Lily White (27 page)

“They never come down until we’re asleep.”

“What are they
doing
up there?”

Lee would get home from her summer job, working on the petitions drive at McGovern headquarters in Manhattan, and find her parents standing by the door, awaiting her, as she came into the kitchen from the garage.

“Is Robin taking drugs? What do you think?”

“Go upstairs, knock on her door, and see if she wants to talk to somebody. You know, a doctor.”

“Speak to your sister!” they ordered Lee. Tell her: The third overdue notice for
Steppenwolf;
a funny smell, like bad cheese, coming through the door of her bedroom; that girl who’s in that
Last Tango
movie with Marlon Brando is on
Johnny Carson
tonight and she might want to see her; Grandma Eva is in the hospital; Grandma Eva is in a coma; does she know where my bone Ferragamo flats are; Grandma Eva died and the funeral is tomorrow at eleven o’clock at Schwartz Brothers.

During June, Lee, dutifully, would knock on Robin’s door. Her sister would open it a crack. The room was always dark and stank of pot and body odor; Ira was never in sight. “Yeah?” Robin would demand. Lee would deliver the message. Robin would invariably respond with “Fuck you, fuck them,” and shut the door.

Then, for the first two weeks of July, Lee simply jotted down her parents’ entreaties and slipped pieces of paper under Robin’s door.

After that she began a lackadaisical affair with one of McGovern’s advisers on fiscal reform, a forty-eight-year-old corporate
lawyer from the second-biggest Wall Street law firm, who had a wife and four children in New Canaan, Connecticut, and a pied-à-terre facing Gramercy Park.

Lee did not return home for the rest of the summer.

You would think, since at least a quarter of the fibers of Lee’s being were dedicated solely to Jazz Taylor, that she might have found something familiar about the finely built young man with the square jaw and cascading brown hair—gorgeous, sun-kissed hair—who sat, in New York University Law School’s alphabetic tradition, five seats before her. At least, his smile—broad, his high cheeks pushing up his eyes into twin crescents—might have reminded her of someone she had spied upon while hiding behind a spreading juniper. Barring that, you would think, surely, that in the second week of classes, when that mad genius of torts, Professor Myron Blumenthal, actually bellowed “Jasper Taylor!” she would gasp in recognition, or that her heart would leap or her head would spin. But no: nothing, zero, no reaction at all.

Lee was too frightened to notice. The summer had drained her: not being able to go home for fear of either being grabbed by her frenzied parents or, if she could steal upstairs unhassled, having to listen to the bumping of a headboard against the wall as Robin and Ira engaged in one seemingly endless honeymoon hump; the doomed McGovern campaign; the dreary love affair of convenience, made even more burdensome when the corporate lawyer proposed to leave his wife and children and begin life anew with Lee in what he referred to as “a Village pad.”

And law school! Could there have been some terrible mistake when they mailed out the scores of the LSATs? Could she have been given some legal genius’s number, while some other White—the legal genius—got hers and gave up hopes of a seat on the Supreme Court and was now a junior buyer in the notions
and trimmings department at Ohrbach’s? The more Lee studied, the more she did not know. She was awed by the penetrating intelligence of her teachers, frightened by the aggressive cleverness of her classmates. No matter how much work she did that first terrible week, she could not make sense of anything that had to do with the law. She searched the faces of the students in her section, hoping to discover fear in their eyes, but more disquieting still, she saw none.

She noticed the young man only because of the manner in which he failed to answer Professor Blumenthal’s question: “Can the same act be both a tort and a crime?”

“I really don’t know,” the young man said. What made her look down the row at him was his air of casual regret. It said: Gee, that’s an awfully good question. I wish I knew the answer. He was sitting back comfortably in his seat, looking Blumenthal straight in the eye. He displayed neither the white-lipped, dry-mouthed fear nor the bogus sangfroid that never hid a student’s mortification at being caught not knowing.

“You don’t know?” Blumenthal boomed. He was a massive man, with a bald head so huge he looked like a monstrous, hydrocephalic baby.
“You do not know?”

The young man shook his head, and his shoulder-length hair moved with soft grace. “No, I don’t.” Now everyone was looking at the young man. They were riveted. Lee could see why: He was simply not terrified. What was wrong with him? Did he lack a nervous system?

“May I ask why you do not know?”

“I guess I didn’t comprehend the reading.”

“You did read it?” Blumenthal snorted a cruel laugh that implied doubt and derision.

“Yes, I did.” Not even a hint of panic. Mild regret, and perhaps the onset of the most trifling irritation that Blumenthal was carrying on so.

Blumenthal, poised at the bottom of the amphitheater of a lecture hall, began to vibrate like a tuning fork, unable to decide whether to attack or merely to dismiss the young man disdainfully. To do the latter might be construed as retreat, even cowardice. Blumenthal filled his large chest with air. Lee felt sick for the young man. But then Blumenthal did not strike. Instead he was lowering his enormous head. He was scrutinizing his seating chart. Now he was looking up, ready to attack anew. His voice rang out: “Mr. White!” She looked around, hoping. No Mr. White. “Lee White!” Her guts liquefied.

“What?” was all she could say, because she could not for the life of her remember the question.

“Answer, please,
Miss
White.”

She stared at Blumenthal, but there was not a hint on his mask of a face. Torts, she told herself. This is my Torts class, so the question has to be … “The same act can be both a tort and a crime,” she heard herself saying.

The professor began to shake his head, as if in utter weariness with the human condition. But her answer was right! She remembered reading … Oh, right. He wanted the details. “Take the case of an assault,” she went on. “It’s a tort because it is an offense against an individual.” She swallowed. Her throat hurt so much she didn’t know if she could go on. And she felt feverish. And her stomach! Any second, she could get diarrhea standing there, and no matter what she did with the rest of her life, anyone at NYU Law School would remember her as the Girl Who Had Diarrhea in Blumenthal’s Section. “But it’s a crime too, because it’s an offense against society.”

Blumenthal nodded, but his expression was bitter, as if what she’d said was not merely inadequate but vile. “Can a tort arise out of contractual relations?” he asked, as if not expecting an answer.

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Like if a person is induced by fraudulent representations to purchase stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Merchandise,” Lee clarified. Then she saw Blumenthal had begun to breathe another weary sigh. Her words shot out like bullets. “An act can actually be three things: a breach of contract, a tort, and a crime. For instance, the misappropriation of funds by a trustee is a breach of the contract of trust, the tort of conversion, and the crime of embezzlement.”

Blumenthal looked away from her, back at the man with the glorious brown hair. “Did you hear that, Mr. …” He consulted his seating chart. “Taylor?”

“Yes,” the young man said. He leaned forward and looked down the row at Lee. “Thanks,” he said, and gave her a grin that was not merely genuine, not merely good-natured, but heartfelt. It filled her with warmth. She smiled back, more girlishly than in all the years since she had become a student revolutionary and stopped shaving under her arms. And in that second, when at last she was able to avert her eyes from his, his name rang out in her head: Taylor. Taylor? Trembling inside, wishing she were numb, she turned back. Taylor! He was still smiling at her.

“Jazz Taylor,” he said, after class.

“Lee White.” Shit! she chided herself. She should have said “Jazz?” Why hadn’t she sounded at least mildly curious about such a singular name? “Jazz? Are you a musician?” she could have asked. No, too contrived. How about: “Is Jazz short for something?” Now, of course, he’d figure out that somehow she knew him. Not just knew him: He’d put two and two together and realize that she was the girl in the Dodge Dart who kept obsessively driving by Hart’s Hill throughout his senior year and even during college vacations. Very likely he knew exactly who she was! She
was probably the laughingstock of his whole family. Jazz’s girlfriend in that dreadful Dart, ho-ho-ho.

“God, you were cool in there,” he said. Up close, his skin was fair but weathered, with the sandy texture and rich red undertone of a born outdoorsman.

“Cool?” she asked. She heard her own voice coming out cold, snotty: like her mother talking to a salesgirl who was wearing cheap shoes. But the words kept coming, and she was powerless to stop them. “Cool like ‘Hey, that’s cool’? Or cool as in unruffled?”

And now what was she doing? Flirting with him! Shit-ass-rat-fuck! If she were a bystander, watching herself, she would puke. Looking up at him with a starlet’s you-great-big-hunk-of-man gaze. Surely in half a second he’d check out his watch and make some pathetic excuse and rush off. Or maybe he was too polite to cut and run, but he definitely had to want to scream with laughter at the sight of her combing back her hair slowly, erotically, with her fingers. Quickly, she stuffed her hand deep into the pocket of her bell-bottom jeans.

“Cool as in unruffled,” he replied. “I was so damned ruffled I couldn’t remember whether I read that part and forgot it—or just didn’t read it.”

“You had to have read it,” Lee said. “It was assigned—” She stopped because now he was laughing—at her earnestness. Maybe he was one of those Learned Hand-type prodigies who merely had to sit in a classroom in which a few legal notions were bandied about and—Bingo!—all matters juristical became clearer than crystal. She was annoyed at not being able to repress the fast, follow-up realization that if Torts had been clearer than crystal, then Jazz Taylor would not have been caught short by Myron Blumenthal. “Doesn’t it scare you
not
to read it?” she asked him. “I mean, every night when I start getting tired, I think: What if Blumenthal calls on me?”

“And so you keep studying?”

“Till I drop,” Lee said, now laughing with him. She realized they had walked through the halls of the law school and out the front door only when a gust of hot-dog-scented wind from Washington Square Park hit her in the face. “There’s so much intellectual rigor here,” she told him. “I’m not just afraid of not doing well. I’m afraid of not …” She paused. He was waiting, and doing what no one else in law school had the time to do: listen.

“Afraid of not what?” he urged.

“I’m afraid of not
getting
it. I mean, even if I could memorize each individual case, I may not comprehend what the cases mean in relation to each other, in relation to the law.”

“In relation to God too?” He was smiling, but not in fun. In compassion. “For someone in her first month of law school, you’re aiming kind of high. Do you really think you have to comprehend the entire history and meaning of jurisprudence? Couldn’t you settle for a B in Torts?”

“But it could be an F!” she exclaimed.

“Come on,” Jazz said, shaking his head. “You’re incapable of getting an F in anything.”

She was about to demand: How do you know? But as she strolled alongside him across the park on this bracing gray day—somehow he had led her across the street without her even knowing it—he seemed so certain. For the first time since she began law school, her jaw unclenched. She would pass Torts. In fact, as she stood beside Jazz Taylor on line at the hot dog cart, she suddenly knew she would get at least a B from the bully Blumenthal.

“Mustard?” the man at the cart was asking. Higher than a B if she kept working the way she had been.

“Lee?” Jazz asked.

“Umm …”Jazz was going to think she was an idiot. A person either likes mustard or doesn’t. She doesn’t stand there with a
stupid, apologetic grin on her face, assessing the pros and cons of mustardhood.

But the September air felt cool on her face. The people in the park—undergraduates, mothers and toddlers, junkies—all looked radiant. The first fallen leaves, the litter, even the dog shit, appeared to be the perfect examples of their kind. Isn’t this the most gorgeous day ever? she wanted to ask him. Red stems brought out the vivid beauty of yellow leaves on the pavement; a Yoo-Hoo bottle resting against the crumpled sports page of the
Daily News
might have been arranged by Renoir; a Newfoundland puppy left a proud, steaming heap of feces. Lee felt something rising inside her. Exhilaration. She was not going to fail. She was going to be a lawyer! Jazz Taylor had made her see that.

“Lee?” And he was saying her name! This wasn’t any exceptionally cute-looking guy, slender (but with powerful arms bulging out of his army-green T-shirt). This was literally the man of her dreams, saying her name! “Lee.” Jazz Taylor!

“Mustard,” she told the hot dog man. “And tons of sauerkraut.”

Life is rarely as thrilling as fantasy, or as well scripted, so it was a double pleasure that two days after Halloween, after they had already sipped seven cups of coffee together and enjoyed two dinners in each other’s company, Jazz finally got around to asking: “Where are you from?”

“Long Island,” Lee responded casually.

“No! You’re kidding! Me too. What part?”

The revelation was precisely as she had imagined it. Well, not precisely. They were friends, not lovers. And the sad fact about the pressures of law school was that Jazz was still the only close friend she had made. She didn’t yet know any woman in her class with whom she could share the do-you-think-it’s-that-he’s-secretly-shy-or-that-he’s-only-interested-in-me-as-a-friend?
conversation and get reassured that he was indeed secretly shy. So unlike in her dreams, Jazz wasn’t kissing her fingertips at the very moment he found out where she lived. He was sitting across from her, sipping his usual half-coffee, half-cream concoction—cream of coffee soup, he called it. She said, offhandedly, as if he probably never heard of the place: “Shorehaven.”