Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (21 page)

“I called my mother after you dropped me off last night.”

She looked alarmed. “You shouldn’t have done that.” Reaching across the table, she wrapped her hand around my wrist. “What good would it do?”

“I was angry, but as soon as I heard her voice, I knew she would not remember. She would not have remembered a week after she did it,” I added. “Do you know how often I had to listen to her tell me she only wanted the best for me?”

She drew her hand away from my wrist and placed it in her lap.

“I think that’s one of the reasons I became a lawyer. She wanted me to be a doctor.”

“Like your father.”

“No, not like him. She didn’t want me to become a general practitioner who loved being a doctor. She wanted me to be someone she could think of as successful, a surgeon, the chief of staff of a hospital. My mother didn’t know a damn thing about medicine, but she could take one look around a country club dance floor and know immediately where each couple stood on the social scale.”

A woman who had grandchildren was sitting across from me, and I was telling her things about myself that I had never told anyone. I leaned over my plate and lifted my fork to my mouth, and then put it down before it reached my lips.

“The worst part is how much like her I am.”

She looked at me with those wonderful oval-shaped eyes that had once inspired so many romantic thoughts and erotic dreams, and a moment later began to laugh.

“I have a very hard time imagining you at a country club dance.

And I don’t believe for a minute that you ever gave a thought to someone’s social standing or even if they had any. You didn’t even like to dance,” she said, taunting me with her eyes.

“I remember I liked to dance with you,” I said, grinning.

The color deepened in her cheeks. “That wasn’t dancing. We were just necking, standing up.” She dared me to deny it, but I just looked at her as if I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You still do that, don’t you?” she asked, a glimmer in her eye.

“You get that look, that really extraordinarily larcenous expression on your face, like a thief announcing at the door that you’ve come to rob them blind, and it all seems so honest no one thinks twice about trusting you completely. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I issued every false-faced denial I could think of that would let her know that I hoped she was right about me and that I was still the boy she remembered.

“I remind myself of my mother sometimes when I hear myself giving advice to a client. I never have any doubt that I’m right.”

It was too flippant, and it was not true. “No, it’s when I catch myself going crazy because something isn’t quite perfect. Everything always had to be just right for her. Nothing out of place; nothing that might cause a complete stranger to notice you for the wrong reasons. Sit straight, walk straight, pronounce each word properly, always be polite, never lose your temper. I can still feel her fingers picking away a piece of lint from my slacks, or pushing a strand of hair back from my forehead. She was always fussing over me. She still does it.” I caught myself. With an embarrassed laugh, I tried to explain.

“She came out last summer. She stayed a week. Every morning when I got up,” I admitted with a sheepish grin, “I made my bed, put everything away, made damn certain my room was all cleaned up before I went downstairs for breakfast.” With a frown, I added, “She still wants to know when I’m getting married.”

There was something I wanted to know, something I wanted to hear her talk about, but I sensed a reluctance on her part to discuss it. Finally, over coffee, I asked.

“Why did you come back here? What happened?”

A brief smile flitted over her mouth and then disappeared. Her eyes looked away and then peered into mine, and then looked away again. She bit her lip, tried to smile, but could not. For a long time she stared down at her hands, and when she finally raised her eyes there was a distance there that I had not seen before.

“Seven years ago I got sick, very sick. I couldn’t do anything.

I couldn’t work, I couldn’t function.” She sighed and then turned her face up to me with the kind of trusting smile that once made me feel we were the only two people alive. “I had a breakdown.

I was in a hospital for months. I’m a manic-depressive. I used to sit in my room for days, staring at the walls. Sometimes I couldn’t even get myself dressed. For a long time I thought I was just depressed, the way everyone gets depressed about things once in a while. But then I started to have these strange thoughts, things that did not make sense, delusions really. I thought people were following me. If someone looked at me on the street, I thought they were letting me know they were watching me. I thought things that were said on television were secret messages being sent to me.”

She saw the look in my eye and, instinctively, reached across and ran her hand over the side of my face. “I’m all right now.

When they finally figured out what it was, a chemical imbalance in the brain, they put me on lithium.”

A thoughtful expression on her face, she sipped some coffee and then, very slowly, put the cup back in the saucer. With her middle finger she traced the edge all the way around to the beginning.

“I got a divorce four years ago. I told you that I’d felt sorry for him—because I never loved him. And I never did, not the way you think you will, not the way I loved you; but we had a child together—it doesn’t matter why we had a child—and we had a life together. It hurt—it hurt a lot. He did what he could, he handled it the best way he knew how, and I think he always thought it was somehow his fault—that I got sick like that—but it made him as crazy as I was. It really did. He was depressed, and angry, and nothing seemed to be going right in his life, either, and … Well, that’s what happened. I went crazy and now I’m better, and I was married and now I’m not.” Struggling with herself, she managed to force a smile. “See how much trouble I would have been.”

It was like seeing her again for the very first time, and falling even more in love with her than I had before. There was no place else I wanted to be, no one else I wanted to be with, nothing else I wanted except to do whatever I could to make sure she was never afraid or unhappy again.

She took my hand when we left the restaurant and walked to the end of the block where she had parked her car. The night was cool and clear and there was no one else on the street. I pulled her toward me, and felt her free hand slip around my neck.

We kissed the way I think we must have kissed the very first time, a brief, awkward trembling touch, and then she snuggled against my shoulder and I felt her warm breath on my neck and the smell of her hair was like the morning breeze that floats through the window when you are only half awake.

“I have to go,” she whispered.

“It’s early,” I said. I held on to her hand as she let go of my neck.

“I told you I had an early flight tomorrow.” She kissed the side of my face, and we walked the last few steps to her car. I would not let go of her hand. She fumbled with her key ring until she found the one she needed. Laughing, she managed to unlock the door, and as soon as she did I pulled her back into my arms.

“Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere and dance?”

She was still laughing, softly. “I’d love to, but not tonight.”

I let go of her and held the car door open while she got in.

“How long are you going to be gone?”

She switched on the ignition and turned on the headlights.

With one hand on the convertible top and the other on the window of the door, I watched her buckle herself in. She looked up and tugged playfully on my tie. “Just a week. I’ll call as soon as I get back.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little curious that even now, at our age, you still have to leave me because of your mother?”

At first she did not understand, but then it came back to her and her eyes gleamed with that same schoolgirl seduction she had used on me that night on the doorstep of her parents’ home.

Then it was gone, and I bent down and we kissed each other on the side of the face like the two old friends we were. As I watched her drive off, I felt empty and alone, and the self-sufficiency of my solitary life suddenly seemed pretentious and false.

It was still early and the last place I wanted to be was in that strange place I called home. For a long time I wandered aimlessly through the streets, in a neighborhood I did not know. My leg began to hurt, and I thought it was funny, because I thought it must be psychosomatic. That leg had not bothered me in years.

The bullet had passed right through, without doing any real damage at all. There was no reason for it to hurt now.

Everything seemed to be conspiring to bring back the past; more than that, to make the past seem more real than the present. I kept switching back and forth, looking back at the past and then going back to the very beginning of things, when I first fell in love with Jennifer, when I first started to despise Calvin Jeffries, when Elliott pointed that gun in my face; going back to the beginning to then watch the way things happened, watching them as if I were seeing them for the first time, like someone who had been given the gift of clairvoyance and could see the future and everything that was going to happen.

The leg hurt like crazy. I passed the open door of a crowded restaurant full of friendly noise. I went inside and found one last place at the bar. The bartender removed a crumpled napkin and a glass of melting ice, wiped the bar with one pass of a towel, and then flung it over his shoulder. He looked at me just long enough to let me know he was ready for the answer to the question he did not need to ask.

“Scotch and soda,” I said in a whispered shout.

I laid a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and watched the bartender take it with one hand while he set the drink in front of me with the other. While the bartender rang up the sale on a refurbished bronze cash register just a few feet away, I was hunched over the bar, running my fingers along the base of the glass. He stacked the change in front of me, and with the same silent question took another order from someone else. Lifting my eyes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the other side of the bar. All around me people seemed to be having a good time, talking, telling stories, making jokes, and laughing every chance they got. I was older than most of them, and much older than some.

I felt out of place and alone.

After I finished the drink, I ordered another, and then one after that. It had been a long time since I had come to a bar by myself and done nothing but drink. I had almost forgotten the wonderful self-indulgence of self-pity, the free fall into the full enjoyment of every felt emotion, the pure untrammeled luxury of caring nothing for what might happen next, the fervent belief that you could tell the world to go screw itself in one breath and have everyone love you in the next. I had another drink, and another, and I was almost there, the lucid madness of intoxi-cation.

I saw my reflection in the mirror, and I seemed older than I had just a few minutes before, and everyone crowded all around seemed even younger. It used to make me pause, the sight of a middle-aged man, drinking alone at a bar, when I was still young and certain nothing like that would ever happen to me. Looking down at the half-finished drink in front of me, I shoved it away with the back of my hand.

I reached inside my coat and pulled out my brown leather wallet and thumbed through the bills until I found another twenty.

With my hand on the bar, I swung off the stool and stood up.

“There a phone here?” I asked above the din as I picked up the change and counted out a tip.

The telephone was in the back, just outside the door to the rest rooms. “It’s me,” I said gruffly into the receiver. My head was leaning against the wall and I was staring straight down at my shoes. They needed a shine. “I’m in a bar. I’ve had too much to drink. You think you could come?”

Fifteen minutes later, Howard Flynn found me at a table in the corner, drinking a cup of black coffee. “Thanks,” I said, somewhat embarrassed. “Order something. I’ll buy dinner.”

He settled into the chair opposite and shook his head. “Hell, I thought you called because you wanted someone to get drunk with.”

I peered at his heavy-jowled, impassive face and tried to smile.

“Tell me something. How long was it before you figured out that AA didn’t stand for ‘anytime, anywhere’?”

“It was one of my life’s bigger disappointments,” he said with a grin. His thick upper arms bulged inside the white dress shirt he was wearing buttoned at the wrists and open at the collar.

“You did good,” he said in his slow, methodical way.

“I did good? Why? Because I came here and started to get drunk?”

“Because you didn’t get drunk. Not all the way. And because you had sense enough to know you couldn’t get home by yourself.” He looked at me through half-closed eyes. “Besides, it isn’t like you went into a liquor store and got yourself a bottle of Thunderbird.”

My head was spinning. I lifted the coffee cup with both hands to make sure I would not spill it.

“How many guys have you seen in the gutter drinking Chivas Regal out of a paper bag?”

“It’s where you end up, not where you start,” I replied.

With a show of impatience, Flynn waved his large, puffy red hand. “You sure you’ve never been in AA? You’ve got all the answers down pat. Listen. I didn’t come down here to hold your goddamn hand. I came down here because you sounded like if you were left alone you might just keep drinking, maybe all night, maybe longer. I’m here to see you don’t. Okay? Now, finish your coffee and let’s get the hell out of here.” His heavy-lidded eyes moved from one end of the teeming bar to the other. “I can’t stand to be around people when they’re having such a good time.”

Flynn pushed back his chair, stood up, and waited for me to come. We shouldered our way through the boisterous crowd, past the bartender with his starched white shirt and black bow tie filling the glasses and emptying the pockets of everyone who lined up for the chance to feel even better than they did already.