A Woman's Place: A Novel (37 page)

Seven weeks to the day after my children were removed from my care, Jenovitz spent an hour with them. One hour. Since neither Dennis nor I Page 197

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

were allowed to listen, we didn't know what was said. We waited in the kitchen, while they took the den.

Carmen had been right. Jenovitz was good with kids. Kikit liked him better than Johnny, who was naturally wary, but even he emerged from the meeting unscathed.

It was rather comical, those moments after, with Dennis and I hovering close, dying to ask what had been said in that room and not daring to. I don't know how Jenovitz did it, whether he had sworn them to secrecy or what, but not even Kikit revealed much. She was more concerned with showing me the nest she had built for the purple alligator she had bought at the circus.

My heart nearly broke when Johnny asked, with unmasked hope, if I was staying for dinner.

Of course, Jenovitz didn't see that. He was long gone by then. Brody's meeting with Jenovitz was more upsetting.

It was held at six on the Thursday evening of that second week in December. I had taken refuge after hours in our Essex store and was sitting on the floor, in the light of a single lamp, surrounded by sketches of spring displays when Brody came in. Beyond my pool of light the store was dark, so I didn't immediately see his expression, but his footfall on the carpet was emphatic.

My hands lay still on the pad. I held my breath.

He strode to the edge of the light. He had worn a dark suit for the meeting, but what with the knot of his tie loosened, his shirt collar undone, his hair spiked on his forehead, and my light flashing against his glasses, he looked stormy.

"Something stinks," he said. I didn't have the breath to ask what.

"You're right, Claire. He has his mind made up. He knew how he felt about me from the get-go. Talk about a stiff handshake. When he wasn't being antagonistic, he was totally disinterested. He had a list of questions in front of him, but once he asked them, the answers might have been irrelevant for all the attention he paid them. What the fuck's going on?"

"I wish I knew. It's like someone has a personal vendetta against me. Either that, or I'm being made an example of." I put my pencil aside.

"What did he say?"

"Tell me about yourself," was what he said, and then he just sat there staring at me. I told him when and where I was born, where I grew up, how many siblings I had, where I went to school. I was just getting to the part about Dennis, when he started fiddling with the pipe." He dragged his lapel to his nose, sniffed, tossed it away. "Let me tell you, if he'd asked me whether I minded, I'd have said yes. But he didn't ask me that. He asked about my divorce. Didn't want to know about my friendship with Dennis. Didn't ask any of the pertinent questions, like what did I feel for the kids. Only wanted to know what had happened to my marriage. Assumed it broke up because of me. Assumed my wife got custody of Joy. Assumed I was the bad guy there." He hissed out a breath and turned his head to the side. "Okay, so I was." He faced me again.

"But whenever I tried to jump ahead a few years and tell him the kind of father I've become, he asked some other insulting question. Like whether I ever had 'my women' in the house while Joy was visiting. Like whether Page 198

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

I didn't feel like a turncoat working first for Dennis and then for you. Like wasn't I worried Dennis would name me in an alienation of affection suit. Like didn't I feel like an impostor when I spent time with Kikit and Johnny." He spat out a bark. "Boy, did I answer him quick when he hit me with that one."

His indignance made me smile. He was such a laid-back, easygoing sort on the average, that explosions of passion were all the more meaningful. When those explosions were on my behalf, I loved him even more. Not only was he championing my cause, but he was validating every one of the feelings I'd been getting from Jenovitz myself.

"Then he asked what my intentions were," Brody said. I waited to hear his response, but he wandered off to the shadowed front of the store. His large frame bent when he set his fists on the sales desk.

"Brody?"

His voice was less distinct coming back to me. "So I told him. Maybe it was defiance, after the impostor crack, but it seemed to make sense. He knows your marriage is ending. He knows how close you and I are. I figured he'd be thrilled to know I wanted to marry you. I figured he'd be thrilled to know we'd be able to offer the kids a stable two parent home."

I rose and went to him. My hand found its way to the highest, broadest part of his back. It was stretched tight by his pose. "He wasn't?"

"Nope. Said I had gall, wanting your business and you. Said I was complicating the custody issue. Said I was confusing the kids. Said I was distracting you at a time when you couldn't afford it." He turned his head, almost looking at me but not quite. "Said I'd be doing you more of a favor by leaving town."

"No."

He didn't move his head. His eyes found mine past the inner rim of his glasses. "Maybe he's right." "No." He pushed up from the desk, drew himself to his full height, and looked at me directly, and for the briefest moment I imagined what it would be like if he left. The sense of loss was devastating.

"No," I said a third time. I grabbed his tie, high, and held on.

"I'd do it, Claire. I've loved you for years--" Pulling on the tie, I raised up and silenced him with my mouth. The kiss was hard and willful. When it was done, I covered his mouth with my hand.

But Brody could be willful, too. Taking my wrist, he lifted the hand and said, "I lived most of those years thinking I'd never have you, and I could have survived that way. I was acclimated to it. It was better than nothing. But I know you, Claire. I know what your kids mean to you. If the choice comes down to me or them, I'll give it all up and vanish."

"Without asking me what I want?" I cried in a burst of anger. "Without giving me a say in the choice? You're starting to sound like them!" He hooked an elbow around my neck and dragged me close. Page 199

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

"In the first place," I reasoned from that sheltered spot, "if it's true that Jenovitz has already made up his mind, it won't make one bit of difference whether you're in the picture or not. In the second place, I'm not living without you." My palms were under his jacket, moving over his shirt from waist to armpits. I knew just what was beneath that shirt, had nuzzled every inch.

It was mine. I wasn't giving it up.

"They'll make you pay."

I drew my head back fast. "Who? Dennis? The judge? The GAL? Who in the hell are they to tell me how to live my life? Like they're paragons of virtue," I muttered, feeling a great swell of contempt. "Well, I'm tired of being put on the defensive. I'm tired of having to second-guess everything I do for the sake of meeting some standard that isn't anywhere near as good as the standard I've always set for myself. I'm done doing it, Brody," I warned. "If Jenovitz doesn't give me my kids, I'll take Dennis to trial, and I'll go from one court to another, if I have to. I'm fighting. I'm fighting for the kids, and I'm fighting for you. I'll even fight you for you if I have to." I stopped talking. There was only one person who could tell me if I would have to do that. I awaited his decision.

It came in slow increments--a movement at the corner of his mouth, a sibilant catch in his breath, a quiver in his biceps, the quickening of his pulse-until finally I saw it there in the dark, felt it in marrow and memory. We had discovered each other, Brody and I, making love anywhere and everywhere as though we had been abstinent for years. We had, in a sense. At least I had. I had never had sex like that, conscious sex, the kind that made you aware of each of its intricate elements. I had never known the pleasure of the process. With Brody, it could be slow and sweet, or hungry and hard. It could be dark or light, verbal or silent. He might not have been able to clap to a song, but the rhythm of his tongue was compelling and the beat of his hips was strong. He knew what to do when for the utmost sensation. In that, his timing was perfect.

In Brody's arms, I rediscovered each of my body parts. Beneath his hands and his mouth, they became things of beauty, and the appreciation wasn't one-sided. I had never before explored a man's body, had never before had the desire. What I had with Brody went beyond desire to insatiable curiosity. I knew how soft the hair under his arms was after a shower, and how vulnerable the skin was at his groin. I knew how tight his nipples could get, and how the ridge on the underside of his penis curved ever so slightly when he was fully aroused. I knew how his hair varied in texture from one part of his body to another. I knew how the pattern of scars on his knee felt against my lips, and the way his crooked pinkie fit the curve of my breast. I knew the taste of his earlobe, his navel, his semen.

"Christ, Claire," he managed to rasp before he brought his open mouth down on mine. His hands were fierce holding my head, flexing here, shifting there to better angle me. He ate at my lips, used his teeth on my tongue, pulled the breath from me again and again. We had made love in lots of places. After those first times in my chair-and-a-half and shower, there had been our beds, our kitchens, Brody's laundry room, my workroom, even under a thermal blanket on the rocks outside my lighthouse. I'm sure there were lots of reasons for it--defiance, daring, curiosity, novelty--but the bottom line on each Page 200

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

occasion was need. We needed each other, right then, right there, needed to make the ultimate connection that said we were something more than we had been before, that we weren't alone, that we loved in the most intimate sense of the word.

So now we made love in the store. It was a challenge, what with Brody wearing a suit and the store so pristine, but accomplished with surprising ease--what wonderful things aren't?--the freeing of one of my legs, Brody's unzipping. There was added excitement to being fully clothed on top, to feeling the abrasion of fabric against breasts and nipples, so discreet there, so bare and naughty below. We didn't move much at first, and that, too, was exciting. I liked holding still with Brody rock-hard inside me, liked the feel of his slightest shift, liked the hoarse, whispered words that told me how tightly I sheathed him and how splendid it felt.

In time, we did move, of course. After a slow slide down the leg of the desk, we sprawled on the carpet and gave in to the need that had built. Brody had the ultimate control, coming close time and again, time and again holding back. Only when I reached my climax did he let go. When it was over and we lay in a decadent heap, he said, still short of breath but in a verbal eruption not unlike the physical one he'd just had, "We can't go back, Claire. Can't be just friends again. I can't be with you without wanting this. So if I stay in the picture, we're hooked up. It's out of my hands. Christ, it all is. Here, this. In that bastard's office. I want to do something, baby. Want to make things right for you, only I don't know what in the hell will help."

"This," I whispered. "You. Incredible help."

"But the kids--"

I pressed his mouth. "Help keep this part of my life on track, and I'll take care of the kids. I'll get them. So help me God, I will." Often in the darkest hours of the night I awoke feeling empty inside. When Brody was there, the emptiness was little more than a shadow in a corner of the room. When he wasn't, the shadow closed in. Part of it had to do with Connie, with the number of times in the course of a day that I reached for the phone, wanting to tell her something I had seen or thought or felt. The rest had to do with the kids, with the fact that they were surviving without me and the fear that I would never get them back.

During one of those night awakenings, I imagined squirreling them away on one of the days when they were in my care. I imagined hiding out with them in Argentina, changing their names, and raising them without the interference of Dennis or the court.

Would I do it? Seriously?

So help me, I wasn't sure. I was a law-abiding citizen. But the law hadn't treated me well. In that sense, what had started for me as a simple case of regaining custody of my children had become something more. I needed to right the wrong of the court. It was a matter of principle.

"What are our options?" I asked Carmen. I had driven into Boston, as much to feel I was doing something as to brainstorm.

"Legally? We can file another Motion for Reconsideration, but without Page 201

Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place

new evidence, it'll be turned right down. Same with another Motion to Recuse. There's the federal angle, a gender discrimination suit, but that'll take time. You want custody back before that."

"What about suing Dennis? You mentioned that once."

"It's definitely an option. We could sue for malicious prosecution, and for intentional infliction of emotional stress."

"That sounds about right," I said, nodding. "I've been on the up-and-up through all this, trying to be honest and agreeable. I've tried to be positive. Tried to talk about my strengths. Tried to tell Jenovitz what I've done for my children in the past and what I can do for them in the future, and all the while Dennis is out there on the hustings slinging mud. So Jenovitz listens to the mudslinger. The good guys lose. I think I've had it with that. Let's threaten a suit."

"It'll take time." "What if the threat does the job? What if that's my lever in negotiating a settlement?"

"Dennis may rethink his position. Then again, he may decide to hold out. Make you squirm. Count on Selwey saving his neck."

"If we went to trial, when would it be?"

"Late spring."

"If we lost that round and appealed, when would that happen?"

"Anywhere from six to eighteen months after the first." I couldn't begin to imagine waiting that long to regain custody of Johnny and Kikit, and cursed--for the hundredth time--the system that had worked so well against me. I rose from my chair and went to the window. Behind me, Carmen's phone buzzed. I heard her pick it up and deliberately tuned out to give her privacy, concentrating instead on the narrow alleyway lined with shops. People came and went, pulling scarves tighter and overcoats closer. For an instant, I imagined I saw Dennis. Then whoever it was was gone.