The Judas Glass (9 page)

“We have the X-rays on that building in San Mateo,” said Matilda. “The stairwell has the steel supports but the parking lot doesn't.”

“That's great,” I said. “That means any earthquake over 5.1 and the parking lot turns to granola.”

I shut the door so Connie and I were secluded once again, and Connie pushed at her hair, gazing at herself in a hand-held mirror, tempting her hair back into place.

“The vast majority of cases against builders are settled in favor of the buyer,” I said, trying to sound like a lawyer again. “My client with the parking lot X-ray has a great case against the builder.”

My trousers were stained with dark discolorations like ink-blots from the burned house. I took a suit out of the closet. It was a ventless single-breasted suit, navy with chalk stripe, and I put it on over a white cotton shirt with a soft point collar. I found myself wishing I had some way of seeing myself. I was going to have a full-length mirror installed on the back of the door; Matilda had called twice asking when it would be delivered.

Connie held out her compact. It trembled with the slight unsteadiness of Connie's hand. I had to take a half-step to one side and crouch a little to use it. The looking glass threw a silvery light into the room, echoing the hazy sunlight from the window.

I wasn't sure I liked my tie, a medallion pattern, port-dark behind gold print. “You look great,” she said, as though complaining. She snapped the mirror shut, and found a place for it in her handbag. “The obituary said she was planning a tour of the East Coast. The article quoted Van Cliburn as saying she had the best touch of any of the younger pianists. There was a picture of her. She was lovely. Private services, donations to the Center for Independent Living.”

I hadn't known about the tour of the East Coast. More secrets. Unless the
Chronicle
got it wrong, as it sometimes did.

She had that serene expression again, and I knew her well enough to ask, “Have you been seeing a doctor?”

She did not deny it.

“You're not—” I didn't know how to ask. “You're not sick—”

She gave me a secretive smile.

“What was it this time,” I said, “a new fertility drug, a new surgical procedure you read about?”

“You know I've never given up hope,” she said.

“Maybe it's better to be realistic.”

“Laser surgery,” she said. “It's only scar tissue.”

“You're just torturing yourself.”

“I scheduled it. The procedure. They'll do it at Stanford, next week. I won't even have to stay overnight.”

“If that's what you want,” I said.

“I'm not doing it to punish you, Richard.”

And I saw that maybe she was, putting herself through further pointless hope, even surgery, to give me something I didn't want.

“Because I want a future, too,” she said.

But not with me, I wanted to tell her. I still felt a threadbare affection for Connie. I couldn't help it—she lived for the moment, like a ferret.

Tonight, I thought, we will have that long talk.

12

I took a moment outside the restaurant, raising my arm and letting it fall a few times. I gazed into my reflection in the glass door.

Angina
. I was raised in a household where medical magazines sat on the side table with the junk mail. But this was my right arm, not my left, and this wasn't straightforward pain. A former decathalon champion had suffered a stroke just a few weeks before; I had read about it over my bran muffin and decided to skip my usual second cup of coffee. I felt clammy, and told myself I was going to give myself a panic attack unless I calmed down.

The numbness, the iciness, crept inward, across my chest. But I looked all right, judging from my reflection in the glass door of the restaurant, my image alongside the credit card decals.

In fact, I looked great. For the moment I trusted that half-truth we all take to heart: looks are everything. I squared my shoulders, and my hand reached toward its reflection in the door.

Stella was late, too, so I sat alone wondering why I had gotten out of the habit of having a drink before lunch. Just one would help. I was in pretty good shape in terms of weight, a jolt of naked calories wouldn't hurt.

I ordered a scotch and soda. The man at the table next to me was signing a credit card slip, the entire skeleton of a fish on his plate.

Poison
. I had picked up some poison through the cut, maybe touched a rose leaf recently powdered with whatever chemical paralyzed aphids. I remembered my father sprinkling chlordane on ant holes, a vaguely green powder now long since proscribed. Maybe I had inhaled something in the smoke, burning polystyrene, old wiring.

I had expected it, but was still surprised: a new version of Stella Cameron made her way through the crowded restaurant. She had been a well-tailored, carefully manicured woman, one of those people who prefer salad and always skip dessert. Now she was glowing, rotund—pregnant.

In my view, heavily pregnant women had always seemed non-sexual, having slipped into the ranks of the purely maternal. I had, without thinking about it, seen pregnancy as a sign of promise, that life was going on, but in a way that was slightly unsettling.

I took her hand with my left, and felt the pulse in it. She was replete with life, pink and wide-eyed, out of breath with the effort of walking.

“I couldn't stand to breathe that stuff outside,” she said. “Do you have any idea how many parts per million there have to be before they call the air unhealthy?” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You hurt your arm?”

“Threw my arm out. I was playing touch football. Rotator cuff, putting a little extra spiral on the ball.”

“Football,” she said, not believing it.

“Sure. I'm pretty good at it.”

“Who do you play with?”

“Some guys.”

“You know that missile that blew up?” she said. “It was the first time Vandenburg Air Force Base has launched anything in years. Their big chance comes along—
koblooey
. Almost as frustrating as practicing law.”

“You don't find law frustrating,” I said. “You love it.” My drink arrived, and I took a taste. I blinked and put the drink down, stung by the carbonation of the soda and the tarry undertaste of the scotch. Had it always tasted like this? The stuff was undrinkable.

“Yeah, but sometimes a client blows up.” Stella seemed to find it hard to take her eyes off me, too, and I couldn't help glancing in my spoon at the distorted, cartoony image of myself. I still had doubts about my tie, the gold medallions. I took a long drink of water, crunched a piece of ice and swallowed it.

As soon as I left here I would call Dr. Opal's office and insist that I needed blood work. The phrase offered so much hope. I had heard my father say the words on the phone so many times. I think it was the
work
part of the phrase that I liked, ambitious capability, like
road work
. I was going to be okay.

We ordered, both of us deciding to have squid. “Do you look more like your mother or your father?” she asked when the waiter was gone.

I was aware that genetics might be of more than passing interest to her. “I'm a morphed-out version of both,” I said. “All mixed together.”

“I think all my mother's genetic material hit the beach and died. I'm more like my dad.”

When had I last seen Stella? I didn't know how to ask if there was a husband, a manly, non-spouse daddy striding proudly somewhere. I wanted to ask her who
she
played with.

“Who gives a shit about automatic security systems?” Stella was saying. “You can't protect people forever. I have this theory that we're all the result of some violent thing that happened a long time ago, an emotional Big Bang.”

“I think it's called the Fall. Adam and Eve,” I said, half-joking. “The Garden of Eden.”

She shook her head smartly. Theology didn't go with lunch. “My client knew when he sold the condo development that he was misrepresenting the medical alert system. The buyers of the individual units were assuming the debt. The homeowners had to pay off the alert system, but they thought the system was included in the price of their unit. It was a surprise. We concede that.”

Maybe the mirror held some sort of antique poison. Arsenic. Curare. The restaurant was crowded, a woman smiling, a thread of meat between her teeth.

Strong scotch, I told myself. One taste and I'm blotto. “Notice,” I said, sounding calm and clear-headed, “that when we say something was a surprise we mean that it was bad. There are good surprises, you know.”

She chewed some bread, swallowed some ice water. “So what you want to know is: is my client going to reimburse yours for the system out of his own pocket, and then dig deeper to pay damages, too.” Her client was not a person. It was a developer based in Maryland. “And my response would be that—”

“It's paid for by now,” I said. “The homeowners voted in a special assessment and paid it off. Each retired couple had to cough up four thousand dollars. These are elderly people, Stella. They need walkers, hearing aids. They weren't prepared for the extra expense. These people are victims.”

“I dropped by Greenwood Meadows,” she said. “These are tennis-playing, tanned business people. It's all this early retirement. People who run marathons are pulling down these incredible pensions.”

She looked down at the table and picked up a fork. “One of them made a pass at me.”

“I said they were old. I didn't say they were dead.”

“One of these dashing guys, a silver fox. Put his hand right here, like this. And said he loved a good mai tai. And I go, ‘Oh, is that what you call it?'”

“One of the plaintiffs had a heart spasm last week,” I said. “He pulled out the little plug in his den, the little thingy with the red cross on it. Paramedics were there in two and a half minutes. He had total coronary occlusion. The Medisafe computer to the rescue.”

She gestured with her fork, a shrug. “It works.”

“It works! Because the property owners raped and pillaged their children's inheritance to pay for a system they thought they already owned.”

“The Medisafe people sold this system at a loss to begin with. It was their first big project, and they were proud to be able to put little thingies on bathroom walls and kitchens so people could have total coronary occlusions and live. It's not like calling 911, Richard. With this you get a document, a phone bill, except a computer recognizes what apartment is involved, preexisting medical conditions, what medical response team is notified, what medications are recommended—”

I hadn't realized how passionate I had become. “These are retired teachers, Stella. Retired social workers. Even their dogs are old and frail. You can't cheat people and then act like you deserve some sort of applause.”

Stella sighed. She straightened in her chair, easing her back. “She kicks.”

I must have looked stupid, sitting there with a piece of bread in my hand, not quite following her.

She patted her abdomen. “Both feet.”

“That's not fair.”

“I'm supposed to tell her to stop wiggling?”

“Changing the subject by referring to your condition. How can I match that?”

“Are you wearing contacts?”

I said I wasn't.

“Your eyes look a different color or something. I get so bored with all this. You know, I'm starting to think maybe capital punishment's not such a bad thing.”

“You're baffling me today, Stella. Leaping from subject to subject.”

“You know, if I didn't know better, I'd say you weren't you. When I saw you my first thought was: he's a new man.”

I was rolling a fragment of bread into a ball, hard. If I fainted would I pitch forward, my face in the tablecloth? “You can never get a squid when you need one.”

“You look like you could be your own brother. Like those twins that impersonated each other, those gynecologists. You know how twins are. Little differences. The baby's father works for American.”

I stared at her, her words almost making sense.

“The airline,” she said. “He does something in security.”

“Keeps airplanes from blowing up,” I said.

“We may get married,” she said. “And on the other hand …”

Stella and I had once nearly spent a night together, after a party in Sausalito, supporting each other tipsily up a steep, narrow street. I had kissed her. And she had been willing, her arms around me as I suggested we could come back for her car in the morning.

But then her keys had dropped, all the way into the creek beside the road, and by the time I had fished out the Great Western Savings key ring we both were willing to pretend it had been one of those non-events, something we both would laugh about.

“What happened to your criminal case,” she was asking, “the guy with the twelve-year-old pen pal?”

“That was years ago.” I didn't like talking about it. It brought to mind the man who killed Rebecca. “He was stabbed. In Folsom. Turned up dead for the morning count.” She waited for more, one of those lawyers who find perpetrators fascinating. “By that time he had graduated to other crimes, other attorneys. He was convicted of felony murder, ran over a newsvendor after his partner tried to rob an ATM with a sledgehammer. God, I'm glad I don't deal with people like that.”

“What happened to the twelve-year-old girl?”

I could hear my eyeballs swivel in their sockets, wet, rubbery friction. “They never found her.” I ran through a list of pharmacological items they were likely to have in a restaurant: aspirin, Alka-Seltzer, vodka.

“You like the way I look,” Stella said.

“Full of life,” I said.

“I look really good with my clothes off,” she said. I didn't like her smile. I didn't want to touch the scotch, and my water glass was empty. My legs were going numb. This was it—I had to leave. But I couldn't. I just sat there.