Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (31 page)

“Say it, bitch!” Again he twisted her arm,
until she thought the ligaments would tear loose from the
bones.

“I have fear,” she cried, eyes squeezed shut,
her shoulder screaming in agony. “I have respect.”

He let her go. Her arm throbbed. Her ear
stung. Blood dribbled from her earlobe. She felt faint.

“Good,” Shank said, pocketing the bloody
earring like spare change. “I’ve got confidence in you, Lisa. When
you’re through with the judge, he’ll vote to revoke the
Constitution if you ask him to. You do your job, Lisa, we’ve got no
problems.” He flashed a smile as jagged as a cracked eggshell. “You
don’t, I’ll take your other earring and the ear, too.”

He said it softly, matter-of-factly, without
anger. Max hurried to Lisa’s side and wrapped his arms around her
just as her legs buckled.

Still speaking in a hushed voice, Shank said,
“Now why don’t you take a little walk so Max can bring you up to
speed?”

Silently, Max guided her to the door. She was
too shocked, too much in pain, to protest. As she stepped into the
corridor, Lisa took one look back inside the apartment. Shank was
lighting another cigarette. He took a deep drag, then tossed the
match onto her Persian rug.

SAMUEL ADAMS TRUITT MAY HAVE BECOME A
JUSTICE of the Supreme Court but at home, he still carried out
the trash. And walked the dog, a russet-haired mutt with retriever
and shepherd blood named Sopchoppy, Sop for short. And verbally
sparred with his wife, Connie, she of the patrician good looks and
slashing wit. And on regular cycles, for the past two years, he
gave his wife twice daily injections of Pergonal plus a 5 A.M.
blood test, all aimed at increasing her egg production so that with
the help of a fertility expert, a petri dish, and divine
intervention, they could enjoy the benefits of parenthood.

So far, the in vitro fertilization had not
worked. All the ultrasounds, all the drugs with their chaotic
mood-altering side effects, all the hours in the doctor’s office
squeezing her hand while a scope was inserted through her abdomen
into the ovaries, all the needles depositing fertilized eggs into
the uterus … all for nothing.

For a while, he thought the experience
brought them together. It was one of the few remaining areas of
common passion or even interest. They laughed over Truitt’s
discomfort at walking into the OB-GYN’s waiting room filled with
suspicious women, then disappearing into a rest room to masturbate
into a plastic cup.

“Was it good for you?” she had asked.

“My hands were too cold,” he replied, “so the
nurse helped.”

Connie had shown him endless wallpaper
patterns, paint chips, and photos clipped
from 
Architectural Digest
 as they set about
planning the nursery. Sam Truitt didn’t know calico from chintz,
and in fact spent several years of bachelorhood with window
coverings of old bedsheets, but he took an interest in the mythical
nursery for the mythical baby because it made Connie happy.

But lately, after so many misses, after
Connie’s headaches and nausea, exuberant hopes followed by deep
despair, after more than twenty-thousand dollars in medical bills,
there was little talk of babies and bassinets. Connie’s moods had
become both extreme and unpredictable. She would burst into tears
at the sight of a pregnant woman or laugh hysterically at
inopportune times.

Today, Truitt knew, Connie had been to the
doctor to see if the latest implant of a fertilized egg or
“pre-embryo,” in Dr. Kalstone’s lingo, had taken hold.

God, let her be pregnant.

Sam Truitt wanted to be a father; he wanted
Connie to be happy; and he wanted to preserve his marriage. At the
moment, all three were in jeopardy.

He had just stuffed a bulging garbage bag
into the plastic curbside container. He had walked and
pooper-scooped Sop, fed and brushed him, and told him he was sorry
there were no game birds to chase in the neighborhood.

Carrying the recycle container to join the
garbage at the curb, Truitt opened the gate in the black wrought
iron fence to what was laughingly called their front yard. It was a
rectangular space of dry brown grass roughly large enough for a
single grave. One block away was the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal,
the narrow manmade waterway where tourists now ride in mule-drawn
boats and locals hike and jog along a towpath lined with giant
sycamores and willows.

The cramped town house was only twenty-seven
feet wide—fifteen feet shorter than his snap to the punter—but
stood three stories high. It was, Connie told him, a shoe box
standing on end.

But it was in Georgetown, which is where she
wanted to live. Insisted on it, really. Her family’s second home
had been here when she was growing up, when her father was a U.S.
senator from Connecticut. That house was three times the size of
this one. But property was cheaper then, and her mother’s
inheritance fueled not only Daddy’s political career but also a
lifestyle far in excess of what an elected official could
provide.

Truitt walked up two flights of stairs to the
bedroom, eager to hear about Connie’s visit to the doctor but
apprehensive at the same time. She sat at her vanity applying
makeup, seemingly oblivious to his presence.

If she’s silent, does it mean she’s not
pregnant? No, the husband is not permitted to draw an adverse
inference from the wife’s failure to testify.

At thirty-eight, Connie was a striking woman
whose fine bone structure, manner, and posture spoke of cultured
breeding and expensive schooling. Truitt did a fancy sidestep to
get around her without banging her elbow. “At home, I had my own
sitting room,” she said in greeting, as if reading his mind about
the tight confines of the town house.

At home.

Home being Waltham, Massachusetts. Home being
where they had spent the bulk of their not entirely happy marriage.
Home 
not
 being where they now lived.

“It’s the nineties,” he replied. “Downsizing
is in. I read it in 
USA Today
.”

“Sam, you don’t read 
USA
Today
.”

She kept her eyes on the mirror, where she
was smoothing a glistening liquid on her lips. Whatever happened to
simple lipstick? He could not keep up with women’s fashions. Sam
Truitt could tell you what Thomas Paine had for breakfast the day
he wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” but he was
oblivious to what his wife wore to the Kennedy Center last Saturday
night, coincidentally, to see a revival of 
1776
. Or,
for that matter, the names of the two couples—her friends not
his—with whom they shared an après-theater supper, her expression,
not his.

He dodged around the bed and opened the door
to what the broker had called the walk-in closet but which would
not accommodate anyone with shoulders wider than the average coat
hanger. Connie’s clothing took up all of her side and most of his.
He stripped down to his underwear, straight-armed a number of her
cocktail dresses, and hung up his suit. Feeling claustrophobic and
not wanting to jitterbug past Connie like Emmitt Smith squeezing
through the off-tackle hole, Truitt sat on the edge of the bed with
its duvet of roses and hyacinths and looked at his wife in the
vanity mirror.

He couldn’t stand it any longer. “How did it
go today?”

“I had lunch with Stephanie,” she said, her
eyes meeting his in the glass.

Objection! Not responsive. Your Honor,
please admonish the witness to answer the question.

“They’re building a gazebo in their
backyard,” Connie continued.

Truitt pondered this tidbit of news. Just
what does one say to a wife whose sister is building a gazebo in
the backyard of her showy two-million-dollar home? That it will be
a nice addition to her Jacuzzi, lap pool, and sauna? That it must
be nice being married to a lobbyist whose basic claim to fame is
being the son-in-law of a former senator—fame enough to make
$850,000 a year, more than five times the salary of a Supreme Court
justice.

“Gazebos are nice,” he said, prudently.

“She showed me the plans. It has a gas grill,
a microwave, dishwasher, full-size refrigerator, plus an ice-cream
fountain and a wet bar with two beer taps.”

Why is she dragging it out? Am I going to be
a father or not?

“What, no roller coaster?”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said.
“Or a snob.”

“What!”

“A reverse snob, actually.”

He was stumped. “What does that mean, that I
look down on people who are better than I am?”

“No, you look down on people who have
attained goals which you think are”—she paused to find the right
word, searching the breadth and depth of her Bryn Mawr-Sorbonne
vocabulary—“inconsequential or frivolous.”

“I cop a plea,” he said. “Guilty as charged.
What are the sentencing guidelines for a repeat offender?”

“Life,” she said, “without parole.”

He smiled with real pleasure. That was the
old Connie. In the fencing match that was their life, a parry was
usually followed by a thrust. Sometimes he yearned for the early
days when they made each other laugh and competed to see who had
the sharper wit. Connie usually won.

He watched his wife lift her long, chestnut
hair into some impossible upswept pile that she clasped with
several silver barrettes. Most of the time, she wore her hair
parted in the middle, where it fell, long and swingy, across her
shoulders. It made her look like a college coed. Now, with her hair
up, she looked regal, Princess of the Capitol, with a long, slender
neck and prominent cheekbones, her dark hair set off by flawless
porcelain skin.

He pondered the nature of their relationship.
Did he love her? Maybe it wasn’t a raging passion, but there was
still care and affection and occasionally, warmth.

Sam Truitt had met Constance Parham at her
family’s third home, the summer cottage on Nantucket. Truitt was an
assistant professor at Harvard Law with no particular interest in
politics, but he had a professed animosity toward many of President
Reagan’s appointees to the federal bench. Senator Lowell Parham was
the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and after reading
one of Truitt’s diatribes in 
The New Republic
, he began
calling on him to draft questions for judicial appointees
considered unqualified.

Truitt was not ordinarily an introspective
man, but he thought now of the forces that had brought him to
Connie. Constance Parham was eight years his junior, just finishing
up a graduate degree in art history when they met. He remembered
the instant attraction to this tall, sassy brunette with a quick
wit and a lethal tongue. She had the clean WASP features of her
mother, a high forehead with a widow’s peak, a wide smile, and the
gift of her father’s laughter and intelligence. Connie could hold
her martinis, crack wise, and beat most men at tennis.

Looking back now, Truitt thought he fell in
love with the family. The senator was a liberal without being a
sissy, a Harvard intellectual who liked to hunt, fish, and drink
bourbon. His wife was a descendant of Massachusetts Puritans who
made several fortunes in New England textile mills and had the
foresight to shift their wealth into Arizona real estate just
before their businesses succumbed to foreign competition. Alice
Parham adored her husband, who returned her love in both public and
private displays of affection. Constance Parham grew up with the
benefits of status and privilege, boarding school in Europe, a
college curriculum that required a commute to Paris, and an endless
supply of eligible suitors, some Cabots, some Lodges, some
Kennedys. And one Truitt.

* * *

“It’ll be nice for the kids,” he said, after
a moment.

“What?”

“The ice cream bar. Maybe the beer taps too,
for all I know.”

“What are you implying?” Irritated now.

“Nothing, just that the gazebo will be nice
for your sister’s children, our nieces and nephews, the little
blond platoon of well-fed Virginia storm troopers.”

Actually, there were only four of them, all
in braces, all in private schools, all with their own horses in
their own stables. The orthodontics and tuition alone must be
astounding, he thought, not to mention the oats and carrots. Harold
Bellows, his brother-in-law, had an eighty-acre estate in Virginia.
In the basement of the sprawling home was an English pub. A real
one, the stained glass and dark wood stripped from a country pub in
the Cotswolds. To Truitt, it represented the essence of
ugly-American acquisitiveness. Taken from a place enjoyed by an
entire village, the old scarred wood bar—ripe with the wet scent of
a hundred years of spilled ale—was now used, if at all, by one
pudgy, overpaid apologist for sugar growers, oil companies, and
heaven help us, handgun manufacturers.

“You’re attacking me,” she said angrily.

“What? How?”

“You’re reminding me in a cheap and cowardly
way that we don’t have children, that I can’t have children, that
my tubes are scarred, but your sperm count is in the top one
percent. You’re a first team All-American sperm machine with a wife
who can’t complete a pass.”

Oh no. God no.

His heart sank. She had answered the question
of the day, the question of the decade, the question of their
lives. He walked over to the vanity and put his arms around her.
Her shoulders felt like pillars of ice. “Connie, I’m sorry. I’m so
sorry.”

She glared at him in the mirror. “If you were
truly sorry, you wouldn’t have used Stephanie’s children to
disparage me.”

He wondered if every marriage had one wound
that would never heal. “I didn’t! Sometimes a gazebo is just a
gazebo. I was just making conversation about our spoiled nieces and
nephews and a goddamn gazebo that’s probably bigger than our
house.”