Exile: a novel (6 page)

“No. Based on a mutual respect and our common dislike of overprosecution.” David smiled faintly. “Except in death penalty cases, of course. We’ll save that for another time.”

An hour later, David left the federal building, hurrying back to his office to meet Carole.

He should be satisfied—whatever grudge Marnie Sharpe might hold, he had done his job as a lawyer. But the confrontation left a sour residue, a toxic admixture with the emotions stirred by Hana’s call. Perhaps, he thought, it was the memory of his own fallibility, the painful lesson, first learned through Hana Arif, that the consequence of his actions might be far different than he intended, or even imagined.

It’s just a case, he told himself—not a love affair. The only consequences, if any, would lie in his next case against Marnie Sharpe. He would deal with it then.

David was forced to smile. Carole was very good at reading others— including, in many if not all ways, David himself. But this was not the right occasion for unvarnished truth. “Why shouldn’t I be?” he answered amiably. “We just set a date. I’m getting married in seven months, at the age of thirty-eight. In a huge wedding. I’m both too old and too young for that sort of thing, and suddenly I’m on the conveyor belt to fatherhood. Which I find a little daunting.”

Carole grinned, good humor restored. As if seeing her for the first time in days—which, given the events of his morning, did not seem that far off—David found himself studying the woman he soon would marry. Carole had a full, curvaceous figure, wavy brown hair, and a pretty, wholesome face, complicated by the deep brown pools of eyes whose almond shape carried a hint of Eurasia, once prompting David to suggest to her that some female Polish ancestor had been ravaged by a Tatar passing through her village. Though her expression was habitually pleasant, it had a resolute cast, suggesting the planner and organizer she was. The Carole Shorr School of Management, David once told her, was what America truly needed.

“The world,” she had amended cheerfully. “If only I had the time.”

Certainly, Carole Shorr managed her slice of the world with consummate practicality and efficiency. She was smart and socially adept, with an
assertive charm that made people like her and, more often than not, do what she wanted. She leavened her determination with a warm, sometimes lightly flirtatious manner, mixed with humor. All this added up to a gift for knowing the influentials of the Jewish community, the Democratic Party, and, at times, the larger world, without the sharp elbows or avidity that would have made her a figure of sport or envy.

All of which made her indispensable to David. Beyond this, only he was privileged to know that she was sexy not just in manner but in fact, with an openness that had, at first, surprised him. And only he saw Carole’s vulnerability—a deep desire to be needed, to be cherished and respected by a partner she knew to be her peer.

“Oh, I know,” Carole told him now. “It’s
so
hard being a guy.” Glancing at her watch, she picked up her purse and stood. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. Including having the babies.”

David snatched the suit coat off the back of his chair. “Good. I’m best at delegation.”

“Just do your part. Sort of like you did this morning.” Abruptly, her expression became more probing. “So what
did
happen between then and now? Something.”

David opened his door, waving her past his secretary’s empty desk. “Have I mentioned that you are a remarkably perceptive woman? Relentlessly so.”

Carole laughed. “As soon as we’re married, I promise to change. Until then you’ll have to put up with my sensitivity to your moods.”

They reached the elevator to the parking garage. Pushing the button, David said, “You’ll remember I was meeting with Marnie Sharpe.”

“It didn’t go so well?”

The elevator opened. Carole stepped inside, then David. “Given that she hates me,” he answered, “it never goes well. I got what I wanted. But not before Marnie accused me of leaking to the press some fiction about an FBI investigation, then exploiting it to knock years off my client’s sentence.”

“And did you?”

David smiled. “Of course. But it still hurt.”

Carole gave him a dubious look. “Isn’t that unethical?”

“Not to me. And it’s certainly not illegal.” Pausing, he spoke more seriously. “First, I believe Raymond’s story, though a lawyer believes clients at his peril. Second, the FBI
should
have investigated. Truth to tell, I didn’t know
what
the FBI was doing. I only knew what they
should
be doing. Sharpe wouldn’t listen to me. So I decided to encourage the FBI by other
means.” David smiled again. “Any lawyer can succeed with an innocent client. The guilty require imagination.”

Carole gazed at him with a bemusement. “To a simple girl like me, David, you sometimes sound immoral. I see this glint in your eye, and for a minute I’m not sure I know you.”

The elevator door opened to a cavernous underground garage. “Don’t feel alone,” David consoled her blithely. “My mother never knew me. Not that I knew
her,
either.

“But seriously, Sharpe deserved it. She overprosecutes, and she loves convictions more than truth. Lawyers should be forced to take a Rorschach test before we allow them to be prosecutors.”

They found Carole’s green Jaguar convertible—British, not German, she had emphasized to David. She inserted her key in the ignition, then turned to him again. “Can we talk for a minute? Dad will understand if we’re a little late.”

“I thought we
were
talking.”

“Deploying words isn’t always the same as talking.” She gazed at the dashboard, gathering her thoughts. “Listening to this story, I wonder about your defending criminals—okay, alleged criminals—two years before you run for Congress.”

“Even if I think they’re innocent?”

“Even then, unfortunately. You’ll probably get by with this case—at least Ray Scallone didn’t murder that guard. But you’re already on the ‘wrong’ side of the death penalty issue.”

“Most voters in my district,” David objected, “don’t
like
executions.”

“Maybe not. But some do. Most
Californians
do, and they elect U.S. senators.”

David smiled at this. “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves? Why not president?”

“The first Jewish president?” she answered briskly. “It’s about time.”

“I thought you were about to say ‘semi-Jewish.’ Anyhow, criminal law is what I like.”

Carole touched his hand. “I know. And the Jewish part we can work on. But sometimes, it feels like you think you’re immune to disaster, or even hurt, as if God’s given you a pass.”

That David knew better, and that a single phone call had reminded him of why, was not something he cared to discuss. “I don’t feel immune,” he told her. “No matter what you think of my charmed life.”

“Not just charmed,” she countered softly. “Detached.”

“Don’t you mean ‘in denial’? I know it still bothers you that my parents were Jewish in name only. They barely mentioned the Holocaust, or Israel. They were patrons of the symphony, the opera, and the ballet who preferred a life of intellect and refinement to one of feeling or group identity—”

“They
had
an identity, David. They were German Jews, American for three generations. We were Polish Jews, immigrants, the kind your parents would find embarrassing. We even talk about body functions.”

David smiled at this. But the difference, he understood, went deeper than his parents’ tastes in music, or that her parents’ refrigerator had been crammed with beets and homemade soups, or that Jewish holidays were strictly observed in her family and perfunctorily noted in his. It was that Harold’s family had vanished up the stacks of Hitler’s camps, impelling Carole to remember, even to live for, men and women she had never known. As she had once mordantly put it to David, she was “suffering from secondhand smoke.” It left her with a profound sense of tribal loyalty coupled with an indefinable foreboding that lay beneath her air of confidence and good humor, a sense that mischance must be avoided, not courted.

“We’re certainly a pair,” David said now. “You and I.”

Carole smiled a little. She knew what he meant, David suspected. Carole was determined to order the world as she wished it to be, the better to fend off doom. But, like Harold, she had a certain reticence—the sense that power was better exercised in private, in ways less conspicuous than was David’s inclination. So her public ambitions were for him, a melding of their temperaments and needs.

David smiled back at her, appreciating how comfortable he felt with her. Like Carole, he wanted children; it was easy to imagine her as a mother, one of the many ways in which he thought of her with confidence and warmth. If he sometimes watched Carole with the eyes of a partner rather than a lover, David knew that this was his way: between Hana and Carole no woman had truly touched his heart, and he had stopped believing that he would find a love that could wholly erase the past. He had loved without constraint only once, and it had brought him such misery that he was determined never to endure it again.

“We
are
a pair,” David reaffirmed with a quick grin. “Our son will have his bar mitzvah, our daughter her bat mitzvah. And we’ll make them go to Hebrew school until they hate us both.”

Accepting this concession with a look of satisfied amusement, Carole turned the key in the ignition. “I can hardly wait to tell Dad about Hebrew school. He’ll be thrilled.”

They pulled out of the garage into the sunlight, David watching Carole’s hair ripple in the breeze of a cool summer day.
So,
Hana had said,
a nice Jewish girl, and a rich one at that. Things often end up the way they’re supposed to, I think.

Years before, David thought, she had tried to tell him.

It had taken several long telephone calls before Hana had agreed to meet again, this time in the only place where no one could see them: his apartment. It was a warren off Harvard Square—a living room with a couch, coffee table, television, desk, and computer; a cramped kitchen with a table that seated two, a bedroom with a queen bed, a dresser, and the racing bike David used for exercise in the spring and fall. Dressed in blue jeans and a sweater, Hana stood in the middle of the living room, unsure of whether to stay or go.

“It’s all right,” David said gently. “You’re safe with me. Or from me, if that worries you.”

“It’s just that this is so strange. Being here.”

“I’d gladly take you out to dinner. You know that.”

“I can’t though. You know
that
.”

David considered her. “Do I? I don’t know anything but what you’ve told me.”

Hana smiled a little. “Were you Arab, you would know without my telling you.”

“Were I Saeb, you mean.”

A flicker of emotion—guilt, David thought—surfaced in the dark pool of her eyes, causing him to regret his last remark. “I can learn, Hana. Really.”

“Why is that so important to you?”

“I’m not sure yet. I only know that it is.”

She gave him a look of cool appraisal. “Perhaps I’m something you can’t have,” she said at length. “And so you’ll want me until you do.”

David shook his head. “Right now, all I want is to cook dinner. And all I need from you is your company.”

She followed him to the kitchen. David had set the table—white dishes, two wineglasses, bright cloth napkins, a candle in a brass candlestick holder—and laid out the veal cutlets, soaking in a marinade of his own invention. As though for something to say, she inquired, “Did you cook at home? Your parents’ home, I mean.”

“Not really. The housekeeper did, mostly. My mother’s passion is for English literature, not cooking.”

“And you have brothers and sisters?”

The question reminded David of how little they knew of each other, the gaps between his instinctive sense of her and the accretion of fact and detail through which people learned—or thought they learned—who another person was. “No,” he answered. “I seem to have exhausted their interest in playing life’s genetic lottery.” He nodded toward an open bottle of cabernet sauvignon. “I usually sip wine while I cook. But I’m guessing you don’t drink at all.”

Hana hesitated. “I do, a little,” she told him. “When I’m not with Saeb, or girlfriends who might disapprove.”

He poured some for her. “Then taste it, if you like.”

She hesitated, then took a sip. “It’s good, I think. But then how would I know?”

David gave her a sideways glance. “What you think is all that matters. Only wine snobs care about knowing. In California, some people devote their lives to it.”

Hana smiled, as if she found this inconceivable. “Americans—even your indulgences take on such importance. You would think no one was starving, here or anywhere.” She took another sip of wine. “That’s much of what makes America dangerous, I think—this self-absorption that keeps so many of you so strangely innocent. Sometimes America is like a large puppy, all big paws and floppy tail, that runs through the living room breaking the glassware and knocking things off tables, too happy discovering all it can do to care about the damage. Except that your living room is the world.”

The metaphor made David laugh. “I’ve got such a lot to atone for.”

Hana gave him an indulgent smile. “It would take a lifetime. Your annual day of atonement—Yom Kippur, is it? Repentance on the installment plan will not be enough.”

“Even if I can cook?”

“That remains to be seen.” Her tone became teasing. “Another thing about Americans is they’re overconfident. They’re not used to letting outsiders grade their performance.”