The Laws of our Fathers (46 page)

    Nikki finds his story spectacularly funny. 'She was going like a dog? Mom, she was going like a dog.' She gets off her chair to play out the scene and is far too keyed up to sit down when I demand that. After several efforts to restore calm, I take her to the den and turn on a video. Better a zombie than a creature ricocheting off the walls.

    ‘I should have thought of that,' says Seth, when I return.

    'Fortunately, it's winter. Otherwise, we'd be on our way outside for a re-enactment.' Seth follows me into the snug kitchen, where I put another helping on his plate. 'It's a great story. Lucy sounds adorable.'

    'That's what everybody says: "Lucy's adorable." ' I take a beat. 'What does her husband say, Seth?' 'Oh.' He groans. 'You don't need to hear me complain about Lucy. Believe me, not every eccentricity is lovable. I mean, I never got used to living with somebody who actually cared about whether the dishes "matched" the wallpaper in the breakfast room.' He spreads his fingers to make the quotation marks in the air. 'Even the constant good cheer can seem over a couple of decades like a prolonged form of lying. But on a scale of goodness, 1 to 10, bearing in mind the kind of crumbs many human beings are, Lucy's way up there. Nine point five and rising.'

    'That doesn't sound too bad, Seth. I'm not sure even Charlie's
mother
would give him more than a seven. On a good day.'

    'Yeah, but Lucy's not the point. Not by herself. It's us together.'

    'Because of your son?'

    'That's part of it. A big part. What confounds me is that I know that if he hadn't died- Isaac - we'd be together. The deal, whatever it is that I made, that we made, would seem okay. But when a child passes - It's the most mysterious thing, but the love, I don't know, it can go, too. We've had wildly different ways of coping. She's become this ridiculous, fucking mystic. She's studying Kabbalah, she's into dybbuks. It's very Catholic, frankly, even though the words are Hebrew. And there's this young rabbi - I mean, I don't think anything's going on exactly, and I'm not the one to throw the first stone anyway. But we're a million miles apart. And even if we somehow get over that, I still have to face my own stuff.'

    'Which is?'

    'Well, why did you leave what's-his-name?'

    'Charlie? Basically, I realized that growing up as Zora's daughter I had developed this way of capitulating to difficult people, allowing them to run wild while I tried to be sensible. And Charlie demonstrated that there could be too much of that, even for me. Especially once I found out there was a coed named Brandy.'

    'Okay, so you said, Well, I can do better. And you showed him the door. I think that's why most people quit on a marriage. They wake up and think, I'm a better person than that. I can be more sensible. More generous. I can be less fucked up if I give myself another start. Sometimes they're kidding themselves. But sometimes, a lot of times, they're not. And that's really the issue for me. With Lucy. I dwell on what's never been right between us. I mean, Lucy and I, we've always had this' - he's looking for the word - 'game? Discussion? Usually it was comic relief during an argument. But we'd ask one another: What if you met someone who was perfect? Who was The Person. What if you met
that
person?'

    'You still have to say everything, don't you, Seth?' 'I'm better.'

    I doubt it. 'So what's the rest of the story?'

    'The answers would change. Both our answers. Sometimes when we were pissed we'd say "I'd run away." We'd say we'd have an affair. That's what we said most of the time - you know, that's where there was permission, if it was
that
perfect. Sometimes we'd say it wasn't worth the risk to our family. But we never kidded each other enough to say, That's you, that person, that perfect person, that's you for me. Never. Not even for a minute.'

    To absorb this, I have taken a seat on one of the dark oak spindle chairs at the tiny kitchen table where Nikki and I have most of our meals - breakfast cereals and evening noodles. I don't believe in that anymore, the perfect person. That's exactly who I thought Charlie was, dark and massive, quixotic, full of the impulsiveness I grew up thinking was rightfully a man's. He was all that stuff, The Other. It made me wet between the legs and agonized the rest of the time. I will never succumb to it again. But somehow as Seth finishes this confession something passes in his look - that timorous, exploring gaze I got a couple times at the food store - and I react at once.

    'Don't, Seth.'

    'Don't what?'

    'Don't start. Or be difficult. Or pretend.' '"Pretend"?'

    'That's exactly the right word. Don't kid yourself. Don't act as if we had the greatest thing since Troilus and Cressida, or that we had some destiny that was thwarted. That's not the way I remember it.'

    He makes a face, and pushes his plate aside. 'Why are you giving me such a hard time?'

    'Why? Because you're sitting around mooning. And it's disconcerting.'

    'So let me have my fucked-up life and my perverted little fantasies, all right? This isn't bail. I don't need your permission.'

    'Don't talk to me like that, goddamn it.'

    'How do you think I should talk to you?' he asks. 'Look, you want me to be honest? This is honest: I was crazy about you. And I never thought we got to the end of where we were going, before all that historical junk intervened. Would it have been great? I don't know. Maybe we would have fought World War III. But would it have been different than what I went on to? You bet your life. And you know, just at the moment, I can't help thinking about that.'

    'So?'

    'So,' he says, 'in my head, I figure it'd be neat to be around you a little. See what happens. Time or not, I just don't think people change that much at the core, Sonny. That's where I'm at. But if you tell me to take a powder, I'll do it. I'll feel bad and all that shit, but I accept the risk. But you've started this twice now and somewhere along we're going to have to mention you. You keep acting like you're powerless here,' he says, 'like all the choices are mine. Where do you fit in, Sonny? What do you do, if you can't talk me out of this?'

    We're back to the parking lot, although I can't for the life of me see how we got here. Staring at Seth in the still kitchen, my eyes feel childish and large. I blink.

    Nikki, perfect child, arrives at that moment to save me. She holds Spark, a stuffed puppy, by a single, bedraggled paw. She is rubbing her eyes and whiny. She should have a bath, but the thrill of Seth seems to have left her weary and she mewls at the thought.

    'A book and bed,' I say.

    'You read.' Nikki points to Seth. Exhausted, she seems to have forgotten his name, everything but the fact that she's in love with him.

    From her bedroom, their voices tumble down the stairs. In the living room, I open
The Nation,
but do not even see the page. To speak and be heard; to hear and understand. How much more do we want? So much of this is welcome - why then do I resist? Atop the stairs, Seth tells Nikki good night.

    'You know what?' Nikki asks, delaying his departure now by any means. 'My teacher, Mrs Schultz? She's almost fifty years old and she still can't whistle.'

    Seth whistles a few bars of 'Good Night, Irene,' then I'm summoned for the final rituals. We pass on the stairs with contained smiles, measuring our mutual enjoyment of my child. He says he will wait to say goodbye, and is down there, in his coat, slumped over and twirling his hat, as he waits beside the staircase on the old country bench which Nikki and I will shortly be using to pull on our boots, when the snow flies.

    'You made an enormous impression,' I tell him.

    'Hey,' he says, 'one out of two.'

    'Seth, it's not like that.'

    'How is it?'

    I heave a weary breath. 'Confusing,' I answer, and know it's the most honest thing I've offered yet. He tips his head philosophically, then zips his coat. He thanks me for dinner and sings Nikki's praises again, before I finally, thankfully, move him to the door.

    'I'm not trying to drive you crazy,' he says there.

    'Yes, you are,' I answer. 'You always have. But it's endearing.' I extend my hand, but it's a false gesture, far too distant for where we are now. We hold in the abrupt evening quiet of the small house, the whir of the appliances rising from the kitchen, amid a sudden sense of the tender space between us dwindling.

    'Do it,' he says to me.

    'What?'

    'Kiss me.'

    
'Kiss
you?' I laugh out loud.

    But he closes on me, as in the movies. I have offered my cheek, but he straightens my face with a single finger and puts his lips on mine. The shock of being this close to a man is one of presence and of longing. Everything kicks in, mobile with sensation - heart and breasts, hips and fingertips. An extraordinary parched ache reaches so far down into me it is all I can muster to hold back a groan. His hand in the moment of embrace has roamed to the small of my back. I step away, and we stand for just an instant with our foreheads touching. I take hold of both his hands.

    'Let's sort this out after the trial.'

    'Listen, that trial won't change anything.'

    'It'll make this a lot easier for me. I'll see you afterwards.' I turn his shoulder toward the doorway.

    When he is gone, my brow rests against the sleek varnish of the front door, chill with the cold outside. Madness, I think again.
What
is in my mind? Is it only because I feel so sorry for him? I hang Nikki's coat on the peg beside the threshold, I turn the bolt. It's because I
know,
I think suddenly. Know that whatever sentiment he nurtures, he is not really here for me. Know that he is wounded and recovering. That his life is circling. That he will be here, then gone. Know that - yes - and isn't this one of those sick truths we always know best about ourselves? - it will be safe.

    

    

    
Sonny

    

    'Mr Trent,' Hobie says with somewhat sinister distinctness. He appears restored by a weekend's rest. He's had a crisp-looking haircut and lost the haggardness of a week on trial, the reddened, jumpy eyes, the runnels of sleeplessness. He strides to the center of the room to confront Core, who is still settling himself on the witness stand.

    'Cuz,' answers Hardcore. A wayward note of black-on-black contempt. Hobie momentarily addresses him in silence, chin elevated, seeing how it is.

    I have already passed an hour this morning with the attorneys in a lengthy chambers conference. Hardcore's lawyer, Jackson Aires, played stalking horse for the prosecution. He asked to limit Hobie's cross, claiming that Core should not be forced to incriminate himself about matters that go beyond his guilty plea in this case. In reply, Hobie railed about his client's constitutional

    right to fully confront the witness. To avoid poisoning myself with an endless rundown of Hardcore's grossest misdeeds, I ruled that the episodes would be taken up one by one during cross. Each event will be portrayed in generalized terms, and Aires and the trial lawyers then can argue about its relevance.

    Aires now sits tensely at the edge of a folding chair, set about six feet behind the prosecution table against the low oak partition that runs beneath the screen of bulletproof glass. Well past sixty, Jackson, in his familiar burgundy sport coat, remains a figure of grace and ease, a long loose-jointed African-descended male with that snowball pomp above his forehead and a manner reflecting thoroughgoing contentment with his own views. In chambers, the discussion between Hobie and him became heated, due in no small measure to the fact, which eventually emerged, that Aires is one of Hobie's father's oldest friends and even employed Hobie for one summer during law school. Jackson, who has never encountered an advantage he was unwilling to use in a courtroom, repeatedly referred to Hobie as 'young Turtle' and told him more than once he had no idea what he was talking about.

    Perhaps it is the stress of performing before his old mentor, or the procedure I've insisted on, which has altered the order in which Hobie wanted to proceed, but he seems fiatfooted almost from the start of his examination. The cross does not go well.

    'You made a sweet deal with the prosecution, didn't you?' he begins. Hobie batters Core with various examples of how much worse things could have gone for him. As part of the plea agreement, the prosecution agreed not to charge Core with any of the narcotics offenses he committed daily. In the upside-down world of contemporary criminal law, a murder conviction often carries a lesser penalty in real terms than a drug crime, for which both parole and good time have been essentially abolished in this state. Core would do eighteen years if the same stretch was for selling dope. And had the prosecutors contrived one of their far-fetched arguments linking June's death to a narcotics transaction, they would have been obliged by statute to seek the death penalty.

    Well rehearsed, Core admits matter-of-factly that flipping on Nile dramatically improved his sentence. More important, as Hobie teases out the details of the plea agreement, the inferences somehow mm against him. In one of those spontaneous audience reactions characteristic of the courtroom, we all seem to recognize together that Core' s credibility is actually enhanced by the deal he's made. A hang-tough gangbanger like Hardcore would go back to the penitentiary only because he had no other choice. Someone was going to burn him, if he didn't cop out first. And logically the person Core feared could only be Nile. After messing up, killing June, the mother Nile presumably loved, instead of Eddgar, the father he apparently hated, Core recognized a high likelihood that Nile, in grief or rage, would eventually roll over on him. That's how I add it up. I find myself somewhat shocked, much as I was on Friday, by the mounting nuances pointing toward Nile's guilt.