The Judgment

Twelve

You could almost feel the simultaneous movement of a hundred thousand hands reaching for the remote control to change channels. In love with death, Americans could mourn collectively for victims they never knew when schoolchildren were slaughtered by classmates and that event became the central preoccupation of the national news. They would become overnight experts in every dull detail of a trial reported at second hand when someone famous was charged with murder. Calvin Jeffries, however, had been killed by someone no one had ever heard of, a man without a name, one of the anonymous hordes of homeless that, like other unpleasant facts of life, we train ourselves not to see.

The air had gone out of the balloon. For eight long weeks, the police had been under enormous pressure to make an arrest. It had reached the point where editorial writers had started to call for an investigation of the investigation. Quick to anticipate the ephemeral moods of the electorate, politicians lined up for the chance to offer their own assessments of who should be blamed and what should be done. The governor-belatedly, in the eyes of some-suggested it might be wise to bring in the FBI. Inside the investigation itself, where double shifts and weekends had become the normal work schedule, nerves were frayed and tempers were on edge as everyone wondered whose careers would be sac-rificed next as part of the ongoing cost of catching a killer.

Now the killer had been caught, and suddenly it no longer seemed that important. It was written on their faces as they stared straight into the vacant eye of the television camera, describing the arrest. After all the endless stories about possible conspiracies, hidden motives, and rumored revelations about powerful people, stories that seemed to make sense out of the murder of a prominent public official, it turned out not to have had anything to do with money, power, or sex. It was a random act of violence, committed by a poor pathetic human being who would not have known Calvin Jeffries from the proverbial man in the moon. Despite a long recitation of facts and figures purporting to show how incredibly exhaustive the investigation had been, the police were forced to admit that a single anonymous phone call had told them where the killer could be found.

His name, or at least the name he gave them, was Jacob Whittaker. They were using his fingerprints to get a positive identifi-cation. Whatever his real name turned out to be, there was no doubt he was the killer. They had found the knife, and the suspect, after all the proper warnings about his right to a lawyer and his right to remain silent, had made a full confession.

My legs were stretched out over the corner of my desk, one ankle crossed over the other, watching on the small television set I kept on a shelf in my office the murder of Calvin Jeffries become yesterday’s news. When the police finished their statement, the questions asked by reporters were all ordinary, routine; questions about whether blood was found on the knife and what kind of tests were going to be run if there was; questions about the condition of the prisoner and the time and place of his formal arraignment. After each answer, there was a dead silence before someone could think of what to ask next. The same reporters who had struggled into front-row seats, convinced this was only the beginning of one of the biggest stories they would ever have the chance to cover, were sitting back, an ankle crossed over a knee, an arm thrown over a chair, following what was said with a shrug and a yawn, and only occasionally jotting down a note to use in what would undoubtedly be the last front-page mention of a story that was now without interest.

With the droning sound of another question fading into the background, the anchorwoman appeared on screen and, with a cursory five-second summation of what everyone had just seen, turned to the other day’s news. The murder of Calvin Jeffries had now been relegated to the vast obscurity of a homicide finally solved and quickly forgotten.

I flicked the button on the remote control. Helen stuck her head in the doorway to say good night. “Someone named Jennifer called to tell you that it was not too late if you wanted to have dinner.” Helen arched her painted black eyebrows. “Well?”

she asked when I did not say anything. “Are you going to have dinner with her or not?”

“I was waiting for you to tell me.”

Her mouth turned down at the corners. “It’s after five, and after five you can do whatever you like.” She thought of something as she turned to go. “Just make sure you’re here on time in the morning.”

“Thank you,” I said after I heard the outer door shut behind her.

I picked up the phone to call Jennifer, started to dial, and then hung up. I had been fretting about it all day. I still did not know what I wanted to say. One minute I was certain I wanted to see her again; the next minute I was not sure about anything. It had taken me years to get over her. There had been times, especially that first year, when I was certain there was nothing else to live for. Sometimes I think the only thing that kept me alive was the knowledge that I would not have to live forever. It gave me a kind of detachment about myself, and I became, as it were, an observer of my own desperation. Eventually, the pain went away, but what had happened had changed me forever. I understood, and I accepted, what I was, a permanent stranger, someone who passes through other people’s lives without leaving a mark.

I picked up the telephone again, and saw myself back in college at a pay phone, dropping in quarters, deciding as the last coin rattled in that I could not do it. I told myself it was a matter of pride, but knew it was because I was too scared to hear her voice again, afraid of how much it would hurt if I did, especially because I knew what she would say. I did hear her voice, once.

It was just before Christmas, and the snow was falling thick and heavy outside in the freezing night air. She answered the phone, and I listened to her say hello, and then I listened to her voice go quiet, and then I heard her say my name, like a question, and then I hung up. I went back to my dormitory room and lay on the bed and hoped I would fall asleep and never wake up.

I dialed the number and, when she answered, felt for just an instant that same fear of being hurt again.

“Joey?” she asked, when I did not respond.

I stared down at the desk. “Yes,” I said, clearing my throat.

“It’s me. Do you still want to have dinner?”

We met at an obscure little restaurant on the west side of town and spent the next two hours trying to remember who we had been. She asked about law school and about being a lawyer, and I found I was talking about things that happened years apart as if they had taken place at the same time. I asked her about what she had done after she got married and she was talking about her life as a fashion designer before I knew she had once lived in New York. We would start on one thing and come back to another. The history of our lives became a vast circle which could be traced from any place you cared to begin.

“I called my mother after you dropped me off last night.”

She looked alarmed. “You shouldn’t have done that.” Reaching across the table, she wrapped her hand around my wrist. “What good would it do?”

“I was angry, but as soon as I heard her voice, I knew she would not remember. She would not have remembered a week after she did it,” I added. “Do you know how often I had to listen to her tell me she only wanted the best for me?”

She drew her hand away from my wrist and placed it in her lap.

“I think that’s one of the reasons I became a lawyer. She wanted me to be a doctor.”

“Like your father.”

“No, not like him. She didn’t want me to become a general practitioner who loved being a doctor. She wanted me to be someone she could think of as successful, a surgeon, the chief of staff of a hospital. My mother didn’t know a damn thing about medicine, but she could take one look around a country club dance floor and know immediately where each couple stood on the social scale.”

A woman who had grandchildren was sitting across from me, and I was telling her things about myself that I had never told anyone. I leaned over my plate and lifted my fork to my mouth, and then put it down before it reached my lips.

“The worst part is how much like her I am.”

She looked at me with those wonderful oval-shaped eyes that had once inspired so many romantic thoughts and erotic dreams, and a moment later began to laugh.

“I have a very hard time imagining you at a country club dance.

And I don’t believe for a minute that you ever gave a thought to someone’s social standing or even if they had any. You didn’t even like to dance,” she said, taunting me with her eyes.

“I remember I liked to dance with you,” I said, grinning.

The color deepened in her cheeks. “That wasn’t dancing. We were just necking, standing up.” She dared me to deny it, but I just looked at her as if I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You still do that, don’t you?” she asked, a glimmer in her eye.

“You get that look, that really extraordinarily larcenous expression on your face, like a thief announcing at the door that you’ve come to rob them blind, and it all seems so honest no one thinks twice about trusting you completely. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I issued every false-faced denial I could think of that would let her know that I hoped she was right about me and that I was still the boy she remembered.

“I remind myself of my mother sometimes when I hear myself giving advice to a client. I never have any doubt that I’m right.”

It was too flippant, and it was not true. “No, it’s when I catch myself going crazy because something isn’t quite perfect. Everything always had to be just right for her. Nothing out of place; nothing that might cause a complete stranger to notice you for the wrong reasons. Sit straight, walk straight, pronounce each word properly, always be polite, never lose your temper. I can still feel her fingers picking away a piece of lint from my slacks, or pushing a strand of hair back from my forehead. She was always fussing over me. She still does it.” I caught myself. With an embarrassed laugh, I tried to explain.

“She came out last summer. She stayed a week. Every morning when I got up,” I admitted with a sheepish grin, “I made my bed, put everything away, made damn certain my room was all cleaned up before I went downstairs for breakfast.” With a frown, I added, “She still wants to know when I’m getting married.”

There was something I wanted to know, something I wanted to hear her talk about, but I sensed a reluctance on her part to discuss it. Finally, over coffee, I asked.

“Why did you come back here? What happened?”

A brief smile flitted over her mouth and then disappeared. Her eyes looked away and then peered into mine, and then looked away again. She bit her lip, tried to smile, but could not. For a long time she stared down at her hands, and when she finally raised her eyes there was a distance there that I had not seen before.

“Seven years ago I got sick, very sick. I couldn’t do anything.

I couldn’t work, I couldn’t function.” She sighed and then turned her face up to me with the kind of trusting smile that once made me feel we were the only two people alive. “I had a breakdown.

I was in a hospital for months. I’m a manic-depressive. I used to sit in my room for days, staring at the walls. Sometimes I couldn’t even get myself dressed. For a long time I thought I was just depressed, the way everyone gets depressed about things once in a while. But then I started to have these strange thoughts, things that did not make sense, delusions really. I thought people were following me. If someone looked at me on the street, I thought they were letting me know they were watching me. I thought things that were said on television were secret messages being sent to me.”

She saw the look in my eye and, instinctively, reached across and ran her hand over the side of my face. “I’m all right now.

When they finally figured out what it was, a chemical imbalance in the brain, they put me on lithium.”

A thoughtful expression on her face, she sipped some coffee and then, very slowly, put the cup back in the saucer. With her middle finger she traced the edge all the way around to the beginning.

“I got a divorce four years ago. I told you that I’d felt sorry for him-because I never loved him. And I never did, not the way you think you will, not the way I loved you; but we had a child together-it doesn’t matter why we had a child-and we had a life together. It hurt-it hurt a lot. He did what he could, he handled it the best way he knew how, and I think he always thought it was somehow his fault-that I got sick like that-but it made him as crazy as I was. It really did. He was depressed, and angry, and nothing seemed to be going right in his life, either, and… Well, that’s what happened. I went crazy and now I’m better, and I was married and now I’m not.” Struggling with herself, she managed to force a smile. “See how much trouble I would have been.”

It was like seeing her again for the very first time, and falling even more in love with her than I had before. There was no place else I wanted to be, no one else I wanted to be with, nothing else I wanted except to do whatever I could to make sure she was never afraid or unhappy again.

She took my hand when we left the restaurant and walked to the end of the block where she had parked her car. The night was cool and clear and there was no one else on the street. I pulled her toward me, and felt her free hand slip around my neck.

We kissed the way I think we must have kissed the very first time, a brief, awkward trembling touch, and then she snuggled against my shoulder and I felt her warm breath on my neck and the smell of her hair was like the morning breeze that floats through the window when you are only half awake.

“I have to go,” she whispered.

“It’s early,” I said. I held on to her hand as she let go of my neck.

“I told you I had an early flight tomorrow.” She kissed the side of my face, and we walked the last few steps to her car. I would not let go of her hand. She fumbled with her key ring until she found the one she needed. Laughing, she managed to unlock the door, and as soon as she did I pulled her back into my arms.

“Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere and dance?”

She was still laughing, softly. “I’d love to, but not tonight.”

I let go of her and held the car door open while she got in.

“How long are you going to be gone?”

She switched on the ignition and turned on the headlights.

With one hand on the convertible top and the other on the window of the door, I watched her buckle herself in. She looked up and tugged playfully on my tie. “Just a week. I’ll call as soon as I get back.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little curious that even now, at our age, you still have to leave me because of your mother?”

At first she did not understand, but then it came back to her and her eyes gleamed with that same schoolgirl seduction she had used on me that night on the doorstep of her parents’ home.

Then it was gone, and I bent down and we kissed each other on the side of the face like the two old friends we were. As I watched her drive off, I felt empty and alone, and the self-sufficiency of my solitary life suddenly seemed pretentious and false.

It was still early and the last place I wanted to be was in that strange place I called home. For a long time I wandered aimlessly through the streets, in a neighborhood I did not know. My leg began to hurt, and I thought it was funny, because I thought it must be psychosomatic. That leg had not bothered me in years.

The bullet had passed right through, without doing any real damage at all. There was no reason for it to hurt now.

Everything seemed to be conspiring to bring back the past; more than that, to make the past seem more real than the present. I kept switching back and forth, looking back at the past and then going back to the very beginning of things, when I first fell in love with Jennifer, when I first started to despise Calvin Jeffries, when Elliott pointed that gun in my face; going back to the beginning to then watch the way things happened, watching them as if I were seeing them for the first time, like someone who had been given the gift of clairvoyance and could see the future and everything that was going to happen.

The leg hurt like crazy. I passed the open door of a crowded restaurant full of friendly noise. I went inside and found one last place at the bar. The bartender removed a crumpled napkin and a glass of melting ice, wiped the bar with one pass of a towel, and then flung it over his shoulder. He looked at me just long enough to let me know he was ready for the answer to the question he did not need to ask.

“Scotch and soda,” I said in a whispered shout.

I laid a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and watched the bartender take it with one hand while he set the drink in front of me with the other. While the bartender rang up the sale on a refurbished bronze cash register just a few feet away, I was hunched over the bar, running my fingers along the base of the glass. He stacked the change in front of me, and with the same silent question took another order from someone else. Lifting my eyes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the other side of the bar. All around me people seemed to be having a good time, talking, telling stories, making jokes, and laughing every chance they got. I was older than most of them, and much older than some.

I felt out of place and alone.

After I finished the drink, I ordered another, and then one after that. It had been a long time since I had come to a bar by myself and done nothing but drink. I had almost forgotten the wonderful self-indulgence of self-pity, the free fall into the full enjoyment of every felt emotion, the pure untrammeled luxury of caring nothing for what might happen next, the fervent belief that you could tell the world to go screw itself in one breath and have everyone love you in the next. I had another drink, and another, and I was almost there, the lucid madness of intoxi-cation.

I saw my reflection in the mirror, and I seemed older than I had just a few minutes before, and everyone crowded all around seemed even younger. It used to make me pause, the sight of a middle-aged man, drinking alone at a bar, when I was still young and certain nothing like that would ever happen to me. Looking down at the half-finished drink in front of me, I shoved it away with the back of my hand.

I reached inside my coat and pulled out my brown leather wallet and thumbed through the bills until I found another twenty.

With my hand on the bar, I swung off the stool and stood up.

“There a phone here?” I asked above the din as I picked up the change and counted out a tip.

The telephone was in the back, just outside the door to the rest rooms. “It’s me,” I said gruffly into the receiver. My head was leaning against the wall and I was staring straight down at my shoes. They needed a shine. “I’m in a bar. I’ve had too much to drink. You think you could come?”

Fifteen minutes later, Howard Flynn found me at a table in the corner, drinking a cup of black coffee. “Thanks,” I said, somewhat embarrassed. “Order something. I’ll buy dinner.”

He settled into the chair opposite and shook his head. “Hell, I thought you called because you wanted someone to get drunk with.”

I peered at his heavy-jowled, impassive face and tried to smile.

“Tell me something. How long was it before you figured out that AA didn’t stand for ‘anytime, anywhere’?”

“It was one of my life’s bigger disappointments,” he said with a grin. His thick upper arms bulged inside the white dress shirt he was wearing buttoned at the wrists and open at the collar.

“You did good,” he said in his slow, methodical way.

“I did good? Why? Because I came here and started to get drunk?”

“Because you didn’t get drunk. Not all the way. And because you had sense enough to know you couldn’t get home by yourself.” He looked at me through half-closed eyes. “Besides, it isn’t like you went into a liquor store and got yourself a bottle of Thunderbird.”

My head was spinning. I lifted the coffee cup with both hands to make sure I would not spill it.

“How many guys have you seen in the gutter drinking Chivas Regal out of a paper bag?”

“It’s where you end up, not where you start,” I replied.

With a show of impatience, Flynn waved his large, puffy red hand. “You sure you’ve never been in AA? You’ve got all the answers down pat. Listen. I didn’t come down here to hold your goddamn hand. I came down here because you sounded like if you were left alone you might just keep drinking, maybe all night, maybe longer. I’m here to see you don’t. Okay? Now, finish your coffee and let’s get the hell out of here.” His heavy-lidded eyes moved from one end of the teeming bar to the other. “I can’t stand to be around people when they’re having such a good time.”

Flynn pushed back his chair, stood up, and waited for me to come. We shouldered our way through the boisterous crowd, past the bartender with his starched white shirt and black bow tie filling the glasses and emptying the pockets of everyone who lined up for the chance to feel even better than they did already.

Outside, Flynn put his burly arm around my shoulder. “I meant what I said. Don’t get down on yourself. You did good. You knew when to stop.”

Flynn drove me home. He held the bottom of the steering wheel with three fingers of his left hand while his right arm was draped over the back of the seat. Each time the car hit a bump, it vibrated like a hard board plank dropped twenty feet onto a concrete floor. He did not seem to notice as the shocks dissipated in the round folds of muscle around his neck. I was not so fortunate. Each time it happened, I doubled over a little farther and wondered how long the queasy feeling in my stomach would last.

“You know why I drive this car, don’t you?” he asked in the apparent belief that an explanation would make me feel better.

“It isn’t just because I don’t want to spend the money on a new one.”

I knew the reason. I had heard it one time or another from every recovering alcoholic I had known. It was part of the list, the twelve steps to sobriety.

“It’s because it’s good for my humility,” he said, his eyes fixed on the road.

It was just a word, but the sound of it, repeated so often, had become part of a secular scripture, but one that seemed without either context or depth. There was something trancelike about the way it was used, like the mumblings of a catechism in a language no one understood. There was something depressing about it, a reminder of how empty things were when something as simple as this was deemed sufficient. Or was it a form of snobbery, a kind of intellectual condescension on my part? I had called Flynn not only because I knew I should not drive, but because I did not want to be alone. Those supposedly simpleminded for-mulae he followed like they were his personal Ten Commandments had made him into the kind of man who would come out in the middle of the night to help someone else stay out of the bottle that once nearly destroyed his life.

“Of course, humility is kind of relative,” he was saying. “We’ve got a guy in our group who got up at the last meeting and reported that he thought it was pretty humble on his part when he got rid of his Mercedes and got a Lincoln instead. Well, whatever works.”

He drove on, and the spinning inside my head began to slow down, and my eyes became heavier and heavier until I could barely keep them open. We were almost there. The gate at the bottom of the drive loomed out of the darkness.

“It’s too bad about that guy who killed Jeffries,” I heard him say. He said something else, something that made me want to ask a question, but I could not find the words. And then, though I tried to listen, I could not make sense out of anything Flynn was saying. A moment later, I could not hear anything at all, except a voice somewhere inside my own head telling me something was wrong.