What He's Poised to Do: Stories (16 page)

The next morning, she was scheduled to join me in the file room, but she stayed at the beige cage to order office supplies. Once or twice I came out to ask her some minor question, and she answered with a nonchalance that was drenched in significance. She was mine, but not if I wanted her. And she was not mine in the way she had been a day earlier, when I had been secure in her friendship, desirous of more, and well aware of the importance of suppressing those desires. Now what was wanted clouded the air between us. I stayed in the file room, out of everyone’s way, playing the radio a little bit louder than I knew was proper. In late morning, Schiff came into the file room, where he praised my efficiency and spoke to me for a few minutes about some new billing conventions that would affect the way we were accounting time on the Younce case but not the Jarney case. He did not dispense his usual aphoristic wisdom, and its absence was conspicuous. That, I gathered, was the day’s lesson, that sometimes wisdom could abandon a man. I wondered how he knew about me and Lisa.

I wanted her to stay late that night with me. I thought I had wanted things before, but I had been wrong; they were nothing in comparison to this. Instead, she asked me downstairs to sit with her in her car while she smoked. She fidgeted nervously with the lighter and left the cigarette unlit until I said what I thought she wanted me to say, which is that the previous evening had been a mistake, and that we needed to be friends above all, because she was my only real ally at the firm, and that I wished we could go back a day and undo what we had done. She agreed too readily for my tastes, and patted me on the shoulder in a way that precisely erased the kiss. With the situation now defused and her power restored, she offered me a ride home, and though I could have refused out of spite, or what I now can see would have been power, I accepted with a shrug that could not conceal any portion of my excitement.

The car was cooled off by now, and the whole way back we carried on a polite conversation in washed-out colors. The next morning, there were no longer even traces of that forced politeness, just a humiliating normalcy. The subject had been dropped, on account of its weight.

T
HE KISS HAD AN EFFECT
on the rest of our friendship, as I knew it would, but I could not have anticipated exactly what effect. It was as if we had met for a meal and did not have much to say about the food until a second spice was added, at which point we realized that it had covered the flavor that we did not previously know had been there. That first flavor was on my tongue constantly, and I was honor-bound to pretend it was not. She was equally unwilling to admit that anything had occurred, and we stood arm in arm on this dishonest foundation. Mortenson was the first to notice, and he started to call us Ma and Pa. One after-noon, he and Schiff called a meeting to settle up some business before they left the city on a trip. The agenda was brief—order supplies, schedule more interviews—but then Schiff said that he had an announcement. “We’re going to give the two of you just one paycheck,” he said. “We won’t pay you less, but since you’re always together, it’s just easier that way.” Lisa and I could have been offended, but we took it in stride. We were happily inseparable, bound as much by what wasn’t happening as by what was. We were determined not to be dismissed as fools, and that determination was perhaps the most foolish thing of all.

Mortenson had said Ma and Pa, but there in the office, after hours, we were like the king and queen of the place. Sometimes I would stand at Schiff’s window, and she would come up beside me and say, “Get to work.” While I took calls from Schiff and Mortenson and ran into the file room to tell them which judge had presided over a certain case or what date a judgment was rendered, she spent an hour ordering lunch or performing what she called her “Goldilocks test,” in which she sat in a series of chairs until she found the most comfortable. She called the local radio station and asked for her favorite songs to be played. The top drawer of the desk by the beige cage was filled with the Mr. Tipton letters, which carped about her lack of focus and drive; they were heaped in a pile to prove the point. Once, she went missing in the middle of the day; I patrolled the office until I found her in the stairwell, smoking a cigarette. She looked as though she had been crying. And more than once, when we were at work late, she took a glass out of Schiff’s cabinet and filled it with whiskey. “To pleasure,” she said, and then corrected herself. “To a few minutes of freedom.” Her refusal to focus on work didn’t bother me so long as she stayed late with me in our kingdom, but after that first week, she abdicated. She left earlier and earlier, sometimes even when the sun was still out. On those evenings, the office was dull: gray, flat, and silent.

But wonderful things happen in the dullest places. Sitting there in the conference room one night, knocking my foot against one of the legs of the table, I saw a comet streak across the sky. The janitor was the only other one there. He had just finished emptying the wastebaskets in the room. The air conditioner had started to power down for the night, and it was getting warm. I was trying to power down, as well, seeking what I would have described as peace, though I have realized as I have grown older that it is closer to humility. Just then, in the corner of the window, I saw what looked like a star moving.

I motioned to the janitor, asked him to verify what I was seeing. The comet moved more slowly, and it was larger to my eye than I would have expected. It passed behind a tree and reappeared. Now it was in the dead middle of the window, perfectly positioned to make a statement, and it flared brilliantly, like a piece of music, and vanished. “That was something,” he said.

I went immediately to Schiff’s office and dialed Lisa’s number. This violated one of our unspoken rules, that when one of us was at home, the other did not intrude. “There was a shooting star, and it was huge,” I said, throwing something extra into my tone to excuse myself. “It almost went all the way across the window.”

“You’re still at the office?”

I went for broke. “Yeah. I could come over.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Well, then, you could stay late tomorrow.”

“Good night, Jim,” she said, but not unkindly, and she lowered the phone and then raised it again. “Ask me again one of these days,” she said. Her tone gave enough away that I did not need to take the chance the next day, or the day after that. We kissed once in the stairwell, and once out by her car, and once when she was driving me home she stopped the car, got out, and let me press her up against the driver’s side door. She said only my name, which almost made me forget myself.

S
CHIFF AND
M
ORTENSON HAD
enjoyed some success with their trips and so they made more of them. That meant time for me and Lisa, but also an awareness that there was never enough time. They were always back too soon for my tastes, Mortenson in particular. He liked to look at Lisa, and though I could not blame him for that, I started to worry that he was looking not out of interest but with a professional eye. She was not, as I have said, working very hard, and a good manager could have put her right out of the office. That would have been worse for me than if I was fired directly.

Cases shifted and settled through June, and by the end of the month one in particular had moved to the front of the pack: the shooting in a motel complex in Georgia of a college football star. The young man, Lorenzo Francis, was staying at the motel with his girlfriend. When an off-duty policeman who was also a motel guest saw what he thought was a drug transaction, he confronted the football player, who denied the accusation. After a scuffle, shots were fired, and Francis was hit by two bullets, one of which severed his spine and left him paralyzed. The officer remembered an attempted flight across a courtyard, but Schiff and Mortenson meant to show that the angle at which the bullet entered the body disproved this story, particularly with regard to location—in short, that he could not have been where he said he was when the shot was fired. To demonstrate this, they planned to use a model of the apartment complex.

This seemed like an opportunity for me to help myself. I went in to see Mortenson. “You need a model built?” I said.

“That’s the word on the street,” he said.

“You should ask Lisa,” I said.

“Lisa?” He said the name as if he had not thought of her for days.

“Not to make it,” I said, rushing forward. “I mean, maybe. But you should ask her because she takes architecture classes and I’m sure she knows people.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said. When he turned, I saw a phone number on the paper. It was hers. He was already planning on calling. I did not even know if he was going to give me credit for the idea. I had parleyed and gained nothing.

Lisa went directly in to speak to Mortenson. I sat outside at her desk. I tried to see the office from her perspective, but it was difficult, since I could see her in the scene. Mortenson laughed and rubbed his bald head. She sat down and made her case: an architecture student would benefit the firm in this regard. A model was precisely what a student was trained to produce. She knew good people. Whatever they paid for the model, could they pay her as well for organizing it? There was something in her expression that was so strong it was almost a scent. Mortenson laughed again, and I had the sudden sense that it was all beyond me.

Mortenson buzzed the desk and asked me in. I entered the conference room and stood there wrapped in the sense that I had intruded. “There’s one guy I think would be especially good,” Lisa said. “His name is Jeff. I don’t know him all that well, but he’s the best model-builder in the class. He could do cutaway views, maybe even put some little lightbulbs in to show where the different people were. He has little kids and he’s always talking about how he needs more money. I think he’d do it for cheap.”

“Hi, there,” Mortenson said to me. And to Lisa: “Lightbulbs. That’s a great idea.” And back to me: “Do you need her for something?”

“Something’s wrong with the printer,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right there.” She was quick to the door.

J
EFF
L
ELAND WORE HIGH-TOP SNEAKERS
and a sweatshirt and his hair was held back in a ponytail. He sat so nervously that he should have stood: he jiggled his knee, fretted his wedding ring. I went to get him. “Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” he said. “Jeff. You must be Jim.” I didn’t like the way he said my name, or even his own. He was too easy by half, and that intimidated me. Now it seems comical, to have been intimidated by a man who was at most twenty-four or twenty-five.

“Follow me,” I said. “Mr. Schiff and Mr. Mortenson are waiting.”

I dropped Leland off. As I was leaving, Schiff called to me. “Stay,” he said. I listened with professional interest, possibly for the first time in my life, as Schiff and Mortenson explained the case. The next day, when I told Lisa about the conversation, I found that I could replay a few notes but not reproduce the whole tune. Mortenson had drawn Jeff in by talking about his outfit. “Say that the cops see a guy dressed like you,” he said, “and they assume he’s up to no good. Is that just cause? And assume that this guy, the guy dressed like you, takes off at a clip, because he’s afraid of what’s going to happen to him, to his girlfriend. Do the cops call out to him? Do they order him to stop? Or do they just draw their weapons and fire at this guy who’s like you?”

Schiff seemed disappointed that Mortenson would not bring himself to the facts. “But not
just
like him. Black. Let’s not forget that. White officers.”

“Right,” Mortenson said. “Young guy. Black guy. Prime of his youth. Suddenly, his life as he knows it is over.”

“He’s not the jury,” Schiff said.

“He might be,” Mortenson said. “Or someone just like him.”

“We just need you to make a model,” Schiff said. “To show us how the apartment complex is laid out, to help us help a jury decide whether or not a man could have jumped from the landing to the middle of a stairwell without injuring himself.”

“So what’s the procedure?”

“Procedure’s a grand way of saying it. We send you up there to that same motel. You stay there. You spend your time taking photographs and measuring, and then you make us a scale model of the place.”

“How long will it take?”

Schiff paused judgmentally. “As long as you need for it to take.” He turned to me. “Do you think he’s up to the job?”

“He asked you that?” Lisa said as I told her the story.

“He did,” I said.

“And what did you say?”

I was silent, just as I had been in the meeting. Lisa fell silent, too, and her face grew very serious, as a joke, and soon we were both too deep in the silence, and neither of us felt like smiling.

J
EFF TOOK THE TRIP
to make the model. Lisa called in sick while he was away. “I’m nervous,” she said. “Maybe I gave them a bum steer.” I told her she had nothing to worry about, secretly hoping I might be wrong. A week after Jeff returned, he brought in his model. He dropped it off, shaking hands with Schiff and Mortenson, and left without saying hello to either me or Lisa.

When I went into the conference room, Schiff and Mortenson were standing next to the model. “Do you notice anything about this?” Mortenson said.

I did: it was beautiful, but it was not big enough to be seen clearly in court. “No,” I said.

“Artists,” Schiff said, “always prefer injustice to justice, whether they know it or not.”

“He even put little handrails next to the stairwells,” I said, trying to praise everything that was wrong about it.

Mortenson stood and came around the table. “The thing is, it proves our point.” One of his fingers stabbed down into the courtyard. “There were echoes when the cop yelled. The sound bounced from place to place, repeating itself, but also erasing the first noise. There was no way for Francis to know where to look. He never had a chance.” He shook his head with effort. “I’m sorry this kid screwed up the model. It may cost us a victory.”