“No.” Elena propped her head on her knuckles. “It’s kind of sweet that you need me. You’ve always been so supercompetent, I never felt useful. That’s why I didn’t mind taking care of Grandma on Mondays. Besides, I love her. I like the way we have to manage together. I’m talented at living on shit and air. I’ve had a lot of practice. I never did like taking money from you once I was out of college, so a lot of time I was getting by on hope. I can cut our food bills in half. Now that I’m working, I can kick in something toward the electric and phone bills.”
It proved much harder to talk to Rachel. The phone call had to be set up by E-mail in advance, because of the time difference.
“Mother, I’m not going to be married three or four times, so if you miss the first, you can’t catch the next showing.”
“Couldn’t you wait till you get back to the States? It’s only till May.”
“You’re just trying to get me to put my wedding off. You tried that when I was home.”
“Rachel, my back is to the wall financially. I’m spending more than I’m making. If I borrow money to go to Israel for your wedding, I don’t see how I can ever pay it back—and Beverly is going to be living here soon, more dependent on me than ever.”
“It won’t feel like I’m really married if you aren’t there, Mother. It won’t feel right.”
“Then please wait till you come home, because I don’t have the money to go there.”
“I’m not going to put off the marriage. It’s time for us to get married. I’ll never in my life meet anyone else I want to marry. Michael and I, we’re two of a kind. We’re soul mates. He’s my chassen, my intended, my bashert. I won’t take a chance on losing him, on things coming apart.”
“Couldn’t you put it off for a few months?”
“It’s complicated enough. We have to go before the rabbinical court and prove we’re Jews and single and so on. It’s a formality, but we have to do it to get a marriage license. We’re trying to get an appointment soon. It’s like a dream, to be married here. Whenever I think of my wedding, which is going to be so beautiful, I want to share it with you. There’ll be dancing, Mother, and local wine and great food and friends we’ve made here that I want you to meet. We’re writing vows in Hebrew.”
“Rachel, I want to be there. I want desperately to be there. But I can’t see my way out of this hole. All I see are the walls of increasing debt around me.”
“You’ll be in our prayers, Mother. You, Grandma, Marta,…and Elena.”
Oh, great, Suzanne thought, but she rebuked herself. Religious attention was what Rachel had to offer. “Thank you. We’ll get through all this somehow.” Her words felt like sawdust in her mouth.
She was lecturing her Feminist Legal Theory class. “As a woman, empathy is one of your strengths. As a lawyer, it can destroy you. Empathize with the victim, and you’ve lost your momentum as a defense attorney, whose role is defined as speaking for the client and giving him the best defense possible.
“As a lawyer, you’re trained at arguing, you’re practiced at making points, you’re good at turning an argument back on a person, picking holes in stories, cross-examining.
“As a mother or a lover or a wife, these skills and habits are dangerous and undesirable. They can and will destroy personal relationships. Don’t think being a lawyer won’t change you. It already has. You don’t think the same way, you don’t talk the same way. You will not act the same way.”
As she spoke, she flashed back to the last year with Sam. All her lawyerly observational skills had gone into cracking the facade of their marriage until she proved that he was having an affair, until she knew almost as much about that affair as Sam did. Smart? Maybe. Painful? Absolutely.
Out to California for another damned postponement of this stupid trial. It just goes on and on and on. My lawyer will die of old age before they drop the charges or we finally go to trial. I expected to be flying to Ethiopia, but the court won’t allow me out of the country. This is killing me by inches. I’m one of those travelers who are very moved by Africa, and I’ve never been to Ethiopia. I’m supposed to be useful around water issues, but will I ever get there? I know it’s the lumber interests that are screwing me, but what good does it do to know that? Anyhow, at least I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. Change of venue refused. Preliminary motions go on. Both sides jockeying for some arcane advantage.
A 10:00 P.M. phone call. “It’s not so bad,” he said, “this occasionality. Is it so bad? After all, do you want a husband demanding you do the laundry, pay the bills, rub his neck, have supper on the table?”
“No.” She didn’t even have to think about it. “Like you, I was married once. It was a mess. I don’t have time.” She loved the sound of his voice in her ear. She closed her eyes when she spoke to him on the phone, lying in bed. “My marriage to Sam died of neglect, like a forgotten goldfish.”
“I suppose I have time for a wife who’d stay home, but she’d tire of me fast. I had a live-in girlfriend in Berkeley. While I was in China, she took up with her tae kwon do teacher. She saw me about as often as you do, except for sleeping time. Women who have children want a father for them. Women who don’t, want to have them. Everybody wants a person who’s there—and as you have observed, I’m with you only now and then. But you’re the same way.”
“Things are a little easier with Elena helping. I’m getting the advantage of her guilt. She’s working now. She’s trying. She cooks four nights a week, which is all I’m generally able to eat with her.”
“Is she a good cook?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But I’m not about to complain. Food made for me is good. Food I have to prepare is bad.”
His dry chuckle in her ear. “The strange thing is, you really are good in the kitchen.”
“In another life.”
He was silent for a moment, and then his voice was ironically dreamy. “Maybe we’ll both retire at sixty-five or seventy and sit and stare at each other and the TV…. I’ll be honest with you. There are times that sounds like paradise.”
“I understand. But my fantasy is listening to music. My music, not Elena’s. Symphonies, not rock.”
“You can sit with your Beethoven and I’ll watch my Forty-Niners and we’ll nod at each other in bliss.”
“Do you really think so?” She opened her eyes, cocking her head.
“Naw, I’ll die of a heart attack in some Norwegian airport, like Trondheim. And you’ll get shot by the husband of one of your clients.”
“Or maybe we’ll both just spontaneously combust.”
“Soon, I hope. In the meantime, I’m stuck out here with this stupid petty trial.”
Suzanne poured coffee for Marta, who was drumming her hands on Suzanne’s kitchen table. When Marta came downstairs for the first time since that damned Monday, Elena got up from the table at once. “Stay,” Marta said authoritatively, and Elena sat.
Now all three of them sat there glumly. “It was a courtesy call I suppose,” Marta said. “To let me know he’s going on what’s his name’s talk show. To try to get me to show up and make a worse fool of myself.”
“Why is he doing this?” Suzanne asked. “You’re the wronged party.”
“His line is that I’m the author of the domestic violence bill—as if a couple of sentences I contributed make me the author. Miles’s wife must be really pissed. It was her bill. But never mind, the idea is that I wrote the domestic violence bill and then I got a gun and tried to kill my husband and his girlfriend.”
“I repeat my question, why is he doing this?”
“He’s furious I threw him out. He’s furious at having to be on his own. In his mind, I really did wrong him by walking in. It’s revenge.”
“What does Miles say?” Suzanne glanced over at Elena, who was sitting very small in her chair and saying absolutely nothing.
“He says I should start wearing maternity clothes on all occasions.”
“He has a point.”
&
nbsp; “Bullshit. I hate maternity clothes.”
“They’re supposed to be better than they were twenty years ago.”
Marta giggled, sounding twenty years younger. “That’s called spacing your children, right? One in college and one in the oven.”
Suzanne spent a moment trying to decide how she would feel if she were pregnant instead of experiencing irregularity in her periods and an occasional hot flash. Would she be glad? No, terrified. She had daughters, and two were quite enough. Often it felt like two more than she could manage. She had been at most a passable mother, mostly defined in negatives. Not abusive. Not violent. Not hostile. Not crazy. Just too busy to give everything they needed. With a checkbook instead of a jar of cookies and an open kitchen door. She was of the generation who had children because they felt they had to but didn’t always know what to do with them once they had them; who were guilty before their children because they dared to have lives and careers and goals of their own. A transitional generation going forward while looking backward. She was vehemently glad she was passing the age when getting pregnant was a possibility. She had done her bit for the population explosion, and loving and trying to give her best to her daughters was hard enough, sometimes impossible.
Elena finally spoke. “What do you want me to do? I’d go on the show and say how ashamed I am and contradict what he says. Would that help?”
“I’ll ask Miles. It might.”
Suzanne was lecturing. “You may find increasingly as you practice litigation, that you find in yourself a conflict between your own sense of right and wrong, and your role as a litigator. Now the usual way of dealing with this conflict is to say, I am a hired gun. If the gun thinks too much about how it’s being used, it will not be a useful gun. But many lawyers find that they can’t make that neat and clean a distinction between their morality and their practice. The exercise I am going to give you today is not a test. There is no right answer, no correct citation. It is an exercise that if it works, will cause you to think about the interplay between your values and your role as a lawyer. You are going to have to think about what you really believe justice to be. It will be a case out of domestic law. Not all of you will receive the same case. It’s a matter of chance which of four cases you’ll draw. Count yourself off one to four aloud starting in the last row on the right-hand side and working toward me. When you get up to leave, you will find that my assistant has placed four piles at the back of the room. Take a case from your number. You have the weekend to consider how you would argue your case. Two out of the four cases I’ve chosen are custody cases, among the most hairy in the practice of a lawyer who specializes in domestic law. One is the case of a woman who went after her rapist and shot him. The fourth is a case of environmental law, which pits community safety against jobs. You will write up your argument and what you will be trying to accomplish.”
Suzanne met the new client at her office at the university. The dean let her use her university office that way from time to time, as long as she didn’t do it too often. Bud Hiller was close to sixty, thin and rigid as a broomstick, large bland features that gave nothing away. He would be a terrific poker player. His voice was pitched a little too loud. Fortunately, her office was reasonably soundproofed by the rows of law books on the walls. He had been through three lawyers on this case, suits and countersuits between the heirs to a chain of outlet stores. The sons and daughters were suing one another for control. They all claimed fraud and even that this one or that one had abused their senile father before his death. It was a busy heap of maggots, reeking of money. Three lawyers had made good fees off this case; it looked as if she would be the fourth.
It was not a case she wanted. She contained herself, listening, questioning him, taking careful notes with Jaime backing her up. Bud Hiller had inquired coldly who Jaime was upon entering her office, but now it was as if Jaime were a cat on a chair. Jaime was a good note taker; he brought the same careful intelligence to all aspects of being a student he would bring to his law career. His beauty was deceptive. He looked languid, graceful, decorative. His mind was spun steel. Meticulous. Wary. Capable of great speed and ruthlessness. She had met his parents, his African-American father and his Filipina mother. By the time Jaime was her age, he would be fat, bald, and far more powerful than she ever would be. She had great faith in him.
Hiller orated on, his injuries, the stinginess of his dead father, the perfidy of his siblings and their spouses, how his previous lawyers had failed him and his just cause. She listened, she took notes, and she thought how she would love to show him the door, but this case leaked money through all its flimsy seams. She had come to a financial crossroads where she must take cases that would pay her bills instead of cases that excited her legally or ethically. She was still the litigator she had always been. She could find a new angle to use. She began to plot her strategy in getting Bud his money and doing his siblings out of theirs.
Jake was still stuck out on the West Coast. She had begun to miss him. Communicating by E-mail and phone worked to a degree, but she missed his presence, his warmth. She did not realize how thoroughly she missed him until she woke Friday night from a dream of his body, found herself wet and steaming with menopausal heat and simple outrageous desire. It was startling to her that she could want him so strongly. She sat at her computer late Saturday night trying to explain why she was feeling especially down and even a little guilty about decisions being forced upon her.
When I went into the law collective after clerking for Judge Fair-weather for a year, I had all sorts of notions of defending the unjustly accused, the poor, the marginalized. But we always made a certain amount of our money on drug dealers, fences, bookies—sleaze. We defended the poor and the persecuted, but we also successfully defended the greedy, the dangerous, and the depraved. That’s how it goes when you’re in criminal practice. You defend criminals, at least part of the time…. So when I joined the faculty, one great source of relief and joy was that I took only cases I wanted to take. Cases that were interesting, challenging, and cases where the defendant had right but no money. Now here I am doing what I consider sleaze cases again—because once again I need the money. It depresses me. I wake up in the middle of the night and I feel the stink of it.
Sunday morning, she had a reply.
Look, sometimes I’m required to make jolly with people who are giving us money. For some of them, it’s conscience money. For others, it’s almost in the nature of a bribe. Give us enough money and we’ll look the other way. With seventy major polluters to choose from, we won’t go after them. And we don’t. It’s never spoken about, but it’s the way the world runs. On grease. We all make a certain number of compromises for the sake of survival, for the sake of effectiveness.
In academia, I’ve been faced with few such problems. Guys on football scholarships don’t take law. I’ve had students try to get me to change grades through threats and promises and histrionics, but I’ve never seriously been tempted to do so. I hear it’s worse when you teach undergraduates—they have a consumer mentality. I paid for this class, so I’m entitled to an A. In law school, we have them more properly intimidated.
This guy and his family are all sharks. The only good thing I can see in the case is that the others are at least as bad as Buddy Boy. You have the feeling if any of them could push a button and cause the others to cease to exist, there’d be no hesitation. But at least he hired me and not a hit man.
As she read his messages, typed on his laptop from motels, she felt a twinge of guilt because it was her nature when involved with a man to try to take care of him: in this case, to make sure that Jake dealt with his stress, made the changes the doctors demanded, ate more sensibly, got enough sleep. But when she only saw a man three or four times a month, she could scarcely monitor his food and exercise and sleep habits. She tried to push it out of her mind, and shortly she succeeded. She had enough to worry about.
39
Elena
Elena could not say she
liked her job, but she liked having a job. It felt normal to get into her aging Honda and drive off at the same time most people were heading for work, feeling like a real person instead of a character in a soap opera. She had lunch alone in the building cafeteria or in a restaurant nearby. This was a neighborhood where there were more places to eat at noon than in the evening, for it was ringed with high-tech firms and places like hers that handled money or practiced law for corporations or consulted with them.
It was boring sitting there out front on display saying the same thing over and over again, Good day, Black, Lincoln and Worthington, how may I help you? Mr. Laslau is in a meeting at the moment. May I take your number? Mr. Rowe is out of the office at the moment. May I take your number? Mr. Lincoln’s line is busy. Will you hold? Receiving packages from UPS, FedEx, Airborne, the post office. Handing over outgoing mail and parcels. Telling people where to sit and serving them coffee. She was a waitress, but one who never got a tip.
She observed that the different analysts and advisers liked to keep their clients waiting different periods of time. There were the five-minute guys, the ten-minute guys (most common), and the fifteen-to-twenty-minute masters like Mr. Lincoln. Naked power, she thought. She wondered how much of her own life had been spent waiting for those who saw no reason to deal with her promptly.
Sometimes one of the guys asked her to photocopy something. Making coffee was also part of her pitiful job. Mostly she sat on display behind the teak counter, answered the phone, and greeted whoever came through the double doors. Already two of the analysts were hitting on her, but she sloughed them off. She just smiled and passed everything off as a joke. “Oh, Mr. Laslau, you know I can’t do that! What a sense of humor.” She sounded like an idiot, but she must not let herself care. She must smile and smile and smile until she thought her face must be sprayed with that strange hair lacquer reminiscent of bug spray one of the secretaries was always using in the women’s room. Elena never did more to her hair than get it trimmed to even it up when it started to look ragged, wash it every other day, and once a week use a conditioner. She loved her hair and took comfort in it. She had always resisted cutting it short the way all her friends wore theirs, for she liked retreating behind that sleek black curtain. She liked the weight and heft.