Three Women (29 page)

“No.” She didn't even have to think about it. “Like you, I was married once. It was a mess. I don't have time.” She loved the sound of his voice in her ear. She closed her eyes when she spoke to him on the phone, lying in bed. “My marriage to Sam died of neglect, like a forgotten goldfish.”

“I suppose I have time for a wife who'd stay home, but she'd tire of me fast. I had a live-in girlfriend in Berkeley. While I was in China, she took up with her tae kwon do teacher. She saw me about as often as you do, except for sleeping time. Women who have children want a father for them. Women who don't, want to have them. Everybody wants a person who's there—and as you have observed, I'm with you only now and then. But you're the same way.”

“Things are a little easier with Elena helping. I'm getting the advantage of her guilt. She's working now. She's trying. She cooks four nights a week, which is all I'm generally able to eat with her.”

“Is she a good cook?”

“I wouldn't go that far. But I'm not about to complain. Food made for me is good. Food I have to prepare is bad.”

His dry chuckle in her ear. “The strange thing is, you really are good in the kitchen.”

“In another life.”

He was silent for a moment, and then his voice was ironically dreamy. “Maybe we'll both retire at sixty-five or seventy and sit and stare at each other and the TV…. I'll be honest with you. There are times that sounds like paradise.”

“I understand. But my fantasy is listening to music. My music, not Elena's. Symphonies, not rock.”

“You can sit with your Beethoven and I'll watch my Forty-Niners and we'll nod at each other in bliss.”

“Do you really think so?” She opened her eyes, cocking her head.

“Naw, I'll die of a heart attack in some Norwegian airport, like Trondheim. And you'll get shot by the husband of one of your clients.”

“Or maybe we'll both just spontaneously combust.”

“Soon, I hope. In the meantime, I'm stuck out here with this stupid petty trial.”

 

Suzanne poured coffee for Marta, who was drumming her hands on Suzanne's kitchen table. When Marta came downstairs for the first time since that damned Monday, Elena got up from the table at once. “Stay,” Marta said authoritatively, and Elena sat.

Now all three of them sat there glumly. “It was a courtesy call I suppose,” Marta said. “To let me know he's going on what's his name's talk show. To try to get me to show up and make a worse fool of myself.”

“Why is he doing this?” Suzanne asked. “You're the wronged party.”

“His line is that I'm the author of the domestic violence bill—as if a couple of sentences I contributed make me the author. Miles's wife must be really pissed. It was her bill. But never mind, the idea is that I wrote the domestic violence bill and then I got a gun and tried to kill my husband and his girlfriend.”

“I repeat my question, why is he doing this?”

“He's furious I threw him out. He's furious at having to be on his own. In his mind, I really did wrong him by walking in. It's revenge.”

“What does Miles say?” Suzanne glanced over at Elena, who was sitting very small in her chair and saying absolutely nothing.

“He says I should start wearing maternity clothes on all occasions.”

“He has a point.”

“Bullshit. I hate maternity clothes.”

“They're supposed to be better than they were twenty years ago.”

Marta giggled, sounding twenty years younger. “That's called spacing your children, right? One in college and one in the oven.”

Suzanne spent a moment trying to decide how she would feel if she were pregnant instead of experiencing irregularity in her periods and an occasional hot flash. Would she be glad? No, terrified. She had daughters, and two were quite enough. Often it felt like two more than she could manage. She had been at most a passable mother, mostly defined in negatives. Not abusive. Not violent. Not hostile. Not crazy. Just too busy to give everything they needed. With a checkbook instead of a jar of cookies and an open kitchen door. She was of the generation who had children because they felt they had to but didn't always know what to do with them once they had them; who were guilty before their children because they dared to have lives and careers and goals of their own. A transitional generation going forward while looking backward. She was vehemently glad she was passing the age when getting pregnant was a possibility. She had done her bit for the population explosion, and loving and trying to give her best to her daughters was hard enough, sometimes impossible.

Elena finally spoke. “What do you want me to do? I'd go on the show and say how ashamed I am and contradict what he says. Would that help?”

“I'll ask Miles. It might.”

 

Suzanne was lecturing. “You may find increasingly as you practice litigation, that you find in yourself a conflict between your own sense of right and wrong, and your role as a litigator. Now the usual way of dealing with this conflict is to say, I am a hired gun. If the gun thinks too much about how it's being used, it will not be a useful gun. But many lawyers find that they can't make that neat and clean a distinction between their morality and their practice. The exercise I am going to give you today is not a test. There is no right answer, no correct citation. It is an exercise that if it works, will cause you to think about the interplay between your values and your role as a lawyer. You are going to have to think about what you really believe justice to be. It will be a case out of domestic law. Not all of you will receive the same case. It's a matter of chance which of four cases you'll draw. Count yourself off
one to four aloud starting in the last row on the right-hand side and working toward me. When you get up to leave, you will find that my assistant has placed four piles at the back of the room. Take a case from your number. You have the weekend to consider how you would argue your case. Two out of the four cases I've chosen are custody cases, among the most hairy in the practice of a lawyer who specializes in domestic law. One is the case of a woman who went after her rapist and shot him. The fourth is a case of environmental law, which pits community safety against jobs. You will write up your argument and what you will be trying to accomplish.”

 

Suzanne met the new client at her office at the university. The dean let her use her university office that way from time to time, as long as she didn't do it too often. Bud Hiller was close to sixty, thin and rigid as a broomstick, large bland features that gave nothing away. He would be a terrific poker player. His voice was pitched a little too loud. Fortunately, her office was reasonably soundproofed by the rows of law books on the walls. He had been through three lawyers on this case, suits and countersuits between the heirs to a chain of outlet stores. The sons and daughters were suing one another for control. They all claimed fraud and even that this one or that one had abused their senile father before his death. It was a busy heap of maggots, reeking of money. Three lawyers had made good fees off this case; it looked as if she would be the fourth.

It was not a case she wanted. She contained herself, listening, questioning him, taking careful notes with Jaime backing her up. Bud Hiller had inquired coldly who Jaime was upon entering her office, but now it was as if Jaime were a cat on a chair. Jaime was a good note taker; he brought the same careful intelligence to all aspects of being a student he would bring to his law career. His beauty was deceptive. He looked languid, graceful, decorative. His mind was spun steel. Meticulous. Wary. Capable of great speed and ruthlessness. She had met his parents, his African-American father and his Filipina mother. By the time Jaime was her age, he would be fat, bald, and far more powerful than she ever would be. She had great faith in him.

Hiller orated on, his injuries, the stinginess of his dead father, the perfidy of his siblings and their spouses, how his previous lawyers had failed him and his just cause. She listened, she took notes, and she
thought how she would love to show him the door, but this case leaked money through all its flimsy seams. She had come to a financial crossroads where she must take cases that would pay her bills instead of cases that excited her legally or ethically. She was still the litigator she had always been. She could find a new angle to use. She began to plot her strategy in getting Bud his money and doing his siblings out of theirs.

 

Jake was still stuck out on the West Coast. She had begun to miss him. Communicating by E-mail and phone worked to a degree, but she missed his presence, his warmth. She did not realize how thoroughly she missed him until she woke Friday night from a dream of his body, found herself wet and steaming with menopausal heat and simple outrageous desire. It was startling to her that she could want him so strongly. She sat at her computer late Saturday night trying to explain why she was feeling especially down and even a little guilty about decisions being forced upon her.

Sunday morning, she had a reply.

As she read his messages, typed on his laptop from motels, she felt a twinge of guilt because it was her nature when involved with a man to try to take care of him: in this case, to make sure that Jake dealt with his stress, made the changes the doctors demanded, ate more sensibly, got enough sleep. But when she only saw a man three or four times a month, she could scarcely monitor his food and exercise and sleep habits. She tried to push it out of her mind, and shortly she succeeded. She had enough to worry about.

Elena

Elena could not say she liked her job, but she liked having a job. It felt normal to get into her aging Honda and drive off at the same time most people were heading for work, feeling like a real person instead of a character in a soap opera. She had lunch alone in the building cafeteria or in a restaurant nearby. This was a neighborhood where there were more places to eat at noon than in the evening, for it was ringed with high-tech firms and places like hers that handled money or practiced law for corporations or consulted with them.

It was boring sitting there out front on display saying the same thing over and over again, Good day, Black, Lincoln and Worthington, how may I help you? Mr. Laslau is in a meeting at the moment. May I take your number? Mr. Rowe is out of the office at the moment. May I take your number? Mr. Lincoln's line is busy. Will you hold? Receiving packages from UPS, FedEx, Airborne, the post office. Handing over outgoing mail and parcels. Telling people where to sit and serving them coffee. She was a waitress, but one who never got a tip.

She observed that the different analysts and advisers liked to keep their clients waiting different periods of time. There were the five-minute guys, the ten-minute guys (most common), and the fifteen-to-twenty-minute masters like Mr. Lincoln. Naked power, she thought. She wondered how much of her own life had been spent waiting for those who saw no reason to deal with her promptly.

Sometimes one of the guys asked her to photocopy something. Making coffee was also part of her pitiful job. Mostly she sat on display behind the teak counter, answered the phone, and greeted whoever came through the double doors. Already two of the analysts were hitting on her, but she sloughed them off. She just smiled and passed everything off as a joke. “Oh, Mr. Laslau, you know I can't do that! What a sense of humor.” She sounded like an idiot, but she must not let herself care.
She must smile and smile and smile until she thought her face must be sprayed with that strange hair lacquer reminiscent of bug spray one of the secretaries was always using in the women's room. Elena never did more to her hair than get it trimmed to even it up when it started to look ragged, wash it every other day, and once a week use a conditioner. She loved her hair and took comfort in it. She had always resisted cutting it short the way all her friends wore theirs, for she liked retreating behind that sleek black curtain. She liked the weight and heft.

She saw friends from the restaurant more often than she had since she'd been fired, but she could not spend much time with them. They worked late; she had to get up early. The women at Black, Lincoln and Worthington didn't attract her. They seemed slight and vacuous. She had made friends with one of the technicians at the rehab clinic, Cindy, recently divorced. They took to going out together Saturdays to the movies, to a club, to a rock concert. Cindy was a year older, chunky but cute, blond, curvy, and savvy with a great capacity for remembering jokes. Elena never remembered anything but punch lines. She envied people who could hold a crowd with a story.

She spent a lot of time going over the affair with Jim. She was sure she had seduced Jim. She was convinced she had thought of him sexually first, then put out some musk he could not resist. He had not loved her; she had loved him. That was her crime. She had made him come to her. Perhaps she had never forgiven Marta for making her lie in court about Evan and Chad, but she knew Marta had done all that to protect her. Why had she held a grudge so long for something done to keep her out of worse trouble? Because she pushed her own guilt off on Marta, that was why.

She tried to talk to Cindy. Cindy thought she was being mushy and mystical. “So you got involved with a married man? Most men are married. I did that back in college. Everybody does it once. It's only fatal if you keep doing it.”

“I think I just bring terrible trouble down.”

“On yourself mostly, sounds like.”

“Not exactly…So are you in the mood for Mexican? Or Thai?”

 

She had been working at Black, Lincoln and Worthington for exactly three weeks. Her probationary period would end next Friday. Monday
as she came into work, she was told to report to Mr. Lincoln. “Miss Blume, I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go.”

“But I've always been on time. I come back from my breaks early. I've greeted everyone the way I was told—”

“Miss Blume, it's nothing personal. But you're at the front door of our company.”

She saw Sunday's
Globe
lying on his desk. In the Metro section, there was a column about the so-called scandal around Marta, Jim, and domestic violence. Photos of all three of them, including a really stupid one of her with her eyes half shut, were printed with the column.

“Is there anything wrong with my work?” she asked.

“We just feel you haven't really fit in…”

She was still on probation. No severance pay, no notice needed. She came in at five to nine on Monday, and by nine-twenty she was back in the parking lot. So much for Black, Lincoln and Worthington. She was unemployed again. And notorious.

 

Suzanne sat at the table, frowning. “I'm just trying to see if we have a case.”

“Mother, enough with law and courts. I'm not going to sue them. It's a crappy job.” Elena was waiting to see if her mother liked the Creole chicken.

“You don't want them to take you back?”

“No. They'd resent it and me. I don't have any friends there.”

Suzanne frowned, eating absentmindedly, glass of water at the ready. “Maybe they could use you at Earthworks.”

“Mother! Haven't you learned anything?”

Suzanne looked blank for a moment. “Oh, Jake is hardly ever there. And if he wanted a young girlfriend, the place is crawling with interns in their twenties. Besides, I think you learned something—I'd like to think so.”

“So would I. Do you like the chicken?”

More water. “It's delightful.”

“It's too hot for you.”

“No, it's fine…. I should learn to eat hotter food. It's supposed to be good for you.”

Nothing further was said about Elena's going to work for Earthworks. She wished she had saved the Sunday paper. She should have asked Mr. Lincoln for his, since obviously he had finished reading it. She found a couple of possibilities in the daily paper and spent the next morning finding out that each of them had heard of her also. Her picture in the paper hadn't helped her job prospects.

One of the guys at the old restaurant told her Natalie's was looking for a hostess. She wished she could stay out of the late-night restaurant workers' scene, but maybe Natalie's wouldn't mind if she was momentarily notorious. She called up and got an interview. There really was a Natalie, who would be meeting her at 3:00
P.M.
Friday in her restaurant at the base of Beacon Hill.

Natalie was about fifty, as short as Suzanne but much heavier, crammed into a pants suit. She had cropped blond hair and smoked constantly. “Yeah, I saw your picture in the paper. What happened, you get canned for that?”

Elena was truthful, figuring she had nothing to lose. Natalie hired her on the spot. “Report for work starting tomorrow. In fact, if you could start tonight?”

“I could be back by five, dressed for work.”

“Do it.” Natalie dismissed her, going back to her accounts.

Well, at least she didn't have to take money from her mother, and she had a job that paid better than Black, Lincoln and Worthington. Almost anything would, short of baby-sitting. It was a familiar scene, and she fit right in even if half the waiters were younger than she was. Robby, the headwaiter, was the person she had most to please, as Natalie did not pay much attention to the waiting staff unless something went wrong. She spent her time on the menus, on lining up specialty events, on advertising and publicity. Robby was exactly Elena's age and quickly figured out they were the same sign, Aries. Robby was thin, good-looking in an edgy, slightly overpolished way, gay, with ambitions to be an actor. Two of the other waiting staff were would-be filmmakers. They had one poet and one photographer and an ex-model, whose career had lasted six months. It was a typical restaurant scene, and after work, most of them went out together to the bars frequented by other late-nighters. Yes, it was comfortable, it was a scene she slipped into like an old pair
of pants. Nonetheless, if she didn't want to spend the rest of her life doing restaurant work, she had to scramble. But in which direction? Up? Sideways? Just not in the same tired circles.

Whenever she was sitting still for a moment, whenever she was in the tub, she no longer fantasized about Jim or any other guy. She tried to imagine herself in various lives. It was a mental trying-on, the way she might try on dresses in a boutique—except with an undercurrent of desperation. She had to choose one of these; she had to try on the right one and plunk down money and time to possess it. She needed to become something real. She had the feeling that then she would be protected from herself, from the wild flight into obsession, from the stupid risk that brought down the roof. But only if the choice she made was the right one. In middle school, they had had a book of short stories. One of them, “The Lady or the Tiger,” she remembered. Two doors, with something behind them, happiness or death. Well, she had already loosed the tiger. Lady Luck had to be behind the next door she opened. Had to be.