots and highest places; with Barbara Bernstein I certainly have known the finest moments of my life. The first years were innocent, spirited, full of that clamorous passion and a sense of mystery that exceeds what can be described: I long at times, in transported recollection I pine, I perish with a groping sensation-I am like some misbegotten thing left at the end of science-fiction adventures which reels about with stumps outstretched, beckoning toward the creatures of which it was once one: Let me in again! Unwork time. When I was in the law school at the U., Barbara was teaching. We lived in a two-and-a-half room apartment, ancient, vermin-ridden, in scandalous disrepair. The radiators shot out streams of boiling water in the middle of the winter; the mice and roaches claimed as their own domain any cabinet space below the level of the sink. Only because it was considered student quarters did this home escape categorization as what was then called slum housing. Our landlords were two Greeks, a husband and a wife, one sicker than the other. They lived a floor above and across the courtyard. We could hear his emphysemic eruptions in any season. Her problem was arthritis and degenerative diseases of the heart. I dreaded bringing up the rent each month, because of the odor of decay, a dense, foreign, rotting smell, something like cabbage, that came into the air as soon as their door opened. But it was all that we could afford. With my tuition deducted from a starting teacher's salary, we approached the bureaucratic standards for recognized poverty.

We had a standing joke, that we were so poor that the only form of entertainment we could afford was fucking. This humor was more in the nature of shared embarrassment, for we knew that we verged on the excessive. Those were sensuous years. The end of the week was something I would drag myself toward. We made our own kind of Sabbath: dinner alone, a bottle of wine, and then lovely, long, ambling amours. We could start anywhere around the apartment, and move, in growing deshabille, across the rug and toward the bedroom. This would sometimes go on for more than an hour, me aching and priapic, and my dark little beauty, her breasts tipped in ecstasy, as we lolled and meandered over one another. And it was one night like this, as I led Barbara toward the final steps into the bedroom, that I saw our blind was open and, above, our two elderly neighbors, their faces toward the window, were watching. There was something so starstruck and innocent about their expressions that in recollection they appear to me like startled animals: does, rabbits: a look of uncomprehending, round-eyed wonder. I never suspected them of having spied for long, a feeling which in no way eased my shame. I stood there with my erect member at that instant in Barbara's palm, which was wet with almond oil. Barbara saw them, too, I know. Because as I drew back and started toward the blind she stopped me. She touched my hand; and then she took hold of me again. "Don't look," she said, "don't look," she murmured, her breath sweet and warm on my face.

"They're almost gone."