Exposed (5 page)

Mark and I were adults. We knew how to exert self-control, so even though we were often approached and sometimes tempted, we kept it together. For a while, at least.

• • • •

Life was good. I’d go back to my hometown to see my folks every few months. It was hard watching them get older. They had a comfortable life since my dad sold his fishing boat, or hardware store, or trucking business. I’m not going to tell you which.

My sister had two kids and was married to a sweet guy we had known in high school who only embarrassed me once by telling me he had always loved me and marrying my sister was second best.

I told him to never say that again, and he didn’t.

My dad almost seemed proud of me, his daughter, the city lawyer who had a Porsche (which he pronounced “Porch”), two houses, and who sometimes was referred to in a
Seattle Times
story.

But my father
loved
Mark. If I wasn’t the son my father had always wanted, Mark certainly was. Mark actually stopped coming to some family occasions because everyone (except me) treated him like a god. At the dinner table, if Mark coughed with something in his throat, my mother and sister would race to the kitchen to get him a glass of water. If he just cleared his throat, everyone would stop talking to hear what he had to say. It was gross.

I teased him about it sometimes. Sometimes I wasn’t very nice, I suppose. Maybe I was jealous. Some of that adulation should have been mine, after all. I may have been making half what Mark made, but my income was still six figures. That was quite
small
of me, I know, but maybe like so much else, it’s just biology.

Grandmama was often quiet on these occasions, not that she talked that much anyway. Once I asked her why, and she said something in French that I didn’t understand. It had something to do with owl eyes being larger than owl mouths, and the source of wisdom.

She had tried to teach me French. And even though I loved the sound of the words and could mimic many of the phrases, I never really got the hang of the verb forms. It was the only time she ever grew frustrated with me. “Eees more easy than English!” she would exclaim.

“You mean ‘it’s easier than English,’ I would correct with a smile.

“Yes, you see?!”

“Well, if French is easier than English, and I speak English easily, I should already have learned French. Since I haven’t, it can’t be.”

This never went over too well, but it ended the conversation. The fact is, there was no French offered in my high school, and just spending some time on it at Grandmere’s house wasn’t enough. But I would sit with her and practice anyway, because it seemed to make her happy.

She was embarrassed that her English was as bad as it was and never did understand why her accent was still so strong, her phrasing not right. “Your accent is beautiful! I hope it never goes away!” I told her. But she would just set her mouth into that grim line and give a quick shake of her head.

On family occasions she would also help my mother out in the kitchen, though from what I knew of each of them, Grandmama could have done the job much faster without my mother’s help, even in my mother’s own house.

We never went to Mark’s hometown, which was on the East Coast, to see his parents. Something happened there Mark didn’t talk about. He was estranged from his family, I don’t know if that was his choice or theirs.

At first whenever I brought it up, he’d say he would think about it, but eventually he’d always say no, that it wasn’t going to happen. I finally quit bringing it up when he’d just look at me with a smile and wait silently for me to stop.

Despite butting heads on things like that, we were pretty happy, which is why it’s hard to say why what happened next, happened. I don’t mean “how” it happened. I am going to tell you how it happened, maybe in more detail than you want. I really mean “why.” The ultimate cause, not just what we lawyers call the proximate cause, or how one thing leads to another.

I don’t know if we got bored with the “perfect life” we had created, if we fell under the influence of something stronger than we were, or if we became who we really were. But, one thing did lead to another. It always does.

I had a routine case. A nineteen-year-old girl (Woman? Not really, not yet.) had been arrested downtown after a minor traffic accident. You wouldn’t think this would have hit my portfolio, and since she wasn’t even the driver, though it was her car, you wouldn’t have thought she would have been arrested. Except for one minor detail.

When the cops got there, she still hadn’t put on any of her clothes.

The driver of the car was cited for reckless driving and DUI, but his blood- alcohol level was right below the legal limit, and he was driving because she was obviously impaired. He was doing her a favor. But she was doing a favor for him, too. The real reason for the accident was that he was in the process of cumming during what was an absolutely exquisite blow-job.

At least that’s what she told the police, in his defense. She offered herself as evidence, said she was willing to spit into a clean glass, surely they could tell from that. That’s why she didn’t get dressed, she thought it would validate “their” case.

He’s lucky he didn’t lose his cock, that it was a “sidewipe” and not a “rear- end,” or a “head-on.” Sorry about the quotes. Lily put those in the original pleading, and we all laughed so hard that Sarah had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t come out for fifteen minutes.

“Linda Williams” (not her real name) was standing by her man. Naked. So, the cops arrested her for indecent exposure, public lewdness, and a couple of other pissant charges I was going to be able to make “go away” for her father, who happened to own one of the larger log export operations in Washington state.

It wouldn’t completely disappear, though, and one of the indecency charges would stick.

That wasn’t enough for Daddy Williams. He wanted to sue the nightclub where his darling daughter, the perfect receptacle for his legacy, the prom queen who would bear his ultimate heirs, had her last couple of underage drinks, despite the fact she was carrying the best fake identification his money could buy.

When she had some place to carry it. Because she had been naked, there, too. The Seattle Area Sexually Social Association was a private club, one that catered to the more offbeat tastes of our fine city. Anything went at SASSA, so long as it was consensual.

As her blow job defense to police proved, Ms. Linda Williams was willing to consent to quite a lot.

Tony was going to handle the lawsuit against the club while I dealt with the charges against Linda. Our offices were in the Seattle Tower, at the corner of 3rd and University, one of my favorite buildings in Seattle. The gilt entrance is small but nearly jewel-like in craftsmanship. The ornate architecture shows attention to detail, common to the grand buildings constructed just before the stock market crash of 1929, that no fifty-story slick bank tower built in the last seventy years can emulate.

I was impressed with Tony’s sensibilities about the building, until he told me our firm was there because it was across the street from his apartment in The Cobb, an urban complex.

I used to tease Mark, who I think was a little jealous that I liked our offices so much.

“Our building is closer to the water,” I’d say, knowing that ruffled a feather.

“Yes, but from my building, you can actually see the water,” was his standard reply, poking fun at the fact that my architecturally amazing but old building was now buried in the shadows of buildings twice as tall. And it was true. From his office in the US Bank Center at 5th & Pike, he could see Puget Sound on a clear day. But the building was boring. Efficiency only goes so far.

Odd as it may seem, Mark and I didn’t talk about our cases much. When we were together, we tended to avoid work discussions. It’s not like we had an agreement or anything. It’s just that we did law all day. We didn’t want to do it all night, too.

And so it was with the SASSA case. The club had been through this type of thing more than once before, had a pretty good legal defense in Washington state law. Tony and I were scheduled for a deposition in the “neutral” law office of another firm not far away, in the Two Union Square building. I’d only been there once before to go to Sullivan’s Steakhouse on the main floor.

I was to be there with Linda to keep her from blurting something too honest or to cover it up by saying that “what my client really meant to say was…”. We were the last to arrive.

When she and I walked into the conference room overlooking Puget Sound, on the opposite side of the table sat Tony and Daddy Williams. They each smiled at us. The other lawyers had their backs to us. We were late, so I nodded to Tony and quickly guided Linda around the table to sit next to her father. I put my briefcase down and sat next to her.

On the other side of the table was the club owner, who was just like you might imagine: a little too modern, a little too young, maybe a little too scruffy but in the current style. To his left was probably the best-known lawyer in Seattle, as handsome as could be, distinguished, seen regularly in the
The Seattle Times
at social functions. Max Moore. To his right sat one of the top young legal minds of the community. Who happened to be my beloved husband.

At the very same instant, in the very same voice, Mark and I said, “Oh, shit.”

That meeting was much shorter than the hour and half that was scheduled. After the reason for our outburst was explained, most of the five minutes it did take involved Daddy Williams threatening me and my license to practice law, swearing at Mark and threatening his license, and, at one point threatening Tony and Max Moore for their failure to find out about this “obvious and egregious conflict of interest.”

We learned, and so did anyone within offices thirty feet outside the door, that Daddy Williams had supported the campaigns of a number of state and US senators and the governor. We were told about the limits of our own imagination to contemplate the consequences of our “clearly unethical and deceitful behavior.”

Finally, Tony got him and Linda out of the room. The club owner was dismissed by Max Moore with the words, “We’ll get back to you,” then we all sat. Finally, Max Moore started to chuckle. Mark started to smile.

I didn’t get the joke, and thought I was in deep shit.

Tony laughed and said to Max Moore, “Doesn’t he know that you put the governor in office?”

Moore chuckled and smiled. “But I used his money to do it.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“We’ll smooth it over,” said Max Moore, easily. “There won’t be any repercussions. Right, Tony?” Tony nodded, shrugging at the same time to indicate it was no big deal.

Max Moore yanked Mark off that case before we got to the elevator, then invited Tony for a drink at Sullivan’s downstairs. Tony said he would talk to me in a half hour and asked that I wait in our offices for him.

“Max uses Sullivan’s like an office. I think he does as much business there or at The Edgewater Hotel as he does in the office,” said Mark on our way to the front door.

I gave him a quick kiss and walked back to my office in a Seattle rain that had come on suddenly to soak the day, and waited.

I was still a little too wound up to concentrate on work, so I read through a copy of
Source of the Sound
, the local alternative newspaper. There was a story about the local homeless population that clustered around Pike Place Market.

Someone was feeding them.

Local businessmen were outraged, since by feeding them, “you just draw more ants to the picnic,” said one, off the record of course. Politicians were outraged, because feeding the poor without going through proper channels, meeting certain standards, “put the poor in danger.” Gnawing hunger is not as dangerous, I suppose.

The Sound
wanted to blame someone, or congratulate them, or maybe most importantly, be the publication to identify them, but no one knew where the food was coming from
or
who was paying for it. The mystery just added fodder for outrage.

When Tony got to the office an hour later, he made me assure him a half dozen times that I had not known a thing about my husband representing the opposing side. He complained only once about the lost fees and withdrew the firm from the case, both the lawsuit and Linda Williams defense.

“I don’t have anybody else who could do it. They’d never trust me. Probably a good thing, too,” he muttered as he walked away to make the phone call.

They all did what they said they would do. It was smoothed over with Daddy Williams, though he left the firm, and we all moved on without any real repercussions.

Except for a few. But those few would change my life forever.

Work continued
along
much as it had been. My little team was as busy as ever. Tony and I talked about expanding the operation a few times, but he kept saying I was the one who made it work, and he didn’t want to spread me too thin. He was generous about it too.

One day he told me he was taking me to lunch.

“Tony, I can’t. I’ve got to keep after a case that’s going to trial on Monday. Lily is going to bring lunch back to the office.”

“Yes, you can. We’re going to lunch.”

We left when Tony was ready, even though I wasn’t. He was usually easy- going, but he seemed tense, if not grim. We wandered down to Pike Place Market, where Tony always ate. Sometimes at Place Pigale, sometimes at Pike Place Chinese Cuisine, sometimes at the Soup & Salad MFG. Company. Sometimes from a vendor on the corner. But always Pike Place Market.

“Tony, why do you always come here to eat? You basically live in a six-block area of Seattle,” I asked.

“It’s comfortable,” he said, preoccupied.

“Is it because you like watching all these people?” I asked, as a man without a shirt walked a pit bull past us, accompanied by a woman twice his size with bright purple hair, pushing a baby carriage.

Tony stopped, forcing me to stop as well.

“See that truck?” he asked. There was a produce truck parked in the middle of the street near a giant bronze pig. The back end was open and the driver was muscling a hand truck piled with boxes onto the lift gate, which he lowered to the ground, then pirouetted it around to push it into the maw of the market.

“Yes. So?”

“That was my job for seven years. Through college. While I went to law school. Every day, or night, depending on my class schedule. Hauling what needed to be hauled to this market. Loading, unloading, trying not to run over people who had fallen down drunk at 3 a.m. Getting up to go to class. Doing it over again.

“So I don’t come down here to watch all these people, as you say. I come down here because these people are my people,” Tony said.

As if to make the point, a man walked by in rags and said, “Hiya Tony!”

“Hey, Leo. How’s it going?”

“Eh…” Leo mumbled, as if that said it all.

“Yeah, I know,” Tony said, as if there had been an actual exchange.

Tony led us into the concrete caverns of the market to Pike Place Chinese Cuisine. We got a table right away, even though the place was crowded, and the waitress brought a beer to the table along with our silverware and water glasses.

“Thank you, Sami,” Tony said.

“You bet. Usual?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She turned to me. “How about you, hon?”

“I haven’t looked yet,” I said, motioning to a menu in Sami’s hand.

“She’ll have the same,” Tony said.

Sami must have known that, because she still hadn’t even put the menus down on the table. “To drink?”

“Green tea?” I asked, which received a grunt and a nod.

“What am I having?” I asked Tony.

“Sheep brains in a light broth,” Tony said.

“Uh Tony…”

“Relax. Fish. Something good, something fresh. Catch of the day. I don’t know how it will be prepared, but it’ll be good.”

Sami brought my tea in what seemed to be an instant. Tony sipped his beer and looked out over the water.

“You’re going to get a larger percentage of the fees you are generating,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m making you a partner, of sorts. You will get a higher percentage of what’s left over after the bills are paid.”

“Why are you doing this, Tony?” I asked.

“Because I’m a good guy, and you deserve it,” he said.

“Tony, I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t act out of self-interest.”

Tony laughed out loud, and long.

“Good for you, Jess,” he said at last. “And my self-interest is this: If I don’t up the ante, someone is going to take you away from me. Then I’ll have nothing.”

He never called me Jess if we were around anyone else. The first time he did it, I thought he was being condescending, because I never referred to myself as Jess. The only ones who ever had before Tony were Mark and Grandmama, at least since college.

But at some point, I realized that when Tony did it, it was not a subtle put down as much as a “tell.” When he thought of me as Jess, he was not on his perpetual defensive.

He was right, too. I’d received a couple of feelers from other firms. But I didn’t know he knew.

“Somebody leak? Or ask you for my references?”

“Remember when I was late to talk to you after the Daddy Williams fiasco?”

“You were having a drink with Max Moore.”

“Moore wanted to talk about a merger of firms, under his letterhead but I would come in as full partner,” Tony said.

My heart sank. That would mean I would be at the same firm as Mark. And I knew that would create problems, even if I didn’t yet know how. The thought of Max Moore disquieted me, too.

“What did you tell him?” I asked, tensing.

“That I was honored, that I would think about it,” Tony said.

“And?”

“I’m offering you a greater percentage of what you generate,” he said. He drained his beer just as Sami put a fresh one on the table, and she cleared the empty as if this were a well-practiced routine.

“I don’t get the connection,” I said.

“For the longest while I couldn’t figure it out. Moore doesn’t need my book of business. Yes, I do pretty damn well, but merging would cost Moore as much or more than he could get training another pack of his own dogs. I didn’t see his self-interest, and Moore doesn’t make stupid mistakes.”

“And the conclusion was…” sometimes I just hated this game of Tony’s, making you ask for the next piece of information, the connection between dots he so reluctantly doled out.

“Max Moore doesn’t want me. He wants you. He wants the business you’ve created, the reputation you’ve made in the community.”

Tony’s eyes hovered over the beer at his lips, but those eyes were locked onto mine. I was being read, and Tony could read anybody.

“Really,” I said. I relaxed. As soon as I did, Tony did too. Nonverbal communication is bred into us by millennia of social evolution.

“What?” Tony asked.

My turn, Tony, I thought. I was going to make him wait. Finally he smiled, knowing exactly what I was up to. “Okay,” he said, “What?” with just enough plea in his voice.

“I don’t want to work at Moore and Associates. My husband works there. I would be lost in his shadow. I would be lost among all those lawyers, all of whom have more prestigious degrees than I do, fancier names, bigger egos. I like what I’m doing, and I like where I’m doing it.”

Tony grinned from ear to ear. He knew I was telling the truth, and with the additional money he just put on the table, he knew I would be very happy to stay right where I was.

• • • •

It was late summer, a Thursday. Mark and I had gone out to dinner, which we did far more often than we ate at home. Both of us can cook, but neither likes to do dishes. We had been talking about taking Friday off, which is the reason I remember that it was a Thursday.

Hell, I have lots of reasons to remember that day. A Thursday.

Somewhere between standard Seattle cuisine of organically grown romaine lettuce and a Dungeness crab-stuffed Copper River salmon, Mark looked out over the water and asked, in the most unbelievably nonchalant voice I have ever heard, “Would you like to go to that SASSA place after dinner?”

“You bored with me, sweetie?” I asked, and was only half-kidding.

Mark and I never talked about our sex life, especially our pasts. I’d not told him of my previous experiences, and he hadn’t offered to discuss his. We were both healthy young adults with history. I guess we each assumed that if there were anything to say, it would be said.

Yes, I had my fantasies, and I assume he had his. But that’s just normal. Talking about them would make it seem… less normal.

Our sex was still good, though. Very good, by most standards. But by that point in our relationship, we could anticipate what the other would do next. Most often we looked forward to that next thing, too.

But routine is routine.  I think we probably took the same amount of time, more or less, each night we made love. Most often that’s good. But it’s still… routine.

“Of course not,” he said, tracing the vein on the back of my hand with the tip of his index finger. “I was just curious. I saw an article about the place the other day in the
The
Sound
and it reminded me. Just thought I’d ask.”

Source of the Sound,
the local “alternative” newspaper. You could pick up a copy anywhere. Leftist, proud if not arrogant, often full of anger about other people’s money, it came out every week. But it was a fun read, especially when it took on Seattle’s elite, and the classifieds were a hoot.

A bald, one-legged, subterranean goat-wrangler with halitosis could find a date in the classifieds of
The Sound.
She wouldn’t even have to spell “goat.” Mark and I both enjoyed reading it at lunch and often brought a copy home.

We’d even argued light-heartedly over the editorial point of view. He thought
The Sound’s
series on the “Secret Samaritan of Pike Place,” was over-done and disagreed with the paper that whoever was providing food to local homeless was doing a community service.

“It’s harming an important heritage,” Mark said.

“Even the poor have a right to be in public places when they want to be,” I countered.

Source of the Sound
also had articles about the Seattle “scene,” straight, gay, alternative, weird. So I wasn’t surprised there would be an article about SASSA.

But it was very unlike Mark to be tentative like that. Which made me curious about what he was thinking. The truth was, I’d been curious about SASSA too, ever since I’d first heard about it from Linda Williams while trying to put her defense together. And for the other, obvious reasons, that I’d pretty much buried since college.

To put Mark at ease, and give my own curiosity a little cover, I said, “Sure. Sounds like fun. But I want another glass of wine first.”

SASSA was in an industrial part of town, not too far from the water and under one of the overpasses for the freeway. The sign was nearly invisible. It seemed creepy right on the face of it, but we had made our decision and neither one of us wanted to be the one to chicken out, I think.

We pulled open the steel door and walked into a tiny alcove surrounded by black velvet curtains. There was a small desk with a very large man sitting at a computer. The music from the other side of the curtain was loud and pounding.

“ID?” said the man.

“We didn’t bring ID,” said Mark, who thought it would be better if we left all our valuables locked in the car. Plus, we didn’t really want to be leaving a fat, wide paper trail of our attendance.

“Well, I can’t let you in without ID,” said the man, not really frustrated, but not entirely patient.

Mark and I went back to the car to get our ID. When he opened the trunk where we had stashed my purse, he asked, “You still want to do this?”

“Sure. I don’t know. Do you?” I gave back a non-answer as I pulled out my driver’s license.

“I don’t know. I guess. We’re here,” was his nearly equally noncommittal reply. He got his license from his wallet that he’d left in the door of my Porsche, the car we had taken to dinner because it was more fun to drive than his Audi.

Back at the alcove, the large man looked at my ID, then at Mark’s, and typed into his computer.

“You’re members, right? You aren’t coming up on the list.”

I’d forgotten that SASSA was a members-only club. “Can we join now?” I asked.

He sighed in a way that made it clear that what would follow was an oft-repeated conversation. He picked up a cordless phone and hit a button. “Hey. Got Newbies.” Pause. “Yeah.”

“Wait here,” he said.

“That’s okay, we can…” Mark started to say.

“Just wait,” said the man. He still had our IDs so we didn’t bolt, as I think we were both ready to do.

Just then the outer door opened and a couple about our age came in. There was just barely room for all four of us in the alcove. I was somewhat reassured by their quality clothes, and they were nice-enough looking. I was less reassured by the handcuffs hanging from the strap of her purse, and how she looked at Mark, who was at least a head taller than her date.

Her date looked at me with a smile that seemed very friendly, or ravenous, I couldn’t say at the time. He was somewhat handsome, not really my type but not unpleasant.

The large man behind the desk said, “ID?” to them, and they gave him their licenses, which he typed into the computer, then he said, “$100.” The man gave him his credit card, signed the tab and they slipped through the curtain. I tried to get a peek inside but all I got was a flash of color.