The Judas Glass (5 page)

“It's okay,” I said.

He pointed at the wheelchair. This was not a casual contest of preferences. How many centuries of hospital lore had led up to this policy—they can fall and break their heads open in the parking lot, but not in here.

“If it makes you happy,” I said.

“It fills me with pure delight,” said the orderly.

It was a shock: it was not yet noon.

I was surprised to see Steve in the lobby, holding Connie's hand. Connie was staying quiet, sitting there, eyes on me.

“We didn't know what to expect. We thought you'd be in overnight,” said Steve, stammering. Steve was my only client to have money in serious quantities, but we had never been especially close. I was touched that he had taken the trouble.

Then Connie was out of her chair, standing straight, jacket over one arm, a businesswoman with little time to spare. She was pale, her lipstick too dark, tiny fine lines of weariness around her eyes. How much had she been able to figure out, I wondered. Everything, judging from the stillness in her eyes, they way she held herself in. That was okay—I hoped that she knew. I couldn't bear telling her.

It was a surprise when Connie touched my face. She looked me in the eyes, and kept me there, like a woman trying to remember a secret.

“A terrible thing,” said Steve. “Absolutely terrible.”

“Sometimes we don't realize the kind of world we live in,” said Connie. She said this without much feeling, and there was an unspoken communication between us: we were going to have a very important conversation soon, whenever we both felt I was strong enough to take it.

“Maybe we are better off not knowing,” said Steve. When he closed his eyes as he spoke his stammer was not so bad.

“They towed your car,” said Connie.

“Naturally,” I said, intending irony. But as soon as I said it I didn't care. If they mashed the car into a glittering cube of scrap steel it would not matter. I had picked the car out of a brochure,
that one
, I said, and then worked the dealer down to such a low price he kept saying I was killing him, like it was a joke. Yes, I had agreed. I was killing him, and we had both laughed.

My car represented a problem I could relish, something to think about. Even in my reduced state I was still a proceduralist. There is a method, always. Someone has to be called, a fee has to be paid, a form signed. Besides, I knew people in the police department.

“It was a mistake,” she said. “I told them so, and they agreed.”

“They?” I said. It was hard to move, talk, think.

“Someone parked the car on College Avenue,” said Steve, “A meter maid tagged it in a red zone. The car got towed, and then Connie—”

He had trouble saying her name, the hard C stopping him, a rock he kept trying to scramble over, slipping.

Tickets. Parking meters. It was all so fiercely ordinary. A skinny young man flew past on a skateboard. There was my car, at the curb. I was almost sorry to see it. I felt like a man about to give away all his possessions. I wouldn't need this Sahara-brown, option-loaded vehicle anymore. It was at that moment that I caught myself, like a man about to embezzle, his hand on the check, his pen poised to forge a signature. A crime—I was thinking of committing a crime, violating my moral duty. I had been thinking that it would be better to take my own life.

“She was raped,” I said.

“Terrible,” stammered Steve at last.

Even talking about it was brutal. Having begun, I plodded ahead. “And stabbed. Many times.”
Eleven times
. I couldn't say it.

Steve Fayette couldn't get a word out, just shook his head. I had misjudged this man.

I continued, “And he's still out there, still at large.” Never before had at large sounded so literal, the openness and vastness of the world. He could be anywhere.

“It was wonderful for you to sit with Connie,” I said.

“Anything I can do,” said Steve.

“I think I was a suspect for a few minutes,” I said. “I sat there running through the very short list of criminal lawyers I can stand to be around.”

“Are you sure you feel okay?” asked Connie.

“One of the detectives told me it was not that uncommon for a killer to set a fire. It destroys evidence.” I swore to myself: he would pay for it.

“It's utterly senseless,” said Steve, with a languid gesture, a man waving away a gnat.

“They'll catch him,” said Connie dismissively. Rape, murder—Connie had more important things to think about.

“I don't suppose you want to drive,” said Steve. He had a manner so gentle, so detached, that he seemed to drift through life.

I said, “I better call Matilda, see what she's had to do to my schedule.” I wanted to say that I wanted to drive all the way down University Avenue, into the Marina, all the way out the Berkeley Pier, into the bay.

But instead I settled into the car, finding the
window down
button, hating the stuffy air. I had always disliked those cardboard windshield guards, but now I could see the point.

Connie got in beside me, shut the door, and without speaking fastened the seat belt.

I picked up the phone, and Connie's hand took the phone away, tenderly, putting it back into its cradle.

I don't know what I was going to say to Connie, but when I turned to her and began to speak I started to weep. It was the second time that day I had been another man, someone not myself. Once I had climbed into a fire to save a life. Now I grieved more fiercely than I could have imagined possible.

7

You can't drive, I told myself.

But I could, taking a brittle pleasure in the operation of the vehicle, avoiding collisions. Connie didn't say a thing, just sat there with her arms folded.

A eucalyptus had fallen across Capistrano Street, barely missing a blue Lexus parked at the curb. The owner of the car was turning off its car alarm, shrugging sheepishly at the scattered but grateful applause that came from front porches up and down the street. We couldn't drive straight down the street; I had to drive around the block to get home.

We had not spoken on the way from the hospital. Now we both strolled silently up the street to look at the fallen tree. We were grateful for the distraction. The roots had levered out of the ground, and the smell in the air was sundered earth and that cough-drop scent of eucalyptus.

When a man in a yellow hard hat failed to get his chain saw working it was a moment of mild drama. A dozen people were watching, and a companion in a white City of Berkeley pickup called out something with a laugh. The man with the chain saw took his time, going back to the truck to put on a pair of ear protectors, rubber earmuffs with a large cup that fit over each ear, as though lack of readiness on his own part had crippled the saw.

Maybe he was right. It started easily, the air discolored with exhaust from the motor. The saw bit into the tree and white sawdust flew. The blade sliced into the tree easily, seventy years cut through in less than a minute.

When the tree was cut in two, one side sprang upward, severed but connected to the roots. The top half fell hard to the street, the shaggy branches and leaves quaking, settling.

We could hear the chain saw even in our house, the door shut. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and was surprised at how commonplace my appearance was. People in movies are stained by crisis, smudged, artfully bloodied. Only my shirt was stained, with Rebecca.

I took it off, and folded it carefully, and put on another shirt just like it, fresh from the cleaners. And then I realized that my dark trousers, olive cavalry twill, were also stained, and I put on a pair of chinos, a man at leisure, time on his hands. I washed my face and shaved, and gave myself the same look I shot myself between meetings, when I popped into the men's room to congratulate myself.

And then I stood with my hand on the the doorknob and could not move. Sorrow broke over me, leaving me helpless.

It was a form of comfort to dial my office when I was downstairs again. I gave Matilda an expurgated rundown of the day's events. “You should be in the hospital,” she said.

“They told me I was okay.”

“But your lungs might be damaged.”

It was like her to think of my body like this. She was gifted when it came to dealing with computers and fax machines. I wondered if my lungs were a variety of office equipment to her. An emotional collapse would mean the same thing. If I couldn't breathe or think anymore she'd be out of a job. Besides, she had asthma. I could hear her wheeze as we talked about smoke inhalation.

“Tell Stella Cameron I can't make that phone conference today—”

Matilda took a deep, forced breath, using her inhalor. I waited for her to exhale. “She cancelled anyway,” said Matilda. “She's having a baby.”

I stared at my appointment book, my own printing dominated with names and numbers Matilda had added in her rounded handwriting.

Matilda read my silence correctly. “No, I don't mean she's having the baby today. I mean she's pregnant and she is having a checkup. Just routine, her doctor had to switch his appointments around.”

Even in my emotionally ragged state I marveled that Stella Cameron had been impregnated. It wasn't that she was unattractive. She was very good-looking, the way a cruise missile is good-looking. Unless Stella had been artificially fertilized there was a man out there who deserved an award. And I had just spoken to her yesterday. People had so many secrets.

“I'll take care of everything,” Matilda was saying, with that trace of accent that made her sound so intelligent. Perhaps it was the implication that because she was fluent in at least two languages, she was superior in other ways, too. Perhaps it was that Spanish grace in her voice, with its hint of Old World manners. I had the feeling that I could vanish from the planet and Matilda could keep my practice going for weeks—maybe months.

I hung up the phone and found Connie organizing her briefcase, finding a place for her laptop in among the catalogs.

“I think if I dropped dead Matilda would rearrange my appointments, turn off the lights, and go shopping,” I said.

“She works for you,” said Connie. “She doesn't necessarily love you, or even like you.” She was pale, her face showing no feeling, her movements crisp and exact. “How's her asthma?”

“She's on a new aerosol, albuterol. It seems to work.”

“I thought Matilda might be the one,” said Connie. “So much of it is proximity, the women men spend time with.”

That was one way to handle it, I thought, like a subject on a talk show. Intellectualize it, make it a subject, not a crisis.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked. It was a dangerous question, the kind I was trained to never ask.

“We won't have our big talk right now. I'm in the middle of figuring out new inventory software,” she said. “And a couple from La Jolla is flying up just to look at that cork-pull, the one you made fun of.”

“I didn't make fun of it, exactly. It looks like a water pump. Who would use that to open a bottle of wine?”

“Wine stewards,” she said, putting a hand over her eyes for a moment. “People collect them. I have to be in the shop in half an hour. Go take a rest, and maybe have some of that rhubarb pie.”

“I feel all right,” I said.

“All right is what you are not, Richard,” she said with the gentle condescension of a woman talking to a child or a very cantankerous old person. She was impatient, too. And angry. It would be awhile before she would let it show, but I could tell, the way she kept flicking her hair back, the way she sounded understanding.

I made coffee, poured whole beans into the electric grinder, set the coffee filter in place, the deliberate steps a boy would take when asked to make fresh coffee for his parents.

When I had a nice steaming cup of French roast I strode into the living room and said the words I had planned. They came out pretty well, without preamble. “I'll go stay in one of Steve's apartments.”

She took her time turning to look at me. I could see her debating whether or not to have that important conversation now. “We'll have plenty of time to talk,” she said. “I do have some regard for your feelings. You're upset.”

The living room was not as cluttered as it had appeared last night. The cello-like shape against the wall was what it appeared to be, a stringed instrument, and the Easter-Island profile was a carved Polynesian idol, grimacing, showing its teeth made of cowries. Connie made money in her shop, but she spent the cash on new imports and paid a crushing insurance premium every six months. Every now and then our home became a temporary showroom, when her shop was crowded and someone had driven up from Carmel to pick up a five-thousand-year-old Cycladic figurine that would match their new sofa.

“I know it's a little like having a spat right after Pearl Harbor, but I feel like finishing everything.” I sounded like a man who would torch his own home.

“Shut up, Richard. I want to have a nice long talk. We can both air out our feelings. This isn't the time.”

“Ask me. Anything you want to know.”

Connie looked away, gazing at the fierce mouth of the wooden idol.

I told her everything, with some soft-focus over the sex, the other, spoken intimacies. But I held nothing else back. Rebecca's music, her blindness, her fondness for scrambled egg sandwiches. It didn't even take very long. This secret love, this wonderful, departed woman, and I could summarize my love for her in the same amount of time it took a cup of coffee to go from hot to warm.

Connie straightened the wrinkles out of her skirt, smoothing them with one hand. “I know how much you need me,” she said.

“Connie, you don't grasp this essential point. Give Stella a call. She's smart. She's fair. She wouldn't mind giving you a little legal advice. It's time we both woke up.”