As Olivia Le Master inspects my office, I note an unexpected air of contrition on her part. She seems to be looking for something nice to say about my office, which will require a major feat of diplomacy. Two weeks ago Rainey brought by a philodendron to hang from my ceiling; however, I have already begun to violate my blood oath to water it. Instead of having a healthy, sleek, green appearance, its leaves are brittle, yellowish, and paper-thin. Typically, I don’t notice it until Julia comes in and stares in horror and makes snotty remarks about how some people shouldn’t be permitted to own living things.
Olivia refuses my offer of a cup of coffee and swallows hard before saying in a small voice, “I’m sorry about the way I testified at the hearing. When I got on the witness stand, I realized I felt some anger toward Andy I hadn’t been aware of.”
Guilt. God, I wish I owned the patent on it. I lean back in my chair and snack on a piece of ice, my newest weight-loss device. I’ve gained five pounds just watching Clan eat.
“I confess I was extremely disappointed in your testimony,” I respond, relieved I don’t have to try to figure out how to initiate this topic. Scolding witnesses is a tricky business.
“I really thought you’d be more supportive of him than you were.” I stare back into her troubled eyes.
Obviously unaccustomed to apologizing, she shifts uncomfortably and fixes her gaze on a spot on my wall directly above my head.
“I felt I had betrayed him after you finished asking me questions,” she says, her voice rising.
“It was only when the prosecutor started in on me that I wanted to defend him. But even right at this moment, I think he probably should have told me to forget the idea of shock treatments Her voice is anguished. This is a battleground she must revisit often.
Jump on ‘em while they’re down, I think, and hit her with my gossip.
“While we’re clearing the air,” I say, watching her carefully, “I think you better be aware there’s some evidence you’ve had an affair with Andy.” Evidence is too strong a word, but I don’t have to prove it. Unexpectedly, her face turns a bright red and her eyes begin to fill with tears. Score one for Yettie Lindsey’s female intuition.
“You didn’t expect to hide it, did you?” I ask, needing a confirmation. I don’t always know why women cry. I hand her the box of tissues from my desk. My office may not be pretty, but now at least it has the necessities.
She nods, a look of genuine misery on her face, and wipes her eyes with fingers as white as chalk. It seems as if all the blood in her body has rushed to her neck and head. “I didn’t think anyone knew.”
As if in celebration of getting the truth, I tap another chunk of ice from the cup into my mouth. My lips are already so numb I doubt if I sound normal. I must be taking some perverse pleasure from this exercise in ruining the few decent teeth I have left in my head. Embarrassed to spit the ice back into the cup, I swallow it whole and begin to cough.
“It’s hard to do things in secret,” I sympathize between wheezes, almost in tears myself from having forced the ice down my throat. My concern for her, however, is genuine. My own life is Exhibit A. I can go to the seediest bar in town in the dead of night, and the next day I might as well have taken an ad out in the paper, so many people will have seen me.
“How do you think Andy will handle the news becoming public?” I ask, leaning in against my desk. I am overselling the danger of exposure (as far as I know, no one has so much as seen them holding hands), but I need to get her perspective on what it means.
Olivia brings her hands up to her mouth and begins to nibble on what was, until now, a perfect nail.
“He’ll worry about what it will do to me.”
Nervously, I begin to tap the cup against the edge of the desk. Saint Andy the Unselfish. This won’t do.
“You realize this is all the more reason he shouldn’t have been working with Pam.”
A sad smile comes to Olivia’s face as she forces her hands to her knees.
“What you mean is that the typical juror, whether it’s conscious racism or not, will punish Andy for having an affair with a white woman.”
That, too, I realize, but she is one step ahead of me. I take the cup, which still has ice in it, and drop it into the plastic wastepaper basket beside my desk, realizing that though this woman may be upset, she can still think. My lawyer’s mind was worrying about the hammer this information, if disclosed, would give to Jill Marymount. In her place, I would argue that Andy’s professional judgment as a psychologist was hopelessly compromised by his relationship with the child’s mother. Yet, as Olivia has suggested, perhaps infinitely more powerful will be the unvoiced argument that society must punish Andy for the transgression of one of the few remaining American sexual taboos. Whatever the cost, a hint of this must not get to the jury, or the real trial might not ever begin. I resist the urge to lecture her. It is my client whom I need to take to the woodshed. I tell her, “If we can prevent this from even being hinted at in court, Andy has a chance. If not, as you surmised, he’s beaten before we get started. I would guess that even blacks on the jury, and there will be a couple for sure, would resent it.”
Her head cocked at a slight angle to the right, Olivia shifts slightly in her seat.
“Are you asking me to lie to the jury?”
“No,” I say automatically, noting her tone didn’t convey much surprise, “but I don’t want you to lie to me either.”
At this stage I have to assume she is what she seems a distraught but honest woman caught in a mess. Do I want her to lie? Yes, but I am forbidden to permit her to do so. It isn’t fair that racial bigotry could decide this case regardless of the lip service that race has nothing to do with it. Black defendants have been subject to prejudice for years because of their color, but not until I entered private practice have I gotten this bent out of shape over their treatment. Since the outcome of this case will have an effect on my practice, I can feel my indignation rising at the injustice of racial discrimination.
At the Public Defender’s Office, we used to play Ain’t It Awful? with this issue, but the paychecks kept coming whether we lost or not. I doubt if paying clients will be that tolerant.
“When did this start?” I ask, wondering how many other people suspect what Yettie Lindsey intuitively knew. I fold my hands across my chest to keep them still.
Olivia studies the ceiling for an answer, further exposing her long, graceful neck.
“Since about two months before Pam died,” she says, again composed.
I study this woman, whose normally cool demeanor has returned. Women, like men, are not averse to using sex to get what they want. Unlike men, they can, if the occasion demands, be subtle about it. I ask, hoping my sudden skepticism isn’t apparent, “Whose idea was it?”
As if she knows what I’m thinking, she gives me a wan smile, barely exposing straight, milk-white teeth.
“Mine. I felt enormously grateful to him. How could I not fall in love with the one man who was trying to help my child? Andy doesn’t think or act like other men. He doesn’t stop and figure out the cost. By the way, he didn’t try to seduce me; I seduced him.” She gives me a fierce look, as if she expects me to react, and continues, “But now that Pam is dead I’m really confused about how I feel about Andy. Maybe he did use my child to get to me. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”
Andy using her? A nice twist, putting the idea in my male mind. I lean back in my chair, trying to decide if she was simply ready for me or whether she has been extremely candid.
Yet my own reading of Andy doesn’t change. As idealistic as he is, he could have been thinking he was embarking on the great love affair of the century. Maybe they’re both for real. Who knows? My chair begins to squeak, and I stop the rocking I have unconsciously begun. As Olivia herself has pointed out, few people serving on an Arkansas jury will sympathize with either of them.
“I don’t know about his personal motivation,” I admit, “but as a professional psychologist he’s going to be held to certain standards.”
She nods soberly, and I am forced to conclude that she is telling me the truth. So what if she came on to this guy to get him to try to help her child? People have gone to bed for a lot less noble motives. What we call “love” always has a price. I feel my own blood begin to quicken. What is it that this lanky, angular woman has to offer Andy that couldn’t be better satisfied by a younger, more voluptuous female of his own race? Is it the forbidden fruit that tempts us all? I have wondered more than once if that wasn’t the initial reason I was attracted to Sarah’s mother. Southern boys at one time had a long history of crossing to the other side of town. I ask, “Who have you told about this relationship?”
Now seemingly more relaxed, she slumps back against her chair.
“No one, of course. Who has seen us?”
Now that some of the tension in the room seems to have dissipated, I notice my stomach growling. It is almost time for lunch.
“Yettie Lindsey has seen all the signs, but I doubt if she can implicate you directly.”
Olivia’s eyes narrow and she once again becomes alert.
Competition is good for the circulation.
“She does everything but take off her clothes in front of Andy.”
I keep from nodding but just barely.
“She feels like you’re moving in on what ought to be her territory.”
“Did she say that?” she asks, now rigid in her chair.
I would not want to go one on one in a dark alley with her.
“Not in so many words,” I say mildly, “but I can understand that point of view. Good men, I hear, are few and far between.” The smile flickers but doesn’t quite come back.
From where she is sitting she can see Sarah’s picture on my desk. I follow her gaze and explain. “At least that’s been my daughter’s experience.”
Her expression softens as she listens to me brag about Sarah. It is somehow easy to forget she was a normal mother at one point in her life. In the last few moments she had become more like some kind of predator. Even as vulnerable as she sometimes seems, I cannot think of her cuddling a child. Perhaps, had I endured her life, I would be equally intense.
Olivia merely shrugs when I finally ask about Andy’s statement that she, too, felt certain that David Spath would go along with ordering remote-control equipment once it had been demonstrated that shock worked on Pam.
“Andy was more optimistic than I was, but he and David were good friends. I had to trust Andy. Usually, the administrators of these places will never go out on a limb, but Andy swore David would come around once he could see Pam was no longer hitting herself.”
I write down the words “not certain at all” as if they are the key to the case. Fat chance. Tomorrow I won’t even re member what they mean. Clearly, Olivia feels too conflicted to make a strong witness on Andy’s behalf.
“What’s your opinion of David Spath?” I ask, thinking of my fruitless interview with him. The only thing I got out of him was that he wasn’t from England.
A look of consternation comes over Olivia’s face as though she has met her match in Spath.
“David’s an expert at massaging parents. He knows how guilty a lot of us feel and tells us what we want to hear; in retrospect, I think Andy may have overestimated him. Honestly though, Andy was really putting him on the spot by not getting consent of a human rights committee first.”
I scratch my right ear with my pen. All of a sudden it is Andy alone who is responsible. She has forgotten she was part of this plan.
“You don’t think it’s possible Spath might have known in advance Andy was going to try shock?”
As if she is resisting me, Olivia stiffens her back against the chair. If she knows something I don’t, she isn’t telling.
“Not David Spath,” she says, her voice hostile.
“I can’t see him leaving himself open that way.”
To make certain she isn’t totally abandoning Andy, I ask, “How much of what happened occurred without Andy talking about it with you first?”
She looks at me warily but admits, “I knew about all of it.”
I nod, knowing she is slipping away from Andy as we get closer to trial. The possibility that her affair with him may become public isn’t helping.
“I admire the hell out of what he risked for you,” I say, trying to keep her on his side.
“As you say, nobody else would do anything but massage you.”
She starts to speak but doesn’t, and I ask the question that has been on my mind since Andy gave me his check.
“Have you given him any money for his defense?”
She begins shaking her head even before I have finished.
“He would never take money from me. He’ll probably never tell you, though, that he has a very successful brother in Atlanta who thinks he’s a saint for working with the retarded.”
“No,” I say weakly, feeling like an idiot. Despite what he had said, I was absolutely positive it was from Olivia. If his own lawyer is this blind to him, what can he expect from his jury? I dread this trial.
After a few more questions I walk Olivia to the elevators.
There is no need to caution her about the need to cool down the relationship between her and Andy until after the trial, since that is obviously on low pilot now anyway. She gets a commitment from me to let her call him first to tell him she has admitted their affair to me. I see no harm in this and was not looking forward to having to leap in headfirst when I see him tomorrow.
As I walk back through the reception area, Julia, who is dressed almost normally for once (her polka-dotted blouse looks as if it is on backward, but I am no fashion expert), says from behind her computer terminal, “You look way in over your head on this one, buddy boy.”
Buddy boy? I laugh out loud, realizing for the first time that Julia is a romantic stuck in a 1940s time warp, all the way down to the fashionable shoulder pads that look like bean bags underneath her blouse. All of this business must be from old movies on TV, because I have a sneaking suspicion, based on her spelling and punctuation, that she is no great shakes as a reader. All we need on our floor is a couple of investigators and she would be in absolute heaven.
“You guessed it, sister,” I say, doing a quick Humphrey Bogart, and roll my shoulders to indicate that I may be in trouble now but I’ll get out of it.
Julia narrows her eyes at me, surely wondering if I am mocking her.
“Guess who called for the hundredth time.” “Mona Moneyhart.”
“Give this man a cigar,” she says to no one in particular.
There is supposedly a key to understanding everyone’s frame of reference. Too bad I don’t have one for my main client. Back in my office I stare out of my sorry excuse for a window (I could see the river if I could hang by my feet) and wonder what really happened in this case. Unfortunately, bad lawyers are always the last to know.
On my kitchen table near the nearly empty box of Kentucky Fried Chicken and french fries confronts me like an indictment. Grease stains and bones are all that remain of my dinner. Since Sarah has been gone this summer, I find I am eating more junk and fat. If she leaves Blackwell County to go off to college next year, I will need to get a grip on my eating habits or I will end up like Clan, whose heart surely must be beginning to resemble a stopped-up garbage disposal.
Seated beside my chair, his spine and legs straight in a rare demonstration of good posture, Woogie reproaches me with his soft brown eyes: if you can eat that junk, at least give me the bones.
“No!” I say, rising from the table with the box in my hand. If I throw the bones in the trash can in the house, the smell will drive him crazy, and though the bones, stripped of meat, seem almost flimsy, the disposal has been making a funny noise recently, as if it has been asked on too many occasions, much like my stomach in the last few weeks, to digest difficult objects. I head for the back door, with Woogie at my heels hoping I’ll spill the box or relent at the last moment. I go through my backyard to the metal trash cans by the diamond-shaped fence that separates my property from my neighbors’. The heat (it still must be close to ninety) of this long July day has begun to lift, but I do not linger outside, dropping the Colonel’s image unceremoniously into a plastic bag filled with the remains of a week’s garbage, and return immediately to the house to read Sarah’s latest letter, which I have saved as my dessert. Again seated at the kitchen table with Woogie and a Miller Lite for company, I rip open the envelope, but not before marveling that the return address is written in a hand (except for the way she makes the number seven-Americans risk confusing ones and sevens, but Colombians, like most of the rest of the world, do not) almost identical to her mother’s. Her initial torrent of correspondence has diminished to a trickle (a sign, according to Rainey, she is no longer homesick). In fact, this is only the second letter since I took her back over two weeks ago. She will be home Saturday-barely twenty-four hours before she leaves for “Camp Anytown,” her religious and atheist do-gooder camp sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
Dear Dad,
We just had a mock trial, and I served on the jury.
Everyone else wanted to be a lawyer or star witness, so it was easy to get my first choice. It was a murder case. In some ways, it was just a chance for the boys to try to show off. Is that why you become lawyers or is it the money ?
I think I’m beginning to have more confidence in myself.
I was the only one on the jury who voted at first for an acquittal. They got mad and said I was just being stubborn.
wouldn ‘t give in though (I knew there was a reasonable doubt!). It was cutting into our free time, so everybody else changed their vote. What I wonder is whether I would have the courage to do that in real life? People like you a lot more if you go along with them. Some of the kids are still irritated with me!p›
I’ve decided my biggest problem is that I want everyone to like me, no matter what. I’ve always gotten a lot of attention at school because I look so much like Mom. It’seasier just to smile and keep my mouth shut. Was she really intelligent? You never have told me whether she was really good at her job or not. Did she want to be a doctor or did she think they are such jerks it wasn ‘t worth it? I’d like to know more about her what she was really like as a per son not just a mother.
I think it’s important that I go far away to college and get out of the South. It’s okay, and people are nice and everything, but it kind of lulls you to sleep like the most important thing is whether the Razorbacks (Razorblacks one of the kids here calls the basketball team) win or not.
I know I sound like a snob (some of these kids are but most are not). I realize how loyal you are to Arkansas and everything, but I think I need to go and see for myself what other places are like. Do you have the money to send me to college next year out of state? If not, I understand. But maybe I could get a scholarship and work part-time. If I had some math and science brains, I’d have more options!
I have no idea what I want to do with my life, but at least most of the kids here don’t either. If they all did, I’d really feel stupid. After this mock trail, I don’t think I want to be a lawyer. Too many egos and silly rules. It is hard to believe you were ever in the Peace Corps or a social worker. You don’t seem the type. I’m not putting you down, but you don’t seem to care that much about other people. I mean, I know you care about me (and maybe Rainey), but really, that’s about all. You have sort of an “us against the world” attitude. I wish I had known you and Mom back when you were in the Peace Corps. I bet it was neat! Remember I ‘m going to the NCCJ Camp Sunday.
Thanks for getting my money in!
Love, Your non-legally interested daughter, Sarah
I put the letter down and grab a beer and check the freezer:
a half-empty sack of Harvest Poods crushed wheat (no cholesterol) bread, and enough ice to build an igloo. No wonder I’m eating fried chicken: I’m starving to death. It seems so hot in the house I’m tempted to sleep in the refrigerator. I might as well use it for something. I sit back down at the table and, still irritated, reread Sarah’s letter while I sip at the Miller Lite. I realize my feelings are a little hurt. You can’t spend your whole life trying to save the world, damn it. Marriage and a family change things. Sarah can go off and escape our provincialism, but somebody has to pay for it. Woogie whimpers as if he is about to. stroke out. His panting tongue, pink as a slab of bacon beginning to fry on the stove, makes me think of Rosa’s Lamaze classes. I walk into the living room and check the thermostat. Damn, no wonder he is about to go into labor. It is eighty-five in the house even though I have it set on seventy-eight. Great. Another bill. Out the back door Woogie and I go to investigate the fuse box, which is behind a holly bush underneath my bedroom window. After scratching my hands on a leaf, I open the metal container to find that the circuit breakers are still in the “on” position. Having exhausted my technological knowledge, with Woogie at my heels I go back inside to cool off with a shower.
The cold water on my back sends an exquisite shock down my spine, but tingling with the mixture of pain and pleasure, I weenie out and switch the nozzle to warm and let it gently knead my neck muscles. When I open my eyes, it is painfully obvious that the pinkish tile in the shower could stand cleaning, but if it’s not going to bother me, then I won’t bother it tonight. Alcohol, heat, and water have their own healing qualities, and I feel myself begin to relax. After a while, with a little help from (as my kindergarten teacher used to call my hand) Mr. Thumb and his four friends, I soon get myself into a pleasant state thinking about Kim Keogh. Each time I have thought about sex in the past week and a half, my musings have been accompanied by a mental picture of my prostate swelling to the size of a watermelon and then exploding.
Following my premature hospital admission, Kim, sounding hung over but anxious, called the next morning, probably to see if I had died. Relieved at the truth (she had merely slept with a middle-aged man who is beginning to deteriorate), she shyly hinted that she would like to see me again. But feeling I had received a warning, I put her off, saying I would call her. I haven’t. Why don’t I have the guts to say that I am not interested in pursuing a relationship with her? Too hard.
For once, I feel deeply ashamed. She bared more than her body. No wonder women think men are jerks. I can hear the phone ringing and grab my towel.
“Gideon, what’re you doing?” Rainey asks. She sounds happy. I have been afraid to call her since I got her out of bed to take me to the hospital.
“Right now?” I ask, looking down between my legs. A disappearing act is taking place before my very eyes.
“Not much.”
“Want to get some yogurt?” she asks, running the words together as if they were the words to a song. No longer do I allow myself to think of Rainey as I have been thinking of Kim Keogh. I always feel too morose later.
I begin to rub myself briskly with the towel as Woogie, who has come into the room to keep me company, licks my wet legs.
“I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”
I slip on a pair of denim cutoffs, a T-shirt, and my running shoes, thinking that forgiveness is a wonderful thing. Like the rain, it falls on the just and the unjust. Thank God for that.
She is waiting for me on her front steps. We are dressed identically, even to our T-shirts from the Blackwell County Pepsi 10K race two years ago.
“Twinkies,” I tell her, as she slides in beside me.
She barely glances at me and says, as she buckles on her seat belt, “I don’t have a prostate.”
One of the things about Rainey I like is that I don’t have to wait long for her to slip a knife between my ribs. I smile, inordinately pleased to see this woman. Her curly red hair is cut shorter than I’ve ever seen it. In profile her face looks boyish. I resist the urge to reach over and playfully squeeze her leg as I do Sarah’s. “I kind of panicked the other night,” I apologize to her as we head west on Maple to the nearest yogurt emporium. “I think I was born without a pain threshold.”
Rainey’s laughter is refreshing as a cool breeze.
“Gideon, you’re just awful! Poor Kim Keogh. I saw her on TV tonight and she looked frazzled. You’re really great for a woman’s ego, you know that?”
I can hear Kim telling her friends: the last guy I made love to had to go to the hospital an hour later.
“I’m too old for somebody like that,” I admit, turning my head so I can see her. She is sitting so straight it makes my back ache. If I had her posture, I’d be an inch taller.
As if she is commenting on the weather, Rainey, watching the road for both of us, says offhandedly, “That’s how men your age die-a massive heart attack and-poof!-you’re gone. Think of the guilt for the poor woman.”
As we climb the hill into Blackwell County’s most exclusive area, the traffic increases as if the heat had driven even the rich into the streets tonight. The poor woman? I feel a sudden twinge in my prostate, as if it is an early-warning signal for the rest of the body.
“Surely, it doesn’t happen all that often,” I argue weakly, wondering what the statistics are.
“It sounds like a line of bull cooked up by wives who won’t put out anymore themselves but who want to scare their husbands into lifelong celibacy.”
Rainey reaches over and pats my knee.
“I’m not your wife,” she says with mock tenderness. Her hand, as light and soft as a first kiss, immediately returns to her lap.
I turn onto Bradshaw and see the lights of the section called Riverview, a yuppie heaven for central Arkansans who demand proof we have the potential to be like everybody else.
Antique shops, pricey women’s clothing stores, pretentious restaurants with snotty-sounding names (Pompidieu’s, the Lion Tamer), business offices (a favorite area of therapists, dentists, and accountants) daintily line the street. A little too cutesy for me, but Rainey, however, has decided tonight that Turbo’s has the best yogurt in town, and obligingly, I turn into the drive-through lane, which, through a stroke of blind luck, isn’t backed almost into Bradshaw this time of night.
“You might as well be my wife,” I say as we pull up to the order window.
“I read a survey recently that married people hardly ever do it after a few years. Like just a little over once a week.”
After we order (she gets her pathetic kiddie cup), Rainey says, “God, Gideon, you sound like Rosa’s been dead so long you can’t remember what it was like to be married to her.”
Rainey hands me a five-dollar bill. It’s her turn, and she has become scrupulous about paying her share since we have decided to be friends. As I get her change from the girl at the window (she looks about nine have the child-labor laws been repealed or does it just seem as if kids are quitting school in the third grade to go to work?), I think about my sex life with Rosa. Have I been romanticizing that, too? It was good, but like everything else, it became a routine. In my present state though, it seems wonderful. Oblivious to the ritzy Buick full of kids that has just pulled in behind me, I roll my white plastic spoon around in my medium-sized cup, mixing the chocolate syrup and the yogurt together and then digging out as big a bite as I can manage to get into my mouth. If this is going to be my only sensual pleasure in life, then I’m going to get it right now.
We drive back to her house and sit on the sweltering concrete steps with the porch light out so as not to attract bugs.
Across the road, lit by the streetlight on the corner, two small children run shrieking through one yard into another chasing each other. The leader of the two, a girl about nine with a long ponytail and short, stubby legs laughs excitedly and blasts a tin can five feet into the air without breaking stride.
“No fair! No fair!” her pursuer, a little boy of no more than seven, wails, throwing himself despondently on the high grass in front of the house as she continues around the corner.
When I was a child in Bear Creek, we played endless games of Kick the Can, and my older sister, before she became obese, was that ponytailed tomboy across the street.
Dejectedly, the boy gets up and retrieves the can and places it upright on the sidewalk. Putting his head down on his chest, he trots around the corner, still muttering to himself.
I lean back and look up at the humid sky, which is packed with misty stars. Under my now sticky T-shirt I can feel drops of sweat slipping down my sides. “My air-conditioning went out tonight,” I say glumly. “If it’s not one damn thing, it’s twenty or thirty.”
Rainey, moving toward me but not touching, titters at my hyperbole. Her laughter is like tinkling glass.
“How you do go on, Gideon,” she says lightly.
“Do you want to sleep on my couch?”
I think for a moment. How nice it would be just to glimpse the woman I have loved for over a year in her nightgown.
Underneath she would be solid, her body still firm from five days a week of Jazzercise. Yet I know I would lie awake all night listening futilely for my name. Our friendship is too delicate to carry such a weight. Maybe in five or ten years, I think irritably.
“Better not,” I mumble, not daring to look at her.
“But thanks for the offer.” Above us I can hear the whisper of a breeze in the maples that flank her house, but ground level it is hot and still. Incessantly busy locusts provide a kind of white noise around us for the now half-dozen children who occasionally come charging into view from out of the shadows across the street.
I think I hear a sigh, but she is gasping at a shooting star that flashes by us from left to right. “Look!” she says, touching my arm. For perhaps a second I trace the star which then winks out of sight.
“Incredible,” I mutter, but I am thinking of the relationship between men and women. Why are things so difficult?
I have tried as earnestly as I know how to accept the terms of friendship she has offered, but times like tonight when I can smell the heat in every living thing around me, including Rainey, it is not easy.
We talk for about an hour. She tells me that she has begun to worry that she may lose her job at the state hospital. The state is struggling to convert itself to a community-based system, and the census is way down. Her offer to loan me money becomes even more astonishing. I’m so cheap I even hate to lend Sarah money. “I probably could get a job at a community mental health center somewhere,” she says offhandedly.
The idea of Rainey moving anywhere shocks me. Ever since Rosa died, I have told myself not to expect permanence in any situation, but as usual, I am always surprised and hurt by the prospect of change. How dare anyone disrupt my life?
I scrape desperately at my empty cup.
“It won’t come to that.” Yet it might. Nothing stands still. As usual, she lets me talk about Sarah. I tell her about the letter I received tonight.
“She doesn’t want to be a lawyer, that’s for sure,” I say irritably. Since I have been in private practice by myself, I have quietly entertained the thought that someday she would go to law school and then come into practice with me.
Page amp; Page, Attorneys at Law.
The right side of her face pressed against her arms which cradle her drawn-up knees, Rainey looks like a sleepy child.
“Who in their right mind would?” she asks, breathing deeply in the dense air.
“Some day historians will look back and regard lawyers as the dinosaurs of our culture. All you did was eat and fight. This country better learn quickly we can’t afford you, or we all better start learning Japanese and Korean
Absently, I lick my spoon, which has long been clean, and taste nothing but plastic.
“We’re like cops: nobody likes us until you need us.”
Rainey raises her head and gazes up at the stars again.
“That’s the problem. We only think we need you because nobody trusts each other in this country. It’s everybody for themselves. That’s what is killing us as a society. There’s no sense we’re part of each other. It’s white against black; rich against poor; everybody against everybody and nobody for each other. We don’t even have large families anymore. I think it’s a pretty sterile mentality we have in the United States with all this never-ending individualism.”
I am surprised at the passion in her voice. Rainey doesn’t make many speeches; yet, I have heard this again recently.
Where? Sarah’s letter, of course. Us against society. Well, that’s how it looks to me. Yawning, I lean back on my elbows until I am almost horizontal on the concrete stoop.
“It’seas ier said than done,” I say, knowing I sound glib, but there is no quick cure for the national mind-set that is enshrined in so much patriotic nonsense.
Rainey takes my cup from my hand and places her smaller container inside it.
“You’re just scared that Sarah will go off to college and never come back.”
I nod. Scared to death.