Juice (8 page)

Davis had not raised his voice. He had not paced, only shifted his position occasionally. He had addressed the jurors each in turn and then as a whole. He had flattered them; and in flattering them he had transformed the state's violence to an insulting attack on them.

And the state had little else to say: the murder was confessed, and all that remained was to prove that Landauer was, and had been, sane. The defense granted that he was now. The state's attorney rested his case; he was baffled and furious.

Davis went to work quietly. He called no witnesses. He asked to have admitted in evidence extracts of notes he had taken in conversation with the defendant. The objection was made and, after Davis had taken the stand to swear that they were authentic, overruled. Davis made the point that his defense required knowledge not of the law, but of the man.

He re-created for the jurors, for the judge (who was already more interested in the defendant than in justice), the world Landauer had re-created for him. He spoke fluently, intelligently, quietly. He read from the notes, interjected his own interpretations—many of which were objected to; it made no difference, the jury had heard—and even quoted bits of his own part in the long dialogue. He discussed sexual aberration, atheism; he contrasted Europe with America; he seasoned the discourse with anecdotes from his own life. He defined Willie, not in terms of origin or personality or appearance, but as he must have seemed to Landauer. He evoked pity for Landauer—“I ate spaghetti with my hands … they put up with me because I would play for them.” He evoked pity for the age, the times; he evoked pity for all men and all women.

When he was nearly through he digressed to intellectuals, pointing out that by most definitions any juror who had followed his, Davis', lecture thus far—and he was sure they all had—was an intellectual.

The state's attorney objected. This was matter for the summation. Davis agreed. “I'm prepared to recess now, if the court wishes, and to begin my summation after lunch. Unless counselor wishes to cross-examine me.”

“No thank you,” the state's attorney muttered.

After lunch Davis took up the thread he had left dangling: they were all intellectuals. The judge was puzzled, the state's attorney flabbergasted. Summation? No beginning?

“My case is all of a piece, Your Honor,” Davis answered. “I have only one point to make. And I think the jurors have understood me quite clearly. I don't believe they need a repetition of what I've already said; and I have no desire to insult them simply for the sake of form.”

He proceeded, drawing instances from their own lives: bills, frustrations, political disagreements, petty rebellions, the desire for divorce, the unbidden and horrifying wish to see wife, husband, children dead. Crime often differed from these normal rebellions not in kind, but in degree. He asked them to consider again Landauer's life: repressions, frustrations, misery, the laughingstock of his community—and yet what a contribution he had made! With whom was he compared? Prokofiev, Stravinsky. His work was played in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Louisville. Was this man, in normal circumstances, a murderer? And could he, after a life like his, the constant search for peace and beauty, could he have been normal when he quarreled with Willie—Willie, whom he—yes, there is no need to hide the fact, and nothing horrible in it—whom he loved? The prosecution would make him out a monster by emphasizing all of his “unpopular” attributes. But the jury knew, and Davis knew, that this was not a monster, but a man; a man so weakened by the miseries and frustrations of a life spent in search of an unattainable ideal that in his moment of greatest stress the overworked, overstrained, unhappy mind failed him; for so long, fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, in an otherwise creative life, his mind had failed him. For so long he had been, by any definition of the word, insane.

How many of us could say certainly that it would never happen to us? Were not Landauer's origins, his intellectuality, his brilliance really, his frightened, withdrawn contempt for society, to be rather pitied than scorned? Without the security of community, family, and friends, any one of us might be driven to that one moment of insanity.

Even the state's attorney, Davis said, would have to admit the defense's point. The state had condemned Landauer on four counts: he was a foreigner, an intellectual, a sodomite, and an atheist. The state's attorney felt that such a man was a monster. But Willie was all of those things save one; yet the state's attorney had described him as clean-cut, a young man with a future, a boy led astray. And in a way Kuno Landauer was a boy led astray: disoriented, rootless, weakened.

“For thirty seconds on that night,” Davis said, “a weak man was insane. In thirty seconds he committed an act against which every hour of the rest of his life, before and after, cries out in horror; an act of destruction damned and denied by a life of creation. I can go even further: I can say that Kuno Landauer, being what he is, probably knows better than we what guilt and innocence are; that he has suffered more guilt since that insane moment than any punishment would ever make him feel. He is a man without malice—” Davis spoke slowly, gravely—“utterly without malice; yet he killed the thing he loved.”

That was it. Davis gave the jury the benefit of a traditional peroration, a plea to them to help bring justice, the law, out of the darkness and into the light, away from the primitive and toward the spiritual. He sat down exhausted; his bowels were knotted, and his body ran with sweat.

The state tried hard, but was unable to avoid the trap of its own emotionalism. The jury was frigid. They were out, nevertheless, for two days. During this time the state's attorney sent Davis a note: “You have tried to legalize pique as a cause of murder. You ought to be hanged, or at least disbarred.” Davis marked beneath those words, “Opinion is not evidence,” and sent the note back.

Kuno Landauer was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The judge, whose charge had been severe toward Davis, was unconvinced; but the verdict stood. Reporters, knowing Davis as a reliable source of quotable wit, surrounded him, and found him oddly distraught.

“What was your fee, J. J.?” one of them called.

“Don't call me J. J.,” Davis said. “There was no fee. Landauer's broke. Everybody knows that.”

“That's not like you.”

Davis looked up, startled. “I suppose it isn't,” he said. He rubbed his eyes. “Listen,” he went on suddenly, “the verdict was right. It was justice. You can print that. Now I have to go to the bathroom. Don't print that.”

“What about Landauer?”

Davis paused. “What about him?”

“What'll he do? Where's he going?”

“I don't know,” Davis said. “Nobody'll hire him now. He has record royalties, but they're small. Interview him. Why ask me?” There was no strength in him; he could hardly stand. “Let me through.”

He left the courtroom, went home, showered, slept twelve hours, called Landauer, returned the cat, and went back to Mexico. He saw Kuno Landauer once after that, and they both knew that once was enough. “It was too much,” Davis said. “For a month I was you, Kuno Landauer; I was split, half of me a lawyer and half of me—something else, I don't know what; and now I want to be myself. I want to make money and drink and stare at women. I can't stand the sight of you. It's like an old mistress; a year later she's a hag, and your teeth grind when you think about her.”

Landauer nodded sadly. “I know. I know. Finish your beer, and then go.”

Six months later Landauer had sent him the bound manuscript of his first piano sonata. Davis had tried to play it, without success. It was in a bookcase now, and dusty.

Almost a year later, at a party given by Judge Francis Winkelmann, an inveterate party-giver (Mrs. Winkelmann
loved
society) and, as Davis described him, a pillar of expediency, Davis had been introduced to Mrs. Newbery. The shock was immediate, profound, and lasting. He had turned suddenly self-conscious; tall, awkward, dark, his face as always, outside the courtroom, the perfect mirror to his mind; the intentness, the falcon's eye, the graying hair, the predatory nose and chin, all revealing the spasm of desire he had felt even before she spoke. He knew that she had seen it, and he knew more (still she had not spoken): that she was glad of it.

“You're Kuno Landauer's friend,” she said.

“Yes. Do you know Kuno?”

She shook her head. “No. But I followed the trial. It was miraculous. I can't tell you how much I admired you.”

Kuno, Kuno, Davis thought, what have you done to me now? His heart labored.

“It was the only serious case you've had that I know of,” she said.

“That's enough,” he said coldly. “If I'd known it would negate the rest of my work I'd never have taken it on. This isn't the first time I've had it thrown in my face. Be good enough to remember that another lawyer, without my shabby and sensational past, might not have pulled it out.” He bowed and started away from her.

“Good for you,” she said. “Would you get me a whisky and water?”

He stopped, glared, and fetched her drink. “All right,” he said. “Damn you. Where's Mr. Newbery? I'll challenge him.”

“Mr. Newbery is dead,” she said, and instantly defiance rose between them.

“I'm sorry,” Davis said remotely.

Then he saw in her eyes what she had seen in his, and he was sorry for her. “Let's sit down,” he said, “and not talk.”

They did. They sat silently for half an hour, aware that they were communicating in an older and more reliable manner; when they rose each knew that they would leave together.

“Not really,” Davis said afterward. “It wasn't really communication. But it gave us both time to complete the illusion, feel the emotion fully, absorb it, so it was a part of us always afterward. The party ended when I looked at you; and I ended; and you ended; the universe was never the same again, because there was a new quantity. Where there had been nothing, there was now—what? May I use the word? Is it all right?”

“How you do prattle,” she said. They were in Davis' bed weeks later.

“My every word is homage,” he said gallantly. “It couldn't have been love at first sight,” he went on, “because we all know there's no such thing. No such thing as love at all, for that matter: simply covetousness or self-love, a kind of preening, the woman as phylactery, the outward sign of the inward mystery. But if you had played Beatrice—Benedict's, not Dante's, God knows—and asked me to kill Claudio—which, by the way, is one of the finest colloquies in Shakespeare—I think I just might have done it. And then come back and said that I hadn't quite caught your name.”

“What is your earliest memory?” she said.

“Go to hell. Bloody Philistine. Capricious and sadistic, mocking the man who worships you.”

“Do you?”

He sat up to look at her. She was serious.

“Yes,” he said. “Do you know what the word ‘adore' means? The real meaning.”

She nodded. Her face was love's face; for a moment he could not say the words.

Then he said them, knowing that they were true, and marveling: “I adore you.”

She turned the face away. Davis sat dumbly, Prometheus Unbound.

Now they were in the cocktail lounge of a restaurant called Là-Bas, and Davis remembered, absurdly, feeling like Prometheus, and wondered why the memory had come back to him, and decided that talk of liver had done it, and wondered who the allegorical vultures might be who pecked at a man's judiciary organ because he had dared to steal fire.

“You're not with me,” she said. “You're miles away.”

He smiled. “Contemplating my liver.”

“It's time for me to go.”

“Yes. Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow. No, don't touch me here. A room full of—”

“I know,” he said. “Landauer once told me, ‘I would not let the world see that I admired. The idea that these imbeciles should love what I loved was unbearable.'”

They waved to Sebastian and left. He found a cab for her, leaned within to kiss her, and watched her out of sight.

Walking home—a mile and a quarter—he prospected his evening. Gloomy vista, he decided. The terrible power of a woman, or of love: felicity had absented itself from him for a while, and nothing could bring it back. This was limbo, the void, the polar night. The life cycle, revised: Love and Transfiguration. Ludicrous: he had all that the world could want, and could no longer settle for less.

He sighed, and the sigh amused him. Love. This too shall pass. No fool like an old fool. There was a homely aphorism to degrade any ecstasy. Héloïse and Abélard, who paid the price. And their letters, later on, the flame dying, the tone more querulous, the moral strictures belittling all that had gone before. The Davis-Newbery correspondence: non-existent. An aphorism for even that: Never put it in writing. Pretended holographs are forgeries. Dealers are warned.

How could you put it in writing? Letters of fire, traced across a cloud? Darling; absence, torment; reunion, rapture. Old-fashioned words, to be written with a quill pen. Out of use; these days they laughed at torment and feared ecstasy. Where was the code duello? By the time a man was old enough to raise a sword he had three children, had learned to swallow all insults not directly bearing on his mother or his flag, and knew enough to go to the personnel director for procedural counseling when his wife, in a final dying burst of confused atavism, betrayed him with the junior systems engineer. “I don't get along too well with my wife's family,” a client had told him, “but we've managed to adjust.” Adjust! Torment? Ecstasy? Adjust! Hit the old gentleman with a champagne bottle, rather, and take his precious daughter by the hair. Or, at the very least, the suitcase and the stepladder. Vanished symbols of a golden age.