The Burden of Proof (38 page)

Attorney he had been roundly welcomed--Stan was intelligent, experienced, and more or less independent of the mayor and his dark cabal.

It was, however, one of the sad facts of political reform everywhere that incorruptibility was not the sole attribute Of good government.

Sennett was the kind of grim bureaucrat, a person of strong discipline and limited vision and courage, who seemed to turn up too often in prosecutors' Offices. Everybody's chief deputy, he never quite seemed to believe he had assumed the mantle himself.

In Stern's judgment, he had a dangerous mixtue of attributes for a man in power: he was vain glorious and insecure, quick to make judgments that were not always correct, and entirely 'beyond persuasion once he had done so. When you sat with him, presenting a problem, pleading for mercy or simply trying to make a point, his small shining eyes would follow you while his expression remained forbidding. 'No,' he. would say the instant you had finished a ten-minute presentation. 'No can do." Few words of explanation, little warmth. No argument. He would stand and shake your hand and see you to the door.

Now he was using Klonsky as his cat's-paw. That was for appearances, but the fact was, this was his case. Stern wondered if Klonsky knew how quickly he would push her aside when the lights of the videocams filled the room. In the meantime, a dark, high-density fluid of regret poured through Stern, the stuff of gloom. Sennett would b.e dogged in the hunt; Dixon, whatever his evasive maneuvers, was in for a long, bloody fight. Lost in these reflections, Stern geached forward and picked up the check.

"Oh, no," she said. As they walked to the door, Klonsky insisted on paying her share. Stern eventually recognized that this was a point of propriety and took two dollars from her. Duke, with his fried-up hair, received their money and bade them, with heavy accent, to return.

Outside, he shook her hand and told her that Margy and he would see her the following Tuesday. She faced him with what was already becoming a familiar look of ambiguity and regret.

"Thank you for asking me. I enjoyed our conversation."

"As well." He made a brief, cutaway bow, Mr. Alejan-dro Stern, the foreign gentleman. She smiled at that and, with her heavy files slung across her body, went off toward the new federal building down the block. Pigeons with their shining gray heads arose fluttering in her path, and a rash of underground air, breathed up through a grate in the walk, raffled her skirt. As he watched her go, it came to him again, an intimation clear as the arrival of spring, that he was alone. The usual affairs of the day, the courthouse, his children--they did not seem to do. Like nausea or hunger, a deep-sprang bodily response, the sense of his own un-connectedness overcame him, just as it did certain mornings, and to his surprise he stood for some time watching the figure of Sonia Klonsky whittled by distance and the phenomenon of aging vision, until she was no longer distinct amid the dark forms on the street.

AT night, he saw Helen rumore often, each week. The 'logic seemed irrefutable. Why should he be home in an empty house when Helen, a channing ,,m, dinner companion, was available? Various adolescent intuitions told him that he was moving with too much dispatch toward an undesired destination. But she was such pleasant company, and who, reasonably, would choose loneliness? He was fifty-six and going steady.

And, like some teenager, he was also screwing his brains out. in fin de sibcle America, it seemed, this was how men and women paid respects. The hell with notes and flowers.

:Let's get it on! One afternoon, Helen met him for lunch at his club in Morgan Towers. In that upright atmosphere, with the waiters in frogged coats and the bankers and business folk waxing genial, Helen grasped his hand and said, "Fuck me, Sandy." She had had a glass of wine and her eyes looked very green.

And did he resist? Not on your life. Mr. Alejandro Stern, at 1:27 in the afternoon, rented a room in his own name across the street iway bow, Mr. Alejan-dro Stern, the foreign gentleman. She smiled at that and, with her heavy files slung across her body, went off toward the new federal building down the block. Pigeons with their shining gray heads arose fluttering in her path, and a rash of underground air, breathed up through a grate in the walk, raffled her skirt. As he watched her go, it came to him again, an intimation clear as the arrival of spring, that he was alone. The usual affairs of the day, the courthouse, his children--they did not seem to do. Like nausea or hunger, a deep-sprang bodily response, the sense of his own un-connectedness overcame him, just as it did certain mornings, and to his surprise he stood for some time watching the figure of Sonia Klonsky whittled by distance and the phenomenon of aging vision, until she was no longer distinct amid the dark forms on the street.

AT night, he saw Helen rumore often, each week. The 'logic seemed irrefutable. Why should he be home in an empty house when Helen, a channing ,,m, dinner companion, was available? Various adolescent intuitions told him that he was moving with too much dispatch toward an undesired destination. But she was such pleasant company, and who, reasonably, would choose loneliness? He was fifty-six and going steady.

And, like some teenager, he was also screwing his brains out. in fin de sibcle America, it seemed, this was how men and women paid respects. The hell with notes and flowers.

:Let's get it on! One afternoon, Helen met him for lunch at his club in Morgan Towers. In that upright atmosphere, with the waiters in frogged coats and the bankers and business folk waxing genial, Helen grasped his hand and said, "Fuck me, Sandy." She had had a glass of wine and her eyes looked very green.

And did he resist? Not on your life. Mr. Alejandro Stern, at 1:27 in the afternoon, rented a room in his own name across the street in the Hotel Gresham. They were at the elevator when Stern recollected that he lacked a necessary item. In the hotel's sundry shop, the attendant proved, of course--of course!--to be an older woman, with a heavy tailored suit and a strong German accent. Already giddy from the loss of inhibition and the lunchtime wine, Stern stuck up his courage and was able to clearly pronounce, "Prophylactics."

"Of course." The woman nodded ponderously as she searched through-the warren of old-fashioned cupboards where the rubbers were hidden.

Eventually, she offered an entire box of different brands. "Good to use them," she added, in the most cordial hotel style. In the elevator, Stern and Helen had been unable to contain their laughter. There-after, that was their watchword. At the most intimate moment, Helen was apt to drone, "Good to use them."

Making love to Helen was inevitably that kind of goodspirited enterprise, and often highly educational. She had read all the books; she had practiced every maneuver. There was nothing she was going to miss. Some developments that took Stern by surprise were, naturally, the result of thirty years with one lover in which the zones of exploration had been long established. He was mystified the first time Helen had extricated herself from his embrace and nudged him onto his back, then moved below. His first thought was that he was the object of a visual inspection, a prospect which he found far more exciting than he would have imagined, but she was soon otherwise occupied, busy with her mouth and fingertips.

"Did you like that?" she asked afterwards.

He answered slowly. "The wings of a dove."

Yet, even making allowances for his lack of prior experience, he still found in Helen a disconcertingly determined interest in the sexual act.

This was not a roundabout complaint concerning Clara. Whatever inadequacies she may have felt--and who could doubt the evidence?--he had never been dissatisfied. But for Helen the actual moment of encounter, the performance, was supreme and seemed to acquire a detached dreamlike rapture that Stern sometimes experienced in museums. They were, both of them, the thing observed, pure phenomenon: her body, his, with their rosy tumescent glow and throbbing veinous parts, the glistening pinkish shaft probing and disappearing. He watched with Helen's bold approval. She slipped her hand down to provide yet one more stimulant.

Like a door prize, there was always something new. One day she tweaked the nipples of his chest while he worked above her. Another time, she lifted her legs and gently moved his hands so that his thumbs kneaded at the delicate little bead which he could reach as he pumped inside her.

She presented herself from the rear, the side. She faced him and sat athwart Stern on a dining room chair. Naked, stimulated, he would drag around the furniture as She instructed as a prelude to the latest innovation. He told her afterwards that the combination of sexual exertion and stoop-labor threatened a coronary occlusion.

"You're in good shape," Helen said and reached below to pet him admiringly.

Stern could tell that Helen was immensely proud of her role as pathfinder and instructor. But occasionally the unlikelihood of these antics would overcome him. In the hotel room the afternoon they had received the peculiar blessings of the German lady in the sundries shop, Helen stood upon two dressers and Stern caught the sight of their forms on the dull slate-green surface of the television tube: a short man, with the tip of his erect penis nipping up just above the bottom of his white belly, which hung on him like a flour sack, his hands dug into the flattened shapes of Helen's buttocks, crouching slightly and pressing face and tongue upward into the wet odoriferous reaches of that mystical passage. It looked like a circus trick or the played-out fantasy of a Cheap pornographer. The image remained with him for hours, lurid, fascinating, but nonetheless disturbing. Was this some more essential self, or a brainless imitation of what others aspired to? Who were they supposed to be?

A part of him remained ill at ease with this emphasis on the physical, not what he'd thought of as his best realm.

But whatever his misgivings after the fact, he enjoyed these encounters as they were occurring. He admired Helen's lack of restraint, and her agility. When he thought of her, it was with appreciation and desire, even while he discouraged himself from pressing for exact answers about the true state of his feelings for her. His friends and acquaintances welcomed Helen openly. It made for fewer reminders of Clara and her passing, which no one wished to contemplate. The Harthells invited Stern and Helen to a ritzy summer cotillion that Silvia had organized at the Greenwood Club.

At first delighted to be included, Helen became uncomfortable with the pretense of the evening once she had arrived. Whenever backs were turned, she rolled her eyes at Stern and made faces, conduct which upset him, with his lifetime adherence to certain rigid courtesies. "You don't like all this schmaltz," she murmured to him at one point.

Helen's honesty was wonderful and endearing, but he also realized how uncertain it made him. She could set him on edge a dozen times a night with her straightforward observations, particularly of him. Was he brave enough to face Helen and her facts? She wanted to know everything about him and then make it better. At one point, turning away from the bar and looking across the enormous tent that had been pitched for this affair, he observed her in animated conversation with Silvia and found himself alarmed. This was a mismatch, Stern thought suddenly. His sister was a woman guarded by layers of the most protective refinements, much as the petals lay about the center of a rose. His first impulse was that she was somehow in danger.

He whisked Silvia away to dance.

"So?" asked Stern. His sister had known Helen only remotely over the years, having encountered her principally at family affairs.

"A charming person," Silvia answered, somewhat formally. He would have expected a similar response from Clara, who, no doubt, would have thought a contessa or professor a more fitting companion for Stern. At that point, . Helen came whirling by in Dixon's arms, looking happier than she had all evening. Helen, like most women, enjoyed Dixon's company.

'Is he the one who is in so much trouble?" she asked Stern as they were driving home on the highway cut between the dark hills.

"He is," said Stern simply. With her unfailing sense for what was important to him, Helen listened carefully to everything he told her about his practice, but he could not recall exactly what he'd said which led her to piece this together.

"Well, you'd never know it," Helen said. "He's quite entertaining."

"When he wishes to be," said Stern.

In the dark, she placed her head on his shoulder. Clara, raised in the fading era of rigid female posture, would never have been capable of this gesture, and he drove the hour back to the city with Helen drowsing, a .warm, comforting weight upon him.

Two nights later, they had a different kind of evening.

Helen's daughter,' Maxine, came to town with Rob Golbus, her husband of only a few months. Maxine had been Kate's childhood friend, and Helen proposed an evening out with all three couples--Kate and John, Maxine and Rob, Stern and her. With the perfect resourcefulness one expected from Helen, she figured out entertainment pleasing to everyone and bought tickets to a Trappers game, Stern was always delighted to spend a night in the handsome old park with its brick outfield walls and cantilevered upper decks, where skied fly balls occasionally came to rest as homers.

But there was soon an irritating undertone. Too much seemed to be assumed. Maxine spoke repeatedly of Helen and him visiting St. Louis, so that he began to feel both put upon and cornered, while Kate seemed coltish and jumpy all evening. When Helen casually--too casually--mentioned a remark Stern had made to her one morning this week at breakfast, Kate burst into the unnerved tittering one would have expected from an early adolescent. When John offered to go downstairs for refreshments, Stern eagerly rose to lend a hand.