“As for me, I have a condominium with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and sufficient cash to indulge in pleasures you might think superfluous. But remember that when we met I was mired in student loans; compared to me you were born to have a restless conscience, and to act on it. Still, I question myself every time I imagine you asking, ‘Is this a life of meaning?’ Then I imagine the conveyor belt of life leading straight to my premature demise, keeling over at my desk on another weekend of too much work for no great cause. Perhaps that’s why I spend so much time at the gym.”
Pierce paused there. Any fair external inventory would count him lucky: he was even fitter than when they had last seen each other, and the twelve years since had lent a keenness to his face without thinning or graying his dark shock of hair, leaving the Damon Pierce of the courtroom a still youthful but commanding presence, tall and slim and quick of tongue and mind. “Nevertheless,” his e-mail conceded, “my career thrives more each year. And I arm myself for Judgment Day by giving pro bono advice in international human rights cases, a faint echo of my time at The Hague.
“As for my former literary ambitions, the only real writing I do is to you.
“Which brings me, I suppose, to Amy.
“We’re divorcing. It’s really not her fault. The most critical thing I can say is that Amy never questions her life. If her client is a crook, he just is. My tendency to ponder the meaning of it all strikes her as a waste of time.
“Why did we marry? To begin, Amy’s a gorgeous strawberry-blonde, so tall and elegant that she looks more like a ballerina than a lawyer. And wicked smart—smart and beautiful, you’ll recall, tends to get my attention. Amy is also the most self-possessed person I know, so that even her bursts of anger seem less spontaneous than chosen. The same spartan discipline governs her exercise and diet: at thirty-five, she remains so youthful that I once teased her that when she dies at ninety, they’ll have to cut off her leg and count the rings to figure out how old she was. She had the grace to find that funny—of course, she herself is often funny in a matter-of-fact observer’s sort of way. A lawyer’s way.
“But then we lived like lawyers. Every Saturday we sat at breakfast and updated our professional and social calendars for the next four weeks. Our conversations were like telegrams—no words wasted. For two trial lawyers, time is always a problem, and there was never enough.
“The question became, For what?
“Expensive dinners alone. Vacations in Fiji. More expensive dinners with other childless couples who trumped Fiji with Montenegro. Fundraisers for abortion rights or battered women or the Democratic candidate for whatever. Comparisons of trial tactics: Amy was so delighted with the exercise of her considerable skills that I once told her she would have cheerfully represented Martin Bormann. ‘Only for the cause,’ she retorted, a slight dig at my pro bono work. Her most grotesque clients became her babies.
“There it is. I wanted them; Amy didn’t.
“Not her problem, but mine. Amy has no illusions, least about herself: that she never wanted kids was just a fact, and Amy never fudged facts. But as you so often suggested, I’m a bit of a romantic, and sometimes still believe that I can make life, even people, turn out as I hoped. And what I hoped for was two small Pierces.
“A couple of years ago, I realized that I was the only one who heard Amy’s reproductive clock ticking. When I said as much, she countered me with jaundiced humor: ‘Have you checked out your partners’ lives postchild?’ she asked. ‘Moving to the dullest suburb for the “best schools”; planning car pools and sleepovers and after-school enrichment programs;
going to parent-teacher conferences and obsessing about how to propel their obviously sociopathic seven-year-old toward Stanford Medical School, until their only friends are the other lobotomized couples whose only subject is “the kids”—’
“’Beats hearing about Montenegro,’ I interrupted. ‘Somewhere during that last dinner, I realized Chris and Martha are the biggest waste of time since reality TV.’ Suddenly I became serious. ‘Amy,’ I said slowly but clearly, ‘just loving
you
is not enough.’
“For a long time she just looked at me. ‘It might be,’ she answered, ‘if you still did.’
“All at once I realized how good she was at stating facts.
“That
fact, once she brought it to my attention, was fatal. I may not be as surgical as Amy, but I’m no more inclined than she to lie about what I know. I had stopped loving the Amy Riordan I had married, and the life she had never questioned. Only the distraction of our work had allowed us to drift apart with our eyes shut, not seeing what Amy now saw so clearly with those beautiful blue eyes—which, for once, were filled with tears.”
Pierce paused. There was more he might have said—not just that Amy and he were different but that the difference between his wife and the woman to whom he was writing had grown in Pierce’s mind. He knew this was unfair: he had taken Amy on her terms, and it was not right to compare her to a woman whose path in life was driven not just by her virtues but by her scars. Nor could he fully explain, to this woman or himself, how much he valued their ongoing connection amid the deterioration of his married life. It was best, he concluded, to stick to that life itself.
“Our decision to divorce was sad,” Pierce continued. “But it was this hollow quality that makes me the saddest now. We’re lucky, friends tell us, that we have no children to pay for our own failure. Still, without kids or money to fight over, there is too little to keep us from drifting ever further apart, until we become again the strangers we once were. The saddest fact is this: when the first of us dies, the survivor will likely learn of it, if at all, by reading the obituary page.
“Sorry. It’s the black Irish in me, and this St. Patrick’s Day I turned forty. As you’re not divorcing, certainly not Irish, and only thirty-six at that, I hope you’ll forgive this side trip into morbidity.” After rereading this passage, Pierce added, “In truth, the confluence of divorce and a major
birthday may be God’s wake-up call. My work at The Hague, however hard, was about something of fundamental importance—vindicating human rights through law. Though leading the prosecution team wasn’t easy, I think I was at my best, and I never doubted the worth of what I did. So it seems I’ve got some things to think about, and the freedom to do so. Perhaps, in its way, that’s not so bad a birthday gift.”
This was a good place to end, he thought. “Tell me how you are,” he concluded. “From what I read and hear, I worry that I haven’t heard from you lately. And you still write a pretty good sentence.
“Affectionately, Damon.”
Pierce sent the e-mail. When he looked out the window again, still pensive, the sun was an orange sliver descending beneath the blue-gray line of the ocean. He went to the kitchen, poured himself a chill glass of Chassagne-Montrachet, and made himself dinner.
Two hours later, as he returned to his computer, an e-mail appeared. Opening it, he found himself staring at its first sentence.
“Seven nights ago,” Marissa began, “I saw the corpses of three oil workers hanging from a tree.”
F
INISHING
M
ARISSA’S E-MAIL
, P
IERCE STARED AT THE SCREEN.
From hard experience, he knew that media attention to human rights abuses was fitful—let alone in a remote region of West Africa shut down to outsiders. His only hope for news was the BBC, the source he had followed since danger had begun enveloping the Okaris after Bobby had issued his manifesto.
Shortly before nine
P.M.
, he found a brief news item on the BBC Web site. By cell phone, a journalist had managed to reach Bobby Okari. On this day, a little after ten o’clock in the morning, a solar eclipse would darken Goro; at the moment of eclipse, Bobby had insisted, he would stage another demonstration, a successor to Asari Day, his symbolic defiance of Savior Karama’s ban on nighttime demonstrations. Pierce checked his watch, calculating the time in Luandia—if the planets stayed on course, the eclipse would begin in a little more than four hours.
Damn you,
his inner voice said. Yet what he felt was not anger but fear. As he knew too well, her life had trained her not to listen.
FROM THE FIRST
words of her short story, Damon Pierce had watched Marissa Brand and known that it was hers.
Each Thursday night, fourteen men and women clustered around a table, listening to Larry Banks—a gifted novelist whose tenure at Berkeley allowed him to write without starving—read one of their stories aloud. His purpose was to conceal the author’s identity, enabling the group to critique without compunction. In Pierce’s estimate, this conceit of anonymity promoted
a certain savagery, licensing the arrogant to eviscerate their peers. But Pierce, a sensitive observer, could often guess the identity of the author and, depending on what he saw, frame his comments to offer a dollop of mercy.
On this night what tipped him off was the woman’s studied veneer of blankness, belied by an intensity of focus so complete that she was utterly still. Though they had never spoken, Pierce’s interest transcended art: clearly biracial, the woman had light brown skin and small, perfect features accented by a cleft chin and dark eyes that conveyed an almost startling intensity unleavened by more than a passing hint of humor. Seemingly indifferent to her beauty, she did not wear makeup or attempt to tame her tight black curls. Yet what Pierce perceived in class was the opposite of indifference: that she was trying so hard to show no feeling suggested, in his mind, a woman who felt so deeply that it scared her.
But he was here for the writing. His interest piqued, he listened to her story as closely as she.
Its surface was nearly flawless. She wrote with a jeweler’s eye—each word precisely chosen, each sentence polished, their rhythms varied to add energy and avoid the soporific effect of sentence upon sentence with too many clauses and commas. Her facility made Pierce smile to himself.
But the story was more problematic—deeply personal and yet oddly abstract. Its core was the blighted relationship between a father and daughter, so mutually uncomprehending that they were doomed to flay each other’s wounds until the man’s last breath. The writer dissected him in telling detail: his narcissism, his emotional aridity, his resentment when his attempts at reconciliation, having failed, revealed how little he saw any woman except as the mirror of his own self-regard. The daughter was different. Though Pierce tried to give her his sympathy, she was less victim than observer, inspecting her father with the merciless scrutiny of a recording angel. The effect was to create more compassion for this man than, Pierce suspected, his real-life model deserved.
The other students were not fools. When Banks finished reading, they nailed its flaws with equivalent charity. “Airless,” a male poet sniffed. The graying lesbian called it “slight as a pianist’s finger exercise.” The pallid woman next to Pierce labeled the story “a lacquer box with nothing inside.” Looking at the author’s face, Pierce wished her critics literary lives of rejection letters and desperate pleas to academic presses. Her eyes betrayed the hurt her words had not.
When Pierce’s turn came, he stressed the story’s virtues. “I wouldn’t add or subtract a word,” he concluded. “And I feel that I know a man I’ll never meet—the essence of characterization. Flaws in a story can be fixed. Mediocrity in a writer can’t.”
By the time class ended, twilight had fallen on the campus. Pierce paused on the steps of the building, gazing at the looming bell tower whose spire split the darkening sky. He felt a presence close behind him.
“Thank you,” she said simply.
He turned to her. “For what?”
“For liking my story.”
Her steady gaze discouraged evasion. “How did you know I knew?”
“Because you looked at me so closely as it began, but not at all when you spoke. Or after.”
Damon waited for the last stragglers to pass them by. With a smile, he told her, “You’re every bit the observer your story suggests. Liking it was easy enough, except for wishing I wrote that well.”
It was the wrong thing to say: her eyes signaled an instant distrust. “Please don’t,” she said in a flat tone. “They were right, and you agree.”
“About the problems? Okay, the female character is too withheld. But as I said, that’s fixable.”
For a moment, she studied his face. “Maybe in stories. ‘Write what you know,’ they say.”
The conversational hairpin turn caught Pierce off guard. But as he well knew, writing, once shared, creates a curious intimacy; despite her obvious attractions, it struck him that this woman might be lonely. “Are
you
withheld?” he asked.
She gazed down at the cement between them, her shoulders finally twitching in a shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t like to think of myself that way.”
Pierce decided to take a chance. “Because you don’t see yourself that way? Or because you don’t like to think about yourself at all?”
She seemed to consider this, and then looked up at him again. “Both. People often aren’t who they think they are, let alone who they say they are. Only actions don’t lie.”
Pierce shook his head in demurral. “That would make us nothing but nerves and reflexes. If we don’t think about what we do, and why, how will we ever change?”
To his complete surprise, she laughed, a sound expressing wonder but not rancor. “And you think that’s so easy?”
“Not easy. Possible.”
In her renewed silence, Pierce realized that darkness had closed around them. “I’d better go,” she said at length.
Pierce suppressed his disappointment. “If you drove here, I’ll walk you to your car.”
The smile she gave him was slightly skewed, as though fending off an antique gallantry. “Facts are facts,” Pierce told her. “Nighttime isn’t safe here. And I’d be happy for the company.”
After a moment, she shrugged. “If you have time.”
With that, she skittered down the remaining stairs and headed across the grass, Pierce straining to keep up. Her small frame moved with a whippetlike efficiency that, for Pierce, held a tomboyish appeal. As though remembering her manners, she asked, “What do you do besides write?”