Evil Eye (17 page)

Continually outside the courtroom Deekman is asked: Will your client take the stand? Testify in his own defense?

Deekman is courteous, deadpan
No.

No? And why not?

Which part of the word don't you understand? N—O. NO.

Bart is thinking he should testify—people think you're guilty if you don't. But Deekman won't even discuss the issue with him. And frankly Bart is relieved, he's seen how witnesses who start out confident can get tripped up, make fools of themselves, or appear to be deceitful when questioned by a shrewd and (it seems) conscienceless attorney. Like the police officer who'd claimed to “question” Louisa Hansen despite her terrible injuries—who'd claimed that Louisa had actually
nodded her head
in response to his questions—Deekman had made an asshole of the guy in just a few words.

How Deekman did it is a mystery! Bart has to concede, you wouldn't want this guy on the other side.

Five hundred bucks an hour, minimum. Plus there's a “defense team”—a half-dozen younger assistants, looks like.

Bart had said he wasn't sure if he could pay him—or when. Deekman laid a hand on his shoulder like Bart Hansen was his own son saying
My fee is not an issue. Getting you free is.

Bart tells himself that when this fiasco is over, and his real life resumes—he'll see an adviser at the university to plan a pre-law major.

Corporate law. Sports-injury law. Those guys raked in dough!

Criminal defense law, he didn't think he could master. Not like Davis Deekman. You had to be quick-witted and kind of duplicitous—tricky. It was something like playing chess if you could find a way to guide your opponent's hand, too—force him to move a chess piece in a way not to his advantage.

Bart was grateful to Deekman, though, for showing him a way to see how the ax attack might've occurred without Bart being involved. It
was
possible—some other individual, maybe a Delt-Sig, driving to East Rensselaer, etcetera.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt
was a sound principle.

After Bart's mother's testimony, no one else and nothing else seemed important in the trial. Bart's mother continued to attend the trial, seated just behind the defense table. She dressed herself, or was dressed, in dark clothes like a woman in mourning, very tasteful, classy. She sat with relatives who took care of her, Bart was relieved to see.

She'd help him with the law school tuition. Anything to do with school, courses, self-improvement—she'd always encouraged him. Dad had had the attitude—
Well sure. Let's give it a try—
so you could see he was skeptical, bemused, waiting for Bart to fuck up.

Why's it my fault, he'd wanted to demand of them, you didn't have more kids?
Superior
kids? Think if you'd had some other sons, they'd make you more proud than Bart did? Fuck it!

Had to laugh. Not once had his dad been
on his side.

After five and a half weeks the trial ended. After jurors deliberated for seventy hours, a message came to the judge that the jury was “deadlocked.”

Meaning that nine jurors had voted
guilty
while three had voted
not guilty
.

It only takes one. We will find that one
. Deekman had not predicted he would find three!

What was—astonishing—almost unbelievable—was how immediately following the jury's decision, as the courtroom registered shock, and even the judge stared at him, Bart Hansen was a “free man.”

Months he'd been kept in captivity like an animal, now he was
a free man.

Bart went to his mother, seated behind the defense table. Bart stooped to embrace her and they wept together.

I love you, my darling baby, I love you. You are my darling darling baby I love you so.

I love you, too, Mom.

Now he would wish he hadn't told so many of the guys that he'd hated his parents. That if
something happened
they'd deserved it.

Well, that had been true of the old man. Not so true of his mother.

Mom I'm so sorry! Hey Mom I love you.

I know you do, Bart. I know you love me.

The prosecutors were poor losers. Threatening how they'd try Bart another time. Deekman assured him this would not happen. They had no way to circumnavigate Louisa Hansen's testimony—a new trial would end with another hung jury.
It only takes one.

In the months following the trial the mother astounded many observers by giving interviews—print, TV. It was fascinating to see the fragile woman with the face that looked like melted wax, a single eye and sunken mouth, insisting that her son
had nothing to do with hurting her or with hurting his father
.

In a pleading voice she said
You would have to be this boy's mother to know him.

There is a place in a child's soul only a mother can know.

She would be led to volunteer, drawn out by sympathetic-seeming interviewers on cable TV, that when she'd been a “young, immature mother” she'd taken tranquilizers and sleeping pills because motherhood had seemed “overwhelming” to her—she'd wanted to be a perfect mother and lost sight of the fact that
no one is perfect.

So she believed she had lost her son for some years. From the time the child was five or six until—oh, maybe sixteen—or, maybe—to the present time. Not his fault but hers.

She wrote a letter to area newspapers claiming that the prosecutors of Rensselaer County had unjustly persecuted her son and never made the slightest attempt to find the actual murderer of her beloved husband. As if, if they couldn't blame her son, they had no interest in anyone else.

The letter was many times replicated in print and online.

I am pleading with you, the Prosecutor's Office of Rensselaer County, New York, to desist in harassing my son with threats of retrying him for a crime he did not commit and knew nothing of. I am begging you to allow us to get on with our lives after this catastrophe as we are trying to do
.

Sincerely, Louisa Hansen

It was curious, Louisa Hansen rarely mentioned her late husband. It was as if the catastrophe that had happened, had happened to her and her son Bart alone.

The son escorted the mother to interviews. Sometimes the son consented to be interviewed with the mother though Davis Deekman strongly advised against this: for there was the possibility of a second trial, still.

The tabloid press and cable channels paid as much as $3,500 for an interview. There was a need for money: the two-hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy paid to Louisa Hansen had gone for Bart's legal expenses, entirely; the house at 29 Juniper Drive had to be sold, below its market value, for the remainder of Deekman's bill, as well as for living expenses for the mother and son.

The Bolton Landing property, valued at one million dollars, had been on the market for months and few prospective buyers had seen it. The sprawling old Adirondack house was badly in need of repair, the dock on Lake George ravaged in storms, and the gravel driveway nearly washed away.

In the Village of East Rensselaer, Louisa and Bart Hansen have become a familiar pair. Mrs. Hansen has bought a two-bedroom condominium in a whitely shining new high-rise building in a residential neighborhood close by the First Episcopal Church and within easy commuting of Rensselaer Community College where Bart is enrolled in a degree-granting program in business administration. With her myriad disabilities, Louisa isn't able to drive: Bart drives her everywhere. The Explorer had to be sold and so Bart drives his father's sturdy dun-colored Lexus, taking his mother to her many medical appointments, to her hairdresser, to the Village library, to the First Episcopal Church of Rensselaer, to the homes of certain of her faithful friends, and to her several women's clubs.

Louisa says in interviews
I have no one but Bart now. I will devote my life to clearing my son's name.

There have been those—Louisa's family, relatives, friends—who've tried to reason with her, to suggest that living with Bart might be dangerous, but Louisa cuts them off curtly. Ridiculous!

There is enough money to live on—just comfortably. Nothing like the multi-million-dollar estate Bart had naively anticipated. Joke's on him, Bart thinks! For it seems that Laurence Hansen died leaving behind questionable investments in discredited hedge funds, snarled finances. And he hadn't kept up repairs at the Bolton Landing house.

Bart blames the father for the mother's money worries—“He should have left you better taken care of, Mom. He always seemed to be boasting about that.” Halfheartedly Louisa defends Laurence—“Well. Your father loved us. He just didn't always know how to show it. He was a
good man
”—and Bart says, humoring her, “Sure, Mom.”

At church, the Hansens are often observed. Rarely do they miss a Sunday service. Their pew is fourth from the altar, facing the pulpit. Patiently Bart walks with his mother, who grips a cane in one hand and Bart's arm in the other: she is half his size, small and broken-backed, yet warmly friendly to all who greet them, and always very tastefully dressed in somber clothing. After church, Bart drives Louisa to the Women's Village Club, or to the Garden Club, for a lavish Sunday brunch. Bart is the only
son
in the gathering.

Eyes move on them, mesmerized.

Do you know who. Who they are?

What the son did
. . .

No girl will come between them. No deceitful frat brothers.

He'd quit the fraternity for sure. Never again pledge any fucking fraternity in good faith, Bart has learned his lesson.

Still owes the Delta Sigma Corporation about one thousand dollars, with fines. Fuck you, sue me, Bart says.

His Rensselaer high school friends have mostly departed. He has friends numbering in the hundreds, online.

His names there are
Cloudsplitter, Hercules II, Sabbathblack, Hotdickke.
He has never arranged to meet anyone he has contacted online, however—how'd you trust any of them to be who they claim they are?

Just like the Delt-Sigs, probably. Lift any rock and what you see scuttling beneath—that's human nature, mostly.

He tries not to be cynical, though. At church, he sits beside his mother gazing at the minister's face, nodding, smiling, with a look of intense listening, rapport.

God forgives. It is not given to us to comprehend God's ways.

The only lengthy drive Bart is required to make with Louisa is to the medical center at the Albany Medical School. There, Louisa sees a neurologist whose specialty is impaired vision. For Louisa is losing vision in her single remaining eye and has been experiencing flashing lights, migraines. Louisa relates to Bart that her nightmare is of
something ugly and sharp
flying loose—like a rabid bat, except not a living thing.

“Yeh.” Bart rubs his eyes with his fists, grunting. “Some weird-fuck thing like that, I dream of it, too.”

Louisa stiffens. Bart realizes, he has misspoken.

“Hey I mean—yeh. Some weird thing like that.”

Helping his mother out of the Lexus, at the entrance of the neurology clinic, while he drives into the high-rise parking garage to park. Then hurrying back to her as he sees her walking, trying to walk, toward the revolving-door entrance, leaning on her cane, faltering, as if determined to show that despite her infirmities, she can walk by herself. Bart comes up behind her—“Hey, Mom. Wait. Let me get the—” It pisses him that she'd have plunged into the revolving door, the cane would get caught and she'd be knocked down or worse yet, dragged inside the door like some kind of beetle on its back, except he'd run back in time to intervene. Christ! A tinge of impatience in Bart's voice but at once fleeting, gone.

In the neurologist's suite, Louisa Hansen and her son Bart are a familiar pair. The receptionist greets them by name. The nurses greet them by name.
“
My son.” Louisa clutches his arm tight at the elbow when the nurse calls her name, the tall looming darkly handsome young son, and she the ravage-faced mother, a Pietà in reverse. “My son will accompany me into Dr. Kraukauer's office.”

THE FLATBED

For Henri Cole

She liked to envision him in this way.

Some sort of flatbed. Like the kind hooked behind a small truck.

And he's on the flatbed in some kind of arrangement of chains securing his wrists and ankles so he can't move.

He's sitting up, chained. An awkward posture that must strain his back, neck, legs.

His head is lifted, his eyes are alert and aware.

The flatbed is being hauled along the interstate.

Wet snow has begun to fall. No wind, the snow falls vertically out of a gunmetal sky, mostly melting on the ground.

Who is driving the truck, he can't see.

He's trapped there on the flatbed. Can't move except to jerk his shoulders and head and tug against the chains making his wrists and ankles bloody. He has screamed—but no longer. His throat is raw, he is exhausted.

Snow on his face like melting tears.

Would G. know where he was being hauled, on the flatbed?

Would G. guess it was to a slaughterhouse?

He said, Is it me? Must be.

He was N. who'd come into her life unexpectedly.

He was one in a sequence of men. Most she eluded and rebuffed and found reasons to dislike, or they suddenly disliked her—one of them said bitterly
A beautiful face doesn't give you the right.

She hadn't had to ask
The right to what?

Or suddenly she was afraid of them, of what is called
leading a man on
.

For no man likes to be
led on
.

But N. was different, she had no idea why. N., she found herself thinking of, often. Maybe it was an ordinary sort of female yearning. Maybe it was her fear of being left alone or discovered to be a dirty girl, that's to say a badly dirtied girl, past redemption. Or maybe (this was a thought she could hardly acknowledge) she was falling in love with N. as a young woman might fall in love with a man.

A normal young woman. In love with a man.

But now it had gone wrong. She was stricken with guilt, shame.

For again it happened. Again, her body resisted the man. It was a subtle stiffening of her body, the tension of one poised at the brink of a dangerous action: diving from a high board, for instance.

It was not an obvious rejection of the man, or a rebuff. It was subtle, yet unmistakable. Every molecule in her body shuddering
No no no.

And she began to shiver. The shivering was convulsive, and unstoppable.

Her way of combating it—the convulsive, ridiculous shivering in her own bed, in the man's arms—was to clench her jaws tight. If relaxed, her jaws would tremble, her teeth would chatter.

What chagrin, her body shutting up as it did. Like the body of a frightened child.

And the chattering teeth, with another as a witness, so intimate.

She said, No. It isn't you. I . . .

There was a pause. N. was listening to her intently. His breathing was hoarse, harried.

She could not bring herself to say
It isn't you, I love you.

He said, Well. Then there is something you haven't told me.

She said, I don't think so.

Amending then, for this sounded too defensive, I—I don't know. I don't think so but I don't really know.

Something you haven't revealed to me yet.

His hands on her, tentative, caressing. As you might lay hands on a frightened and shivering dog, to comfort; to contain, calm, and comfort; and in the strength of the hands, a certain confidence, assurance.

Somebody hurt you, I'm guessing. D'you want to tell me about it?

How many times, she hadn't wished to count.

There had been the mortifying first time, when she'd been nineteen years old—
old
for a first-time sexual experience. And there'd been a second time, and a third—and each time baffling, humiliating.

This was perhaps only the fourth time. But it seemed to her the final time. She was twenty-nine years old: she would have no more chances.

As a young girl she'd been diffident about sex. She'd been uncomfortable hearing other girls talk about sex, her friends had laughed at her.

As an older girl she'd become adept at avoiding sexual circumstances. She grew to like the company of boys and men, and they liked her company, usually—but it was not a good idea to pursue this attraction, she'd learned.

To mislead another is cruel. To entice, and to repel—this could be dangerous.

For she could not anticipate the reaction of her body. Even if she'd had a few drinks. Even if she felt
loving.

The clenching of pelvic muscles involuntary as the blinking of an eye when the eye is touched. The panicked withdrawal, recoil.

As if the man touching her, seeking entry into her body, was an instrument of harm, torture—to be repelled.

The panic reflex. The convulsive shivering. She was helpless in thrall to a terrible suffocating fear as the sexual part of her, which had seemed so alive, so yearning, as if thrumming with desire for the man, had shut up like a fist.

No.
It was her body's mute cry—
No.

An aroused male would have the right to be seriously pissed. Seriously offended. He'd have the right to extricate himself from the female, throw on his God damned clothes and depart and not return.

She could not protest. She could barely murmur
Sorry
.

At the bottom of the pit she lay helpless. Her body was a child's body, in terror of violation. Clenched tight, shivering.

N. was saying, Will you tell me? Who has hurt you?

She told him no one. Please.

No one? I don't believe that.

She'd managed to control the shivering. Clenching her jaws tight so that her teeth couldn't chatter.
That
was an accomplishment, in these mortifying circumstances.

Until at last N. said, Hey: it's OK. We'll be fine.

N. spoke genially, with a kind of forced cheer. For this, she loved him.

Though he was somewhat mysterious to her—not a man she knew well, except intimately.

She'd calculated that he was at least fifteen years older than she was. She'd gathered that he was the father of children; divorced, and the children near-grown. Some bitterness—personal, legal—regarding the ex-wife. And there'd been a domestic tragedy in his life—the death of a child.

To which he'd alluded but of which he had given her to know he did not care to speak, just yet.

Just now he'd seemed to understand, and to forgive. Her body's clenching against his touch was not a clenching against
him.

The last man who'd touched her in this way, who had tried to make love to her, whom she hadn't liked so much as she liked N., had been sulky, sullen—rudely asking if she'd seen a doctor about this—
problem
.

Asking if it was a
problem
she'd had in the past?

What measures had she taken, or tried to take, to deal with the
problem.

Sexual frigidity. Fear.

Sexual terror, phobia.

Can't breathe. Can't bear it.

Sorry sorry.

No man wanted to think that it was he whom the woman's body was rejecting. It was necessary to think that the woman had a
problem
—physical, mental.

Yet N. was saying, We just need to go slow, I think. Slower.

Through a buzzing in her ears like cicadas she heard herself murmur
yes.

I'm a big man. I'm heavy. Heavier than I look. Maybe I scare you. Maybe your body thinks it's being crushed. We can figure some other way. When, you know—you think you're ready.

Heard herself murmur weakly
yes.

We have plenty of time, right? There's no urgency about any of this.

No urgency!
She wanted to think so.

Except:
I am twenty-nine years old not nine years old. I want my life to begin.

She and N. had known each other for approximately eighteen months. Not as lovers nor even as friends but as acquaintances brought into contact through a professional association in which she, the younger, the female, was a new employee and he, the elder, the male, had a position of authority.

Not that N. was her boss. N. was her superior of course but the chain of command didn't link N. and her directly.

The intersection between non-profit and private.
He
was the private.

Was it true there was no urgency between them? There is always an urgency to sexual love.

He would find another, she thought. There were so many women.

Young, unattached. In the early stages of their careers.

And there were other women, single, divorced, even ­widowed —a man like N. would not have to look far.

Yet, N. had seemed to be attracted to her immediately. A shrewd hunter-look had come into his eyes when he'd first approached her at a reception She'd come alone, in black: black silk skirt falling to nearly her ankles, sleeveless black silk top and over it a black velvet jacket that fit her narrow torso like a glove. Her ash-colored hair she'd braided and twisted around her head. He'd greeted her, and peered at her quizzically—he hadn't recognized her at first as one of the young women of the arts foundation, too junior to have a title other than assistant. Then, he'd seemed embarrassed. He said, I'm sorry—I thought you were someone else.

Wittily she'd said, Yes? Who?

Between them something seemed to have been decided.
Though they'd spoken to others at the reception they met again as others were leaving and N. said, Have dinner with me? Hey?

She wanted to think that N. was right: there was no urgency between them.

But when they tried to make love another time and her body recoiled—what then?

She was deeply ashamed of her sexual shyness. If that was what it was.

She had never gone to a therapist. The very thought was
repugnant to her, such
weakness.

It was wonderful to her, that N. seemed to forgive her. Kissing her and caressing her, comforting her and trying to warm her so that she stopped shivering. Wonderful, this man was on her side.

She'd heard N. had a quick temper. She had not yet witnessed it but she'd heard from others at the arts foundation, who'd been astonished and impressed at the way N. was capable of speaking at meetings, cutting off slow-speaking individuals, interrupting or contradicting others. One of his favored words was
Bullshit
. Another was
Fine!
—meaning the discussion was ended.

It was said of N. that he never attacked younger employees but only individuals of his own approximate rank.

It was said
You wouldn't want to cross him.

In N.'s arms she lay shivering, less convulsively now. The panic fit was passing.

The bedclothes that had been freshly laundered when she'd made the bed earlier that day were now humid, sticky. A ceiling fan turned wanly overhead. It was an unusually warm autumn. Their bodies were naked and hopeful—or had been. Now they clutched at each other like exhausted swimmers washed to shore.

She felt the fatty flesh at N's waist, and at his back: sinewy little knobs of flesh, and bumps and indentations across his back. Sparse coarse hairs scattered on his back, in striations across his sides. How strange, to be caressing the naked body of a man whom she scarcely knew, yet imagined she might love!

All love is desperation. This is our secret.

Her fingers groped for his penis, that had been so hard a minute before; now limp, soft-skinned, and vulnerable; and his fingers closed over hers in what she felt to be a kind of rebuke, gently pushing away.

Saying, Maybe we need a drink. Maybe that would help.

She wasn't sure that she had anything to drink in the loft. A friend had brought a bottle of red wine to celebrate her moving into these new quarters in a refurbished warehouse overlooking the river but that had been months ago, she'd never opened the bottle and wasn't even sure where it was.

Drinking was not a solace for her. Or, drinking would be too wonderful a solace, she had better not begin.

He
had urged her to drink. A little sip of his drink. On their walks, a stop at a
taverna,
as he called it, or a
bistro,
and how delightful, the little girl sipping from the older gentleman's wine- glass, until she began to cough, choke.

Then, he'd given her chocolate mints. To disguise the smell of the wine.

Our secret. Just the little darling and me.

N. said, Tell me what you're thinking, Ceille. Just now.

She couldn't recall. What had she been thinking?

She said, I love the sound of my name when you say it. For the first time, I love my name.

Neither made a move to detach from the other. N. would fall asleep kissing her.

That the man so trusted her, felt comfortable with her, after even this clumsy episode, was deeply moving to her.

Badly she wanted to sleep, in the man's arms. It was very late: nearing 2
a.m
. But she was not so comfortable. Her skin chafed against his. His thick-sounding breathing would keep her awake though she was relieved to hear it close beside her as if this were N.'s bed in N.'s life and she had been taken in by N.

Her brain was alive with thoughts, brittle darting thoughts like nails that flew about to no purpose. Often in intimate situations this was the case, with another person.

Fear of the other. His strength, and the surprise of what he will ask from you.

What he will execute upon you, without asking.

And still she was cold. Her fingers and toes like ice.