Authors: True Believers
I didn’t hate corporate litigation, but I rarely reveled in it, as most of my colleagues did. I worked hard and became a partner on schedule. People talk about how relentless and stressful it is working in a big New York firm, especially for women, especially for mothers, and that’s true. But I’d manned up at age nineteen, reconciled myself to a life unnaturally twisted by stress.
So I was not overwhelmed by the exhausting hours and travel; the breathtaking wastefulness and meaningless triumphs; or the clients whose arrogance and mediocrity—guys suffering from a kind of MBA Tourette’s, unable to speak for two minutes without saying “mezzanine financing” or “basis points” or “reps and warranties,” and who actually display the little Lucite monuments to each of their deals—more than justified the five and ten and finally almost twenty dollars a minute I was charging them. But without the teaching—first at NYU, then at Yale—and the book writing, I think I would’ve been bored out of my mind.
Life at a university, on the other hand, I find nearly qualmless. We think and talk and write without heart-attack-inducing schedules, and we try to sharpen fine young minds. We’re paid well but not lavishly. We are the Establishment flaunting its kindly and humane side, The Man doing penance for being The Man—our Institute on Sexual Orientation Law & Public Policy, our Native Nations Law & Policy Center, our Center on Climate Change & the Environment.
I like it here, and most people seem to like me. Last spring, when my name started to appear on the lists of possible nominees to the United States Supreme Court, my star rose dramatically. People smiled at me more and paid closer attention to anything I said. After I removed my name from consideration for the seat, people seemed even more delighted to be in my presence. Maybe because envy had been removed from the mix.
This afternoon I have a department chair meeting where I’ll announce higher cost-of-living pay increases than they’re expecting and listen to a proposal for a new course on the law of transgenderedness. Then I have a meeting with a Hollywood attorney whom I think I’ve convinced to donate $2 million to the school. Then I teach my constitutional law seminar. And then I’ll be home on Wonderland Park Avenue before six-thirty. A day’s work, done. Like I said: sweet.
That’s one big reason I’ve managed these last seven years to finish my biography of Chief Justice John Jay
(The 7th Founder),
which the
Times
said “proves Americans’ appetite for thick workmanlike books about Founding Fathers is insatiable”; to write my first novel
(Objection, Your Honor),
which the
Times
called “an arch but surprisingly tough-minded aging-chick-lit confection,
Rumpole
meets Scott Turow”; and a cover story for
The
Atlantic
(“The Trouble with the Constitution”), which the
Times
said “seems to be upsetting Ms. Hollander’s friends at least as much as her enemies.”
Anther boon to my productivity was becoming single. A gradually failing marriage is a whole lot more time-consuming than either a happy one or a viciously rotten one. It was like living on a leaky old boat I spent half my waking hours bailing out. And then at around sixty, I got a second wind. Maybe it’s the equivalent of the endorphinated final burst of speed that Jack talked (and talked and talked) about feeling in the last few miles of his best marathon runs. For my previous nonfiction books,
Hating Lawyers
and
Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater,
as well as the Jay biography, I methodically gathered all the facts before I wrote a sentence. That’s what lawyers do. But with this one, it felt as if a fuse had been lit, and I had no choice but to
go,
get it done before I lost my nerve.
I have most of the information I need. It’s in my head, or else in the scrapbooks and journals and papers crammed into the soft, dusty old corrugated Kellogg’s Corn Pops boxes next to my desk at home. But not all of it. There are large gaps in my knowledge, a few important things I don’t know.
I’m not certain where those missing pieces are. I suppose that’s true of most people. Who knows what secrets other people—family, friends, enemies, lovers, husbands, bosses, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers—have kept from us? We don’t know what we don’t know.
Unfortunately, I have no subpoena authority or rights of discovery, only my archive and memory and powers of persuasion and inference. And the Freedom of Information Act, which lets you ask the government for copies of any records they may have about you. I mailed my Freedom of Information requests to five different federal agencies a month ago. So far I’ve heard nothing back.
Maybe my FOIA letters are drifting among bored and clueless GS-5s and GS-9s, clerks who’ve never heard of me and don’t regard my requests as more or less remarkable than any of the dozens that come in every day. Or have I risen, possibly, to the attention of some GS-14 who takes her mission or her civil service career seriously? Has she passed a photocopy and covering memo to a member of her agency’s senior executive service, maybe an SES Level 4, a general counsel, a serious keeper of secrets? Maybe there’s a meeting scheduled to discuss my case with a Level 3 or Level 2, a deputy director, an undersecretary. And will someone with a well-known name, a cabinet secretary, a Level 1, finally be asked to decide what, if anything, his underlings will be permitted to tell me about my past? In other words, how steaming hot are any of my potentially hot potatoes?
When I worked for the federal government in the late ‘90s, it once took me a month to dredge up a file about an historical incident on an Indian reservation. The record keeping is
very
twentieth-century, a lot more
Brazil
than
Bourne.
The information I want may be classified. Or it may have been evanescent, contained in a few sentences uttered by some official several decades ago and never written down. Each of the other agencies to which I’ve sent my inquiries—the Department of Homeland Security; the Army Intelligence and Security Command; the Central Intelligence Agency; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—keeps its own special troves as well. Depending on whether someone decided sometime that the information I seek might cause “exceptionally grave damage” or “serious damage” to the national security, it could be categorized, respectively, as Top Secret or Secret.
In the ‘90s, my baby-boomer president signed an executive order to declassify classified information more than twenty-five years old, and to forbid officials from declaring a document Confidential or Secret or Top Secret in order “to prevent embarrassment.” There’s a famous song from
Hair
that has a relevant lyric:
A dying nation of moving paper fantasy / Listening for the new told lies / Let the sunshine in!
It did occur to me when Clinton signed his executive order that the new sunshine might one day result in damage, serious or even exceptionally grave, to my life and career.
By then I didn’t exactly live in fear of inquisitive phone calls, but it was one of those unpleasant possibilities lurking in the background, like the awful diagnosis you fret about when you visit the doctor. It turns out, however, that ever since Clinton’s Executive Order 12958 took effect, employees of the darkness-craving agencies, the bureaucratic vampires and wolves and tarantulas and moles, have been quietly crawling through every inch of those declassified files,
reclassifying
thousands of them, dragging them page by page out of the light and back into their federal caskets and nooks and burrows.
So I’m not counting on the government to shrug and hand over the missing pieces of the puzzle it may have. I’ll pursue other tracks. I’m about to spend a long weekend in Washington, flying out to celebrate Sarah Caputo’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I’ve also scheduled drinks with another well-placed pal—a man I shouldn’t name, a former beau, the closest friend I made during my three and a half years in D.C.—who might be able to pull a string or two to help with my research.
“Dean Hollander?” I look over to see my assistant, Concepción Perez. “Mr. Alex Macallister of Wheel Life Pictures is on the line. He’s calling from
Beirut.
”
I smile. “Of course he is.” Another Bond moment. Although weirdly, in the books, Bond never went to an Arab country. With a fingernail, I slice a Nicorette out of its foil-and-plastic bubble. “Close the door, Connie?”
“Hal
lo,
Hollander! It’s been such a bloody long time!”
Again I smile. I never quite remember until he opens his mouth just how British Alex sounds. The enduring impact of his four years in London during the 1970s is incredible. “Your ears must have tingled last winter, “ he goes on. “I was in Prague for the renaming of the airport after Havel, and raving with your old pal Přemek about how much we adore you. Why on earth do you and I never see each other in the City of Angels?”
Why? Because you’ve invited me to your place exactly once, almost two years ago, during my Supreme Court fame bubble, and whenever I asked you to dinner during the previous five years, you had your assistant cancel at the last minute, once with a text message.
“Hiya, Alex! Great to hear your voice. Vacationing in Beirut, huh?”
“It’s over forty here, maybe forty-five!” On Planet Alex, temperatures are in Celsius. “Although not as dodgy as you’d think. But I’m hardly on holiday. An acquisition mission, actually. I’m trying to cobble together
Cars Two.
” An exhibit that Alex assembled, which he considers art and calls
The Cars,
has been traveling around the world for a couple of years, drawing large crowds. It consists of automobiles in which famous people died—General George Patton’s Cadillac, James Dean’s Porsche Spyder, Jackson Pollock’s Olds 88, Albert Camus’s French coupe, Jayne Mansfield’s Buick Electra. The only one not a wreck is the 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible in which John F. Kennedy was shot. I remember reading that The Cars, the band, reunited to play at the opening of the show at the Armory in New York, and that the only vehicles Alex wanted but couldn’t acquire were Grace Kelly’s Rover and Princess Diana’s Mercedes.
“Can I trust you?” he asks.
“Sure,” I answer immediately. “Yeah.”
“But really. This is hush-hush. Completely confidential. I demand lawyer-client privilege.”
“I’m not your attorney. What is it?”
“Celebrated people don’t much die in road accidents anymore. The Princess of Wales was the last. For a new piece, a piece about
this
century, I’m trying to buy up the important car-bomb cars.”
I am speechless for a moment. Is he joking? Of course not.
“Day before yesterday we acquired the remains of the pickup truck that killed Rafic Hariri. Remember?” Hariri was the former Lebanese prime minister assassinated by a suicide car bomber—truck bomber—nine years ago in Beirut. “Karen, this is
so
much more difficult for me than
The Cars.
”
“Yeah, I would imagine.”
I wonder for an instant if he means difficult psychologically, emotionally. Of course not.
“Luckily, we’ve got some significant friends over here. Americans. We’re still working on getting a loan of Rafic’s Mercedes, which I really must have—the piece only works as a diptych, the truck and the Mercedes together. The family are softening. An important fellow in Pakistan
really
wants to sell me bin Laden’s last Land Cruiser, and I was tempted, but it’s off-message for the show. And in Afghanistan, Iraq, oh my God, you can imagine the provenance issues. People try to diddle you with fakes constantly. Or else they’re offended and call me sick.”
“Really? Huh. Fancy that.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what the Nazis said about modern art, too. So, Hollander: this autobiography of yours, cleaning off and tarting up this old picture of yourself to put on display. I guess with me in the background. You doing restoration or conservation?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m a lawyer, Alex.”
“No, you’re a
writer,
Hollander, like you always dreamed of being, and now you’re a writer of
fiction
as well, an artist, a fabricator of tales. Although the gal in your novel, the heroine? Seemed
highly
Karen Hollanderesque to me.”
His flattery throws me off track. “You read
Objection, Your Honor
?”
“I considered optioning it. Anyhow, my point is that you
know
now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication. In painting, in the art world, restoration, some wise people, the Russians, the Italians, think that old pictures are what they’ve become—and
don’t
uncover the repainted sections,
don’t
fill in the scratched-away patches, accept and respect what the years have done to alter the image. Whereas American restorers go for what they call ‘deceptive retouching.’”
“Whatever I’m writing, it’s not deceptive. The opposite.”
“No, no, you’re misunderstanding. Deceptive retouching tries to make an old picture look
exactly
as it did
originally.
Like people who color their hair.”
“Are you suggesting my hair color isn’t naturally St. Petersburg Champagne Blonde?” Trying to keep things light!
“Which is impossible, of course. Deceptive retouching is fictionalizing that pretends it’s the real truth. Like Colonial Williamsburg.”
“You’re losing me here. I’ve never even understood what ‘postmodern’ means.”
“Just a straight-shootin’ plainspoken old-fashioned midwestern lady lawyer.
Please.
”
“I’m trying,” I say, “to write an honest and accurate account of certain parts of my life. Our lives. Our dreams and fantasies. There’s so much I’d forgotten.”
“So you’re writing some kind of 1960s
Our Town
set in Wilmette? The upper-middlebrows should go for that big-time.” He’s audibly relieved. “ ‘One sweltering summer afternoon, as the cicadas chirped and heat lightning flashed over Lake Michigan, Chuck Levy and I stopped at Smithfield’s grocery to buy some lemon drops for a nickel, and the moment I spotted that poster for Dr. King’s speech on the village green, my life was changed forever.’”