The Burden of Proof (32 page)

For dessert, she brought out berries. She lifted the wine bottle toward Stern, but he shook it off. Helen had drank freely; Stern had had a single glass. He was drinking too much lately, which never before had been his habit; his head was sore on many occasions.

"As usual," he said, "I have done all the talking; and an way that she utilized all this silent plarmingas a means to escape torpor and depression. But the point was that she had done it, he had known it, adjusted to it, and now it was no longer there, like a ticking metronome gone silent. Wounded and reeling, his soul had nonetheless expanded in the recent circumstance, reentering regions closed off for years.

Helen served a splendid supper. She made a salad of shrimp remoulade, and cooked a small piece of blackened fish. She stood over the iron skillet with the smoke rising,. drinking her wine and chatting, like a cooking-show host.

Rick, her younger child, a sophomore now at Easton, dreamed, like many nineteen-year-olds, of being a criminal defense lawyer. Helen relayed his questions. Did Stern believe most of his clients were innocent? How could he defend them if he didn't? How did he feel when he found out they were guilty?

These were old questions, the puzzles of a lifetime, and Stern enjoyed answering Helen, who listened alertly. Some spoke of the nobility of the law. Stern did not believe in that. Too much of the grubby boneshop, the odor of the abattoir, emanated from every courtroom he had entered. It was often a nasty business. But the law, at least, sought to govern misfortune, the slights and injuries of our social existence that were otherwise wholly random. The law's object was to let the seas engulf only those who had been selected for drowning on an orderly basis. In human affairs, reason would never fully triumph; but there was no better cause to champion. Helen sat back, drinking her wine, attentive.

For dessert, she brought out berries. She lifted the wine bottle toward Stern, but he shook it off. Helen had drank freely; Stern had had a single glass. He was drinking too much lately, which never before had been his habit; his head was sore on many occasions.

"As usual," he said, "I have done all the talking; and about myself."

"You're wonderful to listen to, Sandy. You know that."

"Do I? Well, I appreciate a receptive audience." Helen looked at him dh'ectly.

"You have one here," she said somewhat softly. They were silent, considering one another. "Look," said Helen Dudak.

"You know it. I know it. So I'll say it. I'm available. All right?"

"Why, certainly."

She raised her dark eyebrows. "In all senses."

For an instant, Stern's heart actually seemed to shiver, What was it about Helen? She had a way with facts which could be utterly disarming.

She laid out what was on her mind with no more ceremony than a butcher tossing meat onto the scale. But they both knew they had come to an auspicious pass.

"You' re not ready," she said immediately. "I understand that." She reached for her wine and quaffed it, her first overtly nervous gesture.

"But when you are, you are. We're on our way to the twenty-first century, Sandy.-There are no proprieties left about this kind of thing.

Not everyone goes nerve-dead in mourning."

He was not sure what he'd say if she gave him the chance.

Certainly it would not do to explain his circumstances to Helen, that l'dce a vampire he had been out ravishing when he was supposed to be dead, while now he had been laid into his crypt with a stake right through the heart.

Fortunately, however, explanation did not appear necessary.

This was, Stern sensed, well scripted, and Helen had assigned herself all the lines. She had a missionary role.

She was going to heal Stern, sell him on himself. In a second she would be telling him that he was still attractive. He had known Helen for decades now and recognized this forwardness as uncharacteristic. This was not Helen's true nature, but rather the new and improved model, head-shrunk and reorganized. So much of this seemed self-consciously political. The formerly colonized nations should engage in self-determination. Speak your mind. Admit your desires. You were equal and entitled. He was less hopeful than she about the virtues of this revolution. But, for tonight, it was just as well. He would play his part.

Here sits Mr. Alejandro Stern; history's first bald coquette.

"You're quite an attractive man, Sandy."

He could not suppress his smile. Again, she misunderstood.

"Do you think that the only thing women find attractive is a twenty-year-old body?"

Here was one of the five or six highest-order mysteries of life. What did women find attractive? Attention. That he knew. Strength of one kind or another, he had long supposed. But the physical element entered somewhere as well.

"Whatever that might be, Helen, I think I lack some of the essential ingredients."

"I don't think so. I think you have all the essential ingredients.

Maybe some of the inessentials--" Her hand trailed off in space and they both laughed merrily.

God knows, there was no sense in pretending he did not enjoy this. He did. Given the frame of mind with which he had started the evening, her honesty, affection, her excitement in his presence seemed a heartening miracle. He took her hand.

"Helen, this is a charming offer. I am sure it Will obsess me." As usual, he enjoyed being elusive. He was back to his essential aspect, the foreigner, unknown and hard to figure. His ambiguous look was apparently too much for her. She shrank back and shook her head. "God, I've made a hash of this."

"Nonsense."

"Oh, Sandy." She covered her face with both hands. "I'm drunk. I can't believe this." She sat, eyes closed, suddenly flushed, suffering intensely. The sight of dear, honest Helen so humiliated moved him terribly. He was beginning to take on the emotional lability of an adolescent. For now, no matter. He stood at once and from behind her chair wrapped his arms around her.

"Helen," he said.

"I'm drunk," she repeated. "I let myself come on like a lush sitting at a bar."

"You appeared the true, kind soul you are. I am positively alight with flattered pride. And," he said, "I am enormously interested."

"You are?" She Craned her neck straight back, so that she was looking at him upside down, a cute maneuver somehow befitting a person half her age. Her smile, too, was girlish.

"I am," said Mr. Alejandro Stern. He cared for her much too much not to embrace her. He leaned down to meet her, full of kind intentions and wholly unprepared for the spectacular jolt that lit him from the first contact.

Helen, too, felt this and actually groaned. He came around the chair, took her in his arms. He touched both her breasts.

"Upstairs," she said, after a moment. She took him by the hand and led him to her bedroom. There he opened Helen's dress, pulled down the bodice, and helped her remove her brassiere. Her breasts were wide-set and flattened somewhat by age and the toils of female experience, but the sight, to Stern, remained deeply exciting. She left him to begin turning down the spread. Helen had loosened his tie and he pulled it from his collar.

It was then that he remembered Peter's caution. Stern remained stock-still. He was without indispensable equipment. This would be terrible.

"Helen," he said. She looked at him, but his mouth seemed merely to grope. "Helen, I find this most embarrassing--" "Ohhh," said Helen.

"Aren't you contemporary?" She pointed across the bed to a nightstand.

"The top drawer."

Amid the pantyhose there was a package of condoms.

He tried not to start. Helen, who had slipped her arms back into the top of her dress, so that it was languorously draped, smiled faintly.

"I'm not offended, if you're not. To tell you the truth, it's a necessity." He did not understand. "Birth control," she said.

"Why, Helen," said Stern. This news,: somehow, pleased him.

"Don't get too excited," she said and tossed aside the bedcover. "I'm in menopause. Like everyone else. Just not as far along."

Stern fingered the package. The economy size. Twenty-four and most of them gone. Dear Lord, modern life was disconcerting. Helen had come back around the bed to him.

She pushed her arms free of each sleeve.

"Where were we?" she asked.

Afterwards, he lay with Helen in her bed. Somehow, toffght, he had been less adept. He had fumbled with that stupid latex thing, and their nervousness expressed itself as an almost comic courtesy. 'Is that all right?" 'Oh yes, yes, please." Nonetheless, they lay here, quiet and adhering to one another, fully content. At some point, he thought, he was supposed to leave. But not just now. In an idle way, it occurred to him that he was a truly vile creature, one of those sly, conscienceless mpscallions out of some French bedroom farce, vowing chastity and then throwing himself on the first woman that passed into sight. What was wrong with him?

But he did not feel vile--or wrong. He had supposed from listening to TV and the movies and cocktail talk--from wherever it was these ideas came--that these couplings, called casual, were supposed to be loveless and numb. But here in the soft dark he found himself aswarm with gentle feelings. This woman, like Margy, would he dear to him for life. Was that self-deception? Or had pop mythology just missed the point. Was it intimacy and connection that everyone was seeking? He thought, oddly, of Dixon. Did the master swordsman also experience his thousand interludes this way? Yes. Probably. Even for Dixon there must have been more to his wandering than the chance to brag. He craved acceptance, tenderness, female succor, before returning to the world made harsh by men. So, too, Mr. Alejandro Stern. His life as he had always known it was gone, and the road down which he marched was largely unknown to him. What was ahead? The last months, he recognized quite suddenly, had been rife with fear. But not right now. For the moment, with Helen curled in the crook of his arm, her breathing against him slowing as she dove near sleep, he had stepped aside, taken time out, cooled himself in the refreshed air of night. For today, tonight, for the first fraction of tune since it had happened, he was able to declare himself, however briefly, at peace.

For the occasion, Stern borrowed the 1954 Chevy Of his law school classmate George Murray. At this time in America, automobiles had only recently ceased being shaped like tea-kettles and Stern regarded this vehicle, which came equipped merely with a heater, as sleek and impressive. He had not made the acquaintance of many girls in the United States; there seemed to be so few opportunities. For years, he had been ahead of himself in school and, accordingly, was of little interest to the young women around him. And since he was seventeen, he had worked each weekend, driving a punchboard route that took him all about the Middle West in a dilapidated, foul-smelling truck owned by Milkie, his grubby one-eyed boss. Over time, his inexperience seemed to compound itself. Foreign-born, Hispanic-accented, Jewish, he was apt in female company to feel like something set down here from another universe.

So he was grateful for Clara's ease with him. He crossed his feet trying to race her to the car door, but she remained amused and casual.

Somehow, he made this dour young woman comfortable. As much as he aspired to her, blindly and instinctively, she perhaps thought he was all that she deserved.

"You know," she said, as soon as he was seated, "this was really my idea. I begged my father to ask you."

"This," said Stern, gesturing to the two of them, "was my idea. You, however, put it into action." .

"Oh, you are smooth." She smiled. "Daddy says that. He thinks you' re very bright."

"Does he?" Stern, unaccustomed to city driving, watched the road in desperation. If this car suffered any injury, he would have to flee the state. Murray had made that clear.

"What do you think of him?" she asked. "My father?"

Stern, in spite of himself, was too distracted to prevent himself from groaning.

Clara laughed out loud. She touched his arm as he moved the gearshift along the column.

"I am terrible, aren' t I? I'm not like this, Mr. Stern.

It's all your fault. Do you know that I am usually so quiet? People will tell you that about me."

"What else would they tell me?" Stern asked. He had fallen into a companionable mood. She smiled, but it was the wrong question.

"Tell me about Argentina," she said after a moment. The concert was Ravel. She spoke to him about the music, making offhand reference to passages that she supposed were as plain to him as if they were words written on the page. At the intermission, he bought orange juice. Only one bottle, for her. His normal penury had guided him without reflection and he saw at once that he had disconcerted her by making his lack of means so plain. But she refused to be flustered. She offered him the straw that had been punched down through the cardboard bottle cap and made him take a sip. And there something occurred. The concert hall was crowded; the grand acoustics of the building amplified the hubbub, and the lobby lights were stingingly bright after the prior hour in darkness. But the moment to Stern grew more intimate than an embrace. Somehow her character had become as clear to him as the notes which had been played: she was kind. Committedly. Unceasingly. She cared more for kindness than social grace. This vision of her overtook him, and Stern, in a kind of swoon, felt himself suddenly immersed in that warm current and his heart swimming toward her.