A Thousand Pardons (3 page)
“Please,” he said. “Who do you think I am?”
She stepped out of her heels, and when she straightened up again she was three inches closer to the floor. She had a boyfriend, a large, servile, sullen former lacrosse captain whom she’d dated since college, when she was a sophomore and he was a senior. Over the past two years they had seen little of each other, mostly on weekends when one or the other of them could afford to travel, because she’d been in Durham; but when she came for her summer in New York, where he was already living while working as a junior analyst at Bank of America, it seemed only logical, not to mention kindly optimistic, for the two of them to share his apartment in Fort Greene. It had not gone all that well, in her mind at least, but that didn’t mean she was going to cheat on him. He knew all, or most, about the texts and the cellphone calls from her boss. It would matter to Cornelia that standing frankly in the nude in a hotel room for ten minutes or half an hour, while one of the junior partners looked at her with actual tears running down his face, emphatically did not fall into the category of having sex with, or even being touched by, another man. She unzipped her dress, not slowly or provocatively, and
when it fell to the floor she picked it up and laid it carefully along the foot of the bed, smoothing it with her hands. Her bra left red lines under her breasts and along the smooth skin below her arms; Ben stared at those lines as they faded away to nothing and felt as if he had triumphed over time. The bounty of her seemed endless. She took off her simple panties, and he saw that she had shaved her pubic hair, not completely but down to a small strip, as they all seemed to do these days, because it was beautiful that way. What a wonderful world, he thought, where women will do something so difficult and intimate and utterly pointless just for the sake of beauty. What a blessing to be a man in it.
“Okay?” Cornelia said finally, resisting the urge to fold her arms over her breasts.
He tried to speak but could not, so instead he nodded and smiled. It was a sad folly, he knew, to assume that even this feeling, the most powerful he could remember, wouldn’t weaken in time just like every other feeling; but for the moment he was so suffused with gratitude for living that he could not imagine ever feeling any other way.
When she was dressed again he stood and opened the door for her, and there on the threshold—in no way out of breath, but rather as if he had been standing there for quite some time—was Cornelia’s boyfriend. Ben heard Cornelia gasp before he actually saw the boy (he was looking at her ass again, and thinking about the difference between imagining what it looked like unclothed and remembering it) and he lifted his head just in time to receive the first blow right on the mouth. It was like being kicked by a horse. He couldn’t believe how much force was behind it. He intuited what was happening, mostly from the quality of Cornelia’s screams—she was trying to control the young man rather than plead with him—even though he’d had no idea there was any sort of boyfriend in the picture at all. He didn’t appear in Cornelia’s personnel file. His name, evidently, was Andy. Ben dropped to his knees and then felt a kind of splintering in the area of his nose before everything went white. The blows were all just one blow for a while, and then they had stopped. “No police,” he mumbled in a voice that didn’t sound like his own voice at all, and he opened one eye and saw
that there was no one there to hear him anyway; the corridor he viewed sideways from his prone position on the carpeted floor was empty, and both Cornelia and his young assailant were gone.
His first thought, naturally, was to go back into the room, which was paid for. But the key card was not in his pocket. It was entirely possible that he had forgotten it on the dresser, or even that he had left it there on purpose since he’d thought they were checking out. It seemed too long ago to remember now. Avoiding all mirrors, he rode down to the lobby, bulled his way through the horrified stares of strangers and bellhops in the lobby, and ordered the doorman to get him a cab.
“Sir?” was all the doorman was able to say.
Ben gave up and barged past him, head down, into the back seat of the first cab he saw. “Thirty-eighth and Tenth,” he said. The cabbie was one of those who spent his whole shift talking incomprehensibly into a hands-free cellphone. He might have had Bigfoot in his back seat for all he knew or cared. Ben smiled, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Something was broken in there, or if not broken, then way too loose.
The parking garage attendant at Thirty-eighth and Tenth was someone Ben had spoken to five afternoons a week for the last four years, and so the quality of the man’s reaction gave Ben a little bit better idea just how bad he must have looked. His lapels and shirtfront were brown with blood, that much he could see, but his new face was still a mystery to him. The attendant—Ben had tipped him a hundred bucks last Christmas but was suddenly unable to remember his name—stood there like a statue, pale and terrified, even though Ben’s mere presence should have made the fact that he wanted his car crystal clear without any further instruction. But the man’s fear of him brought home to Ben that his spectacularly fallen condition, paradoxically, lent him a certain fleeting authority, a license to say anything, and that gave him an idea. He pulled out his wallet and gave the attendant—Boris! that was the name—two fifties.
“Boris, my man, go across the street,” he said as clearly and haughtily as he could, pointing to the liquor store directly across Tenth Avenue from the garage, “and buy me a liter bottle of Knob Creek bourbon. If they don’t have the Knob Creek, then Maker’s Mark.”
And Boris did it, if only to get away from the bloodstained arm around his shoulders. When he returned, Ben took the bag from him and made an extravagant gesture of impatience, as if to say, And where the fuck is my car? Once that was accomplished, Ben climbed in and shut the door, stuck the bottle between his thighs and uncorked it, and began, for the very last time, his nightly commute home to Rensselaer Valley.
He never made it, though he did get as far as County Route 55 just four and a half miles from his house, which under the circumstances was an impressive enough achievement. The trip from West Thirty-eighth Street to Meadow Close should have taken two hours at most; the extra hours were something Ben was completely unable to account for, and no one else ever came forward to do so either. Possibly he was just driving and drinking. The police, called by Helen after she was called by the senior partner at Ben’s firm, were not the first to find him; an early-morning cyclist came across Ben’s Audi just after dawn, lights on, windows down, having drifted to a stop half in the roadway and half on the shoulder. The fuel gauge was well below E. Ben’s breathing was shallow and rapid, and he was lying on his right side across the front seat. He did not respond when spoken to, or when shaken squeamishly by the ankle. The cyclist pulled out his cellphone and dialed 911. He thought he probably ought to wait for the police or the ambulance to arrive, just in case anybody had any questions. He lifted his chin and turned his head, but he heard no sirens, only a light wind moving the leaves. Then he held up his phone again and took some pictures with it.
Ben’s unresponsive state was the work more of the bourbon than of his head injuries, though the swelling caused by the latter made things difficult for the paramedics at first. But though it was touch and go in the hours after he was found, in less than a week Ben had stabilized to the point where he was cleared to return home, pending arraignment. For by then criminal charges had been brought against him, and not just a DWI, which by itself might have been felonious enough to threaten his career. Instead, two detectives drove up from Manhattan to stand beside his hospital bed and arrest him for attempted sexual
assault. He was so surprised he thought maybe it was just the morphine, but when he asked one of the floor nurses the next day if all that had really happened, she tightened her lips and nodded. Cornelia, Cornelia, he thought. Maybe she really was that ruthless about getting where she was going; or maybe she was that scared of the psychotic boy-giant who apparently considered her his own. Either way, he realized, he was now out in the open water, and he had gone all that way for her sake without ever having the first clue who she was.
Helen didn’t even want to let him come home from the hospital, but he was so weak and in so much pain—these days hospitals turned you out pretty much the moment they felt they could do so without killing you—that she caved. Still, she couldn’t believe how little sympathy she felt for him. Eighteen years. At night she left the Vicodin and a glass of water by his bedside and went to the living room to sleep on the couch. Sara came out of her room only for meals; school started in less than two weeks. Their phones were all turned off. By the middle of each afternoon Helen longed frantically to get out of the house and just be somewhere else, even for an hour, but she was scared to leave Sara alone with her father and more scared to leave Ben alone by himself. She sat in the kitchen and watched for strange cars through the blinds.
Any old-fashioned hope that this was the sort of indiscretion powerful men might cause to disappear was undone by the camera-phone photos, which were all over the Web in a day, and in the newspapers the day after that. A letter of resignation, which Ben signed, had been brought to him in the hospital. His former partners then let him know, via registered letter, that, in an effort to send the message that they did not condone his behavior, they had filed disbarment proceedings against him as well; they had no real grounds to do so, but just knowing they considered their reputation damaged enough to care about the symbolism of filing was chilling to him. He had a few acquaintances who were litigators at rival firms, but even those who returned his phone calls wouldn’t take his case. With a bail hearing imminent, it didn’t seem like a great idea to represent himself. In the end he had to settle for a lawyer right there in Rensselaer Valley—the only one in
town, in fact—who insisted on a large cash retainer because, as he said to Ben and Helen while drinking a cup of take-out coffee in his second-floor office above the hardware store, he wasn’t at all sure that when everything was said and done they would have a cent left to pay him.
“If it’s as hopeless as all that,” Helen asked the lawyer, whose name was Joe Bonifacio, “then what do you suggest we do?”
“Two things,” said Bonifacio. He must have been around the same age as Helen and Ben, sallow and sharp-eyed, and dressed as if for yard work; though he was polite and engaged, she couldn’t help feeling there was something obligatory, something ginned up, about his interest in them. You’d have thought he saw a case like this every day. He had apparently spent his whole life, apart from college and law school, right there in Rensselaer Valley, which made it remarkable that Helen couldn’t remember ever seeing him before. “One, Ben, we have to start to lay the groundwork for the idea that you are not responsible for your actions, that they were committed in an altered state. You admit nothing, you apologize for nothing. Let me ask you this: had you been under any particular stress in the weeks or months leading up to the incident in question?”
“No,” said Ben.
“Yes,” said Helen, looking at her husband in amazement. “Yes, he was. He was emotionally unstable. We have a doctor who will surely testify to that. Well, not a doctor, really, but close enough.”
“Stop it,” Ben said coolly to her. “I don’t want to be a coward now. Let it fall on me. If I’m going out, I don’t want to go out as one of those guys claiming he’s not responsible for his actions.”
Which Helen actually found somewhat moving, insofar as she could be moved by anything to do with Ben these days; but when she looked over at Bonifacio, he wore a smirk like he was enjoying a bad TV show. How he must have hated guys like Ben, Helen thought—lawyers who rode off to Manhattan every morning while he climbed the stairs beside the hardware store and tried to act outraged over whatever sad grievance one of the locals might bring in.
“Here’s the thing to remember, though, Ben,” he said. “It doesn’t all fall on you. If you want to go the noble route, while you’re off in jail
writing your memoirs or whatever, your wife and your daughter will be put out of their house, and any money you have anywhere will be taken away from them faster than you can say ‘mea maxima culpa,’ all right? Now I am sure you would like to avoid their having to suffer for your sins any more than absolutely necessary, and if you want to avoid that, or at least negotiate it, the only way to do so is to find a way to contest the idea of your guilt.”
Ben’s response was an acquiescent sigh. His usual practice was trusts and estates, but at bottom, Helen saw, both men were lawyers, and shared an acceptance of the immutable truth of what Bonifacio was saying.
“So here’s what we do. Ben will be voluntarily committed to an institution in Danbury called Stages, maybe you’ve heard of it, where he will be treated for his chronic depression, bipolar syndrome, attention deficit disorder, panic attacks, alcoholism—”
“I don’t really have a drinking problem,” Ben said.
“Did I ask you if you did?” said Bonifacio, not unkindly. “You’ll recall I said there are two things you need to do, and that’s number one. Now, as to the rape charge.” Helen winced but did not correct him. “It’s my opinion that they know there’s no there there, in terms of evidence, and that their plan is to withdraw the charge before trial no matter what. They just threw it because they know that you’ll never get the stink of it off you. And the reason that’s smart, as I’m sure Ben has figured out, is that it softens the ground for the civil case, which in my opinion is where this whole flaming bag of poo has been aimed from the beginning. We have to start insulating you against that judgment as best we can, and we have to start today. So forgive me if I seem to overstep my bounds here, but thing two, Helen, is that you file for divorce immediately, on grounds of infidelity. Ben will not contest it.”
Ben frowned. “Does it have to be infidelity, though?” he said. “Because, not to get all Talmudic about it, but, as Helen knows, I was not actually, literally unfaithful to her.”
