The Judgment

Ten

It was nearly ten o’clock before I opened my eyes. For a few minutes I lay there wondering if I could fall back to sleep. Finally, I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the bathroom. I stood in front of the toilet, staring down at the bowl, watching the ripples spread in the water until I was finished. Then I stepped into the shower and slowly changed the water temperature from hot to warm to as cold as I could stand it. When I was younger and drank too much, I did it to get sober; now I just did it to force myself to wake up.

I threw on a dark blue T-shirt and a pair of jeans and walked barefoot to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. I was almost finished with the Sunday paper when the doorbell rang. No one had buzzed from the gate at the bottom of the drive, and I was not expecting anyone. Annoyed at the intrusion, I opened the door.

“Yes?” I demanded irritably.

A woman, tall, willowy, with black hair and wide sloping eyes, was standing in front of me. She was wearing a yellow dress, with a white sweater thrown around her shoulders. Her chin was tilted back at an angle, and a half-mocking smile played on her mouth.

I knew that look and, though it must in some ways have changed in all the years that had passed, I knew that face.

“Yes?” I asked again, starting to smile.

“Have you forgotten me, Joey?” she said, teasing me with her eyes. She pronounced my name in a soft, low, lilting voice, as if she did not want to let go. It was the same way she had said it on her front porch, sometime after midnight about a hundred years before, when we were both just kids and I was in love with her the way I would never be in love with anyone again.

We looked at each other, not quite certain what to say. Her gaze drifted away, and all her bright, shiny confidence seemed ready to turn and run. I put my arm around her waist and her arm encircled my neck, and for a minute we clung to each other.

“I saw your sister last night, and she told me that…”

“She called me late last night,” Jennifer explained as we stepped back from each other. “A friend of hers, someone she works with-

Harper something-told her where you lived.”

“Come in, come in,” I said, stepping aside.

“How did you get through the gate?” I asked as she looked around the living room.

“It was wide open.”

Then I remembered. “I forgot to lock it last night when I got home.”

It was a lie. I had not forgotten. I did not lock it because, afraid of what might be lurking in the shadows, I did not want to get out of the car. I had not seen her in years and I still did not want her to know that I was capable of courage only if I thought someone was watching.

She walked around the living room as if she had been there before and was making certain that everything was still the way she remembered it. With her hand trailing behind her, barely touching the spines of the books that lined the shelves, she moved the length of the bookcase that covered one wall. When she reached the end, she looked back.

“Remember I told you that you were too serious for me? You always knew exactly what you wanted to do. You always had such great plans. I didn’t think much beyond the next weekend.” She laughed, softly, and her mouth twisted down at the corners, tender and sad. “Maybe if I had been more like you, things would have been different.”

As soon as she said it, she shook her head, embarrassed, and laughed again. “I didn’t come here to complain about my life.

Honest. I came to ask if you’d like to go for a ride. Like old times,” she added.

It would not have occurred to me to say no, but I felt somehow awkward and stupid, like someone who does not know quite how they are supposed to act. I could not know how much she had changed, and I could only wonder how different I was from the way she must have remembered me.

“Where would you like to go?” I asked, sounding stiff and formal and every bit the pompous fool.

She looked at me again with that same half-mocking smile, that look that had always told me that she knew more about me than I ever would myself.

“Does it matter?”

“No,” I admitted with a laugh. “Doesn’t matter at all.”

I changed as quickly as I could into a pair of slacks and an ox-ford shirt. When I came back downstairs she had left the living room and found her way into the library. She was standing on her tiptoes, gazing up at a row of books on the top shelf bound in green and gold leather.

“The collected works of Francis Bacon,” she said when she became aware of my presence. “Have you really read all of this?”

I leaned against the door, my arms folded across my chest, and shook my head. “Not only have I not read them, they don’t really even belong to me. They were given to me, along with the house.

A judge, the kindest, most intelligent man I ever knew, left it to me when he died. I think he thought I might be able to learn something.”

She smiled at me from across the room. “And have you-

learned anything?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Marry the first girl you fall in love with. Nothing is ever as good as that.”

Outside, on the front steps of the porch, she let her eye wander across the green grass lawn and the flower gardens filled with azaleas and beyond that to a stand of fir trees at the fence.

“Reminds me of that song,” she said, as she stood next to her car, her hand on the door. She wrinkled her nose and tossed her head. “The fool who lives on the hill.”

“The old fool who lives on the hill,” I said as I climbed into her shiny black Porsche convertible.

“Nice car,” I remarked with deliberate understatement.

She reached into the console between the red leather seats and pulled out a pair of dark glasses. “Married badly, divorced well,”

she remarked as she put them on.

She started the engine, then turned to me, an innocent mischievous smile on her face, as she unfastened the ribbon with which she had tied her hair. “Ready?”

Leaning against the passenger door, my arms folded loosely, I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

As soon as I said it, she ducked her head, jammed her foot down on the accelerator, and threw it into gear. I grabbed the side of the seat with one hand and braced myself against the dashboard with the other. The car hurtled down the drive and onto the street. Her long black hair was flying back around her face and over her shoulders, the wind whipping it into long twisted tangles. Her eyes were fastened on the road in front of her. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gearshift knob. Darting in and out of traffic without bothering to signal or even to look, she left it to everyone else to get out of the way.

Leaning toward her, I shouted above the whining roar of the engine, “You’re still the worst driver I’ve ever seen!”

She slid the dark glasses down to the tip of her nose and glanced across at me. “You forget,” she yelled back, “I used to drive like this!” Clutching the wheel with both hands, she closed her eyes and laughed as if it was the most fun she had had in years.

I grabbed the wheel away from her and held it steady. The speedometer was edging past ninety. “I was only kidding. You were always a great driver.”

“Remember the MG? British racing green? You didn’t mind the way I drove then.”

“When I was eighteen I thought I’d live forever.” I started to laugh. “Of course in those days I thought forever meant forty-five at the outside.”

“I liked that MG,” she said, looking straight ahead, her head held high. “It was safe.” She darted her eyes at me and then looked back at the road. “It didn’t have a back seat.”

We drove to the coast and followed the highway south as it curved through dark forested headlands and high rocky cliffs beaten smooth by the sea. We crawled through oceanside towns, waiting at crosswalks for the tourists and day-trippers eager to see the huckster shops filled with candy and myrtlewood carvings or to visit the coffee shops and ice cream parlors on the other side of the street. The April sun beat down through the cloudless sky, drying against our skin the cool salt air. As we drove on, I closed my eyes and slouched down until my head was resting against the top of the seat. The breeze that blew by us had a chill to it, but the sun was warm on my face and I felt as drowsy as the boy I had once been, when I slept with a blanket pulled up under my chin while my feet stuck out the other end.

We barely spoke. We had not even talked about where we were going. I could not count the number of times we had come here, to the coast, on a weekend day, stopping wherever we felt like it, and seldom the same place twice. We had always come in her car, and Jennifer always drove. She loved it and never got tired of it, the sheer, hypnotic thrill of taking a car high around a corner and then flat out through a straight stretch of road. I used to watch her, the constant, fluid motion of her hands and arms and wrists, the fixed determined look in her eyes, the way she laughed when she had taken the machine right to the edge of what it could do. In the shared silence of those day-long drives, I had felt closer to her than I had ever felt to anyone before, or ever felt again.

Jennifer pulled off the road onto a promontory high above the sea, and parked the car in front of a restaurant that had been there as long as I could remember. It was a long, lowlying wooden frame building that looked like a roadhouse, the kind you once saw in movies where long-legged women sat at the corner of the bar, staring through languid, half-closed eyes into the cigarette smoke that danced slowly into the air with every provocative breath they took.

We found a booth next to a window that overlooked a small cove. Down below, on the rock-covered inlet, waving their arms in the air, children ran into the water and then, when it was up to their knees, tumbled back to shore.

“Do you remember this place?” Jennifer asked as she studied the menu. “We stopped here the first time we came to the coast together.” She glanced at me over the top of the menu. Her dark glasses were on the table. The lines at the edges of her eyes, barely noticeable before, spread out and deepened as she smiled.

“It hasn’t changed, has it?”

I followed her gaze around the busy dining room. A man in his early thirties was sitting at a table with his blond wife and their three blond children, talking to someone on his cell phone.

One of his children was playing with a handheld video game. At the far end of the restaurant, next to the steps that led up to the bar, a bearded, heavyset man was sitting alone, drinking coffee, his plump fingers tapping slowly on the keyboard of a slim lap-top computer.

“The restaurant hasn’t changed,” I replied.

“Neither has the menu,” she said, inspecting the cracked plastic surface of the art deco cover.

The waitress, a woman in her late forties with a cupid mouth and a quick smile, took a short yellow pencil out of her graying blond hair and jotted down our order on a green paper notebook, the kind that wind up stuck on a spindle next to the cash register. I watched her walk away. “I think she waited on us last time. I remember her. A cute blond high school kid.”

My eyes came back to Jennifer. “Your sister said you moved back a few months ago. She’s really the society editor? It’s hard to believe. I don’t think I ever saw her in a dress.” I was going off in all directions at once. I stopped and shrugged helplessly.

“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked quietly.

“Do you know how long it’s been? I couldn’t even be sure you still remembered me. If Lisa hadn’t called last night and told me that she had seen you, and told me that you lived alone, I don’t know if I ever would have…”

“You don’t believe for a minute that I could have forgotten you. I was in love with you. I was always in love with you.”

The waitress brought our food, and for a while we talked about nothing but the mundane details of everyday life, like two old friends who had never been more than a few months apart.

“Why didn’t you ever get married?” she asked, pushing her dish aside. She had barely touched her food.

I tried to make a joke out of it. “You ruined me for other women.”

“No, really,” she said, searching my eyes.

“In a way, it’s true. I never had that same feeling again. Not for a long time. Just a few years ago,” I said, gazing out the window. The sea stretched out in the distance and then, at the far horizon, dropped off into the sky. “There was someone I wanted to marry.”

“What happened?” she asked sympathetically.

“Nothing,” I said, turning back to her. “She wasn’t in love with me. We lived together for a while, and then she left.”

I did not want to talk about it, not even with her. “What about you?”

This time, she looked away and watched the children play on the beach.

“Remember the summer after your first year in college, the summer after I graduated from high school? Remember that August, the night before I was leaving for Europe, when we stayed up until three o’clock in the morning, talking about what we wanted to do?”

She was still watching out the window, a distant look in her eyes. “Remember when you asked me to marry you? Remember what I said?”

“That you weren’t ready for that yet, but that maybe someday, when you were older…”

“Yes, but then you remember the letter I wrote you the next day, just before I left, the letter-”

“What letter? I never got a letter.”

Her eyes seemed to freeze, and then, slowly, she turned away from the window. “The letter I left at your house. The letter I gave to your mother to give to you.”

“She never- What did it say? What did you write to me?”

“That you were right, that there was no reason to wait, that I was in love with you, that we should get married just like you said.”

“I never got it,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “She never gave it to me. Why would she have done that?”

We both knew the answer. My mother had tried to control everything I ever did. It was one of the reasons I had decided to go so far away to school.

“She thought I’d ruin your life. She expected you to do great things.”

“That was her all right. She was always trying to run my life, but I still can’t believe that she-!” I stopped myself and laughed derisively. I knew it was true, and despite that I had still felt this strange irrational compulsion to say something in my mother’s defense. “I believe it. It’s exactly what she would have done. And it worked, didn’t it? I never got the letter. All I knew when I left you that night was that you said you would think about what we talked about. I never heard from you again. I went back to school and I didn’t come home again until the summer after my senior year, the summer before I started law school. You know why I didn’t come home? Because I knew if I did, I’d try to see you again, and I knew-I thought I knew-that would just make things worse.”

We were looking at each other and thinking of ourselves, all the ephemeral events of our lives, wondering how much different things might have been, astonished to discover that everything that had happened had been a kind of fiction that began with a lie.

“Maybe your mother was right,” Jennifer said. “I might have ruined your life. I was selfish, self-absorbed, and sometimes even cruel. And we were so young! If we’d gotten married, how long do you think it would have lasted? And then what would have happened?”

I felt again inside me the vast emptiness of that next year away at school, the awful sense that nothing mattered anymore and that I had become the unwilling spectator of my own meaning-less life.

“It would have lasted,” I said, certain it was true because everything else had been so false.

She smiled and touched my hand. “It’s nice that you still think that.”

The waitress cleared away the dishes and brought coffee. It was after two and only a few people were left in the restaurant. The sunlight slanted through the window and I twisted around against the corner of the booth to avoid the glare.

“That’s the way you always used to sit. You never sat up straight.

You always slouched like that, and you’d look at me with those big brown eyes of yours, always sulking about something.” She hesitated, as if there was something she wanted to tell me, but was not sure she should. “I fell in love with someone once because he had eyes like yours, brown eyes that seemed to look right through me.”

“Is he the one you married?”

It took a moment for her to remember that we knew next to nothing about the way we had lived our lives. “No. I was married at the time, but not to him. I met him at a country club dinner. Some friends of ours from college had invited us. They brought along a friend of theirs who was visiting from Chicago.

He had your eyes. I think I fell in love with him before they finished introducing us…” Her voice trailed off, and she gazed out the window at the ocean lying motionless under the sun.

“We danced together,” she said, still staring out the window.

“We were in the middle of the dance floor.” She took one last look and then turned back to me. “One moment we were dancing, and the next moment, while everyone was dancing all around us, we stopped, stopped still, right in the middle of the dance, and he said, ‘Leave with me, now, right now. Let’s just walk off the dance floor and never come back.’ “

She looked at me as if she had just made a confession and was waiting for me to pass judgment.

“Did you want to? Leave with him, and never come back?”

“More than anything.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I felt sorry for my husband, because I’d never loved him.”

“Never loved him?” I asked, confused. “Then why did you marry him in the first place?”

“Because he raped me,” she said simply. “You know how it used to be in those days. Everyone used to drink too much and then use it as an excuse for things they wanted to do anyway. It wasn’t really rape, not in the way we usually mean it. We’d been to a fraternity party and we had both had a lot to drink. We were parked in his car, necking, that’s all. Then he tried to do more than that, and I told him not to, and when he wouldn’t quit, I shoved him away from me and told him to take me back.”

She lowered her eyes, and with a wistful look slowly stirred the cup with a spoon. “He didn’t take me back,” she said as she lifted the cup to her mouth, holding it with both hands. She sipped the coffee and then placed the cup back in the saucer.

“Anyway, I got pregnant and we got married. That’s how it worked in those days, remember?” she asked, a faint, reluctant trace of defiance flashing for just a moment through her eyes.

“Why didn’t you-?”

“Have an abortion? I’d done that once already. I wasn’t going to do it again.” Her eyes flared again, followed closely by a sad, apologetic smile. “It was a long time ago, Joey. We were just kids.”

We left the restaurant and found a bench at the edge of the cliff, next to a wooden staircase that led down to the beach.

Above the low roar of the ocean, we listened to the shouts of the children playing and tried not to think too much about what might have been. After a while we got back in the car and drove along the shore, like two aimless wanderers with no place to call home.

“We lived in Los Angeles, until four years ago, when we got a divorce, and he moved back to Seattle. My son, Andrew, is a producer. Television shows. He’s done very well. I’m a grandmother, for God’s sakes. Twice. A boy and a girl, eight and six.”

It was what every parent wanted to think, that their child had done well. My parents had thought it about me, and I guessed Jennifer’s parents had thought the same thing about her. It was, I imagined, one of those instincts that must come with having a child of your own, the capacity to limit your memory to what was only seen in the best possible light.

“Did you ever see him again?”

Her eyes stayed on the road. “The man at the country club?”

She wrinkled her nose. “The man!” She laughed, struck by how incongruous it all seemed now. “He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six. He was just a boy. And I was only twenty-four, just a girl.” The smile lingered a moment longer, then faded away. “Yes,” she said finally. “I mean, no. I never saw him again. He called me, left me his number. In case I ever changed my mind, he said. I kept it for a while, then I threw it away. If I’d kept it any longer, I would have changed my mind.”

On the way back, we stopped and watched the sun slide down the sky and dissolve into a liquid orange fire that spread out across the horizon as it pulled down the darkness over the edge of the sea. And then we left, the lights of the Porsche slashing the night as we followed the narrow road that cut through the coastal range and took us back to the city.

“Want to have dinner tomorrow night?” I asked, as casually as I could, when she dropped me off at the house.

“Call me tomorrow.” She leaned over and kissed me on the side of my face. I watched her drive away, and thought about all the years I had missed, all the things that might have been.

When I got inside, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number. No one answered but I let it ring anyway. Finally, she picked it up, and I heard her frail voice.

“It’s me, Joseph,” I said brusquely.

“Oh, hello, dear. I was asleep. Is everything all right?”

I had forgotten the three-hour time difference between here and North Carolina where my mother lived with her second husband in a retirement community.

“Do you remember Jennifer Frazier?” I asked. The anger that had been building inside me was suddenly replaced by a feeling of helpless fatigue.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think so. Was she a friend of yours?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said quietly. “I just called to see if you were okay. Sorry I forgot how late it is there.”

My mother had kept Jennifer’s letter and changed two lives forever, and had dismissed it from her mind as a matter of no great consequence. It was probably better that she did not remember. She would still have insisted that she had been right.