The Judas Glass (2 page)

“I wish I went to parties like that,” she said. “It sounds so glamorous.”

“What I really like to do is talk. Basically, I'm all mouth.”

“Is that a tongue in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?”

I laughed. Rebecca was a brilliant mimic. Besides, there was something sultry about her that Mae West would have never equalled. Where most people would have displayed photos of family, favorite artworks, Rebecca had shelves of CD's and cassette tapes, with twin Bose speakers in the corners of the ceiling.

“I brought you something,” I said at last. I made my way naked to my jacket, folded over a trunk in the corner. The present was not gift-wrapped. I had chosen it because it felt so luxurious, because I knew she would love its touch.

She sat up, holding it to her lips, the fabric cascading down her breasts. In this muted light the midnight blue cloth looked black. “It's perfect,” she whispered.

“I'm glad you like it,” I said, my words so full of feeling that my voice was husky.

“You like giving things, don't you?” she said.

I let myself lie down again beside her. I wanted to tell her that I wasn't really a very generous man, that most of my present goodness she brought out of me. “To you,” I said.

“Didn't you ever want children?” asked Rebecca.

I understood the innocent logic behind her question. I felt touched too deeply by her curiosity, especially since I had just used a birth control device, a condom, something I never had to use with Connie.

“No, I never did. I couldn't see myself as a father, responsible for shaping a tender psyche. Anyway, we couldn't.”

“I'm sorry,” said Rebecca.

“Connie has—a fertility difficulty.” For some reason I didn't want to expose Connie's medical history. “She doesn't like to talk about it. Maybe I don't, either.”

“You don't have to, Richard.”

“She had an infection years ago, and now her fallopian tubes—I picture them as two little creeks that just empty out in the middle of the desert. We even visited a man in L.A. once, someone Dr. Opal recommended. He sat us down and gave us the news that some things are not meant to be.”

“You still love her,” said Rebecca.

I had a vivid impression of Connie, hunting down Rolaids, calling Matilda at home, fretting. It was after nine by now. “I should hate Connie for the way she's treated our marriage. But I don't.”

“When you talk about her you have affection in your voice.”

“That's one of those things women say hoping to hear it denied.”

“Do you know so very much about women?”

“I'd be a fool to say I did.”

She laughed very quietly. “How did your lecture go?”

“It wasn't much of a lecture. More of a harangue.”

“Did they like it?”

“They didn't tar and feather me.” Actually, there had been applause, and it had been genuine. It was one of my talents. I give a good speech, even when the effort is wasted.

“You never told me what it was about.”

Connie never asked how anything went, not a hearing, not a lecture, not even an interview that would show up in the paper the next day. “I didn't want to bore you.”

“Tell me now.”

“I'm not that cruel.”

“I'm waiting very patiently.”

“I talked to the California Association of Realtors about the responsibility of realtors in preventing overdevelopment. It's not so much that we'll lose rare species of wildflowers and butterflies if we subdivide every hill in the state. I like animals, but I think people are more important. You develop a community too fast and you have overcrowded schools. You don't have enough parks. You have a sort of null prosperity. Everything is new, but it isn't a community.”

I waited for her to agree that this was too boring, but Rebecca touched my face with her hand. “I bet you changed some minds—woke them up to some new ideas.”

I had to laugh. “They invite me to their conventions so they can tell themselves how progressive they are. They can't be such bad people—they sat and listened to Richard Stirling for an hour.”

“I bet some of them left impressed.” She felt for something in the dark, her silver bracelet.

I ran my hand along her side, her hip, her thigh. “I don't think it works—arguing with people. Even when you prove them wrong, with charts showing how they've failed, they see you as a form of live entertainment.”

“‘Ethical barbarians,'” she said.

When I didn't respond, she said, “I'm quoting you. I have your book on tape. That's what you said banks and developers amount to.”

I was a little embarrassed that this lovely woman would waste her time listening to one of my fairy tales on how to make banks socially aware, how to encourage financial institutions to open more branches in the inner city, how to avoid excessive lawsuits by having contractors do the job right in the first place.

Our nakedness seemed vulnerable at that moment. The quilt over us was not a magnificent antique meant to last forever, the collection of one-sided records in the hall was not a storehouse of music that would survive for generations. It was all so easy to love, and easy to lose. I took her in my arms, and experienced the most pleasurable combination of protectiveness and lust.

Connie would have said, “Again? Already?” And laughed, not sure she wanted to continue, already having collected herself back into her normal state of mind. Rebecca did not know that this was unusual for me. To her I was a sexual creature, easily aroused, not a distracted man with a mind riddled with while-you-were-out memos.

Her body was made for mine. Her knees parted around me, her heels finding a place on the small of my back. But without a prophylactic this time, and neither of us noticed, neither of us gave it a thought. As though we already knew what was going to happen and celebrated in its shadow.

There was no hurry. It was late, approaching midnight, but I didn't want to leave.

I was dressed again, feeling both reassured and artificial, as I sometimes did when I followed my consultant's advice regarding what to wear for the cameras. Auburn jacket to go with your hair, blue ties to match your eyes.

Rebecca wore her kimino, her feet bare. She was on the dark front lawn, reaching for the faucet and finding it. The sprinkler's glittering spider of water shrank, hesitated, and vanished. The lawn was saturated, a sudden puddle of water appearing with each step.

“There aren't any snails, are there?” she asked.

I stooped to pluck one from the stone before her and toss it into the darkness. When she sat beside me on the front porch I soothed a grass clipping from her foot.

“I want you to do something for me,” she said.

Anything, I wanted to say. Anything in the world. But I said nothing. We both knew that I had accepted limits on what I could do for Rebecca, the time I could spend with her, the love I could give her.

“I'm recording a few pieces,” she said, in that off-hand way people sometimes use to share worrisome secrets.

“That's wonderful!” I put my hand around her wrist, around the silver bracelet I had given her, silver otters interlinked, chasing each other.

“It's terrifying. They want that Chopin thing everybody does, Fantasie-Impromptu. And the others I do.”

Her talent awed me. I had taken a few piano lessons as an eight-year-old, when my father said a well-rounded person should be able to improve upon his parents. He meant this jokingly, believing himself to be superior to most of his fellow Homo sapiens, including, although he would not have put it bluntly, myself. He was so self-confident he could admit to being incomplete in trivial ways. However, several weeks of “In An Indian Wigwam” had everyone agreeing that perhaps riding lessons were a better idea.

“This was the kind of break you dreamed about,” I said. “Why are you so nervous? I've never known you to be nervous.” Despite my failure as a fledgling pianist, I had always hungered for music, high music, low music, everything from Bob Wills to Benjamin Britten. I think my lack of talent left a dry arroyo in me, a feeling of failure, a canyon I wished could sport poppies. I couldn't listen to a driving drummer, or a sizzling bassist, without finding my hands twitching, playing air guitar.

She made a gesture, annoyed humility, with just a hint of pride. “I'll also record a few things of my own. Just a studio on Arch Street, nothing major.”

“It's fantastic!”

“I'd like you to be there.”

Her success was mine. “I'd be delighted. Tell me when.”

She hesitated. “You don't have to.”

I was tugging the black leather calendar from my jacket pocket. “I'll have Matilda do major surgery on my schedule.”

“You think about cutting a lot,” she said. “Flaying, stabbing.”

“Figures of speech,” I said.

“You don't have to decide now,” she said.

“I'll be there,” I said, with some heat. “I want to be there. I feel honored—”

“We can go on like this for a while. But some day you'll have to choose.”

There was never a time when I forgot that she was blind. Everything about her house, the way she listened, the way she made love, was colored by this presence of a way of life very different than mine.

From the first moment she asked if she could touch me I had never imagined her to be anything else. But I found myself looking into her eyes, wondering how long I could go on like this, impatient with my life. Rebecca was so unlike anything I knew that I was afraid of my love for her.

“You'll do wonderfully,” I said. And yet I felt slightly strained, despite my sincere pleasure for her. I was a little bit jealous of the new possibilities that might open and distract her, take her away.

“You're going to stop seeing me,” she said.

She said
seeing
this way, just as sighted people do. “I wanted some time,” I said, forgetting the first thing you tell a witness—think before you answer.

“No, don't lie to me, Richard.”

I actually put my hands to my lips. It was body English that any criminal lawyer would have recognized as a confession. I had been about to mislead the court. How could I tell her that I loved her so much I felt threatened? I was used to my life having structure, logic, love providing a pleasant hedge of greenery, nothing more.

“Thursday afternoon,” she said, “two o' clock. Just be there. I need you.”

Unlocking the car, I nearly turned and went back to her. I had forgotten to tell her about the explosion, the missile, the bright scrawl in the sky.

I drove the streets of Berkeley, taking Oxford Street after passing the stadium and the Greek Theater. As I drove, the phone trilled. I almost answered it, my hand falling to the receiver before I could stop myself.

I let it ring. I didn't feel like talking to Connie right now. But I didn't turn off the ringer, taking some masochistic pleasure in letting her nag me.

The phone stopped its bleating and then started right up again. This was pure Connie. She let it ring five times before she hung up and started again.

Some people expect an attorney to be able to pick up planet Earth and drop it on someone's head. I told new clients to make a list of what they want me to accomplish. I told them to sit down and put it in writing. But, I liked to add, don't leave the paper lying around. For some reason women appreciated this approach more than men, especially the part about folding the list and hiding it. For all the respect and even adoration I sometimes received from happy clients, I had never been unfaithful to Connie—until now.

The phone stopped. That only meant that Connie was calling the office again, maybe calling Matilda at home, being reassured by that wise woman that she hadn't heard of any accidents on the Bay Bridge.

So what was the problem? Why didn't I tell Connie to call Jessica Friedlander or Ben Sattler—both perfectly good divorce lawyers. Or Stella—Stella would nude-wrestle a crocodile for the right price.

Rebecca was exotic, a woman who lectured in musical theory, and played the piano well enough to have prizes, framed documents, hidden away in her closet. Even her handicap made her a creature from another world, and she was in every way too much my dream of what a special woman should be. She had been blind since the day after her tenth birthday, a brain lesion caused by a hit-and-run driver. She was beautiful, needful in a way that wasn't clinging. She said she had never played as well as she had since we became lovers.

And Connie? I tried to make a list of Connie's virtues but the phone started in again and I didn't bother. Besides, I was beginning to feel that flutter as I turned left onto Capistrano Street. I still took my marriage seriously in one part of my mind.

3

“I could fall over something,” I said. A new rug was bunching up behind the door, one of those Zapotec rugs with animal patterns, bears or trunkless elephants.

She didn't say anything for a while, let me imagine what she might be about to say, put words in her mouth.

She spoke. “I've been sitting here looking forward to this. Wondering what you'd say.”

As usual the living room was a new configuration of vague shapes and objects; a cello, it looked like, leaned against a wall, couches moved around, something that looked like an Easter Island profile over by the window.

She said, “You didn't answer your phone.”

I had to watch where I was going. I flung my briefcase onto the sofa, turning on one of the table lamps. The little lamp was pretty, but didn't make much light. I didn't have to look to know where she was, red fingernail to her front teeth, tapping her bicuspids the way she always did, with one of her unhappy smiles.

I turned to look. Yes, there she was. In me Connie had seen status if not big money, life with a Name Lawyer. What, I asked myself, had I seen in Connie?