A Multitude of Sins (14 page)

Sallie suddenly said, as though she’d been composing something while I was musing away balefully, “Do you remember after New Year’s that day we sat and talked about one thing changing and making everything else different?”

“The Big Dipper,” I said as we came to our familiar exit, which quickly led down and away through a different poor section of darktown that abuts our gentrified street. Everything had begun to seem more manageable as we neared home.

“That’s right,” Sallie said, as though the words Big Dipper reproached her. “But you know, and you’ll think this is crazy. It
is
maybe. But last night when I was in bed, I began
thinking about that poor little puppy as an ill force that put everything in our life at a terrible risk. And we were in danger in some way. It scared me. I didn’t want that.”

I looked over at Sallie and saw a crystal tear escape her eye and slip down her soft, rounded, pretty cheek.

“Sweetheart,” I said, and found her hand on the steering wheel. “It’s quite all right. You put yourself through a lot. And I’ve been gone. You just need me around to do more. There’s nothing to be scared about.”

“I suppose,” Sallie said resolutely.

“And if things are not exactly right now,” I said, “they soon will be. You’ll take on the world again the way you always do. We’ll all be the better for it.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry about the puppy.”

“Me too,” I said. “But we did the right thing. Probably he’ll be fine.”

“And I’m sorry things threaten me,” Sallie said. “I don’t think they should, then they do.”

“Things threaten all of us,” I said. “Nobody gets away unmarked.” That is what I thought about all of that then. We were in sight of our house. I didn’t really want to talk about these subjects anymore.

“Do you love me,” Sallie said, quite unexpectedly.

“Oh yes,” I said, “I do. I love you very much.” And that was all we said.

A week ago, in one of those amusing fillers used to justify column space in one of the trial lawyers’ journals I look at just for laughs, I read two things that truly interested me. These are always chosen for their wry comment on the law, and are frequently hilarious and true. The first one I read said, “Scientists predict that in five thousand years the earth will be drawn into the sun.” It then went on to say something like, “so it’s not too early to raise your malpractice insurance,” or some such cornball thing as that. But I will admit to being made oddly uncomfortable by this news about the earth—as if I had something important to lose in the inevitability of its
far-off demise. I can’t now say what that something might be. None of us can think about five thousand years from now. And I’d have believed none of us could
feel
anything about it either, except in ways that are vaguely religious. Only I did, and I am far from being a religious man. What I felt was very much like the sensation described by the old saying “Someone just walked on your grave.” Someone, so it seemed, had walked on my grave five thousand years from now, and it didn’t feel very good. I was sorry to have to think about it.

The other squib I found near the back of the magazine behind the Legal Market Place, and it said that astronomers had discovered the oldest known star, which they believed to be 50 million-light years away, and they had named it the Millennium Star for obvious reasons, though the actual Millennium had gone by with hardly any change in things that I’d noticed. When asked to describe the chemical makeup of this Millennium Star—which of course couldn’t even be seen—the scientist who’d discovered it said, “Oh, gee, I don’t know. It’s impossible to reach that far back in time.” And I thought—sitting in my office with documents of the Brownlow-Maisonette case spread all around me and the hot New Orleans sun beaming into the very window I’d seen from my car when Sallie and I were driving back from delivering the puppy to its fate—I thought, “
Time?
Why does he say
time
, when what he means is space?” My feeling then was very much like the feeling from before, when I’d read about the earth hurtling into the sun—a feeling that so much goes on everywhere all through time, and we know only a laughably insignificant fraction about any of it.

The days that followed our visit to the SPCA were eventful days. Sallie’s colleague Jerry DeFranco did, of course, die. And though he had AIDS, he died by his own dispirited hand, in his little garret apartment on Kerelerec Street, late at night before the marathon, in order, I suppose, that his life and its end be viewed as a triumph of will over pitiless circumstance.

On another front, the Brownlow appellants decided very suddenly and unexpectedly to settle our case rather than face years of extremely high lawyers’ fees and of course the possibility (though not a good one) of enduring a crippling loss. I had hoped for this, and look at it as a victory.

Elsewhere, the marathon went off as planned, and along the route Sallie had wanted. I unfortunately was in St. Louis and missed it. A massacre occurred, the same afternoon, at a fast-food restaurant not far from the SPCA, and someone we knew—a black lawyer—was killed. And, during this period, I began receiving preliminary feelers about a federal judge-ship which I’m sure I’ll never get. These things are always bandied about for months and years, all sorts of persons are put on notice to be ready when the moment comes, and then the wrong one is chosen for completely wrong reasons, after which it becomes clear that nothing was ever in doubt. The law is an odd calling. And New Orleans a unique place. In any case, I’m far too moderate for the present company running things.

Several people did eventually call about the puppy, having seen my signs, and I directed them all to the animal shelter. I went around a time or two and checked the signs, and several were still up along with the AIDS marathon flyers, which made me satisfied, but not very satisfied.

Each morning I sat in bed and thought about the puppy waiting for someone to come down the list of cages and see him there alone and staring, and take him away. For some reason, in my imaginings, no one ever chose him—not an autistic child, nor a lonely, discouraged older person, a recent widow, a young family with rough-housing kids. None of these. In all the ways I tried to imagine it, he stayed there.

Sallie did not bring the subject up again, although her sister called on Tuesday and said she knew someone named Hester in Andalusia who’d take the puppy, then the two of them quarreled so bitterly that I had to come on the phone and put it settled.

On some afternoons, as the provisional five waiting days ticked by, I would think about the puppy and feel utterly
treacherous for having delivered him to the shelter. Then, other times, I’d feel that we’d given him a better chance than he’d have otherwise had, either on the street alone or with his previous owners. I certainly never thought of him as an ill force to be dispelled, or a threat to anything important. To me life’s not that fragile. He was, if anything, just a casualty of the limits we all place on our sympathy and our capacity for the ambiguous in life. Though Sallie might’ve been right—that the puppy had been a message left for us to ponder: something someone thought about us, something someone felt we needed to know. Who or what or in what way that might’ve been true, I can’t quite imagine. Though we are all, of course, implicated in the lives of others, whether we precisely know how or don’t.

On Thursday night, before the puppy’s final day in the shelter, I had another strange dream. Dreams always mean something obvious, and so I try as much as I can not to remember mine. But for some reason this time I did, and what I dreamed was again about my old departed law partner, Paul Thompson, and his nice wife, Judy, a pretty, buxom blond woman who’d studied opera and sung the coloratura parts in several municipal productions. In my dream Judy Thompson was haranguing Paul about some list of women’s names she’d found, women Paul had been involved with, even in love with. She was telling him he was an awful man who had broken her heart, and that she was leaving him (which did actually happen). And on her list—which I could suddenly, as though through a fog, see—was Sallie’s name. And when I saw it there, my heart started pounding, pounding, pounding, until I sat right up in bed in the dark and said out loud, “Did you know your name’s on that goddamned list?” Outside, on our street, I could hear someone playing a trumpet, a very slow and soulful version of “Nearer Walk with Thee.” And Sallie was there beside me, deep asleep. I of course knew she’d done it, deserved to be on the list, and that probably there
was
such a list, given the kind of reckless man Paul Thompson was. As I said, I had never spoken to Sallie about this subject and had, until then, believed I’d gone
beyond the entire business. Though I have to suppose now I was wrong.

This dream stayed on my mind the next day, and the next night I had it again. And because the dream preoccupied my thinking, it wasn’t until Saturday after lunch, when I had sat down to take a nap in a chair in the living room, that I realized I’d forgotten about the puppy the day before, and that all during Friday many hours had passed, and by the end of them the puppy must’ve reached its destination, whatever it was to be. I was surprised to have neglected to think about it at the crucial moment, having thought of it so much before then. And I was sorry to have to realize that I had finally not cared as much about it as I’d thought.

Créche

Faith is not driving them, her mother, Esther is.

In the car, it’s the five of them. The family, on their way to Snow Mountain Highlands, to ski. Sandusky, Ohio, to northern Michigan. It’s Christmas, or nearly. No one wants to spend Christmas alone.

The five include Faith, who’s the motion-picture lawyer, arrived from California; her mother, Esther, who’s sixty-four and has, over the years, become much too fat. There’s Roger, Faith’s sister Daisy’s estranged husband, a guidance counselor at Sandusky JFK; and Roger’s two girls: Jane and Marjorie, ages eight and six. Daisy—the girls’ mom—is a presence, but not along. She’s in rehab in a large midwestern city that is not Chicago or Detroit.

Outside, beyond the long, treeless expanse of whitely frozen winterscape, Lake Michigan itself becomes suddenly visible, pale blue with a thin veneer of fog just above its metallic surface. The girls are chatting in the back seat. Roger is beside them reading
Skier
magazine.

Florida would’ve been a much nicer holiday alternative, Faith thinks. EPCOT for the girls. The Space Center. Satellite Beach. Fresh pompano. The ocean. She’s paying for
everything and doesn’t even like to ski. But it’s been a hard year for everyone, and somebody has to take charge. If they’d gone to Florida, she’d have ended up broke.

Her basic character strength, Faith thinks, watching what seems to be a nuclear power plant coming up on the left, is the same feature that makes her a first-rate lawyer: an undeterrable willingness to see things as capable of being made better, and an addiction to thoroughness. If someone at the studio, a V.P. in marketing, for example, wishes to exit from a totally binding yet surprisingly uncomfortable obligation—say, a legal contract—then Faith’s your girl. Faith the doer. Faith the blond beauty with smarts. Your very own optimist. A client’s dream with great tits. Her own tits. Just give her a day on your problem.

Her sister Daisy is the perfect case in point. Daisy has been able to admit her serious methamphetamine problem, but only after her biker boyfriend, Vince, had been made a guest of the state of Ohio. And here Faith has had a role to play, beginning with phone calls to attorneys, a restraining order, then later the police and handcuffs for Vince. Daisy, strung out and thoroughly bruised, finally proved to be a credible witness, once convinced she would not be killed.

Going through Daisy’s apartment with their mother, in search of clothes Daisy could wear with dignity into rehab, Faith found dildos; six in all—one even under the kitchen sink. These she put in a plastic Grand Union bag and left in the neighbor’s street garbage just so her mother wouldn’t know. Her mother is up-to-date, but not necessarily interested in dildos. For Daisy’s going-in outfit, they eventually settled on a nice, dark jersey shift and some new white Adidas.

The downside of the character issue, the non-lawyer side, Faith understands, is the fact that she’s almost thirty-seven and nothing’s very solid in her life. She is very patient (with assholes), very good to help behind the scenes (with assholes). Her glass is always half full. Stand and ameliorate could be her motto. Anticipate change. The skills of the law, again, only partly in sync with the requirements of life.

A tall silver smokestack with blinking white lights on top and several gray megaphone-shaped cooling pots around it now passes on the left. Dense, chalky smoke drifts out of each pot. Lake Michigan, beyond, looks like a blue-white desert. It has snowed for three days, but has stopped now.

“What’s that big thing?” Jane or possibly Marjorie says, peering out the back-seat window. It is too warm in the cranberry-colored Suburban Faith rented at the Cleveland airport especially for the trip. The girls are both chewing watermelon-smelling gum. Everyone could get carsick.

“That’s a rocket ship ready to blast off to outer space. Would you girls like to hitch a ride on it?” Roger, the brother-in-law, says to his daughters. Roger is the friendly-funny neighbor in a family sitcom, although not that funny. He is small and blandly handsome and wears a brush cut and black horn-rimmed glasses. And he is loathsome—though in subtle ways, like some TV actors Faith has known. He is also thirty-seven and prefers pastel cardigans and Hush Puppies. Daisy has been very, very unfaithful to him.

“It is
not
a rocket ship,” says Jane, the older child, putting her forehead to the foggy window, then pulling back to consider the smudge mark she’s left.

“It’s a pickle,” Marjorie says.

“And shut up,” Jane says. “That’s a nasty expression.”

“No it’s not,” Marjorie says.

“Is that a word your mother taught you?” Roger asks and smirks. He is in the back seat with them. “I bet it is. That’s her legacy. Pickle.” On the cover of
Skier
is a photograph of Hermann Maier, wearing an electric red outfit, slaloming down Mount Everest. The headline says, GOING TO EXTREMES.