The Burden of Proof (12 page)

When he opened the package, he found a videocassette.

"Watch it." She gestured through an arch toward the small adjoining family room. Stern, thinking of resisting further, abandoned the notion. With Fiona, there was no point. lie found the VCR and pushed the buttons; he was good with machines. The images jerked onto the screen in the midst of some sequence. The picture was of poor quality, homemade.

The skin tones were far too rosy. But they showed enough.

The first frames were of a young woman. She zoomed in and out of focus, but she remained naked as the day of her birth. She was slender and small-breasted--seated on a bed, and smiling at the camera in a harmless way. He was too taken aback at first to understand what consequence this naked woman could be to Fiona. But then he recognized Nate's voice on the sound track; the words were not clear, and Stern, as he stood there, .suddenly nipping at his sherry, had no wish to boost the volume and further intrude. He understood enough: Nate was the cameralilan.

Strangely, his first impulse was to feel sorry for his neighs, bor. How could he have done this to himself?. There was nothing particularly salacious about the girl's poses.

She crossed a leg casually at one point; she had on black high-oheeled shoes, and as Nate moved the camera about her, the dark pubic triangle was more visible, split with the bright pink lick of her labia. There was something almost innocent about these pictures. Certainly relaxed.

Nate and the young lady, whoever she was, were well acquainted. She smiled as if she were on a beach.

Then, as Stern had a finger poised over the stop button, the picture flipped; the screen went black, then raced with fuzz, and finally filled once more with figures. It took him an instant to sort things out, and a sense of disturbance preceded his willingness to name what he was seeing. Nate, it seemed, had turned the camera on himself.

Out of focus, the white shaft of his erect penis was nonetheless recognizable; perspectives were hard to discern, but Nate appeared to be a man of generous proportions. Then, without warning, the image jumped again and settled finally on what Nate likely had been meaning to portray all along. The distances were too short for the camera's focal range, and you saw mostly the young woman's hair, which, blurred, looked like some matted bathroom rug.

But there was no mistaking her reddened lips fixed over the end of Nate's member. "This is great," Nate said on the tape. "This is great." Stern could understand that much.

Nate's blow job was preserved forever.

"I see," said Stern. He had stopped the recorder.

Fiona had remained by the tea cart, with her back to the screen.

"Pretty nasty, don't you think? The son of a bitch told me he was going to AA at night. How do you like that?"

"Fiona--" he said, but he had no clue as to what else he should add.

"Here's what I want to know, Sandy." She threw cubes quickly into her glass; she still had not faced him. "If I file for divorce, can I use that in court?"

Stern at once turned elusive. He was not about to get caught between his neighbors. His practice did not include matrimonial work, he told her. Different courts often followed different procedures.

She interrupted, making no effort to hide her harsh look.

"Don't give me a song and dance, Sandy. Yes or no? What do you think?

I want to know where I stand."

He realized that he was highly alarmed. The tape had upset him. And it bothered him more than he would have expected to find that the Cawleys, one more fixture in his life, were coming apart. Eventually, however, he answered.

"I would think it is likely to be admitted in court." There was really no question. Any lawyer with half a brain could think up a dozen ways to get the tape into evidence.

"Well, he'll be a sorry little bastard that day, won't he?

I've told Nate for years he can't afford to divorce me. Now he'll really see what that means." Fiona had her chin erect; defiant. It was hard not to be frightened by her obvious relish in the pain she meant to inflict. "Do you know where I was the first time I saw that, Sandy? At the store. Nate actually asked me to take the camera in to have it fixed. And the boy behind the counter showed me the cassette in there and said, 'What*s this?" He played it in the camera --you know how you can do that?--and he gave me this look. This twenty-year-old kid. And you know what I did? You won't believe it. I pretended, Sandy. I couldn't think of anything else. I actually pretended they were pictures of me."

She cried then. Stern was surprised she had held up as long as she had.

It struck him that Fiona was right. The young woman looked a good deal like her. The same slender, highcheeked prettiness. Was that a hopeful .sign, or something dismal? Or just one more indication that some people always made the same mistake? Certainly there was no wondering now what distractions had kept Nate from returning his calls.

"Fiona, you are upset," said Stern.

"Of course, I'm upset!" she screamed. "Don't patronize me, damn it."

Thinking he might soothe her, he had started to edge forward. But now he held his place.

"Nate doesn't know I've seen this. I couldn't stand to listen to him explain." She looked fiercely at Stern. "And you don't say a thing. I'm still not sure what I'm going to "No, no, of course not," answered Stern, although it was difficult to think that Nate, who after all had handed her the camera, was innocent at every level. But Fiona was not one to adhere to complicated views of human intention. She had a narrow vantage, a limited rangewher emotions moved only between mild hostility and absolute rage. She was at the point now of flailing, and was likely as a result to do herself serious harm, as she had just now by urging Stern to look at this tape, thinking she would shame Nate before the respectable neighbors, and finding instead that the humiliation was worse than she could bear. It probably was best that she avoid the confrontation with her husband. In humor, Clara and he had promised over the years that they would never disclose their infidelities to one another. A joke, but not without its point.

It was hard to imagine a loving explanation of this sort of business. At any rate, he had been lucky enough to limp through his marriage without unfaithfulness--at least, not of the carnal variety.

Stern tried to be solicitous. Couples have gone on, 'he told Fiona, but she was paying no attention. She sat on the corner of a lounger, a few feet from where he was standing, sobbing into her drink. He could see the spots of rouge on her cheeks, the perfect part in her colored hair.

"You know what I resent the most? That he would do this now. Now.

Twenty years ago, there was always some fellow around. I got out of the car and men watched me walk down the street. They ogled me." She pronounced it with a soft o, so that the word rhymed with 'google." "I could feel it," said Fiona. "But he has to go looking for the fountain of youth. For what? What does he think is so wonderful?

What does this do for him? Can you believe that last business? The big goddamn stud." Fiona cried harder. She held the highball glass up to her cheek. "Don't you think I can do that, too? I always thought he wanted me to have some dignity. I can do that. I'll let him take movies. I don't care. Pull your pants down, Sandy, I'll do it to you.

Here."

For the faintest instant, Fiona's look became far more purposeful than the liquor would have seemed to allow, and Stern was convinced that she meant to move toward him.

Perhaps she even started and he faltered. Something happened--the quickest moment, in which he did not observe things clearly, given his sense of alarm.

"Oh, what do you care," she murmured. She had come to her feet, but she sank down now. He was not sure precisely what she meant by the remark--probably that he was without compassion; but there was some strange insinuation in her voice, in her usual domineering tone, an odd suggestion that he was an abject thing with no right to resist. "Fiona," he said.

She waved a hand. "Go home, Sandy. I'm losing my mind."

He waited a moment or two until she had composed herself a bit.

"I'll tell Nate You were looking for him."

"Yes, please," he answered, and they parted on that odd note of propriety.

That night, he could not sleep. Throughout their marriage, Clara had suffered prolonged bouts of insonmia, and often went through the days with a worried look and smarting eyes. Occasionally, in. the depth of night, he woult muse himself to find her wide-awake beneath the reading lamp on her side of the bed. In the early years, he had asked what ailed her. Her reply was always reassuring but elliptical, and in time he responded to these episodes only by muttering that she should turn out the light. She complied, but sat upright in the dark. Now and then, when this went on for nights, he had made the mildest suggestions, but Clam was much too circumspect to lay her head, or troubles, on any psychiatrist's couch.. She, like Stern, believed that, in the end, one must master these matters on one's own. So be it. Now the troubled nights were his.

He sat up with his pillow propped against the headboard, the single directed beam on his bedside lamp the only light in the house. He took up a Braudel history, and then replaced it on the night table. This episode with Fiona would not pass easily. From his body a mild force field seemed to rise, an almost electrical aura. In the dark he made his way to the sun room for a drink. Vodka and soda, something he had seen a client order in a bar. He pushed aside the curtain, looking to the Cawleys'. Nate's BMW was in the circular drive, and the only light was borrowed from the street lamps and the moon crazing the dark windows. Was Fiona also restless, or did she sleep soundly, spent by ire and impulse?

He roamed back to the bedroom with the drink. With the liquor, the sensations had become stronger and more localized. His genitals were almost singing. With a certain shyness, he reiterated in his mind the tape recording. One image seemed to fascinate him, a peculiar lateral alignment in the camera's eye as it looked down to the woman's head in Nate's lap and caught the white part in her hair, the shining ridge of her nose, and the glistening pale stalk growing out between her lips as she drew back. Slightly drank, he had no power to resist his own excitement. His organ throbbed, lifting the bedcovers. Three weeks ago, he would have assumed that he was dead forever to such stimulation.

He thought suddenly: What happened there at the end? If anger and despair had emboldened her wildly, would he have stopped her? 'Oh, what do you care?" He still had no idea what Fiona had meant, but recollected, her remark set up a shiver, as if it were a tantalizing message of libertine permission. What did he care?

"Absurd," he said aloud, and tried to sleep, galled to think that he was taken up with half-drunk fantasies of Fiona. Fiona! She was one of those creatures he had never found appealing. But now, as he crept in and out of a dusky night-town on the borders of sleep, she appeared in his mind alarmingly confused with the young woman for whom Nate had spumed her. Clara had been twenty pounds overweight since Peter's birth, and Stern did not recall wishing even for a second that that were not so. But now he dwelled on the slim body of that much younger woman, transposed in dreaming moments to Fiona. Near five he slept solidly and then bolted awake. He had had the crudest and most direct of dreams that he had supplanted Nate; his penis stood erect, burning with sexual and urinary urgency. What nimble ges-lure, he wondered with sudden languor, would have been utilized to speed his response? He imagined, somehow, the fingering of a flute.

Before six, he drove down to the office. The sky was beginning to be colored, gray and rose, a certain prairie feel to it. The night of sleeplessness left him feeling shattered; he concentrated poorly, while the sensations of his smoky dreams persisted, leaking over him. Behind his desk, he remained stimulated, so that even his fingertips, the hairs atop his knuckles, were quick with sensation. And he heard, remote but insistent, that insinuating voice:

Oh, what do you care?

THREE years ago, Stern had been retained to represent the chief deputy in the Kindle County Prosecutor's Office, who was charged with murdering a female colleague. It had been the tri-cities trial of the decade, revealing tawdry passions and political intrigues, and Stern's role had briefly fiveted attention on him across the nation. In the aftermath, his practice, never insubstantial, had grown significantly. While formerly he'd had one associate, Stern now employed three younger lawyers, all of whom insisted lately that at least one more attorney was needed. One of the lawyers working for Stern, Alec Vestos, dealt exclusively with civil matters and was 'largely on his own; Stern, even three decades along, felt little confidence with the endless rigmarole of civil procedure--depositions, interrogatories, and requests to admit.

The other two lawyers--Raphael Moya and Sondra Duhaney--were both former state defenders and had come to Stern about the same time, two years ago. They followed criminal files in the state court, while Stern usually took principal responsibility for the federal criminal work.

Alec, Raphael, and Sondra were capable of handling most matters without guidance, and since Clara's death, they had been piloting the ship.

Stern's hours here were significantly reduced. After his broken nights, he would find himself in the mornings stricken by morose visions from his dreams, often too forbidding to fully recollect.