Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (25 page)

Discussion

First, Atlantica correctly
notes that the federal government exclusively regulates matters of
air safety and flight operations. This federal regulatory scheme
was enacted to ensure the safety of all passengers by centralizing
rule-making authority and promulgating uniform federal airline
regulations. Atlantica further points out that the 1978 Airline
Deregulation Act includes a preemption provision “prohibiting the
States from enforcing any law ‘relating to rates, routes, or
services’ of any air carrier.” 
Morales v. Trans World Airlines, Inc.
, 504 U.S. 374 (1992) (finding that this clause preempted
state consumer protection law restricting the advertising of
airline fares). Atlantica contends that this action involves
questions of airline “services,” which are controlled by the
federal law and therefore are outside the scope of state law. The
Court agrees. Because federal law does not provide a private cause
of action, Plaintiffs have no remedy. Although this result may seem
harsh, this Court has no authority to create such a cause of
action; it is a matter for Congress to consider and
address.

Moreover, Plaintiffs’ claims against the
Airline fail for the additional reason that they have not presented
any evidence of negligence. While not conclusive, the evidence of
record is that the crash of Flight 640 appears to have been caused
by an explosive device planted by unknown third parties. There has
been no showing of any error of commission or omission on the part
of Atlantica that contributed to the planting of such a bomb. It is
Plaintiffs’ burden to demonstrate such evidence.

Because Plaintiffs have failed to
demonstrate a genuine issue of fact as to the essential element of
negligence, their claim fails on this ground as well.

WHEREFORE, the Court grants Atlantica’s
motion for summary judgment as to all claims raised in the
complaint.

Norman T. Schenkel, Judge

LISA FREMONT STIRRED, CRAWLING
THROUGH the cobwebs of sleep, grasping at the fragile tendrils
of an early morning dream. Through the fog, she saw herself
stretched between Max Wanaker and Sam Truitt, who were playing
tug-of-war with her.

“I love you,” Max was saying, pulling at one
arm.

“But I respect you,” Sam Truitt countered,
pulling the other arm.

“I need your help!” Max pleaded.

“But your loyalty is to the law,” Truitt
said.

I want it all
, she thought, waking up
with a ferocious headache.

She had a breakfast of three Tylenol and
black coffee. Max was gone, having left early to meet the lawyers
for another session at the FAA, contesting a surprise inspection
report.

Lisa had slept restlessly, her mind churning
at the prospect of the job interview. She awoke several times, and
now another dream came back to her. She and Max were in New York at
a Broadway show. While in the office, he was a gruff corporate
executive snarling at underlings, but take him to 
Les
Miserables
, and he’ll burst into tears the first time Fantine
sings, “I Dreamed a Dream.”

Maybe that’s why I still care for him. But
is it love or a mixture of debt, gratitude, and nostalgia?

Which made her wonder.

If I’m trying to change, if I’m trying to be
different from Max, why do this? I want to believe in ethics and
fairness and all the flowery words in all those dusty books. Why
don’t I? Why can’t I?

She’d gone through so many changes that her
life, which had once seemed so simple—should I wear the black
fishnet stockings with the see-through toreador’s jacket?—had
become incredibly complex. Including the really big questions.

Who am I? What do I believe in?

She didn’t know.

Late last night, they’d ordered Thai takeout
and watched a movie. Just like being married. They had made love,
but her heart wasn’t in it. It had become a mundane duty. A routine
parting of the legs and disengagement of mind from
body. 
Really
 like being married, she supposed.

Lisa wanted more. She wanted a man she would
long for when they were apart, cherish when they were together.
Sure, it sounded like soap opera stuff, but she’d had it once, oh
so briefly, with Tony.

Lisa proceeded to get dressed, or rather to
get dressed and undressed several times. She began with the
double-breasted navy blazer. Three of them, actually, spread across
her bed. One had natural shoulders and white buttons, the second
padded shoulders and gold buttons, both with three-inch lapels,
while the third was collarless.

After modeling them all in the bedroom
mirror, she chose the one with gold buttons, a nautical flair.

If he hires me, I’ll probably get all the
damned admiralty cases. And if he doesn’t, I will have let Max
down, something he never did to me.

She stood in front of the mirror, holding the
jacket under her chin. The strong, dark color suited her fair
complexion and blue eyes. Okay, so they weren’t really blue. They
just took on whatever color framed her face. They became emeralds
if she was dressed in her Sherwood Forest aerobics outfit, as she
called the kelly green tights and leotard. They looked like the
shallow, turquoise water off St. Kitts if she wore the light blue
silk scarf knotted at her neck. In the mustard business suit she
bought on sale at Saks, an instantly regretted purchase, her eyes
assumed a hazel cast.

She held up two blouses, both silk and pearly
white, one with a mandarin collar, the other a V-neck. She had a
good neck, so why not show it. Of course, under that theory, she
should also show her ass.

She tossed the clothing onto the bed, the
silk blouse sliding to the floor, the blazer joining a jumble of
suits, dresses, and jackets already modeled, critiqued, and
discarded. Now she was naked, studying herself in the mirror. It
had been ten years. Strange, she looked younger now than she had as
an underage dancer —
“never say stripper, you’re an exotic
dancer”
—in her black garter belts, matching thong, and that
awful red satin bolero jacket. And the makeup! Thick eyeliner on
top and bottom lids, smeared upward to give a catlike look of
sexual ferocity, her lips painted a deep crimson.

Who was I then? Who am I now?

“I’m Lisa Fremont,” she said to the mirror,
extending her right hand to an imaginary interviewer.

“Ah yes, Ms. Fremont,” dropping her voice to
a masculine timbre. “I’ve reviewed your curriculum vitae, and I
must say, you have an impressive background.”

She laughed. “You don’t know the half of it,
Justice Truitt.”

She gave good interview—top of the class, a
first-rate law review note on the right of privacy, and
street-smarts that her Ivy League competitors couldn’t match—so why
was she so nervous? Another interview came back to her. In her last
semester at Stanford, she had applied to one of San Francisco’s
largest and stuffiest law firms. She’d gone to lunch with the
senior partner and two young male associates—all suspenders, cuff
links, and pearly California teeth. They were at the Big Four, a
mahogany mausoleum honoring four railroad tycoons, a place so
masculine that testosterone replaces the vermouth in the martinis.
The old coot was rambling on about the glory of representing
insurance companies, banks, and manufacturers with an unfortunate
predilection—his lawyerly term—for producing exploding tires,
collapsing ladders, and toxic pharmaceuticals. She listened
politely, ignoring the two boy-toy lawyers whose leers suggested
they couldn’t wait to bend her over a stack of Corpus Juris
Secundum. She wasn’t halfway through her Dungeness crab cocktail
when the boss patted his worsted wool suit pocket and turned to her
apologetically. “It appears I’ve left your curriculum vitae in the
office. Could you orally refresh me?”

The two associates snorted vichyssoise up
their nasal cavities, faces turning the same color as their power
burgundy ties.

“No,” Lisa answered, politely, “but I have a
couple of girlfriends who’d love to.”

She didn’t want the job, anyway. Or rather,
Max didn’t want her to have the job. He was already talking about
the court of appeals job, a great stepping stone to clerking for
the Supremes.

Lisa Fremont, clerk on the United States
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That had seemed like
the top of the world. But now, this …

After a year clerking on the appeals court,
she applied for a job with Samuel Adams Truitt, the newest Justice
on the Supreme Court, whose vote Max’s lawyers said they needed if
they were to win. Neither Max nor his deep-carpet mouthpieces could
help her now. To be a law clerk on the Supreme Court of the United
States, you had to earn it.

She studied herself in the mirror. She had
long legs with more than a hint of muscle in the calves, a legacy
of the dancing. Her stomach was flat and her bottom tight, countess
squats in the gym compensating for sitting on her ass the last
twelve months in the chambers of Judge Mary Alice O’Brien, a
sixty-six-year-old Reagan appointee who sipped bourbon during
recess.

Still looking in the mirror, Lisa arched her
back and stood, hip shot, an old pose from the club. Her firm, high
breasts were too small for her prior line of work, Lisa had
thought, until Sheila, the mother hen and oldest stripper, told
her, “It ain’t what you got, honey, it’s what you do with what you
got.”

From the Tiki Club to the Supreme Court. One
small step for a woman, one giant leap for a stripper.

Now, she put on her makeup, a light
foundation that covered the sprinkling of freckles across her
narrow nose. Her cheekbones, already strong, took on new contours
with a light dusting of blush. An almost invisible application of
mauve eye shadow and a coral lipstick followed. She’d already
blow-dried her short, reddish blonde hair that, like her eyes,
changed color in different surroundings, taking on golden red
highlights at times, becoming a flaming forest fire in direct
sunlight. She’d gone through law school and her one-year clerkship
with a shoulder-length layered shag. She cut her hair after her
visit last spring to Harvard, a week after Professor Sam Truitt’s
appointment but before his grueling confirmation hearings. She’d
sat in the back of the lecture hall, listening and watching … and
learning. Not about natural law versus positive law—she’d already
read Truitt’s articles—but about the man.

The hall had been packed. No Socratic inquiry
this day. It was a straight lecture, or rather a performance. The
tall, handsome, broad-shouldered professor, a youthful,
sandy-haired forty-six—as different from his faculty colleagues as
she was from her fellow students bounded across the stage, taking
the class on a trip, dramatically tracing the history of the law,
the entire range of rights and responsibilities from the Code of
Hammurabi to modern teenage curfews. Playing several roles, Sam
Truitt became Madison and Hamilton

tackling federalism, Zola
shouting 
“J’accuse!,”
 John Marshall Harlan
dissenting against segregation, and Clarence Darrow pleading for
the lives of Leopold and Loeb: “Why did they kill little Bobby
Franks? They killed him because they were made that way, and that
calls not for hate but for kindness.”

Affecting a Boston accent, standing ramrod
straight, he became Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the magnificent
Yankee: “When the people want to do something and I can’t find
anything in the Constitution expressly forbidding them, I say,
whether I like it or not, Goddamn it let ‘em do it!”

He drew raucous laughter as Dickens’s Mr.
Bumble, who, having been told that the law presumes a man to
control his wife’s actions, responded, “If the law supposes that,
the law is an ass, an idiot!”

Near the end, he became Willy Loman, telling
his boss, “I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now
I can’t pay my insurance. You can’t eat the orange and throw the
peel away.” Then he asked his students to consider the moral and
legal issues of Willy’s suicide and whether the life insurance
company should pay his widow. Before anyone could think it through,
he was George in 
Of Mice and Men
, shooting Lennie to
spare him from a lifetime of imprisonment, asking what George
should be charged with, and what are the moral differences between
his actions and those of Dr. Kevorkian?

Cooking a stew of history and law, morality
and philosophy, fact and fiction, Truitt mesmerized the students.
Here was a professor who was witty and entertaining, profane and
profound, charismatic and charming. It was a breathtaking
performance, and afterward, the students stood and applauded for
several minutes, whistling their approval, stomping their feet,
crowding around him, peppering him with questions. Many of the
women—Lisa included—desired him. She had to remind herself that
this was a job, that Sam Truitt was her mark, and what she had to
sell was herself instead of a seventy-five-dollar bottle of
carbonated champagne in the Tiki VIP room.

But he was so damned smart and so damned
sexy. What a powerful combination. In the tepid tea of academe,
Truitt was a bracing shot of vodka on the rocks. Law professor as
rock star.

She allowed herself a small fantasy. She was
in the library of the Supreme Court, deep in the tall stacks,
searching for some obscure precedent among the dusty volumes. She
stood on tiptoes and stretched to pull down a volume, but it was
too high. Standing behind her, Sam Truitt reached up and plucked
the book from the shelf. Their bodies touched. She turned, and his
arms slipped around her waist, pulling her close. She rubbed
against him, an affectionate cat, and they kissed, a magical kiss
that swept her away. Away from her past, from Max … from reality.
She even tried out the name, Lisa Truitt, repeating it silently,
then chasing the thought away. How juvenile! Sam Truitt was one of
the elite. What would he see in her? Besides, dummy, he’s
married.